A Blog of Glup

Kimchi

2011-06-19T18:42:00.007-04:00

OK so kimchi. I've tasted a spoonful of batch 2 and it's sufficiently good to begin blogging about. *thumbs in suspenders*

Anyhow, despite six years or so in co-op grocery stores, the shameful truth is that this recipe is s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶n̶ adapted from the the New York Times a few months back.

So here's what I got out of it.

1) Sweat the cabbage in brine (while weighing it down and keeping it underwater)

I've used a big plastic bowl with an upside-down plate, and both Napa and Savoy cabbages. Napa are easier to get into the sort of mouth-sized ribbons you may want. I'm reasonably retentive about keeping knives, bowls, cutting boards, my hands, etc. clean, or as retentive as you can be in a kitchen that might make a safety inspector chuckle once or twice. No untoward molds yet!

2) 24 (batch 1) to 36 (batch 2) hours later, scoop it out of the brine (saving the brine), spice it, and pack jars of it along with whatever the hell ingredients and seasonings you want, covering it with the aforementioned brine. Surfaces exposed to air are not your friend.

I put fish sauce in the first one (and no chili powder or paste), so the resulting product was a bright ginger-yellow, somewhat over-garlicked, and unsuitable for vegetarians. Also, I can't get little carrot sticks to come out to save my life. I've still blown through four bottles in two weeks.

For the second batch I knuckled under and bought some gochujang. The color's more on point. You're supposed to use powder which has no extra salt, what with all the salt you're supposed to use in step 1. Hmm. I fudged the salt down a bit on the sweating step and it doesn't seem too bad, a little under-spicy if anything. Shouldn't have cut out the soy sauce too.

Batch 2 has shallots (I'm done with scallions, just done), daikon, and pineapple. I went real easy on the pineapple (I was warned against using too much as it breaks down proteins) and it's a good thing, since it adds a definite sweetish tang which it might be easy to over-do. This stuff is tasty.

The NYT says to start refrigerating it like three days afterwards, but I've got one more jar of batch 1 still sitting in the garage; it's been, what, almost two weeks now. You'll know it's working when the veggies start to levitate in the container; the bit of space at the top of the jar has given me no problems with spoilage but has taught me to keep them on a paper towel. I like mine seriously tangy and with as much bubbles as soda, but I gather I'm a bit strange in that regard. Also I drink the juice. Mmmm.

Below, a blurry picture of the bacon-kimchi sandwich I ate while preparing this post! It was a jocular idea but worked so well I'm going to do it again tomorrow.

An atypical height conversation

2011-05-23T14:25:00.002-04:00

A dapper old gent spoke with me in the lagoon today; he mentioned in his native Germany that "they would say of a man like you, that he drinks from the..." Expressive pantomime followed, and then "from the gutters that hang down from the roof."

I allowed that it was quite a mental image; he thoughtfully added: "You don't want to drink that water." He was quite helpful in pointing out the remark was vaguely derogatory, but it would come as a surprise to me as to how.

The German saying I can find that most approximates the matter varies in its phrasing, but one version is:

"Wenn Dummheit lang machen würde, könntest Du aus der Dachrinne trinken!"

"If stupidity were height, you could drink out of the gutters."

...hm.

2011?

2011-05-14T19:57:00.000-04:00

Oh look, a post.

Let's not get our hopes up too much, though.

Writing

2010-11-24T19:22:00.002-05:00

Chet hit a nerve; these are most of my Czech translation notebooks. Haven't done much of anything since...uh...summer of 2009? Hrm. Lousy school.

More 251 club action.

2010-08-10T22:24:00.003-04:00

It's hard to muster the energy to blog myself when there is an abler chronicler already on task. I'm Gigantor, if that weren't obvious.

A teaser...

2010-08-06T22:48:00.002-04:00

One of the things I did on my two-week trip to Vermont recently was a tour of the Northeast Kingdom.

One of the other things I did on my vacation is sprain my left ankle, so this teaser will have to remain for now.

be never once out of a delirium

2010-06-29T04:35:00.001-04:00

Recognize the rotundity of the earth
with an invocation for Divine guidance and aid
The question is one which has exercised many investigators.
You will have fearful chilblains if you do so.

on Italian chickens

2010-06-17T15:00:00.001-04:00

If the Italian city of Livorno goes by "Leghorn" in English, does that make the Loony Tunes' chicken's first name "Fovorno?"

the same idea translated in terms of art

2010-06-16T17:54:00.003-04:00

I acquired this book recently; for those who don't want to click on a meaningless Amazon link, it is "Kenkyusha's New Dictionary of English Collocations: A Word Finder." In less delightful terms, it purports to express a broader semantic range of English concepts for the Japanese learner by translating giving sample usages instead of definitions. The...interesting nature of some of the sample collocations makes this book an excellent way to pass the time, as one sample entry will (I hope) show. I can't read the Japanese of the introduction, so I have no way of knowing what the emphasis on non-entry words is intended to express.

juice
express the juice of the grape
generate the gastric juice
squeeze the juice from the poor
[There is] no juice on.
a sweet watery juice

I trust we all have a broader understanding of the nuances of the word "juice" now. I know I do.

Still plugging away at a project from 2004, naturally...

2010-03-02T20:49:00.002-05:00

"The crematorium, Mr. Strauss, is a truly divine thing. It helps the Lord God in hastening the return of man to dust. Imagine if men were made from some indestructible material. If that were the case…” Mr. Kopfrkingl shrugged his shoulders, looking at the elderly woman in glasses holding a beer, “then give him to the earth; but man, fortunately, is not indestructible. Do you know how long it takes before a buried man turns to dust? Twenty years, and even then the whole skeleton does not disintegrate. In the crematorium the process takes a mere seventy-five minutes, skeleton included, when you place the body into the coke-fired stove. People sometimes raise the objection that Jesus Christ was not cremated, however. This is true, Mr. Strauss,” Mr. Kopfrkingl smiled, “but that was something else altogether. I always tell these dear people this: they embalmed the Savior, wrapped him in linen and entombed him under a stone slab in a cave. No one is going to do the same for you, embalm you and wrap you in linen and put you in a cave…and the argument, Mr. Strauss, that the coffin cracks underground beneath the weight of the earth, and that it might hurt when the earth collapses on the head, that argument of course does not hold up, for when a man is, “Mr. Kopfrkingl tilted his head, “dead, he will not feel it any more…but there is yet another argument for cremation. Look, Mr. Strauss, if people were not allowed to be cremated, but were only buried in the ground, then what would we use the ovens for?”

from Burner of Corpses, chapter 1

Gritting my teeth and diving into the past

2010-02-15T22:11:00.003-05:00

Reworking some sections of a book I started in on over five years ago. It's good to see my first work is still almost entirely usable, but there are some sentential-level techniques I'm only now working out. There are sections that are sloppy. I always worried about looking at early work, like it would be utterly neotenous compared to the masterpieces I'm obviously producing now in my more mature years (ahem) but in any event I'm hoping to move more works into the "finalized" category and get them out of my mental space, and maybe force myself out of my cowardice/apathy about submissions and publishing in general.

Nothing creepy about this loving father below!

“So this is Prague,” said Mr. Kopfrkingl, turning his gaze from the young pink-cheeked girl in the black dress to his left, “it is beneath us as though it were in our palms. As if we stood on a high peak and regarded the world spreading out beneath us. There is the Vltava, Charles Bridge, the National Theater,” he said, “those two towers are the Týn Church, the tower closer to us it the old town hall, and the truncated one behind it is the Powder Tower….the National Museum is over there, and the big white modern building behind it in Vinohrady is the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord. Mili, look through this glass,” he told Mili, pointing at a pane of smoky yellow glass, and when Mili looked, he said: “That bit of glass is the same color as the glass we have in the incinerator windows. The most sacred windows of the world, for through them one can see directly into the kitchen of the Lord God as the soul separates from the body and flies up into the ether. Show me how our Prague looks through that glass.” He bent over and looked at then raised his head again and said: “It is true. Our Prague is beautiful.”

Hirsute, horror, urchin

2010-02-04T19:12:00.003-05:00

Proto-Indo-European had (it is reconstructed) a root *ghers- meaning "bristle."

A suffixed form with -tu in Latin gives us hirsūtus, whence "hirsute."

A lengthened form *ghēr gives (h)ēriciōnem "hedgehog" in Latin, which winds its way through various Frankish dialects until it emerges in English at yrichon in the 13th century, becoming "urchin," later acquiring the denotation of "ragamuffin."

And a suffixed ablaut form gives us he verb horērre, whence English "horror."

I originally laced these together when I realized I didn't know the derivation of urchin, and the semantic threads are fairly early to follow. [I have bitten bradshaw of the future's style here for a moment, if poorly, but still in good fun.]

A brief manifesto

2010-02-03T00:27:00.004-05:00

     I love massive, completist geographical projects, and a bike is an excellent way to set one in motion. Get as big a map as you can and a marker and start shading in street as you ride them.

     I went a little crazy in Santa Cruz with this in May of 2008 after a breakup and got a compass to mark off concentric circles from certain locations. I've now been on more than 99% of the paved roads (and some unpaved alleys) west of the river in Santa Cruz--probably been on every street except a few up off Empire Grade by campus. (Empire Grade ate a frame when I was rocking a single-speed; it's hard to crank up there.) It was a fun way to plan day trips and lunch breaks from work, and great for building an intuitive sense of how the city fit together in ways that were intensely personal. I've had situations where I'm leaving someone's house in a neighborhood I rarely go to but still have a mental map of the entirety of the surrounding streets. I grew my own heads-up display, basically.

     It's not necessarily for everyone (I really, really like maps). The great part about grandiose plans is that you can ignore them and just get lost and have fun. I ended up cruising down a lot of residential streets and sketchy areas and boring subdivisions, (and got a few odd looks when I would bike by the same intersection three times in five minutes, or up a short dead-end street only to turn away grinning) and it got a lot harder to "knock off a few streets" as the streets I hadn't been on receded increasingly far away.

     Restlessness is one possible side effect, too. Having been on every street on the West Side, it's impossible for me to get lost or make new street grid discoveries, and the challenge of getting to the new ones can seem insurmountable. The new environments to map are farther off, and this detracts from the spontaneity of the original experience. But that's the beauty of it all. I get to see much more of the city around me than the paths of home-work-bar-beach. All the tiny little nooks and funny ways to hack the city to meet my needs, the shortcuts that wouldn't occur to people--they really help keep my physical surroundings an organic whole.

______

(walking your town would be a better manifesto, but these are some notes from 2008 that I've decided to transcribe and get out of my hair. Plus I should be tuning my bicycle, and bicycle theory is a great way to procrastinate on that.)

Limiting Magnitude triangles!

2010-01-19T00:23:00.003-05:00

I remember these from...high school? Hadn't done much with them, and I won't tonight, but foggy nights are good for organization and theory, I suppose.

Establishing limited magnitude.

A Bad Night of Stargazing Beats a Good Day At Work

2010-01-14T03:02:00.003-05:00

Got out tonight about 11:30; clear skies in large chunks but definitely a frustrating evening. Canopus might have been above the horizon but fog banks rendered it pretty invisible. I might have been able to get as close as tau Puppis. Oh well. Could definitely resolve most if not all of Puppis and gamma Velorum to boot, so a good swath of the summer sky extending east towards Hydra and west towards what I presume to have been the vicinity of Caelum and Pictor? Anyway. Praesepe in Cancer was right overhead but nigh-impossible to resolve with my binoculars, Andromeda was fuzzy and indistinct, M79 was utterly elusive although I think I know where to look, Arcturus was hidden in fog over West Cliff though it might be out now...

Still, I suppose it to be a victory that I knew exactly where all of these things should have been; my "global" knowledge seems not to have suffered in a weather-and-sickness-related lapse in stargazing...

[Edit: ooo, and apparently that was Saturn rising in Virgo. Good to know.]

Meta-Monday

2010-01-04T14:48:00.001-05:00

Good New Year's so far; housemates and dogs filtering back into the house, so much sun it's not even funny, and even daily reading and writing, which had eluded me for a little while.

And dorky cephalopod evolutionary poetry. Where else would I put this?

Resolve II

2009-12-31T02:11:00.004-05:00

Last New Year's I was naked in the Mojave. Well, for brief intervals, anyway, topping of a five-or six year streak of being in somewhat random places as the ball dropped. This is my third New Year's in California, and I'm spending it in Santa Cruz for the second time.

I'm of two minds about this--I want to travel more in 2010, and went farther than seventy-five miles from my house...maybe four times in 2009. That trip to the desert, my brother's wedding, and maybe two trips to San Francisco. So obviously I was a bit of a homebody.

But at the same time this year has definitely been the year I carved myself a home out of Santa Cruz--domestically my life is a lot less cluttered and a lot more ecstatic--so why would I have gone anywhere when I was building this? Still, there's so much left to see, and I have to make at least some of it a priority.

So part of me is sad that I don't get to go anywhere, but part of me wants a quiet New Year's in the town that is now my home.

Hrm.

Resolve

2009-12-31T01:59:00.003-05:00

I had planned on using this space to talk about resolutions, but I'm at the sort of stage in a new venture or two (and some old ones) where it almost seems profane to discuss them. Nevertheless, the semester break lasting until the 26th and my housemates all being gone for a while has lent itself to a certain amount of reflection, and a certain seeking of discipline.

I am making deals for productivity, happiness, and fitness, and concessions to rest and time off. What else do people do?

(oh fine for some reason I've battened onto this list of books to read. Maybe in 2010, maybe over a longer period. I'm already pleased to have found Malamud's short stories, having only read "The Natural." Very very much like a Fuks who had gotten out of Europe before the sorts of horrible things Fuks wrote about.

OK, so not really like Fuks at all, but sort of an alternate-universe one in some strange way. But when I'm typing I'm not reading, so I'll to that.

The Tale of Barbara of Mníšek (II/II)

2009-12-30T17:49:00.002-05:00

     Sixty years later she took lively interest in whether Franz Josef was going to marry Elisabeth, and asked every person who went through the woods about it. "She'll be unlucky with him," she claimed, "she should stay in Bavaria; pretty dresses aren't everything. I'd rather walk in these," and she pointed at her own clothes, which were already quite shabby and tattered, even having patches in places, for it had been eighty years since the time she had died. Once, when she met the forester of the time and told him about young Elisabeth's misfortune, the forester, perhaps from allegiance to his lord and employer, dared to express doubts, and at that she supposedly smiled and said: "Just so you know, young man, today your cows won't yield anything," and quickly disappeared into her cairn, and truly that day the forester's cows did not even produce a liter of milk and the forester decided: "Better not to argue with her and anger her." When, almost fifty years later, Elisabeth was assassinated, she was still walking about in her veil, and saying: "My words have come to pass; she should have stayed in Bavaria. She shouldn't have gotten on a boat or had her twenty-five year old son...” She feared the Prussians, and even hated them when they invaded the country; she said that no such thing would have been possible under Maria Theresa.

     When Kaiser Franz Josef died and the world war ended, Barbara of Mníšek sat by the stream and pondered what was next. According to some she was supposedly quite angry that everything was over and failed and she said that it would never have happened so under Maria Theresa; according to others she merely pointed at her clothes, which were even more rotten and tattered, but that she wished for a republic. She stopped travelers much more frequently than before, especially at twilight, and asked about what was going on in the world, for news of the world, and how the money was holding out. When anyone told her that there were carriages without horses going along the highways, and others along rails that were similar, but much longer and shrieking with steam, she would shake her head and say that no such things were possible under Maria Theresa. She would sometimes hear rumbles and roars over the forest, which seemed to be getting more frequent and more terrifying in recent years, and she would ask people what sort of huge birds they were; those had not existed, as far as she could recall, under Maria Theresa at all. "Those are aeroplanes, which fly under their own power," someone particularly daring told her, and she just shook her head and sighed. In recent years people in and around the village claimed that Barbara of Mníšek went through the woods with something strange on her shoulder, some sort of stick or rifle, basket or something, and that her skirts were so shabby after a hundred and seventy years that they were almost disintegrating...

     But after the second world war her cairn collapsed in the woods outside of Mníšek. In its place today there are only a few stones overgrown with moss, wild brambles and raspberries. Barbara has lost her grave. Still, though, poor Barbara of Mníšek was quite the prophet. Birds now come to rest on the wreckage of her cairn and feed themselves from the wild bushes.

     God only knows if she still appears to anyone in the ravaged forests today...

1966

______

Elisabeth of Bavaria. Her assassination is a sad tale of how extremely tight corsets can keep you from realizing you've been stabbed in the heart.

The Tale of Barbara of Mníšek (I/II)

2009-12-30T00:06:00.002-05:00

     In the game reserve behind the valley which leads the stream, there is a glade in one spot and in it a stone cairn overgrown with dark moss--a grave in the forest. The mossy initials B v M, which stand for Barbara of Mníšek, are carved in one stone, and a date of 1770. It is said that back then, when there was no glade but just the deep and thick forest, that this was where the eighty year-old Barbara of Mníšek died, she who was a friend of the Empress Maria Theresa, as she was walking with a stick or a gun. Barbara loved the forests to her last moment and spent her afternoons in them. The chronicler tells us that Barbara of Mníšek died that year in a castle in a soft bed, because her legs had become paralyzed and she was only buried in the forest under a cairn because she loved the woods and had left instructions to that effect in her will. But the circumstance that the chronicler scarcely mentioned, but the people of these days heard from their ancestors (which their ancestors had told them) and which has remained in the knowledge of the village down to the present day: that the tale of Barbara of Mníšek's death was fraudulent. Barbara of Mníšek had been buried alive under her cairn as a punishment, since one of her ancestors had a hand in the assassination of Count Waldstein, and that mistake had terrible consequences for the whole forest and mainly for the people who went walking in the reserve.

     Storms used to come up in the woods even when the day was clear and cloudless all around, and something wildly flew among the trees, whistling and moaning and following and frightening wayfarers. But when Maria Theresa died ten years later and her son Josef II. took the throne, a man of letters was said to have appeared in the village, perhaps the teacher from the newly-founded one-room schoolhouse, who had heard enough of these terrors in the woods and said that he would stop it. One day he set out for the cairn. What he did there no one knew, but the next day he proclaimed in the village that Barbara of Mníšek's haunting was at an end. That she had been sent from this world once and for all, and that no one should believe in her or think of her any more. And they say it was true that the strange storms in the reserve ceased, at least those when elsewhere it was clear, the normal kind remaining, and the terrifying flights and whistling ceased as well; all was quiet. Nevertheless, people in the village soon began to miss Barbara of Mníšek and, almost as if they could not say goodbye to their ghost, they began to claim that Barbara of Mníšek was only calmer, but that she still existed in unspoiled nature, and they especially made that claim once the man of letters was gone, half-chased out of the village, since he bothered the people about the scholarly progress of their children and interrupted the field work.

     Barbara of Mníšek then came out of her cairn on peaceful strolls throughout the forest, and stopped the forest creatures, talking with them about various things, such as edicts of tolerance and the fact that Maria Theresa was dead and that her son would soon spend all the money which she had wisely saved during her reign in the state's coffers, and that he was even abolishing seminaries and monasteries. Some of the stags tossed their antlers and said it was the end; but the deer, as a rule, only smiled and spoke their own minds. That Josef would not rule for long. Barbara nodded her head and said "I think so too, I think so too," and proclaimed under her breath that she would cause it as well. "All these novelties that are going on now would not have been possible under the Empress," she would say bitterly, "the Empress used to usher in the new and abolish the old, but the nonsense he's doing, (by whom she meant Josef) she would not have done." Ten years later Josef died and soon the works of his reign went to nought, and then Barbara said: "So you see what I can do ," and disappeared, satisfied, back into her cairn. She predicted short reigns for his successor. When his successor died in two years, she again told people whom she met: "So you see what I am capable of," again disappeared in satisfaction into her cairn, and a frost passed over the backs of the people. When they executed the daughter of the dead Empress in France, she went about in a black veil and prophesied the end of the world.

______

Random Fuks; I just translated this today. Once again, double your money back if you've ever read this before. It's...sort of usual for him, at least sort of usual for the Fuks who's not writing about Holocaust-era Czechoslovakia.

Poor (textually-un-named)Leopold II.

Winter Hexagon

2009-12-29T00:27:00.003-05:00

I really should have started with this one if I'd been planning this in any form, since the asterism known as the Winter Hexagon (or, alternately, the Winter Circle, I believe) is the key to the late-fall to early-spring skies.

Fortunately for the part of me that's lazy, the Winter Hexagon is relatively well-known, so people with much better production values throw together jpeg overlays.

I like this site this site Betelgeuse's misspelling aside. (And Saturn's not there at the moment either.

Southern skies in the evening. It's too big to be taken in at once--when Sirius is low in the sky, Capella will be reasonably overhead. Once you get the knack of it, you can start using it to locate some of the smaller constellations in the winter sky! Like those ones I already mentioned! Plus, it's got seven of the twenty brightest stars in the sky, so it sticks out a lot better than Lepus' ears.

One Step Back, One Constellation Forward

2009-12-26T23:06:00.006-05:00

What, then, if I have dug too greedily, and too deep towards the southern celestial pole? Why don't we back it up a bit. If I intend to show something more familiar, we'd better get out of constellations you can't see north of Las Vegas or Spain?

Plus I just sort of assume the location of Columba is a given to get one of those kites I keep babbling on about, and that seems unwarranted.

We'll need two reference points, one derived from the other. Orion, and from it, Sirius.

Here we see the constellation at the feet of Orion, nestled right up there underneath Rigel and Saiph, whose existence I had never been able to puzzle out until sometime this fall when I realized that OMG THERE'S A FLUFFY BUNNY THERE. This is Lepus. (wait, let me try that again. Lepus. No, wait, this Lepus, the hare, filling in the spot between the hopefully-familiar (Orion) and the Andrew's-personal-system (I drew a carrot! I see kites in the sky!)

Another picture without all the invisible and therefore meaningless in the field constellation boundaries and all the other lines drawn in is:

Both pictures have their pros and cons. This latter is more uncluttered (look, room for an eye!) but shows way too many little stars that won't ever show up under normal non-magnified viewing conditions. Once you pick up on the shape of Lepus (and I hope you do, it's not as random as this second picture makes it seem) it's hard to un-see.

The second picture also shows its proximity to Sirius, while the first relates it to Columba the dove below it. Now that I look closer, I realize I'm an idiot, and in my haste to make a Srsly joke, I ignored the fact that Sirius is not off-screen in the first pic, but is in fact the bright star below the clever text. Sigh.

Lepus peaks in January and February in the southern sky, about midnight now, but around ten at the end of January and eight at the end of February.

Photos "borrowed" from here and here. I uglied 'em up real good, though.

Update

2009-12-26T02:14:00.003-05:00

I've downloaded a paint program, Seashore for OSX, so now I can ~~make lolcat macros about Czech translation~~ some crude star charts indicating the paths I use to navigate the night sky!

So in a nutshell starting out at Sirius and knowing roughly where Columba is, we can construct those two kite shapes, the one of which centered on Columba points down towards Canopus. As earlier stated, you can't try this if you're above Latitude 37°18' north, and that's a theoretical maximum. If only I had readers. *shrugs*

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T03:43:00.006-05:00

Pursuant to the last post, Canopus' window of technical visibility has been creeping earlier and earlier. I chased it again today, setting out as the time crept towards midnight.

The skies were right, and as I walked down Almar towards West Cliff I knew that if I stayed up on the cliffs itself I'd be subject to light pollution from houses on three sides.

I knew a spot, however.

That's me on Christmas Eve of 2007, in a pair of shoes that have been worn out and tossed, a pair of jeans now raggedy, a bag lost in New Orleans in August of 2008, a shirt I don't even know what happened to, and a hat that soldiers on. My feet are in the same place I parked myself tonight, the sea-fig on either side blocking out the light to my sides, as I stared out at Orion and Canis Major and worked my way towards the horizon.

Binocular work is as physical as it is mental; once I'm situated, I'm not sure if the moves I make are grounded in a knowledge of the stars themselves or the knowledge of how far to increment my arms to get me to something I want to see.

The bright star at top left is Sirius; if you see the stars like I do, you can see a diamond shape with the "feet" of the constellation Sirius is in and a star in the constellation below it. In the "eastern" quadrant of the picture is Columba, the dove. See the descending line pointing down from the triangle of stars that forms the head, forming another kite-like shape? Follow that line, adjust a bit to the left...that's Canopus at the bottom. You can trace another line (not in green) back up to that diamond shape I mentioned.

No matter how clear it is, it's always foggy right off the horizon, just west of Carmel Point across the bay. Still, after a quarter hour, I could make out a bright star in the right spot, the same spot as last time. Second-brightest star in the sky, Sol aside. 22.5 miles farther south, and Canopus never breaks the horizon, and I get it twice in a month? I spotted it maybe a degree above the horizon, and, to add the cherry to my Christmas cake, I swear I caught an averted glimpse of it with the naked eye as I stowed my binoculars and headed up the stairs.

Merry Christmas to all.

Can it be?

2009-11-25T05:52:00.004-05:00

CHDKable camera, tripod en route from Vermont (early Christmas presents). I believe I have spotted Canopus nineteen minutes of latitude (22.5 miles) south of where it is impossible to see. Monterey Peninsula stops in time, and the fog held off for at least the forty miles across the bay to allow me to make it out--I used beta and eta Columbae as pointers.

If I can figure out the weather and the mechanics (should be in the same position four minutes earlier every night) I might even get a picture. I wouldn't hold my breath, but I am fairly elated for three in the morning.

(Just watch me find out tomorrow it was a boat or something. Seemed too steady for that; I got a good fifteen minutes of observing in.)

[Edit: I was going to teach myself how to calculate star transit times, but Wolfram Alpha seems to know how to do that. What I saw was in the right portion of the sky at the right time...]

Stargazing:

2009-11-21T14:09:00.003-05:00

The stars you can see at night depend on the time of year and the time of night, of course, but also on your latitude. Burlington's at about 44°28' north, about halfway between the equator and the North pole. As you go south, you can see things closer and closer to the south celestial pole, within certain defineable limits.

Santa Cruz is at 36°59'--I'd been able to figure out it's farther south than what I was used to but I hadn't known the details until this morning.

Canopus, the second-brightest star in the north sky is theoretically visible from lat. 37°18', The existence of Monterey and the hills behind this probably wash it out, or did last night--I figured out I could get painfully close. I guess I should check out other locales (up the coast) which leave the south view as free as possible and check on some celestial mechanics.

On the plus side, I've never gotten better views of Canis Major, and I've been figuring out some of the smaller constellations around it. (Lepus and Columba last night).

105 words, 11/15/09

2009-11-15T20:16:00.000-05:00

The sun is low in the horizon blasting directly onto the eleven maples lining Gault Elementary: one block of peak foliage in the middle of November thousands of miles from (and a month later than) my formative autumns.

As I round the corner and my chin swivels up, my jaws close in astonishment, clicking together as if to grip this scene in my teeth, as though I am (it occurs to me) an expectant dog, trying to grasp the situation that has presented itself beyond my nose.

I keep a leaf to burn in meager re-enactment. Should I rend it with my teeth first?

November

2009-11-11T20:07:00.001-05:00

You cannot yet say that the year is ending; there is a lot of life yet outside in the fields and meadows; the goats and cows are grazing hurriedly before they are locked away in the barn to impersonate the manger in Bethlehem; the white campion are still blooming, the Virgin Mary's tears, the ragwort still glitters of gold, and the cinquefoil is still of a mind to flower. As far as the ground is concerned, that is all prepared; it is all turned, plowed, and softened, and now takes in moisture and air, scents and aeration, sighing and disappearing into the loose topsoil. The morel still drips in the woods, the golden chanterelles slowly dry, white mushrooms draw unnameable fairy rings on the forest floor, and there are flushed old men everywhere hewing wood, collecting it, and tossing the fragrant firewood onto carts. Surprisingly, there are even more animals than during the summer; clusters of partridges whirr out of every furrow, the hare weaves through the woods, the wings of the grouse beat heavily, and the white tails of the deer gleam in forest clearings. So, as I have said, there is still enough life to it, but sooner than anyone expects it is gloomy twilight, lights glittering here and there, and an unaccustomed orphanhood settles over the world; a wagonload slowly scrapes towards the village and a lone man heads somewhere rapidly and silently, his hands in his pockets. The year is not ending, but the days are.

It is a futile splendor; autumn is dark, but even so it is still well-outfitted. Were that not the case, the last colors of autumn could not blaze so pathetically; the crimson of the dogrose, and the rich red of the bunchberries, and the scarlet of the tops of the cherry trees, the dark yellow of the larch and the firm golden color of the fallen chestnut trees (look, the dark brown of the chestnuts themselves are peeking out from their ruptured cases). And without the darkness, the proper and most glorious light of autumn would not shine out so strongly; the light in the windows at home.

It is said that nature lays itself down to sleep in the autumn. This nears the truth, but it lays itself down to sleep the way we do, dragging its feet, undressing itself with lackadaisical enjoyment, still of a mind to talk about what happened today and what will happen tomorrow, and before it falls asleep, it intermingles memories of time gone by with plans for the coming day. The summer foliage has not yet fallen, and the hard heads of next spring's buds already stud the twigs and branches. And now we can go to sleep, for even sleep is forward motion.

Through all of this, I have saved for the last the true annual breakthrough of autumn. It is the discovery of one's own down blankets. It is the annual return to bed. You never sleep more gratefully and toss and turn less than when the days are short. All poets laud things, but I don't know if any one them would sing the praises of an ordinary warm bed instead of the bust and heavenly phenomena. Enough already has been written about dreams, but who as yet described the smooth comfort of the pillow and the faithful cupped hand of the groove underneath us as we sleep? Let us therefore add praise of human bedding to the praises of autumn, whether it be good for the sleeper, gentle for the infirm or strengthening for the weary; and may the hare find a good oven, the stag a dry hollow, and the sparrow a good nest under the eaves, amen.

1937

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Autumnal

2009-11-03T16:46:00.003-05:00

These are still golden and cerulean days, for there is nothing more golden than the November sun. But November's true hour is not in the break of day swathed in food or even the golden noon, but at twilight. Twilight, redolent of potato tops, the cool gloom which reaches out coldly for you, the thieving darkness, flickering with the light of someone's far-off fire. Homewards, homewards! How pretty are the walls, the lamp, the armchair and the books! You only really notice the glory and perfection of human dwellings in these long hours of darkness--how they glow! ¹

     But there are such short days; another of autumn's gifts. The darkness comes on so quickly that you don't even notice it at first, and then you are already planted in it as in some dampening, thick matter, in which everything slows down, even time itself. People even start to live and speak more slowly; they do not think about exploiting advantages, pulling off any quick schemes or getting up to things behind anyone's back. They rest as though fettered, and the things they say to each other are somehow more private and softer than those they speak under the influence of the sun. I think that even if murderers and traitors were inside like this that they would be similarly enlightened. Devilish notions are just the sort that come up if people withdraw from the light into darkness to conceal themselves. But this darkness is not a mask behind which anyone can hide, but like a moss which grows over him. It is, if I may say so, the moss of timelessness, for timelessness is dark. It is for just this reason that people talk about serious and private matters at times like these. I think that the council of ministers should keep hours from time to time; they should assemble in the growing dark, lit only by the burning tips of a few cigars. One minister after the other would fall into a quiet melancholy. "Boys," the prime minister might softly say, "I've had it up to here with this politicking. You know, if we stopped lying once in a while and just said what we really wanted..." "Yes indeed," someone else might sigh, "I sometimes feel like governing is a hell of a responsibility. It weighs a person down. If only it just...worked without all these machinations and contrivances...if only people were more transparent..."

     "I think so too!" a third would say.

     "What we could accomplish if we all believed in each other!"

     "Yeah," a fifth would say, "but politics is such rubbish. If we just only thought more about our huge responsibility and less about politics..."

     "So," the prime minister would ask, "can I turn on the lights yet?"
"Not yet--we're doing such a good job!"

1926

     It can truly drive a man crazy when a coal cart goes rattling down the street. Nothing clangs and rattles so terribly as coal; perhaps they have made it out of some sort of especially resonant wood, like primitive drums.² Half of our municipal psychoses must certainly have their origin in a rattling coal cart. The pedestrian regards the coachman with a murderous hate without the slightest bit of effect, and the two stiffs up above jouncing along on the pile of coal, and looks to escape this clanking beast either ahead of it or behind it or around the corner (of course in vain), for wherever he may turn, he finds himself in the active radius of at least one coal cart with its coachman and helpers.
     This wild hatred of the city dweller vanishes in a trice, however, when he comes upon a coal wagon in the winter. Then and only then does it seem to rattle triumphantly, and clang righteously, boasting of its fully-laden nature--even the shovelers leap about somehow solemnly, as though the crushing din exhilarated them. And then the cart stands before your gates, the horses stuff their noses into the bags of oats, and exhale deeply, the two stiffs climb down and set up their lunch pails on the softened sacking, and the coachman spits magisterially and unloads coal with a wide, ringing shovel, and the coal is already rattling and drumming down into the cellar, the coal dust rising as though from a mine, and thank goodness is there ever a lot of it, that will do for me until spring, and that is coal for you, sir, black and shiny as pitch.
     But if you went out tomorrow and saw one on the street, you stare at that rattling coal cart with murderous hate; you'd flee before it, seething and spitting, that people suffered such a clangor on the streets! They should just ban them and be done with it!

1925

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1The Czech word for "they glow," září, is the same for the month of September, and etymologically created. It is my assumption that the coincidence is intentional. (Czech months are based on old Slavic etyma instead of being borrowings of the Roman months)
2 Čapek has an adjective here which is probably directly translated as "Negro (drums);" I'm cautious enough to bowdlerize it a bit but literalist enough to need to footnote it.

October, or On Animals

2009-10-31T16:25:00.002-04:00

Every season has its signals, on earth as well as in the heavens. Certainly the bird is a harbinger of spring, or indeed anything that flies; Cupid himself is winged in the spring, and all of the animals that bring in spring have wings, whether they are larks, swallows, butterflies, or, as stated, Love itself. Summer is the season of the elements, the sun, wind, water and earth, and therefore pertains to elemental beings, such as nymphs and rusalkas and vodníks and he bird of fire and the Noon Witch and the Wild Girl, ethereal, bare, nude creatures which cannot be conceived of in inclement or bad weather. And finally autumn shows itself in thickly-pelted beasts, covered in sorrel coats or those of chestnut brown, like the autumn leaves, like every ripened thing of autumn; it is the time of stags, fawns, boars, and foxes, the time when the men stop scaring the girls and start hunting hairy beasts instead. All Souls' Day signifies the mark which reminds us that the year is moving into a time focused on the home and hearth; like the souls of the departed, the imps of the home, pig-sticking, fire crackling, and books.

I have never shot an animal as long as I have lived, but whenever I meet a squirrel in the October woods, or a fox or a stag and fawns, I have the feeling that I have somehow stepped into another world, into their world, for October involves them more secretly than any other time of the age. In summer coming across a buck is like coming across a pretty girl; may God keep you, girl, you needn't fear me. But coming across a deer in autumn is like coming upon a god or something altogether ancient; you hold your breath and stand still so as not to commit sacrilege; you are ashamed to give your astonishment its true name, which is reverence.

I tell you, every stag is something like the stag of St. Hubert, when its stands, head raised, crowned with a massive and shaggy cloud of antlers, ears pricked up, frozen in noble watchfulness, it is as if there actually were something like a cross glowing atop its head. Yes, if I were a holy Christian man, I would certainly see a glowing cross there as well, but since I am a confused man of little faith, I see no cross, but some sort of large and unclear sign. O hunter, do not aim at the buck's forehead, for that would be a sin, aim for the heart instead, and fire, your heart constricted with horror and passion. Do not disturb the crown on that animal's head and do not break the symbol off its forehead; and when you hang those antlers on the wall, do it like a conqueror placing he stolen crown of a vanquished king into safekeeping. For even a stolen crown is an subject worthy of its own reverence.

This did not happen to me, for my vocation can be described as being somewhat more puerile and uncertain--but there was this solid, firm man, keen as a knife and hard as stone, I tell you, there are few molded from such clay as this. So right in front of him in an October glade there appeared twenty, fifty, a hundred of the lightest and unhurried deer, with royally-antlered stags on guard; and there that man held his breath and almost trembled in awe or reverence and whispered that it was something out of a myth, something out of the past; he stood there so long and then left so quietly, more quietly than he would ever have trodden in a chapel or any holy place; and a good hour after this apparition he spoke in hushed tones like never before. I bear witness to you, that beasts in October have carry some great and godly secret with them.

It is perhaps because of this that hunters, when they return from waiting, speak in exceptionally loud and boisterous tones, to shake off that strange and silencing magic. "Here's what happened," one cries at full volume. "A deer approached me, a hundred and fifty paces off; I watched it for an hour and I couldn't get a shot. God, boys, you should have seen it!" "And I had one for half an hour; right when I got to the spot it was right across the glade." "I had mine in the heart from seventy paces, but that's not much of a shot. What a time we had today. God, I wish I'd gotten the buck I saw yesterday!"

Yes, for the most beautiful deer are always the ones that got away. Obviously St. Hubert saw his most beautiful buck, the one with the cross, from a hundred and eighty paces; know that otherwise he would have certainly bagged it and the burning cross on its forehead. Right in the heart.

1927

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[Seasonally appropriate. Outstanding. I had to skip about thirty/forty pages what with the months of inactivity, but I've gotten back on track. This thumb injury's been good for something...no footnotes today, St. Hubert and the rusalka can be found on Wikipedia, I'm sure.]

Golden Land

2009-10-30T16:28:00.002-04:00

     It is gold, red, violet, green. Again, it is golden, purple, blue and brown like brown ocher, sienna or sepia, the red of cinnabar, carmine, Venetian or Puzzuoli red, sulfur yellow, chromium yellow, Indian yellow, terracotta, mottled greenish-blue, yellowish green, blue, dark purple. Take a train through the woods of the Carpathians and stare like a madman at what October can do. When the sun is shining on it, the whole poplar burns like a yellow flame, the beeches spout their narrow orange flames into the sky; I don't know which plant burns the red of the forge. Gold, red, violet, green. Sacred, sacred, sacred! Our Father, who art in heaven--it is beautiful.
    It is sentimental, but I cannot help it; if one looks at nature in its sacred moments, the the other events seem suppressed and muted. The bureaucracy certainly does not look as nice as walnut leaves. When a government falls, it doesn't make the same sound as a chestnut falling out of a tree and plonk! its little eye peeks out from its green casing. And currency values do not fall as elegiacally and majestically as the beautiful golden foliage. Gold, brown, orange, red.
    Bless me, O beautiful fervor of old things. Face to face with nature like this, sir, and it awakens it you unusually conservative feelings (and do not try to deny it). May the durability of old things and pragmatic advice be praised. May what is not epochal and groundbreaking in humanity be praised, what is not yesterday's or tomorrow's, but what is eternal and unchanging. Namely: youth and maturity, rest, love, a good table, religion, heroism, sleep, and other old and wise matters. My handwriting cannot compete with you, O burning groves, but face to face with you I am content with my few gray hairs, my fatigue, and my strength. For everything is in order, as it has been for ages. Gold and green, white and black.
    And I will tell you, what it especially pretty now in October are the villages. They are bundled up in their golden and red apples, yellow lindens and chestnuts in a gentle and almost playful way. Red and gray roofs, and overhead some wise smoke. God, how grandly, how thoroughly the year proceeds in such a village! How firmly and sacredly each season nestles in here! Here with us in the cities a person scarcely realizes that things are transpiring, that things are changing. Spring and summer, autumn and all, they take on and put off an overcoat, put the umbrella in the corner, and take out their gloves. That is all. We have not stopped time, but we have concealed its tracks somewhat. We age, but without rhythm. Another year of life gone, but there were no four seasons; there was just the one year.
    Gold, red, cerulean, brown. Dried leaves. The enormous extravagance of nature, which shaped, crenelated, corrugated, and furrowed each of those beautiful leaves, and now it casts them off, crumbles them, and pulps them down. Then it begins to shape them, scallop them and furrow them all over again. That is as it should be. It's good when it is as it should be. Green, gold, and red. Dried leaves.
    There are still golden and violet flowers at the periphery, still tender and trembling honey mushrooms smelling sweetly in the damp clay, and the last apple still shines red on the branch. Lord, when I get old, when I really get old, give me the tenacity of flowers and fruit. Give me golden and violet blossoms, until I bloom in quiet and bright stars; grant that I bear solidly firm and red apples which will last through the winter. And when there is a new generation of growth, when the cherries are all eaten, when we've gotten to the last apples, they do wither, but they will await a new age, tough and dark. Let me once raise a few tough red apple trees that will survive to next summer, amen.
    Gold, red, broken brown. Lord, thank you for the beautiful course of the year.

1922

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[No one can say the man's not aggressively sentimental. Nevertheless, there's a niceness here. Perhaps it's a bit close to "Topsoil" in content, but these were originally published eleven years apart instead of two days.]

Autumn

2009-10-29T22:57:00.002-04:00

     Humanity is never quite in step with nature. We think that the leaves fall and that is the end of it, with nothing but bare branches left over. But when we look at things over the course of time (several decades will suffice) we see what is left over on those bare twigs; what they have for character and personality. If we just start with the bark, which is purplish-read on the bunchberry, green on the broom, yellow on the willow, white on the birch, silver-gray on the beech, and on top of that we have brown, cinnamon, ocher, black, smooth, taut, shining, rugose, furrowed, scaly, sticky, peeling--every branch gives away what has grown on it, each has the character of the whole tree or bush. And that is not even mentioning the brachiation and the structure of the crown--the dictionary does not suffice to find us expressions for each growth pattern and composition of the branching. There ares forked branches and perpendicular ones and crooked ones and tenaciously thorny ones, firmly and tortuously affixed to larger branches, others lightly and fluidly sticking up as though teased out with a comb, or others shooting straight up into the sky, others spreading, others hanging down, stretched out, whip-thin or luxuriously thick, muscular or emaciated like a skeleton or resembling long locks of hair, flexible and fleshy, or hard and dry like dead wood. Every shrub and every tree does it differently, according to its cultivar and species, so even when the leaves fall we can still in due course regard the full and unceasing multiplicity of nature, and best of all when the frost comes.

     And I haven't even mentioned the roots, of which there is an amazing and peculiar distinctions in color and growth, what sort of hirsuteness, woodiness, offshoots and expanse; one cannot overvalue them enough and perhaps even the Creator looks upon them with favor and praises them, saying what a beautiful cluster of roots has this tree or that bush has. What a beautiful subterranean country there is.

     We look at this all in a very human way, which is to say fallibly, when we say that nature dies back in resignation, and similar nonsense. First of all, nature does fairly well for itself, because in the simple majority of cases it does not die at all, and second of all it does not give itself up to any such sentimental weakness as resignation. On the contrary, there is something resolute and active in it, as though its opinion was: Enough talk, we must prepare for this and mobilize all of or strengths to defend ourselves! It will not happen without sacrifice, we must give up all of our foliage, tighten our belts transforming ourselves, and stash our sugars, starches, and other chemical necessities into our roots. Let's go, let's go, whining and moaning will not help us at all, it could come upon us at any second, and it must find us with matured and capable wood to survive this, but also capable of blossoming and flowering when this damned winter passes us by. We've got to make hay while the sun shines, that is our motto.

     As you can see, if we describe something as autumnal, there is no resignation in it, but rather a stout exhortation.

     And one night a harsh and sudden gray frost falls. The bare branches suddenly gleam with an unaccustomed and beautiful clarity, which we have not yet noticed; how everything is at once frozen, severe, and austere, so much so that it is a wonder the do not ring out like iron bars or rails. Everything is prepared; each one of those bare, hard branches is an armored line protecting the life behind it. We call them bare branches, and meanwhile it is vegetation in a coat of armor.

1934

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(d64 gave me fifty-five lines to do today, and this piece was fifty-four. A decent coincidence.)

Topsoil

2009-10-28T18:28:00.003-04:00

     It would be a beautiful thing if there were a map that faithfully captured the natural colors of our country. There would naturally have to be the dark green of the pines, the deep color of the spruce, and the light green blurriness of the leafy forest; but the soil would contribute most of the color as we see it now in autumn, freshly overturned, still unweathered, unbleached by frost and dryness. Such a map would of course largely correspond with a geological map, but it would not be so erudite and would serve to delight the eyes, for it would be beautifully colored and richly tinted like a work of art, which freely mixes all these clays on its palette, reliable colors that do not run.

     There is an orderly progression of colors from white sand to the thick black of the richest earth. Some places have whitish topsoil or a lightish gray, there are soils colored like milk chocolate, as if they were powdered or bleached dry, almost bluish, or like milk dripped slowly into coffee. Then there are yellowish clays with various hues of ochre and rust, blond and yellow soils, ruddy earth with streaks of Naples yellow or Indian yellow or burnt umber. The browns of course would have the widest range of colors, from the lightest straw to the darkest, richest sepia, from the sharpest tints to the rich reddish (almost chocolate-colored) hues, coffee brown, chestnut brown, the brown of burnt clay or the tanned brown of bread crusts, the dry and pale brown of shallow and stony topsoil, or the plump and juicy brown of loess or alluvial deposits. And finally scarlet earth, the reds from the color of rust to that rich red which toys with the violet, siennas of all intensity, the color of bricks burned in the oven, red edges or strata seemingly painted with blood or vermillion, as if burning with the color of the setting sun. Each region in turn, or even each village in turn has its own dominant color and its own shade of soil, and now that the harvest is brought in, the full map of cultivated land speaks directly to us.

     And think of everything that's been put into it: lime and heaps of black manure and ashes and powders; it is interesting that hundreds and hundreds of years of work cannot overpower or weaken the inborn color of the land. Humans have fertilized and overturned that thin little strip of topsoil for hundreds of years, covering it year after year with cultural accretions of labor, but a deep brown area stays deep brown and the yellow country stays yellow; the land will not permit itself to be re-colored; the ages cannot carry off its tongue, its hues. It cannot be done with the tractor or the spade, after light-colored wheat or dark-colored potatoes it resounds brown or yellow depending on its original shade. The ground is nowhere uniform; nations and cultures can bestride it and mix on it, but that which they tramp on cannot be taken away or intermingled on horseback. Perhaps that is why we like to talk about our native land; we want a piece of its constancy. Look about you, sir, what a solid and anciently-colored piece of work our soil is; it will outlast us.

     When one talks about the colors of autumn, let us not forget the beautiful and warm colors of the topsoil hidden by the plow. Even there are we a land richly blessed, endowed with a coat of many colors; we are an impression, so to speak, of all different types of soil, and all of the different geological eras have operated to bring about this small piece of land. People with their own shades and colors come off rather poorly, probably because they just got here yesterday, in geological terms. It will be a while yet before people look at the colored map of nations and states with the same joy as at a map of the soil.

1922
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[I rolled a d64 (you can also call it the "I Ching") to determine how many lines I had to translate today, and got #64. Hmm. Alternate title: "Čapek gets a new box of crayons."]

Autumn or Planting

2009-10-14T02:11:00.002-04:00

     Let's say that you have a little place among the meadows and forests, your cabin, bungalow, weekend place or whatever you call it; and around it you have a plot of land that you can call your own; or let's say that you don't have anything of that sort yet, but that you'd like to. In that case you should know that these autumn days are not the time in which the gentleman farmer stores things for hibernation, but it is quite the opposite. This is the time when the planter's blood is boiling, and only now does he begin to stick all sorts of bushes, saplings, trees, stems and bulbs into his staked-out plot. Spring is the time for flowers, while autumn is the season when the gardener deals with the pith of the matter and plants the future bushy crowns by way of digging holes in the ground and placing little bits of roots which one day will be a lush shrub or a hundred year-old tree; then he shovels the earth back on, tamps it down with his foot, and gives it a decent soaking. Then it becomes nature's turn to show what it can do.

    Yes, a currant here in the shadow of the wall, and a dark lilac over there; those lilacs always seem to go near pumps in the country. That'll be a whole row of lilacs, and it is impermissible to have their blue and purple clusters and not have the golden rain of broom and forsythia. Syringa, Laburnum, don't those names already sound like the peal of morning and evening bells? And you have to plant a sweet mock-orange over here for its sent on spring evenings, and the afternoon sun will sparkle off the white flowers of the Deutzia or the Spiraea; and nothing is more beautiful during a spring shower than the pink calyces of the Weigela, ardently and richly burning in the thick red foliage. Yes, we've got to have all of this, and maybe a Rosa rugosa and a vermillion flowering quince, and heather, yes, for what would life be without heather? That'll do for starters...

     But no, there's more than spring, after all; don't you want to have your beauty in summer and autumn as well? Just keep digging your holes, O gardener, you have to put a cotoneaster here and a barberry with its little red globules; here a little poison ivy will glow wonderfully in the autumn twilight, and a Tatar maple will look like the burning bush over here. Now we're getting somewhere; just dig on, gardener, to make sure there will be at least a little color for the winter, and make holes for the golden and coral-colored stalks of bunchberry, for the green stems of the Japanese yellow rose, and here, by the brook, for the lavender and golden stems of the willows. And you cannot do any more; the year is short and there are only four seasons in it.

     Wait, what's that weak little twig? Well, it's Prunus sachaliensis, a cherry from Sakhalin; and you had better find a big place for it, for this little twig will be a shrub thirty meters tall. And this tender little stalk, that's a Hisakura cherry, which will grow so big that you'd think you could sail along the sky on the rose-colored clouds of its blossoms, and this one over here will be a bird cherry as tall as a dome, a cherry from your childhood garden.

     And that's everything, isn't it? Well, praise be that the plot of land is now planted. The forests loom around dark and deep, the trunks of the white ash wave in the high distance, the golden crowns of the oaks are heavy and dense as granite in the autumn sun; but the gardener planting his saplings does not notice them at all; he looks at his staked-out plot, where a few thin sticks straggle up gauntly through the grass, and whispers to himself in profound and almost blessed satisfaction:

     "Well, it's not so empty here any more!"

1926

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[I love fall, or its nearest equivalent here. Skipped ahead thirty pages and am now re-situated chronologically. We'll see where this goes.]

Trash Fiction Break!

2009-09-15T19:12:00.003-04:00

I've been rebuilding the Cussler collection that I think has been twice disbanded. The fifty-cent paperback rack in the lobby of the library has been key. Only the Dirk Pitt adventure novels and the NUMA files novels are counted; he and his *ahem* co-authors are getting away from me with the Oregon Files and the Isaac Bell nonsense

The Dirk Pitt Canon:

(X) The Mediterranean Caper
(X) Iceberg
(X) Raise the Titanic!
(X) Vixen 03
(X) Night Probe!
(X) Pacific Vortex (2009! Finally! Also it's freaking terrible)
(X) Deep Six [I'd forgotten I'd read this]
(X) Cyclops [Ditto--though it involves a shootout on the moon!]
(X) Treasure
(X) Dragon
(X) Sahara
(X) Inca Gold
(X) Shock Wave
(X) Flood Tide
(X) Atlantis Found
(X) Valhalla Rising
(X) Trojan Odyssey
(X) Black Wind
(X) Treasure of Khan [Sure the Mongols stashed a bunch of stuff in Hawaii!]
( ) Arctic Drift

Kurt Austin adventures (with Paul Kemprecos)
(X) Serpent
( ) Blue Gold
(X) Fire Ice
( ) White Death
(X) Lost City [dastardly French arms magnates? Haven't we seen this before in Africa?]
(X) Polar Shift [Magnetic Polar Shift. Awesome]
( ) The Navigator
( ) Medusa

Maybe I've read Blue Gold or White Death? The other three have come out since I did this the last time, and everyone should know I'm not paying anywhere near full price for these babies.

A fragment

2009-09-12T22:35:00.003-04:00

     Getting to the Faculty of Art from the dormitory by tram is a little complicated. A few clarifications: I am (technically) a trained linguist (degree and all, I’m afraid) and, as I assume most people to be, somewhat obsessive-compulsive about particular things. Therefore, the perceptive reader (read: not blind) will be forewarned of the three following themes: (1) My exceeding height. (2) My love/lust for etymology, the compulsion I have to examine words for meaningful components. (3) In spite of (1) and fueled by (2), my love of the tram network of DPMB (Dopravní podnik města Brna, the Brno municipal transportation authority).

     Sure, it’s relatively easy, even at seven-thirty in the morning, with a few hours of sleep under your belt, to make your way down to the nearest No.1 stop. This is Výstaviště, the Exhibition Center, though “center” is perhaps not the best rendering. The word itself is immediately from výstava “exhibition,” and the suffix –iště “place, location.” Výstava is from the root /stav/, an old suffixed causative of the verb /sta/ “to stand”, prefixed with vy- “outwards/up,” with the prefix vowel lengthening in nominalization, a process I believe is peculiar to Czech and Slovak in the Slavic languages. The amusing thing (well, amusing to me) is that the suffix - iště is also originally a derivative of the verbal root /sta/, cognate to the Indo-Iranian suffix –stān “place of.” So, the whole thing is the set-up place, the made-to-stānd-up-place-of-standing, or, to torture the metaphor, the Upbuiltistān of southwest Brno.

     “Exhibition Center” it is then.

     However, that line one stop, with its eminently mineable name, is but the first step and the first tram line, unless you want to stay on the one and go to the main station or all the way to the other end of town and its hinted-at suburbs, in this case, Řečkovice. Even four, five, six months in, the end-points of any given line remain nebulous, hypothetical, existing only in electronic letters, and, more prosaically, on placards and maps. A single stop in the direction of Řečkovice gets us to Mendlovo náměstí ([Monk/geneticist Johan Gregor] Mendel Square.) Note the fairly common placename náměstí “square”—a long-i neuter noun originally from the prepositional phrase na městě “in the city” (there’s some funny initial vowel lengthening again) and also note the Czech possessive adjective suffix –ovo (neuter). At Mendlovo, Mendlák in the slang of the town, you must exit the one, cross the street, and pick up a five, six, or seven heading north and east, conjoined for the upcoming stretch of track. The three stops here: Nemocnice u Svaté Anny, (the hospital at/by St. Anne) Šilingrovo náměstí (should be parsable as Šilingr Square) and then down a street that used to be the walls around the old town to Česká (Czech [street]), the transport hub at the north end of the city center.

     From there, off the second tram line of the day, it’s about a three-block walk, if you remember where we were going in the first place, but the lazy step is to transfer one more time to the twelve or thirteen, up one step to Grohova (ulice “street” is implied, which is feminine, hence the feminine ending –ova); Groh Street. From there the faculty of Art is half a block away, and you can stagger to class, if you bothered going in the first place.

______

This is from a handwritten fragment from the winter of 2004-2005, probably written in my dorm room in Vinařská or at the Yellow Bar. It brought back some associations, although this whole process was already becoming obsolete when I started walking up the hill, not down, and either walking the whole way or just taking the bus (the 20? 21?) the back way. I've made some minor emendations, including the last sentence, which was an attempt to give a bit of closure to the whole thing. Its incompleteness aside, I thought I'd rescue it from its spot folded up inside some Slavic book on my shelf and see if it triggered anyone else's associations.

A Few Droplets

2009-08-30T00:16:00.000-04:00

If it has been raining so much and continues to do so, I will add a few droplets to it. Besides, that might make it stop; if it only lasts five minutes I’ll set my writing down and go for a walk.

I noticed years ago that during all the larger storms they always announce a disturbance or depression over Iceland. Beautiful weather has something to do with the Canary Islands, from where “regions of high pressure” trundle along as a rule, but rain and sleet and cold always come from Iceland; it is clearly the specialty there. No one ever announces a depression over Kardašova Řečice in Southern Bohemia or a region of low pressure over the district offices in Trutnov; it just goes to show you that even after the handover of power we remain dependent on foreigners, at least so far as the weather is concerned. As for Iceland, it must be a strange place, for (according to Otto’s Encyclopedia¹) it is a land with “a coarse, cold, and damp climate,” but also a “comparatively mild” one; they suffer from tapeworms and asthma and in the past they banned love poetry by law² which seems sensible enough; their main industries are sheep, fish, volcanic eruptions and rain.
Of course it just started raining again.

This year the harvest will be bad on account of the terrible rain; otherwise it would be bad on account of the prolonged drought. But prolonged drought is better for the farmers, because then we suffer from “catastrophic climactic threats” and especially “hail the size of pigeons’ eggs,” (the size of pigeons’ eggs only being referenced in this context) whose result is the forbearance of certain taxes and “speedy relief from the responsible agencies.” We didn’t hear anything this year about the size of pigeons’ eggs on account of all the bad weather; repeat it a hundred times and you will feel the sweltering heat, the piercing sun, the oppressive humidity of an incoming storm. The farmer carefully looks up at the sky, the chickens already having hidden themselves, and sees the booming heavens, the downpour beginning to splash and spray, and suddenly “hail the size of pigeons’ eggs” will ring down. But that has simply failed to happen this year.
Besides, the sun just came out once more. I’m going outside for a bit.

The summer solstice is a time when children from country schools take excursions to Prague. I met at least a dozen such excursions today at the very minimum. The children are all holding hands and not even looking to the right or to the left, as they have a horrible fear of getting lost; getting them across the street, for instance, is a very tricky maneuver indeed. These little country moppets are quite agitated, and the children do not let go of each others’ hands even at night (for the world is an evil place), and I haven’t even mentioned the country trousers yet; neither long or short, but the famous “trousers you’ll grow out of,” and the little girls pattering around like mice with supernaturally large umbrellas, and the teacher bringing up the rear with an umbrella and his overcoat over his arm, counting his charges at every corner. It is a wonder one female teacher did not burst into tears when she sat her group down in pairs by the National Theater and suddenly realized she had three girls too many. How it happened and what she did with them I have no idea. But nothing is more touching than when it is raining quite steadily and the bridge looks like it has been swept clean of people, and one of those children's crusades is straggling along it with soaked hair and dripping umbrellas and numb hands, just to see “the great city, whose fame…”
God, it’s started raining again!

     "And the Lord sent rain down onto the earth. It rained unceasingly for six moths. The waters rose and inundated the earth forty cubits above the highest summits." That is the description of the flood in a variation of the Bible from Turkestan. The prophet Noah also built an ark in this version; but when all the animals were going on board in pairs, the devil caught the ass by the tail and held him. The ass stomped and brayed and would not go on. "Come on, come on, you devil," the prophet shouted at him. At that the devil dropped the ass' tail and dashed for the ark. "Wait," said the prophet, "who called you?" "You did," the devil replied. "You just said 'come on, come on, you devil,' and that is me, after all!" So Noah had to let the devil on the ark, and that's how the devil escaped the flood. Now you know why the flood--in light of the devilishness of the world--was completely unnecessary.

     There is a relevant detail to this story which the Bible has left out: that it really smelled in the ark, on account of all the filth from the animals. That angle on things surprised me and utterly convinced me. Noah even prayed to God about it. But the Allah of Turkestan, instead of creating the broom or the shovel, created the dung-beetle instead, which removed all of the filth in question. Since then God has left it among us, to get rid of the mud and all kinds of unclean things.

     It rains no more. I'm going out.

1923

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1 [Otto's Encyclopedia was the largest Czech-language encylopedia. Of course Čapek had access to a copy; I'm sure it was his Google/Wikipedia.]
2 According to this site, the Gray Goose Laws forbade, among other types, "poems praising a woman." In an era more conducive to blood feuds and blood money, I suppose this made sense. However, it also says such laws were frequently ignored, which also makes sense.]

Housekeeping

2009-08-17T13:58:00.001-04:00

I managed to post "Sunday" on a Monday, and I managed to post Pentecostal only two and a half months after actual Pentecost. (May 31st). Whoops; this is a little delayed, isn't it? I hope this isn't one of those projects that fall through the cracks; I seem to have a lot of those.

Pentecostal

2009-08-16T00:15:00.001-04:00

     When I, a heedless child, was instructed in the highest secrets of the faith—namely the Holy Trinity—by Mr. Bret the catechist¹, it was not at all strange to me that there were three personages of God; for me there I simply recognized three gods in heaven the way I recognized three gods on earth—the notary public, my father, and the chairman of the parish council, having chosen those three among other the others for their physical size. It was something else that bothered me: what exactly did the Holy Spirit do and what was its purpose? The business of God the Father was clear to me—the creation of the world is a tangible work, after all. God the Son was at least a man, and had once been a child, and I could color his clothes with the most beautiful red and blue colors in the Bible stories I had. I just didn’t know what to do with the Holy Spirit; I didn’t know what he looked like and I couldn’t define exactly what his function was; he seemed to me a little undervalued and occupied by internal affairs, without a defined and practical sphere of action. I maintain that everyone had the same problems with the Holy Ghost.

     Since that time I have not made much progress in matters of religious expertise, having instead been forced to turn to more humanistic concerns, and it is still a question of spirit which makes my head spin. For even we people know full well how to value material work and control over matter; we know how to love out hate human leaders, saviors, and the shapers of the church; but our stance on the mere soul which does not do this or that is uncertain, diffident. The human spirit concern our very faith in humanity, but does not have a defined sphere within it; we regard intelligence or education as some sort of honor or adornment, but not as a worthy goal or sense of living. Not long ago a survey of pedagogues resulted in a distaste for impractical education, which supposedly was poor preparation for a useful life. Yes, the spirit, which does not serve strictly practical needs, seems somehow useless and poorly regulated; we esteem it but we do not know what to do with it. It is the same with the Holy Spirit; it rules nowhere, but makes everywhere sacred. It cannot be measured by the results of its work; its sphere is everywhere.

     For that reason we should celebrate the human spirit at this year’s holidays, that tongue of flame and universal language; the spirit, which did not create this world and does not lead it, but sanctifies it; a spirit wholly impractical and unfettered, useless, unregulated by defined limits. It is difficult to define the function of the spirit, of education, of culture; we know that we cannot find it and we cannot sow a field or grease a wheel with it. It may be more personally valuable for us to recognize it in the actions of the law than in music; it will clearly be more fruitful to manufacture nails than read verses, and it is certainly more useful to cultivate turnips than to cultivate atomic theory. Culture is indefensible on practical terms, but that was the case millennia ago, when people composed useless music, verses and paintings and enumerated the stars and wasted their time in hundreds of similar ways, as we do today. Education too is indefensible except by saying that whoever that exciting tongue of flame descends upon recognizes through some secret fashion that it is all worth it, that it is worth more than any sort of useful or profitably or popularly-regarded deed. In its ultimate sense the spirit serves nothing else at all besides humanity; it does not exist for any other reason.It does not nourish anyone, or lead anyone anywhere, but it grants one thing: a life of value.

1929

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1 Mr. Bret the catechist--teacher of religion and friend of the Čapek family in Úpice, who is also mentioned by [Karel's brother] Josef Čapek in his autobiographical writings and by [their sister] Helena Čapková in her autobiographical work Malé děvče [Young Girl].

Sunday

2009-08-06T00:12:00.002-04:00

     I don’t know whether it is an atmospheric effect or an acoustic one or something else, but the fact of the matter is, that (though I never know what the day is or the date, usually figuring this out from the masthead of the newspaper) on Sunday mornings I usually feel some special pressure right when I wake up, a disinclination to rise, an overall weakness of will and a simple insufficiency of enthusiasm for any task or type of work; you could also call it indolence, sloth, spleen, or just plain boredom. Normally I am vexed by confusion about this sudden depression for a little while until I finally say: “Oh, it’s probably Sunday.” And it always is.

     So, as I have said, I do not know where it comes from, maybe it is some atmospheric pressure or magnetic disturbance or something. It is possible that something in the universe just does not work on Sundays, by which the daily order of things is disrupted. It ought to be scientifically ascertained if the trees or grass grow on Sundays, or to test if it is an empirical fact that it rains more on the red days on the calendar or is hotter than usual; if spiritual activity is dampened, if the dogs stink particularly badly and the children are more vexing, to see if it is always windier outside, if more people drown, if there are a larger number of automobile accidents, actors performing worse, the trains and trams run badly, problems with digestion and beer and handwriting are worse than at any other time. It is possible that there are periodic cosmic interruptions on Sundays and holidays and that one wakes up on Sunday with a tangible foreboding that something is not in order. There is the hidden trouble.

     Or perhaps it is an acoustic phenomenon; one awakens and does not hear the vast and wide hum of human endeavor; the result of which is that something seems lacking. Is is as unnerving as a mill that ceases to turn. That explanation is a simple one and consequently it cannot be correct, for I wake up with a catastrophic feeling on Sundays in completely foreign cities, even alone in the mountains, and if a storm cast me on a deserted island without so much as a Friday I would still wake up one morning with a terrifying feeling that something was not in order and that I didn’t feel like doing a thing. “Aha,” I would finally say, “it’s probably Sunday.” And indeed it would be.

     I maintain that weekends, excursions, and all human holidays are just desperate attempts at flight from this Sunday depression; people think they have to fatigue themselves to forget the crushing burden of holidays. Woe to them; for Sundays find them at the feet of St. Jan’s, in Divoká Šárka⁴ and at the stadium of Sparta. Better served is he who confronts the streets of his town face to face or passes his Sunday at home, lounging around as though he has the flu. Well then, in cities people show that it is possible to bear Sunday afternoons after a fashion—actually, there is almost something exalted about it, for the girls are prettier and on top of that you get to read the Sunday papers. Well into the afternoon a true Sunday state blooms, as the city shrugs off its somnolence and people come into the street whom you never see at any other time. There are thousands of people who only exist on Sundays; old women, widows, orphans, mustachioed men, uncles and aunts, nuns and grandmothers, strange people who look like they were put away in the wardrobe thirty years ago and let out on Sundays so that the moths do not eat them. They have strange, washed Sunday faces; pale, long-nosed, whiskered, ginger-haired, freckled, and doughy, dressed somewhat poorly, as a rule, but the clothes are clean; there is something old-fashioned about each of them, even anachronistic; other than on Sundays, you only meet these people and these sorts of clothes at a third-rate funeral. Towards about four or five o’clock you meet whole families who only exist in public on Sundays; on normal days you meet families with unpleasant little boys screaming at every step, with little girls peeping out from the edge of their mother’s skirts, with a mother swaying like a ship, and with a father smoking a cigar in a holder and criticizing the state of the roads and the construction. I swear to you that this is human nature on Sundays, which is exactly the same in Rome, Paris, or London, and which returns the whole world to an indestructible and horrible thing: into a small town. The town dweller does not flee from the city and its uproar, or the small town and its boredom, its slow pace and its slothful disorder. This suppressed small town, hidden during the week in shops and work floors and houses has Sundays and holidays to itself to dominate the streets; these aren’t walks, these are a manifestation. We are here. We, the old maids, the fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts. We the anachronistic. We the eternal.

1927

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1 [Svatojanské proudy (St. Jan/John's rapids/streams) no longer exist, having been dammed downstream and turned into a reservoir. Pictures survive, of course. Divoká Šárka is a large park and nature preserve in the northern outskirts of Prague.]

Uproar At The Edge Of Town

2009-08-03T15:11:00.002-04:00

     It changes endlessly, and that is the truth; sometimes it glistens in the rain or almost rings under the sun; sometimes there is frost or fog or snow and sometimes there are the most strange and beautiful clouds overhead that it is almost unbelievable; but all in all they are still the same roofs and chimneys (and the occasional chimney sweep) with the same windows, with servants (sometimes different ones) shaking dustcloths out the windows, and the same yards and the neighbors’ children—in short, these are just the sort of things you can see out of any window. It is probably the same for you.

     And in addition to these daily sights there is another view, an auditory one, if I might put it that way. The same sounds come in the window every day; you scarcely note them as they happen, but you know that if they did not come at their appointed time that you would notice something lacking and begin to listen intently. This is why Sundays and holidays are somehow oppressive, because that daily aural backdrop is different; suppressed and thinned out. The world is not so full or so real on those days. How could you not recognize the sounds of your part of town? I know them so well I know nothing of them as they happen. Hammer away, carpenters, shaping the timbers of a new row of houses, you are no bother; rattle on, coal carts, roar and shout, heavy motors straining up hill; and you, airplane, droning overhead—it does not touch me. What sort of new and unaccustomed sound would there have to be to summon me to the window? The bugle and bass of country musicians would do that; I’d jump up and go look and the old man blowing into his horn. Or the sounds of cows and heifers and the high-pitched calves, that beautiful, husky, the thirds and fifths of the mountain pastures. Or a song for seven singers. In any of those events I would leap up from my work and tear over to the window to see where—where—

     Suddenly I hear a boom. It is ten-twenty in the morning. So what does that boom imply? Maybe the soldiers are drilling down in the fields; perhaps it is a mortar or a detonation, as they call it, but the soldiers nearby have already finished drilling and are headed home singing, “oh, you will regret, you will regret this, my love.” Well, it could be the trams clanking, or the boards pounding over at the construction site; perhaps they have torn down some scaffolding. A number of loud noises have already fallen into this beloved daily din at the edge of town. Whooo, whooo, wheezes the powerful locomotive; and hear the iron squeal on the bumpers. And that freight truck tries to brake as it hurtles noisily downhill. “Hey, hey,” the coachmen might shout, “why did they load on so much?” And I know that other sound, that is the children whistling as they go to school. The barking of a puppy. The clanking of a steamroller. The sonorous clacking of bricklayers laying. I don’t have to get up from my work; repetition has already brought these sounds here into my space, and so much the better, for they are so extensive and vibrant.

     At ten-twenty there was a gas explosion in an apartment a few blocks away. It was a proper boom, but before I could evaluate it, is disappeared into this living, bustling, crashing polyphony at the edge of town as though it belonged there, as if it had already been written down beforehand in the sheet music.

Boom. One strike of the drum to keep the beat.

1931

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Confindence and nativizing

2009-05-26T13:47:00.002-04:00

An interesting article in its own right, but most striking for me for its first line.

That continuum of confidence, of retaining the foreign or arrogantly nativizing it, pretty much sums up large chunks of my life.

(via languagehat)

Čapek seems to be on hiatus until further notice. I've got other fires to tend.

via Raminagrobis

2009-05-20T18:04:00.003-04:00

There is nothing new under the sun.

The Recency Phenomenon, as applied to cell phones.

The Chain of Transmission

2009-05-08T17:57:00.002-04:00

I am an axe.

(via Language Hat via wood s lot.)

Beyond The City

2009-05-01T21:05:00.007-04:00

     I say this from my own experience: the city is a bad place, unhealthy and entirely injurious to humanity. I do not even mean the dust, smoke, bad air and other horrible dangers to both health and morals that lie in wait for the man on the street. I mean the unhealthy and truly terrifying fact that the city-dweller cannot ordinarily see the moon and the stars. The true autochthon of the center of town cannot see the Big Dipper or Polaris on account of the streetlights; and because of the buildings no one knows whether the full or new moon is shining; even if they did know, to them it would be six of one and a half-dozen of the other.

Big Dipper, Vermont, June 2006

     As far as the stars are concerned, their astral and planetary influence on human destiny is strongly in doubt, and as far as the influence of the moon is concerned, educated people only recognize its important to the extent of the tides, the palolo worm,¹ the growth of certain plants and bacteria, and perhaps also on sleepwalkers, poets, lovers and cats. I, however, am not concerning myself with these effects; I am concerned with the fact that if a denizen of the streets lifts his eyes from the ground, he cannot see the twinkling of the stars in the sky, and cannot see the face of the moon. If goes out on the threshold of his building, he does not even meet his nearest neighbors Venus or Jupiter. He is not permitted to direct his steps by the moon. He doesn’t even know if the night sky is black or white. He lives in a starless cavern like an olm,² but he does not realize it. The olm probably does not realize it either.

     The man on the streets lives in the city, and sometimes in a very large one, but he does not live in the universe, for he does not live under the stars. He lives among a million people, but not among a million stars. His world ends in Vysočany or Bubeneč³ instead of ending at Arcturus or the Milky Way; it’s really quite a small little world, for it does not go on into infinity. It doesn’t even matter if you study the star charts or can differentiate Altair from Albireo;⁴ it is more important to just be able to convince yourself whenever you want that the stars are still up there and that the cosmos exists. The man on the street has to go all the way out to Zbraslav⁵ to spot the universe; but the man at the periphery is in the universe as soon as he stands at his own door and looks up. If people met at night under the stars instead of under lamps, I think that they would not be easily able to talk about politics or the terrible state of things; it’s easier to talk of love, of the next day, and of other quiet and serious things under the stars. Under the stars you can go crazy or fall in love, but you can’t get really aggravated. Secret astral influences do exist; the stars have a powerful influence on a person who looks at them, but they have no influence on someone who reads the glowing advertisements for the Lyon Works⁶or reads theater reviews at lunch. A man under the stars is a participant in the grandiose glory of the world; he is crowned by those stars themselves.

     The effect of the moon is more profound. I don’t even mean the splendor of the moonlit night, the supernatural beauty of the Ottoman crescent, or the silver palaces on the moon⁷; I have the lunar phases and quarters in mind. A man who lives in the street conducts himself by the calendar; he knows it is the first or the fifteenth or the seventeenth, by which he is fatigued by everything brought to him by the merry-go-round of time. His time is not sacredly and lightly inscribed in the phases of the moon. His life is not divided into heavenly quarters, and does not consist of light and dark periods. When he pays his rent on the first it is no eternal recurrence of time as it is when the moon is full. The time between two full moons is more profound and solemn than the time which comes between the first and the last. Time for a man of the city is a mere date, is it just a number and in no way a heavenly phenomenon; it does not come from eternity, which is the time of the universe. A man who sees the face of the moon lives not by the ticking clock on the wall, but by the secretive timepieces of the planets; consequently he measures time, by very long feet, if I may say so.⁸

     The last time I moved I intended to move alone to a wild and abandoned part of the city, but instead I found that I had moved much farther away: out to the moon and to the vicinity of the stars.

1926

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1 ["The worm lives in the shallow waters in the coral reefs. During its main breeding season , which occurs on the second or third day after the third quarter of the moon in October or November, the worms produce segments which are engorged with sperm or eggs . These segments break off at sunrise, rise to the surface, and release their gametes into the sea . The local villagers and fishermen collect these segments in large quantities as it is a popular delicacy. The gelatinous mass of worms is baked or fried and then eaten." (courtesy here. Mmmm. "Mblalolo" in the original, which is fascinating to me, as it does not seem like a permissible syllable onset a Malayo-Polynesian language. [EDIT: Fijian has a prenasalized "mb" permissible as an onset; not sure about the "l," though.]
2 [The olm. Sure, I could have said "salamander, but it's actually a close translation, and of course, I love little words I rarely see used.]
3 [Both of these are districts of Prague, recently added (1/1/1922) as of the time of the writing, and therefore suitably remote.]
4 [A suburb of Prague at the time. I think Čapek would find it funny that it is now one of the outermost districts of Prague itself, the city proper having grown significantly since the 1920s.]
5 Arcturus--the clear, reddish star in the constellation of Boötes, hurtling through the cosmic abyss at a speed of 500,000 kilometers per hour [see, the real footnotes are just as ridiculous as mine--Andrew]; Altair--one of the stars in the summer constellation of the Eagle; Albireo--the name of the topaz yellow and sapphire-blue double star forming the southern end of the Swan or the Northern Cross, one of the three significant constellations of the summer sky.
6 A former silk merchant on Železná Street in Prague [Thank God for these footnotes, because if this needed to be explained to citizens of Prague in the 1920s, I and Google couldn't do a thing about it]
7 [The original says "Ottoman half-moon," and I love Čapek too much for a [sic], but am also too pedantic not to point that out. I have no idea what he means by "silver palaces," that's for sure.]
8 [Originally "by very long ells/elbows," the word for the unit of measure "ell" being exactly the same as the part of the body, instead of just being etymologically related as in English.]

How Houses Smell

2009-04-28T18:21:00.002-04:00

     I don’t mean any consecrated odor, steam from the washing or even the stink of the kids’ diapers. I live in a young neighborhood which is growing with the ringing of hammers, the clatter of scaffolding and the strokes of the carpenter’s axes, and if you bound my eyes and led me through the city I would know my way by smells: there is an old street, those are new buildings, still partly uninhabited, there is an unsold house, while the foundation on that house is caving in. For the building smells of the man, gives our the odor of the matter from which it has arisen, and it takes decades before odors settle, and the dry, dusty stink of accidents hang in the air.

     At first it reeks of barren earth; the cold, damp, sepulchral breath of the bedrock below wafts up from the dug foundations. But there are already piles of bricks set up around, and well-baked bricks have an odor almost like that of bread; the dry oven sighs out of them, and the hot, mealy dust drifts off of them. Then the slaked lime blows in, which stings the eyes and sticks in the throat, and there is also the cold, raw smell of the mortar, which hangs coarse and close. The smell of new construction is cold and raw like the air in a cave, and campfires and good lamps will be needed to make this into a dwelling.

     Then the boards go up and the scaffolding rises, to let the wall-builders up and to change the smell, for the odor of wood is solid and good; wood smells of home, of ripeness, and its pitchy, sunny exhalations cover the lime reek of the plaster and the muddy smell of concrete. And let us not forget the sourish stench of iron, girders, pipes, and wires, together with the oily fetor of lacquer; or even the smoky reek of charcoal smoke used to cure the walls. And here we have the rank and file of carpenters and joiners as they raise the timbers, lay the floors and install the windows and doors; wood prevails and its resinous, balsamic odor drifts out of the clangorous construction. To that are added the smells of turpentine, varnish and oils, the stink of coats of wallpaper pastes and paint. And finally the well-scrubbed building sighs lightly and smells of soap like a boy fresh out of the bath on Sunday; the cool emptiness and strange hollowness of new construction exhales out the open windows.

     And a new building does not lose its own odor right away; just as new clothes smell of the textile factory and new shoes of the tannery, the house smells for a long while of the building site. Sir, it is a lng time before people feel at home in it; the building yet hems them in like some temporary enclosure, not yet grown around them like the shell on a small, it comes out strongly here and overpowers over there like new clothes. It must be extinguished somewhat to render it fit for people; you could say it must ripen for a few years. It only becomes a full, real house when it stops being a new building; then it becomes not just the work of the builders, but also of the people who live in it. From the laundry in the cellar to the smoking chimney it sings of humanity and warmth, until one day when men come with picks and shovels, and it smells, for one last time, of the grist mill, the meal, ripeness and its own special desiccation, reminiscent of the scent of hay and rotting wood.

1933

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2009-04-24T01:48:00.004-04:00

It bears repeating, but the Čapek I'm posting? I'm pretty sure you're the first people to read it in English. Ever. Same as last year.

So too, with this Fuks I've just started the second draft of.

______

     "It was long ago, very long ago, when I sent a letter from Prague to Daniel Potocky, lover of food and drink, to make time on Saturday and Sunday and come out to see me at my cottage. I wrote the letter with deliberate ambiguity, and yet urgently, closing with the remark that he certainly would not regret coming. And I sketched out a little map of how to get there once he got off the highway at Benešov.

     I imagined he would brag about it to Jána, who was his intellectual superior many times over, and he did. She called me at the neighbors’ cabin, for they had a telephone. I didn’t even have electricity there, relying on flashlights and oil lamps for light.

     “He was excited,” Jána divulged to me, “to see what I would make of it. Why he was invited. I told him it seemed like you were preparing a feast—you know how he likes to eat—and that you wanted him there for mysterious reasons.”

     Jána had never studied psychology; she was a chemist at the medical examiner’s office, but she had always had interesting insights into people’s personalities. What she had told Potocky about my letter seemed wise.
That memorable June Saturday was unusually hot and humid, as were the days preceding it. People complained of the humidity and torpor, the swimming pool was full of people, and they had even started to run out of beer and soft drinks. “If only it would rain a little,” people said, looking longingly at the sky whenever it started to cloud over. But no rain came. I had no beer or soft drinks at the cabin, just ordinary water, ten bottles of wine, two bottles of Greek cognac, a bottle of middling whisky and an exceptional banana schnapps. I also had three bottles of vodka, four tins of tomato juice and plenty of pepper. “If I mix him drinks,” I thought that Saturday, “he’ll be done. Sooner than I want, and I can’t have that today. He’ll just drink wine, which he can easily stand.” Before his arrival I looked over the glassware and the things for dinner. Then I went into the attic of the cottage, where I had a sort of study, which contained a low round table and a comfortable armchair, and I readied the pistol.

______

There's your hook. Unfortunately ninety-eight percent of it still only exists in my handwriting. If you liked it, ask me where I am with it round the summer solstice.

2009-04-23T20:15:00.002-04:00

The Painting of Martin Blaskowitz has a first draft. I first put pen to paper on June 4, 2008, almost eleven months ago.

It took longer than the first book I did, which is probably as it should be.

"And I don't know what I'm feeling right now, but it's intense. I just walked around the block without really registering it. My hands were shaking, and an eye was twitching a few pages from the finish. It's...man. I won't be at all surprised if no one has the same experience reading it, thinks it's ho-hum or predictable or whatever...but still. I took that text word by word, and performed some act on each of those components, and then wrote it all down. I owned it...but it's doing a good job of owning me."

I wrote that three and a half years ago and five or six projects ago.

I owned this one too, and they all do a good job of owning me. I need a nap.

Worries.

2009-04-21T18:34:00.003-04:00

I've been translating a set amount (40-42 lines) of the most recent Fuks novel I've been working on daily, with only five days off, since the third week of March.

I have two more days worth of work to do and I'm done with that, and am really at a stage (well, I was at this stage before I started this book, if not before) where first-draft translating, though excellent mental practice, is not what I need to be doing.

I must confront the fear that that is really all that I am capable of, that the neatly-defined first-draft step is all I have the patience for, that I will do nothing but swim in paralysis at the massively branching possibilities of editing. Writing this post is hopefully a decent start.

[EDIT: Not _much_ life-spanning melodrama is intended here, merely an articulation of something I've been dealing with for years--that I have more fun writing a first draft than subsequent drafts, but first drafts aren't exactly disseminable. Or even legible.]

Spring Storms

2009-04-21T17:36:00.002-04:00

     There are two kinds of spring storms: the first kind are those that occur in nature with rumblings, sheets of waters, hail, rainbows, and other ancillary phenomena through to the victorious birdsong at the end. The second kind of spring storm is that which has already begun to take hold in the winter, when the heads of the household begin to notice that they need to paint and knock a hole in the wall here and fix this up and make sure the stove is in order and plane this, hammer that, add a little more mortar to this, seal, lacquer, upholster and the like. There is an astonishing array of professions who wait to come into your home with stepladders and scrub-brushes and screwdrivers and mallets and putty knives and tubs and a bunch of other implements, with whose help they will turn all the wood in your domicile upside-down. Vast and elemental is the destructive power of human ingenuity.

     As far as I can tell, this storm of work is most often unleashed in human accommodations in the spring. I have no conception what all of these professionals do in the winter; perhaps they give themselves over to their victorious invasions and strategies of the year before. It starts out very innocently as a rule; one man comes to your house to have a look around and tells you they will begin work in a week or after the first of the month. Well, nothing can wait a week’s time or until after the first; two or three days later you start to grumble that that darned man should just come and start already. In this manner you are adroitly brought into a state of impatience, and you await an invasion of unfriendly forces as though it were a divine blessing. When you are well and truly worked over, your bell rings at seven o’clock in the morning and some skinny guy at the door proclaims that he is there to work. And he starts to work up a storm with the help of some hammers, chisels, and other tools.

     All of the other professionals have been waiting for this moment, and the varnishers and joiners and glaziers and painters and paperhangers and installers all rush in and begin to quarrel about who is in the way of whom. Don’t get involved, keep your hat on and let them sort it out amongst themselves; from this moment on you have become an insignificant, even unnecessary creature in your own house who isn’t even worth the energy to be told off. The already-named specialists suddenly each to each demolish something else; you have to recognize that they have the matter in hand. A half a day later your apartment is leveled to the ground, and when lunch-time comes they sit victoriously amongst the ruins, eating head cheese and talking about things in Unhošť or Strančice.¹ In spite of your dismay at this man-made swath of destruction you are a little excited that it has gone so quickly. “So,” you say ebulliently to these resting men, “you’ll have it all back together by tomorrow, then?”

     But to your surprise: the day after tomorrow instead of this terrible invasion there’s only one man there fiddling with something in the middle of the ruins. The day after that is a Sunday or a holiday and you are resigned to stew in peace on the rubbish heap which once was your place of residence. Them comes a strange and protracted stage when it is a “work in progress,” though this is not at all visible, the dust and filth waxes, the scraps of wood and the splinters, bread crumbs and other sorts of chaos, out of which a new reality does not appear. The following stage is one of mute despair: you come to the realization that the items in the world will never again be put back in order, the situation is clearly helpless and that you cannot expect better days.

     And one day quiet surrounds you, the stepladders and buckets and hammers are gone, and you come out into your reborn living room somewhat cautiously, like a farmer surveying his fields after a storm, to determine the damages after the elements have been unleashed. Well, the farmer says, a man has to find some good in this; this is broken, and that’s a little knocked-down over there… and finally he says to himself, with the indestructible optimism of the human race: “Well, it could have been a lot worse.”

1931

______
1 [Central Bohemian towns well outside of the Prague metro area now, let alone eighty years ago.]

Resurrection

2009-04-18T23:58:00.004-04:00

     When I was a little boy playing in the fields and wiping my nose on my sleeve, every year I experienced one moment of ceremonial excitement, and that was resurrection. We¹ had a deacon, may God grant him eternal praise, and he was supernaturally fat: spiritually, officially, exaltedly fat; his rotundity had none of the vulgarity of the lay people, but there was some special divine love visible in it—in short, he had an immaculate deacon's corpulence. And when our town square glowed forth in the mild spring evening with rows of candles in the windows, and a flow of white-dressed ministrants flowed out the cathedral doors with burning candles, and the large white figure of the catechist behind them, and then the deacon himself in golden vestments with the shining monstrance under the silken baldachin², that being carried by Mr. Kut’ak and Mr. Blahouš and two other municipal leaders, and everyone dressed in black with glittering furs, with Mr. Temín and the town choir trumpeted the sacred, ever-so-sacred intrada, and four ministrants ringing little bells, and two little boys swinging censers, and Nyklíček the sacristan ringing the giant bell, ding dong, ding dong, and lo, hallelujah, hosanna, hooray! The deacon sailed along like a fantastic, glowing cloud, redolent of incense, there it was, God, so beautiful, so unusually beautiful, that I (a low and godless boy) cast myself on my sinful knee, unable to tear my eyes from those slowly-moving lights, candles, tongues of flames, banners and gonfalons³, torches and the monstrance and the baldachin and all that glory, and my stomach rose in envious, wretched bitterness: why was my father, my big, strong, and dignified father not carrying the baldachin behind the deacon, or at least a banner or the littlest light; and that was the yearly pain of a godless boy.

     Since then I have not witnessed a resurrection, because I do not want to spoil that one great and sacred impression, but every year around White Saturday a certain Catholic nostalgia befalls me. And now tell me that it is aestheticism! Well, of course I was quite the aesthete at age eight, the same sort as the natives in the Congo or New Caledonia who watch their own processions and dancing magicians and torches and other such wonders; the same aesthete as the citizen of Prague or Madrid or I don’t know which man on the street staring at his famous funerals, parades, processions, and celebrations. This aestheticism is as old as the world and sophisticated as an Indian; it somehow doesn’t suit this age, but…

     “Yesterday at twelve o’clock noon the mayor Dr. Baxa welcomed Spring in the Kinský garden in the name of the municipal committee of Greater Prague and the the population of the capital city. Accompanied by representatives of the town councils, the chairs of municipal offices, representatives of the guilds, firefighters, municipal organizations, the uniformed clubs etc. etc., he visited the First-Blossoming Crocus and assured it in a lengthy speech of the overjoyed feelings with which the capital city welcomed Spring into its ancient and celebrated walls. Thereupon the police band struck up music and the chrous Hlahol sang the moving choral “Lo, Spring Arises.” Simultaneously all the bells in Prague rang out, ten cannons were fired from the Mariánská fortress, and squadrons of airplanes crossed over the Vltava River. Innumerable throngs of the citizenry voyaged to the First Crocus, guarded by honorable patrols of the Sokol, security forces, municipal clubs and the Worker’s Gymnastic Union…”⁴

     “Our president welcomed Spring at an intimate celebration in the Castle garden. Nuncio Micara⁵ expressed tremendous feelings of joy in the name of the diplomatic council, and they along with the government and its representatives welcomed spring in general and especially into the territory of a state as flourishing and wisely governed as is Czechoslovakia…”

     “All political parties took part in the arrival of Spring with meetings and camps of people, after which they departed in streams for general merriment in Stromovka park…”

     “The general inspector of the Czechoslovak army saluted Spring at a formal parade undertaken at the training-ground near Invalidovna. The sun extended its blessed rays from early that morning…”

     Why go on like this? Democracy is beautiful, fine, but it doesn’t know how to celebrate at all. Mayor Baxa did welcome the participants of the trade fair, but he did not welcome the First Crocus, nor will he, although the first crocus is something better and more sacred than the whole trade fair. And our mayor is not leading the ceremonial Procession Over The Frozen Vltava, nor is he celebrating the fantastic and exciting Departure of The Ice to the peals of the cathedral bells. We still accept Christmas and Easter and All Saints from the fading hand of the church; old Catholicism still maintains the sacred division of the year, but we the godless have found nothing, nothing at all, to replace it. I do not know what contemporary democracy is lacking more: a little poetry or a little positive thought.

1923

______

1 i.e, in [the author's hometown of] Upice, [which we've seen before]
2 [Wikipedia was again very helpful with some of the specialized religious terminology.]
3 [Sure, I could just call it a pennant, but I remember the word from a translation of the Song Of Roland I have back in Vermont, and if it can be used in a baseball context, I consider myself justified enough.]
4 [The Sokols (Falcons) were a patriotic Czechoslovak national organization. The DTJ (Workers' Gymnastic Union) was an phys. ed organization founded by tailors(!) in 1897. Both still exist, at least with American successors. Also, say hello to Mayor Baxa again!]
5. The [main] papal diplomat.

Pretty Tired Too

2009-04-14T02:27:00.003-04:00

Hi, Nick!

Yes, I'm so lazy these days about posting that I'm piggybacking someone else's meta-post about not posting.

It was fascinating to look at the wikipedia page for lomography, for what I assume is the correct derivation for the unfamiliar-to-me appellation of "some lomo douchebag."

There's more Čapek in the pipeline. That's the good thing about a series of short pieces set throughout the course of the calendar year; it gives the merest hint of actual structure while enabling me to take vast swaths of time off.

On The Magic of Easter

2009-04-06T21:57:00.003-04:00

     This then is the truth: Easter has always been as richly embroidered with folk customs and superstitions as Christmas; it is as magical and pagan a holiday as the winter solstice. But there is one great difference: the mysteries of Christmas is to a large extent prophetic, whereas the mysteries of Easter are more akin to conjuring. At Easter no one pours lead or halves apples or cracks walnuts or lights candles or looks into the depths of the water so that the future might appear. No dog barks at Easter to indicate the direction the bridegroom will come from. All of these prophesies belong to Christmas.¹ At Easter magic is performed so that we will be happy, so the harvest will be good, and what have you. At Easter you do not pose questions of what will be with magic rituals, but you instead look to effect an enchanting influence on that future. Wash in the brook at dawn, girl, and you will be healthy all year.² Do this and that, fulfill this magical law or that, and everything will be in order; your future will be in your hands. It is not in your power at Christmas to determine what shape the poured lead will form; you have no influence on whether the core of the apple will be shaped like a cross or a star; you cannot cause your little candle to burn out faster than all the others. But at Easter you are sort of master of your own fate; you do this and you’re be healthy and happy as a clam. So run along and do it.

     It might be because Christmas is ruled by the night and Easter by the divine day. Nature sleeps at Christmas and nothing can be done about it, man together with nature sits, hands in his lap, until the winter passes. He cannot reach into the current of events in any way, it’s only a matter of somehow survived until spring. And so he, dreaming and waiting, gets in a mood for fortunetelling. A man with a plow in his hand doesn’t powerlessly ask how the harvest will be, because to a certain level he’s making it happen himself; hail can still come, our drought, but a man does what he can to get his field to grow. He performs magic so that evil powers do now ruin his work and his health; so he sets up candles against storms and says old sayings to ward off disease. At the winter solstice he sits in the gloom with his hands in his lap and longs for omens and signs; show me what will happen to me and mine, for there is no way for me to do this myself. At the vernal equinox he has too much to do already; God be praised, he is again the architect and shaper of his own fate, to a certain extent. And around him everything is moving, nature gives itself to its own grand progress; there is no more of this hibernal fixation and paralysis. And that is why springtime enchantment is entirely different from that of the wintertime; no more of this metaphysical impotence and helplessness, which can only ask fate what will happen, but some action at least, a little force to have a noticeable influence on one’s fortunes.

     And I think that we all can have enough of this wintry prophesy. The whole of Europe is given over to it; always these anxious questions about what will happen and how it will turn out. Perhaps it’s time for people everywhere to throw themselves into a springtime enchantment and do something so that things turn out well. If we do this and this, if we fulfill this prerequisite or that, we will be happy and healthy. And every one of us can help with this enchantment--whoever is doing something does not have to ask helplessly what fate has in store. Do not think that we cannot have even the slightest influence on what will be; even the smallest influence is better than mere prophesy. That is the whole secret of spring magic: what is going to happen is under our control.

1935

______

1 [Most if not all of these are outlined many places on the web, say here, for instance.]
2 [People love discussing the pomlázka tradition (myself included) but there are other Easter traditions as well, some noted here.]

What? No Meta-Post?

2009-03-31T14:27:00.002-04:00

Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era

"If we no longer think, with Swift and Johnson, that languages ought to be stabilized, we still feel that their proper condition is stability. The admission of ain’t to a large American dictionary provoked newspaper hysteria in 1961-62. That in Canto 53 the same emperor appears indifferently as Tcheou Kong and Chao Kong causes many readers uneasiness outweighing the instruction the Canto affords, and a scholarly convention in citing the word ideogramic is to tag it [sic], meaning “not so in my dictionary.” Words, since the 18th century, have seemed fixed upon a rigid and authorized grid, each little violation of which incites the Great Anarch.

Behind such feelings lies the notion of a stable shared world in which all men’s senses participate and the features of which have been labeled by agreement, though different agreements obtain in Italy and in Sweden. Gatto, say the Italians for some reason, and katt the Swedes; it would be simpler if they said the same thing, but anyhow cats are cats. The linguistic contracts, being arbitrary, are fragile, and the only code book, Webster’s or Larousse’s, wards off unspeakable disorder. An alternative notion, that names should be left in place because they are somehow right, is traceable in theory to Plato’s Cratylus but in practice to costive notions of correctness. Both positions were still seriously defended in the early 19th century. Both linger in the average literate psyche. Both were rendered obsolescent by the slow discovery of language, a complex coherent organism that is no more the sum of its constituent words than a rhinoceros is the sum of its constituent cells, an organism that can maintain its identity as it grows and evolves in time; that can remember, that can anticipate, that can mutate. Latin is not a dead language; everyone in Paris speaks it, everyone in Rome, everyone in Madrid. The poetic of our time grows with this discovery."

Borrowed from this Languagehat post. It bears repeating.

Making the Rounds in March

2009-03-31T03:05:00.002-04:00

     You always sense it with your nose and your ears more than with your eyes; the air is full of it, it flows out of the soft earth, gurgles along in brooks, roars in veritable streams, and whistles merrily in blackbird-song. What does it matter if the grass in the meadow is still blond and brown as a hare! The truth is if you take a closer look around you will find things under last year’s stubble, under the dried leaves—a light green something shooting upwards. Is it the creeping strawberry or the dark green of the celandine, God only knows which, but it is fertile and eager, spreading greenly, if only you look for them like lice up against the base of these brown hairs of last year.

     But what of that; this isn’t about the embarrassment of weeds, let them grow as they can if it is their time, for we have more a more serious nomination for spring. You might call them branches or broom handles. We, however, know that they will become lilacs, black elders, barberries and viburnums, gooseberries, hawthorns, dogwoods, honeysuckles and privet; for now has come the time when spring asks what you have planted last autumn. I planted all this last autumn, sir, and besides that willows and cotoneasters, mock-oranges, deutzias, spireas, maple and broom, sumac and rowan, oleaster, bird cherry and flowering cherries; I should really have a white coat like a doctor in the hospital, walking around from bed to bed and diagnosing with his eyes and his hands as to how his charges are doing. Thank God, this one’s not so bad; the patient is still sleeping, but the pith is green and full of sap; true, this little limb is bad, but one little operation, my little bush, and we’ll regain ourselves and start sprouting like mad. And what is wrong with you I don’t know; we may have transplanted you without some of your finer roots, you look more dead than alive; we have no magic, but it is still possible to hope that “nature will cure,” as the doctors say; it is still possible to bend over the patient and carefully score the skin here with my nails—well, I don’t know. And here, the rabbits did this to us, eating the outer layers of the colutea during the winter right down to the quick; God only knows how we’ll get out of this one, and it seems nothing remains but to shrug our shoulders and chalk the whole thing up to the capriciousness of nature.

     Those were the invalids, but God be praised for the others! They live already, I tell you, they’re already at work, you have only to look at the buds. Yes, have a look at the blossoms; some look like little knots and some jut out of the end of the branch like a thumb or the hard end of a spear; but most are obscured by a little insect seated on the twig, wings folded; it sits facing down, hunched over and immobile, and drinks until it is ready to burst. This one over here on the viburnum looks like a fuzzy gray fly with a thin behind, this one of the barberry looks like a dark and engorged tick, this one on the dogwood is just a flat little thing; you can’t even see it as it clings to the branch; but they are there as they eagerly and breathlessly drink. Just another little while now, and the the sated little fly will spread its folded wings, the immobile aphid will carefully unfurl its own, and more wings, still wrinkly and folded, will spread themselves and face then sun to rise up from their bough from spring until autumn. We people call these things leaves, but they are nothing more than the buds themselves growing wings.

     The little wings of the leaves, the flying pollen and the buzzing of all sorts of insects; I tell you, all this arises from one of the strongest impulses of life, and spring truly starts with the fluttering of all the little wings on the earth.

1937

______

[Wikipedia served as my specialist dictionary, helping me convert Czech common names to Linnean binomial nomenclature and then back to English common names. I can't imagine having been able to do this without it.]

Just Posting a Skosh

2009-03-30T20:21:00.002-04:00

Somewhere in perusing the internet today I came upon a reference to the word skosh. and found to my amusement that it was a borrowing from Japanese sukoshi (a little bit). I was surprised, for I'd apparently I had a notion it was of good anglo-Saxon stock, having heard it since my youth (usu. with epenthetic t--more like "skowtch" if I can be quick and dirty with the phonetics.)

Upon some thought, though, its not altogether surprising a useful little word of Japanese could have made it into English in the years before my parents were born, what with the military presence in Japan right after World War II (which continues, at least on Okinawa, until the present day.) My paternal grandfather served in the Eastern Front during WWII (in Fiji, from what I'm told). This is not to say I'm suggesting Papa brought that word back himself, but if ever there were an organization to move slang around the world, I suppose the US Army would be it.

It's interesting to think back on my grandfather, who died when I was six. His parents were immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (mountains of NE Slovakia) who had managed by design or chance to get out of Europe in the decade just before World War I. He participated in the Second World War as part of an effort, one of whose very tiny aftereffects is written into the English language.

New Čapek by noon tomorrow.

Word-Hoard Or Word Problem?

2009-03-25T21:01:00.004-04:00

(I get the vague impression that I've articulated this somewhere before, but I find no evidence of it. Either that or it's so obviously a blog post I can't believe I haven't yet.)

Among my various half-tended patches of language is Old English. I'm not sure if it's a matter of being interested in Old English per se, but since I am interested in comparative translation, historical linguistics, an English speaker...Beowulf sort of keeps coming up.

A housemate finally gave me another copy of Seamus Heaney's bilingual translation of the poem (I either gave mine away or left in in Vermont) and this has brought me back to another book I picked up a while ago, Barney's Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English vocabulary. (1985)

This story is going to veer into mathematical territory here, as unlikely as that may seem from my largely linguistics-based interest in the work, but there's an interesting series of numbers thrown out in the introduction that have always struck me. (That, and the nickname "Old Anguish," which I hadn't heard before I found the book.)

"The total vocabulary of [preserved] Old English poetry...is something over eight thousand words, of which about sixty percent are compound words. But a student need learn only a quarter of this number of words to know the meaning of over ninety percent of the running words he will meet in reading Beowulf." (vii.)

I remember the first time I read this a couple of years ago going "wait, what?" It struck me as a very indirect way of expressing these quantities, so of course I got cracking. For the following, I assume the phrase "this number of words" refers to the total vocabulary, and not the subset of that comprised of compound words.

compound words in preserved OE lexicon: "something over 8000"*"about sixty percent"=~5000 compound words.

"a quarter of (this number of words)"="over ninety percent of the running words he will meet in reading Beowulf."
.25 * ~8000 = ~.9 * B

B = ~2000/~.9 = ~2200-2250.

Well, now we know how many "running words" there are in Beowulf. The running words vs. hapax legomena post will have to wait for another day.

This wasn't a math problem, you say? Could have fooled me.

Going Home

2009-03-25T18:52:00.002-04:00

     With this title I do not mean any symbolic way home--no pilgrim’s return to his homeland from far-off lands; I mean the entirely ordinary and everyday trip home; a trip which one could almost undertake with eyes closed: straight on here and around the corner and across the street and left and right and there we are. I’m thinking on a trip which we undertake with the eyes of our attention also closed, which we undertake out of habit, inattentively, mechanically, proceeding step by step into our own footprints. No one discovers the world when taking that daily trip home. Similarly, no special thoughts occur along the way. It is as though one’s own thoughts are falling back into the footprints of yesterday and the day before.

     But once in a while a man meets with a cosmic occurrence on the way that switches him suddenly onto a different track. A sudden rain strikes and the pedestrian finds a brook in place of his own footprints which he must jump over; going home seems a bit fresher and becomes an invigorating adventure. Or the wind comes up and the walker must struggle against its malevolent opposition, gaining ground step by step, as if conquering his own home. Or the path is covered with black ice (whereupon I have finally gotten at my actual subject). Yes, once in a while (especially overnight, when nothing can be done about it) freezing rain comes down like glass, except that no one stumbles so much over glass, glass not being so treacherously uneven, and also since it would be impossible to make such a quantity of glass—that stands to reason. And when that slippery ice stands between you and your home, then (after a few unsuccessful attempts at normal walking¹, at sliding uphill, at gliding or of finding firmer footing) you realize a few more or less unaccustomed things in regard to the walk home.

1. That there is something like mountains and oceans, deserts and abysses between you and your house (even though it is just there around the corner and across the street), thousands of dangers, difficulties and cursed places, and that the ordinary walk home can be something like an expedition to distant regions as yet untouched by human feet;

2. That your house is something like a castle on a glass mountain, which gives it a certain inaccessibility, but also a special and purely magical beauty;

3. That there is something in the old sayings, such as “finding yourself on a slippery slope “ or that “it is not good to lose the ground beneath your feet,” and “east, west, home is best,” or “look before you leap”;

4. That undertaking even such a small piece of the trip home means putting one foot in front of the other and that even a small step forward is a measurably meaningful success in life.

5. That your house is truly a safe haven where a boat tossed by a storm can cast its anchor and say “ahh, that’s better,” and that safety is perhaps the closest thing to that which we call happiness—among other reasons, because you don’t normally realize it.

     All these things considered, a man returned home has a new outlook on those down below him still outside and trying to get home. Oh, you people look like a mule on ice! Isn’t it just hilarious how they look like ants crawling around down there?

1924

______

1 Growing up in Vermont I was taught from a very early age the proper way of "walking" on ice—a foot-shuffling maneuver designed to minimize the potentially catastrophic impact of putting your foot down onto a low-friction surface. My mother and I (and, I’m sure, many others) find it humorous when we come across others—even other Vermonters—who never learned this trick, and enjoy teaching it to them. Here in Santa Cruz I have absolutely no use for this. Someday again, though.

March

2009-03-24T20:29:00.004-04:00

There is no point in disbelieving it and deliberately appearing incredulous in the face of this new disappointment—it is already upon us. First of all soot begins to fall in place of snow, beautiful black municipal soot, which darkens the ugly white snow so prettily, puddles and swampy spots begin to form on the ugly smooth ice, the air brings in an auspicious tepidity and dampness, mud and muck seep out of the pores of the earth, fog and pools and all the little vernal messes, and there can be no doubt—spring is upon us. I caught the swollen buds when they were still under the snow; now something quickens in them quietly, and a week from now they will split open and the fuzzy and coltfooted tips of leaves will spring forth. The swallows on the roof twitter their exuberance; it matters not whether it is drizzling, say, or if their claws seize old of damp and miserable weather, the sparrows’ clocks have already struck spring; they fluff themselves up, vociferate and shake themselves, twitching their tails and fluttering their wings as they whirl themselves somewhere into the garden.¹ And when night falls, those alto, throaty moans, the longings of the cats ring out from the courtyard. That is the the first spring, the dark and wild spring of the cats, and everything else follows in sequence.

A large number of gulls come into Prague without fanfare or festivities, having first sent a delegation of their numbers. Now they arrive in full force, happy and healthy, it seems. Mayor Baxa has not welcomed them nor granted them a commemorative ceremony in Prague, although they are foreigners, nor has councilor Čenkov made any proclamation nor has anyone showed them the memorable sites of the City, they were not invited to the Castle nor the famous representation of Libuše, Mr. Strimpl has not received them by proxy for Prime Minister Beneš²; in short nothing has happened in the accustomed manner to make a more pleasant stay in Prague for these pleasant foreigners; perhaps that is why they are having such a good time. They are most fond of holding regattas³ on the Vltava and flying circles around Střelecký Island, going on fishing excursions, swimming (freestyle) and other sports; sometimes they have a content laugh under the March sun, and at night… Wait, where do the gulls go to sleep? Who has seen a sleeping gull? They supposedly nest on the rocks by the ocean; where on earth do they spend their nights in Prague? No one knows this, not even the best experts on the Prague nightlife or the police. It is one of the innumerable secrets that surround us that we cannot bring to light.

Since every single place I look on the street an egg is rolling or trundling by, since it is the time of the pomlázka⁴ and dyed eggs, even though I dislike eggs and because it actually could have happen, I will tell you this little story about an egg. Once there lived a hen in Spain, a little over four hundred years ago, an ordinary hen who scratched in the courtyard and cocked an eye at every grain and laid eggs and cackled all the while. Once, however, she lay an egg and did not cackle, she sat on it silently and looked so—well, so solemn and secret that the entire chicken coop marveled. “Please,” a second hen asked her, “you old thing, what has happened to you? You look like a abbess or something. Do you feel well?” The happy hen looked at her with a proud and maternally sainted expression. “Just now,” she proclaimed proudly, “just now I have laid the Egg of Columbus.”⁵

1922-1924

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1 [The Czech had an onomatopoetic expression for the high-pitched noise of bird flight noises "frrrrr!" which was delightful, and which I have tried to replicate here.]
2 Ludvík Strimpl (1880-1937) painter and artist who took part in the First World War in France in the fight against Austria, after which he entered the diplomatic service and later became Head of Protocol for the President of the Republic. [Obviously was considered the only person a Czech from 1948 wouldn't recognize without endnote-based assistance. Edvard Beneš eventually became president and is famous for being threatened into signing the Munich declaration. Karel Baxa was important enough a mayor to have his own Wikipedia page. This Čenkov fellow...not yet that I've been able to track down.]
3 Regatta - a festive, sporting race on the water [oh, 1940s Czech editors, you crack me up]
4 [There's that Easter whip again.]
5 [This is something I had forgotten about too. Columbus...but not quite how you think!]

Creating Productivity by Increasing the Number of Distractions!

2009-03-24T19:38:00.005-04:00

It is spring, the time of year when the young man's fancy turns to new and exotic case systems, alluring non-Indo-European tongues and sexy, sexy aspectual distinctions.

It is also the time of year when I get bored with having only Czech as my plaything all winter (shocking but true) and apparently crave languages with severe constraints on syllable patterns and phonologies.

To that end, I have ordered a grammar of Finnish, signed up for an online Finnish vocabulary program, and ordered a book of Hawaiian grammar lessons. Spanish still holds no lasting interest for me, of course, in spite of my environment.

Predictably and paradoxically, this has increased my productivity in terms of the Čapek and the Fuks I'm working on. I have two Čapek updates I'll get to as soon as I format and footnote them, (within twenty-four hours, hopefully) and one more before the end of the month. The Fuks I'm playing closer to my vest right now.

The Cusp Of Spring

2009-03-17T17:36:00.002-04:00

You’re the first, the one we’ve waited the whole winter to see: you, snowdrop; you, earliest crocus; you, winter aconite; you, pussy willow. Your blossoms are ther before the the first flower forms and the first leaf unfurls, they flower before nature can start to breathe. Love comes first. Everything else comes later: the eagerness of growth, the work of roots, the quiet and relentless struggle for life, but you, first flower, do not spring from anything but yourself. The raw earth is still closed, the roots cannot suckle at a ground yet sleeping, the plant brings out that first flower from its own essence. It doesn’t have anywhere to get anything from, so it offers up its own heart to the undertaking of spring.

As far as it concerns us people, do not believe every rumor, O spring bud—it is not so bad. Even we would like to have paradise on earth and holy peace and resurrection and eternal spring and other things like that, but meanwhile we’re only arguing about how to arrange it and where to get it from and who is going to do what and so on. It seems that it just hasn’t worked yet, unless the very earth we live upon were to open up itself to (as the gardeners say) vegetate the garden of Eden. But if we pay close attention, we will find people here and there who put their whole hearts into these heavenly undertakings, and bring the means to make our world better out of themselves. Love comes first.

But I witness that previously mentioned first snowdrop (it doesn’t have another given name and played its part anonymously for the honor and glory of its kind), and it was plucky to set itself to such spring business. It had to bore through the snow and ice, quite the little icebreaker; to plunge into spring full force, accepting the risk of night frosts and freezes. You don’t realize such a little flower experiences no idyll of sunny comfort—-it is a noble lot, all courage and adventure. The first herald standing before the lines and waving a white banner. Pioneer and conqueror. The first settler in an inhospitable country. The first white sail on the ocean.

It is courage and it is a matter of course. That is a good thing.

As far as the plants are concerned it has already begun: here is a stubby sprout, fat and closed-off, pokes through the earth, a leaflet extends over there that is so beautifully green that there had never been anything like it, but that’s not all. When you look at it closer you see that this tiny little life is coming out of last year’s mold and rot, that it is up to its neck in the communal grave of last season’s vegetation. Last year’s leaf is not interred until now; now, in this time of sprouting it returns to ash and dust. When we take a decent look at it, the spring earth is not bestrewn with flowers; it is strewn to a much larger extent with dead foliage and rot and decomposition of what was there last year. Only now is the previous year buried; only now does dead life return to the earth from which it arose. This is no resurrection of the dead; it is a resurrection among the dead.

Listen, you fresh little leaf among the heaps of decomposition, this itself what I’m trying to show you: the eternal concurrence of life and death.

1929

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...and now March is half gone?

2009-03-17T00:46:00.003-04:00

I've been more restrained of late (or at last like to tell myself I have been) with the boy-my-life-is-crazy and where-has-the-time-gone posts, and that having been said, I'll proceed to do exactly that.

March has been somewhat different. I got into graduate school--master's in library science, San José State, and am trying to wrap my head around the changes that will entail. Also, the store I work at has recently moved into a brand new location three times the size, which involves a whole slew of logistic and sociological problems that are going to be weeks, if not months, in the sorting out. Switching my schedule to a 6:45 am work five days a week is also not without its issues.

All of these have contributed to a certain amount of constant fatigue and narrowing of my abilities to focus. My main translation efforts continue apace, but the Čapek is suffering. Never fear, though. If I have enough energy for navel-gazing, I'm bound to get back on track.

Re-learning how to nap's been a big help.

The Signs of Spring

2009-03-09T03:06:00.002-04:00

     There are many signs in heaven and on earth which accompany the onset of spring; the blackbirds, for instance—as soon as the blackbirds begin to shout and whistle away, you can bet your life that it is March and that it is all starting. Or the Lenten rose, let’s say: suddenly its golden or purple bud appears out of nowhere: but the Hamamelis is already blooming with its little yellow stars and the snowdrop’s little chalice rings in the terrible western wind. At that time the clouds have passed across the sky with striking speed, the earth opens up and the Iris reticulata opens its blue gothic flower.¹ Those are the basic signs of spring.

     There are other, equally reliable indicators of spring, as when the housewives begin to wash the windows. It happens as it does with the Lenten rose, most likely some impulse from the cosmos; each hangs a blue skirt and red apron out the window, waving rags and singing; the patrolman on the street pretends not to see it (Kate’s not tied to anything, you see), but it is well-known that normal girls don’t fall out of windows these days.

     The most important sign of spring is of course the bricklayers. Someone’s grandfather, pipe in hand, appears at every construction site that has slept the winter away, fallow and abandoned—-most likely he himself had hibernated there—-but in March he comes to and walks around the piles of bricks, puffing away at his pipe, which is a sign that spring has come. At that a group of men appear with masonry tools and other noisy implements, whereupon they begin to pound boards and clap bricks together, which gives the perfect aural impression of spring, together with the blackbirds’ song.

     This is at a part of the world’s expanse known as a “site,” which is probably from the Aramaic for “cursed place” or something else damned and abandoned, full of disorder and filth. But even the construction site awaits its spring day when a band of men voyage to it and hammer and dig up that degraded surface. Look at the earth open up: under the cultured layer of human ventures, filth, and topsoil there appears the dead (and therefore virgin) clay, sediment, or a deposit of sand which breathes out cold and raw moisture. They set to with great exertion and lashing of whips and a procession of carts bearing away the results of their excavation, and in a week the basement and framing of a new building begin to spring forth from the earth.

     The clangorous, chirping bricklayers’ spring, smelling of lime and fresh walls, mortar and sawdust; there is nothing less poetic than the spring which unfolds raw furrows in the fields: it is happier and manlier than that. I mean nothing against the blackbirds, larks, woodpeckers and titmice, but the music of spades, of work, which rolls out in the first early spring days from the streets, yards, and construction sites with its tools and saws, boards, bricks and coats of paint; it is just as exhilarating as birdsong. The brooks bubble and the the soil gives up its first flower; the blackbird pipes its lovely song and one builder shouts to the other: “Franta, pass me a brick!”

1930

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1 Hammaelis —- a bush cultivated in parks with yellow ornamental flowers. Iris reticulata -- a dark blue iris originally from the Caucasus

Frustrated Intentions

2009-03-02T15:43:00.003-05:00

     Every winter, at least from the start of February, when the days start to lengthen, I state with firm and sacred resolve: No, decidedly I will not let this year get by, and when it comes I will illuminate is as I should—from up close, attentively and deductively. I will take a certain stick or branch, measure out a square meter of earth and pay attention to how spring is made. I will study the first moist and crisp little balls as they form into the first buds, I will watch the bud to see its gradual growth, its hairy or sticky surface, its sudden swelling; I will have to be there when it finally opens (with a weak little sigh) and the pale edge of the first leaf comes out, as it unfolds in little wrinkles like a newborn, until the composed fans of the leaves begin to open and stretch out until proper leaves are made of them, and there, then there will be a green bush in the place of a place of bare twigs, and I will know it detail how it has happened. Yes, decidedly I will do so. And as I sit on my heels and look at my square meter of earth: suddenly a little pebble gets pushed aside and a tiny finger pushes up, and I watch as the first fresh blade of grass crawls up, such a thin and happy little thing, soaring up and beginning to stretch; I’ll watch its little siblings, I’ll count them and there will not be a single one which I have not assisted in its marvelous birth. Maybe my clay will even produce a strange little bulb which spreads and swells into a proper thing right under my eyes; maybe a crocus will come out of it or a coltsfoot or some hitherto unknown flower which I will discover and attach my name to. Maybe a pair of birds will alight on my little enclosure and show me how eggs are made. In short, I definitely won’t let this year just go by; I’ll catch spring in flagrante, I’ll hold it right in my hand, right in my palm to see how it’s done and to make sure there’s no fakery, no scam, no trick to it; I’ll track it, control it, watch it, check up on it, stare at it, test it and watch it and I won’t let anything get by me this year.

     Yes, I pass every winter with the same firm and worthless resolution. Then come the days when the sun starts to shine again, the ice melts and the gulls fly back, and then I decide that this day or the next I will begin to carry out my plan. And listen, it is so beautiful when the blue sky comes back and all of that. Grandmothers on the street selling violets and primroses, a man gets the urge to take a willow switch and chase the women around¹; my God, I’ll just set this little bit of work aside and moonlight a bit, go on a visit, dispense these two social obligations, and just get this letter out, and then I’ll be alone with spring and go have a look at how it’s really done. And do you know what? Today I won’t a single one of these tasks or obligations today, even if they’re dragging me off—today I have to go see if spring has started.

     And for the love of God, it’s all over already! The bushes are green, there are already blooms in the young grass, and we can already sit in the shade of the first cherries, wiping our brow, and decide to go for ice cream. Wait, the cherries are already gone? Then give me the autumn plums instead, even autumn is beautiful and there’s much left to enjoy… but what? Friend, where has the time gone? It is December already, the heat is on inside, you already feel a year older; you had to make it all good again next year, and when the beginning of February comes, you must again resolve not to let it get away from you. But be careful that this spring doesn’t pass you by in a gust of wind, doesn’t sneak around you and dash on by. Be very, very careful next year!

1922

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1 [Yes, this is actually a Czech Easter tradition. Relevant quote:

"Another popular pagan tradition surviving to these days is the whipping of women and girls. The whip or “pomlázka” is braided from three or more willow rods. Pagan Slavs believed that whipping brought good luck, wealth and a rich harvest for the whole year. The strength and vitality of young twigs was supposed to be transferred onto the person whipped. I suspect that in these days, men don’t have a clue about the metaphysical meaning of this tradition; they simply enjoyed the opportunity to chase the village girls and have some fun."]

February.

2009-02-28T21:54:00.001-05:00

8 handwritten letters (matched last month's; two a week on one of my days off seems doable. Would you like one? Leave a comment and this year it will work out better than this. Knock wood.

6 Čapek posts. (same as last month, but I'm a bit ahead of the game; only four or five next month to keep us on target)

At this point I've posted more in 2009 than either of 2008 or 2007.

0 100+ word posts (I'm not sure if I have the patience for fiction that's not translation, and they were just turning into non-fiction anyway. Food for thought.)

just the one meta-post.

At the End of Winter

2009-02-23T14:14:00.002-05:00

     It is true that February does not enjoy especial popularity among the months; it is too brief for that and gets the short end of the stick, smashed between the broad-shouldered giants of January and March. You might like it to imitate the one or the other, but where on earth would that get you? It delivers us frosts and blizzards, but no longer has that great and grave majesty of winter; its frosts are only nipping, its snow is raggedy, its freezes are light and crisp; the longer the light has to work the more you can see its wrinkled, rimed, spiteful and mottled face. Or it eases up and seems as though spring is in the making, a south or west wind comes up, the ground softens and streamlets and rills gurgle everywhere; the sun shines on all of this and the earth is swathed in an almost cleansing heat; you sniff to see if it is a true thaw, but no! The earth is hard again the next morning until it crackles underfoot, and the living water goes blind in icy opacity; it’s not quite the turn of spring; that divine grace is yet lacking in it.

     As I’ve said, there is not too much granted to the month of February; it is such a halfhearted month, neither winter nor spring; but there are phenomena that distinguish it from all the other months of the year. Most importantly, the dusk is born again in February. There’s no true dusk in winter, no wavering procession between day and night, but the night just pours in and that is that; and you turn your lights on and go about your business. But in February a moment of dusk quietly steals in—perhaps it is because there is more daylight, maybe that everything is soaked in just a little more light and glows from within at just the right time: simply put, there is a secret and sweet moment when it seems that things are quietly and privately…outlined of their own accord, of their own quiet light, and right then you can renounce your own vain toil, put your hands in your lap let yourself be carried along in the lingering passing of the day, turn off the lamp with a sigh and say good night.

     You have to have good eyes to see the second change: February has its own color. The grass is still rust-brown, the earth is still pale with frost, and the earth is still pale and unempurpled¹ by moisture and aeration, but something more than a breath of color already flickers and lingers on the branches and twigs of the bare trees. There aren’t any buds yet to give off a yellowish, verdant, blushing haze in the spreading shoots of the trees and underbrush; it is unusually discreet, a scarcely-perceivable colored touch on every bare twig. Simply put, in February the sap has already begun to flow into the branches; the green phloem swells, shrunken bark stretches, smoothing its winter wrinkles and glows with succulent life, and brown, scarlet, and yellowish shades appear on the emaciated brush; gold shows on the willow, a fine violet appears on the birch, the fruit orchard blooms in a secret scarlet. What was black as ink during the winter plays out in the faintest outlines of color, and sooner than we expect a spray of glowing buds,the silky softness of catkins, and the fresh green grass will come along. I know we’re not that far along; but something new is already afoot in the universe which falls to the small month of February: the naked branches have begun to glow in excitement, working towards the onset of spring.

1937

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1 [Eight hits on google, so I didn't quite make it up. Czech nezbrunátněla is from the adjective brunátný "dark purple, ruddy," Verbing that with the inchoative prefix z- gives us zbrunátnět "become purple/ruddy," the ne- is a negative prefix and the -la replacement at the end marks past tense and gender (feminine). Pardon the vanity footnote, but I am incredibly happy at un.em.purple.d to translate ne.z.brunátně.l(a) at the level of each transmissible morpheme, and am happy to have a platform to explain that out in excruciating detail.]

Confession

2009-02-20T14:58:00.004-05:00

     When you get right down to it, I was just afraid for my plants. I was worried about my Japanese anemones and chrysanthemums, my roses, my freshly-planted Abies concolor,¹my common broom and my new phlox and everything else which grows and blooms in this part of the universe which I call my property. Such a dry winter with no protective layer of snow, the cold, the hard frost, a black or barren winter is worthless; the soil cannot rest and stay warm under the snow and hold in its moisture, the exposed plant bulbs will freeze and the roots will break and the buds will get blasted with frost and it will all turn into a wasteland. It is so, and for that reason every gardener says that it should snow, and he worries from November to March, and makes regular trips to the barometer to summon huge drops in pressure. And when the winter is bare and desolate, black, dry as a bone with expanses of nothing, then the gardener—

     Here’s the thing: a gardener does not turn beseechingly to the heavens and say: “Lord God, if only some snow would fall on my garden, on my anemones and roses, and if not on them, at least on the rows of tulips, they’re right over there, and on the other beds too! I say no one does that to settle their own account with the weather when there are other people around, and so we complain about the prevailing weather, saying:

     “If only I didn’t have the flu! The flu always goes around when the winter is so dry. You’d see, if the snow fell then we’d all get over the flu—the bacilli would all get trapped under the snow and die, and besides, when it snows the air gets refreshed and that’s that for disease.”

     Or: “That’s that, then—it should snow.”

     Or: “Unemployment! If only there were no unemployment! If the snow fell they’d have to clear the streets and there would be work like crazy. But when the winter’s so miserable…”

     Or: “And what about the children? They can’t even go sledding this winter, they can’t make snowmen—how is that at all healthy? But if the snow fell the children would look completely different, hale and hearty, with their little apple cheeks all rosy."

     Or: “I mean, in my childhood it was different: snow up to the knee every year, icicles to the ground—my, those were beautiful winters! Everything sparkled with purity and beauty. Now people can't help but be sad and devastated when there are such dark, foggy, miserable winters! As I say, its such a dirty business—”

     Or even: “They always call it the age of sports, but not if it doesn’t snow. [Skiing under the crematorium?] Not all of us can go to Switzerland or Jilemnice² with our gear. If I had my way the snow would fall so people had enough for their sports, and everything would be in order.”

     And so I have fulminated this way or that again a dry and black winter, perhaps not to demand compassion for my anemones, or maybe because it is in human nature to couch one’s own interests and needs in the interests of society—in short:

     I swear, (I have an elevated notion that at this moment fifty thousand readers are placing their hands over their hearts³); is it not the same with so many societal questions both local and universal? Do we not make heavenly declarations under the banner of society and democracy for our own interests, private pain or personal dreams? Are our common ideals and protests and agendas not only masks with which we conceal a longing from ourselves for some private and egotistic satisfaction?

     Maybe so; and let it so be. And look, snow has fallen, and I confess my egotism; I cast off my hypocrisy and discover my true face. And while I admit my own ego, the children whistle and shout outside on their sleds, the shovels of the unemployed scrape the streets, the world is beautiful and people look happier leaving footprints in the snow.

     And once more (while we’re on the subject) hand on my heart: is there not something in our egos that is wishes good for the world? It’s not just about snow any more, but politics and other big selfish things. We might all feel selfishly, but maybe there is some desire in it, even unawares, to make the world more beautiful and our individual spheres happier; and for the buds of things yet to be born to thrive.

1931

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1 Abies concolor-the white fir, brought to our lands from North America, appears in parks and gardens in a variety of decorative forms.
2 [Jilemice-Wikipedia's paucity of information aside, assumedly it is (or was) a ski town.]
3 [I'd settle for five!]

Return To Nature

2009-02-18T21:09:00.003-05:00

     Lest there be any doubts, lest anyone think me unwilling, I wish all of you headed to the mountains this winter forty centimeters of clean, fresh powder, fantastic downhill runs and everything else pertaining to the matter. May it be so.

     But when I see this movement of nations over the holidays and weekends, these processions of young men and women with skis on their shoulders, the jumbled and feverish flight to the white majesty of the mountains, at first I think that all these pilgrims are just headed out to experience telemark, Nordic skiing and whatever else these disciplines are called as they tumble out, pack together and enthuse rabidly like dogs. Not all of us is given that measure of grace which is necessary to do it everything there is. I am also certain that a burning need to give oneself to the white majesty of the mountains and venerate its divine cleanliness drives all of these devotees into the foggy distance; for if ever there were such a powerful mass movement towards beauty, majesty and cleanliness we would see more of it in our cities, or even in our customs and institutions. Grumpy and obstinate people would say that this wintry pull of the mountains is not the one thing or the other, but just fashion. As far as it concerns me, I think that it is something blinder than fashion. That it is something like an instinct. An atavism. It is a return to nature.

     Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.¹ Drive nature out the door and it will come back in the window. Drive it from the city and chase it to the mountains. It had to come to this. Since the snow on our streets was blocking traffic we have to find circumstances in which snow can just be snow or even the snowiest snow of all. The more we advance the less we live in the forest primeval, and so we make pilgrimages to camp in the woods. We chase the sun and the water because we are no longer farmers or fishermen. We even rediscover the sun and the water in some way with an inexhaustible and unaccustomed excitement. By sitting for so long we have discovered our own legs and begun to use them in fantastic ways which we call sports. This discovery is an appreciation, first and foremost. We appreciated the snow and the water, the sun and the air and the movement, we rendered the world more beautiful and valuable. Subjugating natural forces is very advantageous; but so too is appreciating them. The child who goes sledding and makes snowmen and licks icicles has a greater connection with the cosmic phenomenon of winter than the office in charge of snow removal. I’m not saying that such an office isn’t useful or necessary, but I am happy that kids are going sledding.

     We still are not ready for all discoveries. Perhaps we will yet discover and appreciate the moon and the stars, maybe we’ll get a taste for the rain (building little streams or something) and discover something good in the rain, something like children and their kites—and plants and animals yet remain. Maybe then the time will come when we discover our own roads and cities as a piece of the universe and discover people to be an old and good part of nature, and begin to cultivate them with communal desire and passionate excitement. May it be so.

1931

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1 [Glossed anyway in the next sentence; a more literal translation is "You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it will come running back." (Horace, Epistles 1.10.24)]

Own Your Town

2009-02-17T23:40:00.005-05:00

Get as large-scale of a map as you can of your town and a writing implement. Bike a street, draw it in.

I started this in Santa Cruz last May, and by the end of that month had been to probably 99% of the streets west of the river. (More than the above picture, which was as of May 25th.) If you're like me, you'll get a compass and draw circles in half-mile increments from critical points. I could (and will) talk more about the theoretical underpinnings of the project because let's face it, it's in my nature, but it's still a fun way to figure out how your environment fits together, where the shortcuts are, and to know where the most random little corners of your world are--or at least as far as the road network can take you in pursuit of those goals.

I've got to get going on the east side once the rains cease.

Winter Butterfly

2009-02-16T23:15:00.003-05:00

     O green caterpillar, I came upon you on a twig in July; I fed you blackthorn leaves (which you ate so seriously and ardently, as though they were the only task at hand), and with such unceasing appetite; finally you were fat, pretty to behold and golden as a pear. Then you hung yourself up by a thread on the branch and focused yourself inwardly; giving yourself to stupor, immobile, inert towards everything—you had one goal before you. And one morning it was all ready: an angular chrysalis hung on the branch which resembled a knight’s shield.

     I am recalling this all now because I had completely forgotten the green chrysalis stashed since summer in cotton batting until he began to rustle in his box just last night. You have come out, beautiful swallowtail, you emerged fitfully and shook your dapper wings. Perhaps you might not want to take wing in the middle of the Czech winter? You tremble in excitement, unfold your delicate wings, run about, flap those wings sharply and impatiently and fall. Aren’t you a weakling! If I had wings… I’ll start again. Your little wings quivered, all awhirl as you ran along the edge of the table, and rose up bodily on your gallant little legs, headed for that electric Sun, O little Icarus!¹ You fell to earth like a dried leaf, like a discarded scrap of paper, like a wisp in a storm.

     The butterfly sits on my finger, newly born. He unfolds his antennae, exercizes them in a game of perception, stands on his legs and studies; his golden-black wings beat uncertainly and steadily in the exciting moment just before takeoff. The little body is rising, the legs scarcely touching my finger, it only has to let go and —are we flying? The whole delicate figure of the butterfly’s body shakes with zeal. The wings jerk, and this golden leaf crumples passively to the ground.

     A butterfly was born to me yesterday and taught me how to fly. Now it sits facing the window, mangy, wings battered. This big four-cornered thing might be the sun. The big hot thing in the corner might also be the sun. The swallowtail knows nothing except the desire to fly. I found him on the ground twenty times. His wings do not tremble any more with the fever of flight. It is an agony of enthusiasm. He only occasionally tries to take off and falls down in a somersault. Such a tiny instant of flight! Now it is sad to watch a butterfly learn. He sits, impatiently walking at times, beating his wings, but he seems resolved. “The weather’s not right. You can only fly when it is nice out, when the sun is shining on butterflies. I’ll wait for the sun.” This morning he will lie on his side and be done for.

     It is true, little butterfly, that the weather is not right even for us, (you know, for people, who are only just large and gluttonous caterpillars). Perhaps we are as confused in the date as you are, and have suddenly begun to beat our wings enthusiastically, by the thousands, in the middle of the Czech winter. We all have such wings in ourselves — you, called Psyche in classical language,² must understand this. We feel wings in ourselves and want to soar in flights of freedom. We even tremble in anticipation. And we we have fallen so many times that your little legs are not enough to count them all. It wasn’t the right weather for flying and you can only fly when it’s nice out.

     One more moment, little butterfly, before you lie on your side. It isn’t the right weather, and it isn’t even that flying is so hard—on the contrary, it is such a natural thing. Discussing things, however, is not flying, and if that sentence doesn’t quite hang together, it is because we have fallen on our heads. Must we wait for better weather? Must we renounce everything as you have? Many caterpillars have done so, but I think that they are not right. You’re alone, and have no friend, no female, but there are so many of us big caterpillars, so very many, that we can do something. We cannot fly any more, but we can begin to make better weather. If every caterpillar spins out one sunbeam, then what a large sun we would have! And what then would be easier than spreading one’s wings—

     The winter butterfly falls on its side.

______

1919

1 Icarus (Ikaros) -- Hero of a Greek myth, who boldly flew to the sun on wings of feathers and wax.
2 [The original has "in Latin" where "psyche" is Greek. I feel more kindly disposed towards Čapek than translating precisely and tossing in a (sic)]

DIYBio

2009-02-10T12:10:00.002-05:00

One of the truly fun things about the internet, from my perspective, is the possibility for collaborative work. The DIY approach to molecular biology, esp. gel electrophoresis (through a drinking straw!) is something I've been reading about recently: it's interesting to see where people can go on a shoestring budget. They can't amplify fragments of extracted DNA and transillumination without toxic dye remains difficult...but it's exciting to see people considering these problems.

(via Boing Boing)

Can't match January's pace, but that's probably for the best.

2009-02-09T03:57:00.002-05:00

And this is where the pre-prepared Čapek runs out and I have to start creating blocks of time to get this done if I want it to get done. No more excuses? That's the exciting part.

I'll try to keep the meta-posting down--there's some DIYBio stuff I've been excitedly perusing for a bit (homemade electrophoresis setups are the most engaging crowdsourced science I've seen since Foldit), not to mention the nascent garden project.

To work.

Icicles

2009-02-09T00:37:00.001-05:00

     So one day I looked at the newspaper first thing to see what was new (and bad) in the world, and then out the widow to see what was new under the sun; during that second glance I noticed in surprise that there were twelve icicles lined up in a neat row in my garret window. The largest and prettiest at the ell was as big and strong as an arm; the others were all smaller and weaker, perhaps to show that there was no parity even among icicles. I don’t mean to claim that my twelve icicles were an unusual or rare phenomenon; the only strange thing about them was the horrible joy I experienced out of the blue. And while I wondered why I was grinning and rubbing my hands together I realized: that like many other things (snow, caterpillars, mussels, rabbits, and marbles, for example) that icicles too were inseparably linked with childhood memories.

     I swear, only a small child can properly appreciate an object so interesting as an icicle, for as soon as a child encounters their first, they discover to their pleasant surprise:

     1. That an icicle can be broken off, the process of which produces a pleasant glassy tinkle.

     2. That an icicle can be licked, and though it is horribly cold and children’s wet little hands numb easily, it is an exquisite delight as a seasonal treat.

     3. That they make excellent targets to throw snowballs at, especially when there are no nearby windows. Knocking down a good-sized icicle which shatters dryly on the ground into crystalline fragments, that is undoubtedly one of life’s greatest delights and greatest successes, and whoever has not gotten their icicle does not know what youth is, nor winter nor the beauty of the world, and above all, does not know what a proper icicle is.

     Yes, that is it: the icicle has much to do with childhood; you see, sir, don’t you still look at things in enchantment, smile excitedly, and get the impression that the whole day is somehow prettier and happier when it is framed by twelve icy stalactites? And you see that you could reach out with your hand and see what a pleasant glassy sound it would make to break one off, but you don’t; it seems to you that it would be a waste of an icicle. You could break off a piece and suck on it, but even that desire seems vastly remote. How on earth has your childhood curiosity weakened to try and find out what an icicle is good for, or for that matter anything in the world you come across? No, perhaps it has not weakened, for I now notice something I hadn’t noticed before—how icicles grow. They are composed ring by ring, layer by layer being laid down until a great big stalactite is formed. It looks just like the icicle were flowing down from the roof: truly it is an act of patient arithmetic. When one looks properly one can see the horizontal segments, and that isn’t all—for example, which way the wind was blowing as the icicle grew. That makes a little ball on the other side of the icicle where freezing droplets of water are blown; the whole icicle is articulated by these little layers like the little spindle on a spinning wheel. And before I had thought this all through, my biggest icicle had grown by a whole new layer; now I can say I have seen an icicle grow.

     And perhaps it is so with all aspects of human knowledge; perhaps in all cases humans are first interested in whether or not something can be broken or licked or used for something else; only hundreds or thousands of years later does anyone start to be interested in how these things are and what laws they follow. It’s possible that humanity is very young, and still only trying to see how things can be used—to eat or to wage war with. When we grow up, we may look more lingeringly, more closely at how things are, how they arise, and what morphological or genetic laws constrain them. We may as yet only be at the stage of licking or curiously breaking a great many things.

______

1937

Frost Flowers

2009-02-05T00:01:00.002-05:00

They are called “flowers,” and the old descriptions of nature assure us that Jack Frost "conjures numerous enchanted flowers on windows.” Well, I looked at them carefully, and I saw that Jack Frost has fantasies of being some sort of tinsmith, as a rule, and takes special care in conjuring something that looks like barbed wire. As far as vegetative elements are concerned, shapes are constrained to those resembling thistles, holly, brambles and prickly branches, or some sort of braching fern, spiny leaves, foliage lined with horribly spiked thorns, jagged moss, slender needles, stinging prickers—in short, something very sharp and prickly, far removed from flowers. A window overgrown with frost flowers in no way resembles a bower lush with flowers; it resembles an abatis instead, horribly spiny fencing, which surrounds us as if we were a besieged fortress. The window is a hole in the wall; when the frost comes, the hole is barricaded by icy pikes, daggers and blades. It is no flowering and lush pleasure garden, but a rich, flowering blockade with horribly sparkling swords and bayonets.

But when fresh snow falls something miraculous happens; the streets somehow seem wider than they did before, and the houses seem farther apart, and what had seemed confining and narrow in the world before recedes into the width of that uninterrupted white growth. All areas seem much freer; the world has much more clearance, as we might speak of overhead clearance in a pipe.
If I wanted to depict it beautifully, I would have to write it out in lines that were widely separated from each other, leaving the clean white paper between them, but the reader’s eyes would have to wade through the lanes that I left between the lines, as though you were strolling along through freshly fallen snow.

It is no accident that we always use both systems of temperature on thermometers: Réaumur¹ and Celsius. If one wants to complain that the heating is poor in his house and that Lord, it’s cold, he proclaims (according to Réaumur) that it is “only twelve degrees;” had he said that it was fifteen degrees (Celsius) the weight of his protest would be weakened. If on the other hand he wants to claim that it is madly hot in his room, of course he will say that it is twenty degrees (Celsius) and never fifteen degrees (Réaumur).² If he wishes to prove it is terribly cold he will of course use degrees Celsius, if he wishes to prove that it is too hot he will give the temperature in Réaumur. So it is entirely normal, that thermometers are manufactured with both scales, with a humane consideration for people’s needs to exaggerate a bit.

When there is snow on the ground, there is yet another way to measure the temeperature, and that is acoustically. If the temperature is just a little below freezing, the snow crunches nicely and deeply underfoot; if it is five below, it starts to creak with a rather high pitch; if it is ten below, is scrapes and resounds with a high, clear tone; but if it is fifteen below (Celsius), it whistles and cries in a terribly high tone, like a grasshopper rubbing the violins of his legs together. One might even say “Today the snow is two octaves above middle C." Snow is indeed so squeaky and shrill, it is like scraping a knife across a plate.
The nicest thing about snow is that it returns the inhabited world its virginity. The busiest and most disagreeable street has those short moments in the snow where not a human foot has trodden, and the first pedestrian steps out onto it like a sailor onto a new and virgin continent.

It is possible that snow is white out of physical or chemical reasons; I would rather believe that it is white so our northern nights are not so terribly black. Perhaps it is only white to be the frozen light of the longest nights.

______

1925

1 [Réaumur scale. Simple conversion with Celsius: [°Ré] = [°C] × 0.8]
2 [sic] (20 * 0.8 = 16] But so it is in the original. Perhaps he's just being fuzzy with the math.

Hoarfrost

2009-01-29T12:03:00.002-05:00

     It is true, they call spring enchanted, and no objections can be raised to that, as long as we mean it to praise these April mornings or May evenings when the lilacs and mock-oranges are in bloom. But if we take the term “enchantment” a bit more conscientiously, as it is defined in all the technical manuals (fairy tales, for example), enchantment depends on someone waving a magic wand or mumbling an incantation with the goal of creating a change in the immediate vicinity; and in the morning there is a glowing castle or uncrossable lake or some other unusual phenomenon of which there had not been the slightest suspicion before. True enchantment is never a gradual or patient process; rather, it happens with a sudden and surprising effect. To act slowly, painstakingly, to exert a great deal of time and work for something that was not there before, that is called creation; but the true and honorable enchanter just clicks the tongue or waves a wand, and it is done.

     There are no doubts that spring does not enchant in this strict sense of the word; the truth is we are never there when the first flower of the forsythia opens or the first March bud unfurls, but flower and leaf take their sweet time, and we must have an angelic patience with them. The grass does not grow overnight and the birch does not glitter with fair foliage between evening and night; it takes an awful lot of work before the thin sapling becomes the rustling crown. Everything has its long days and weeks of quiet preparation and imperceptible waxing of colors; and “enchanted spring” only suddenly occurs after a lot of hesitation and fuss.

     Winter works in other ways, and it does so according to all the classical formulas for enchantment. You wake up in the morning and have a look out the window, and suddenly where yesterday there was dark and hardened earth there is brilliantly white and fluffy snow; all at once the dirt of the whole world has transformed, it has a new pattern, new quiet, new structure—if someone had carried me off to Easter Island some Christmas Eve, it would not be such a vast change as when fresh snow has fallen.

     Or the frost comes on overnight, and in the space in which you had been accustomed to seeing your neighbor’s roof, silver ferns bristle and sparkling needles and white moss and fans of seaweed appear as frost flowers on the window pane. I say, let someone try to arouse in glass such interesting vegetation overnight! If this be enchantment, it is properly done, to contrive such an entirely new world.

     Or perhaps it is only hoarfrost; fallen in the harsh light of the moon, and now the whole world bristles in a terrible and sharp beauty and shines bleakly. What yesterday was a black and wiry tree is today an enormous tuft of marbled, shining coral; yesterday’s frightful and desolate thicket is now a wrought silver gate; the cobwebs on the old gazebo have turned into silver lace, the dried leaves are tassled with silver and the frozen asters on the lawn glitter like cut glass. Every pine or fir needle is marked with a glittering wand; the blackened leaves of the ivy are wreathed in silver filigree, the dry yarrow stalk bristles with the finest fringe of frost—and what can shall I say further, for you know it yourselves; you too have tried to lick the whitened branch and run your finger along the exceedingly beautiful tuftlets of frost. You too have seen the orchards bloom on Christmas morning with a frost so madly rich that no May can compare with its cherry trees and their fragrant blossoms; and you too have witnessed the sun shining through as the treetops rustle weakly, and the whole white show is gone: what to do, what to do, it is just enchantment, which never lasts. The truth is creation is a slow cooker, and no one will ever conjure anything like this by waving a magic wand, but it is, if we may say so, more solid and longer-lasting work.

______

1937

Trackbackery.

2009-01-27T23:08:00.003-05:00

Nick's most recent post is another keeper. It's all good, mind.

Pertinent quote for me:

"Instead, I have to engage in this carefully planned, supplied, and fought battle with my own ignorance, and when I achieve victory, I don’t really have anything to show for it, except some bullshit shot or print that demonstrates that yes, I have the technical capability to use this technique — but that has no other virtue. And I don’t even have anyone handy to issue me a fucking gold star."

Amen. In some areas the war against my own ignorance involves way more mental preparation than I feel comfortable bragging about, even when I'm quite proud, which is an interesting mental place to be. The never-ending Fuks project, say. Work that takes a lot of effort and generates a lot of pride results in...large amounts more work. (Cooking, too, takes more energy than I would have thought, but at least that work produces edible and often surprisingly tasty results.)

Still, as Nick says, know that I'm leveling.

more apt Borges

2009-01-27T20:19:00.002-05:00

From the story Nick sussed out that I was thinking of with no more information than the collection it was in:

"In the preceding tale, I have tried to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat... I reflected that a more poetic case than these would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden other men, but is forbidden to him. I recalled Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words comedy and tragedy. I told his story; as I went on, I felt...that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more than a few snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios."

--"Averroës' Search"

The amusing part about being reminded up this story during the YLNT show and then having it identified for me later is that I completely forget the moment of connection--I don't remember what was said, I don't remember what part of the story (it wasn't the one above) my mind linked it to. I only remember jumping up and down on the street in disbelief when Nick picked it out. The process of failure, maybe, but defeat not so much, I like to think. Or if you're going to fail, at least fail amusingly?

Dash to San Francisco.

2009-01-27T03:58:00.003-05:00

It's nice when I have someone else (in this case Nick) to write about hilarious adventures of which I took part, viz. here.

Went up to the City yesterday to see Nick and watch Monsters of Podcasting. Within the first ten minutes of meeting Nick's mother and sister I managed to lacerate two fingers in a botched attempt to open a bottle of fermented German elderberry soda (?!) with a lighter. Six hours of jokes about my being/not being accident-prone ensued. We showed up way too early, camped out in the front row laughing hysterically and got in some nice post-show words with Merlin and Adam from You Look Nice Today. And we all learned an important lesson about The Snuggie.

All that and I was even able to figure out my crash pad after that with only a half an hour of wondering if I was going to have to stay up all night wandering around.

Not just about 2003 any more!

2009-01-24T20:25:00.000-05:00

Here's a long-promised update. I can't do it right, but I can expand on promised blog posts from five years ago. Also, I'm closing the gap between the old and new blog for some reason. God, I love that mohawk picture.

My last seven January firsts:

2003 Orlando, Florida. (Capitol One Bowl--Auburn 13, Penn State 9. Boo.)

2004 Essex Junction, Vermont (Nate and I went downtown too early and ended up back in my father's basement. Classy.)

2005 Brno, Czech Republic (Fléda! Russian "champagne"!)

2006-Camel's Hump, Vermont (4,080 feet, lots of snow. May my hiking cohort rest in peace.)

2007-Burlington, Vermont (Six Pine St. party. Classic B-town.)

2008-Santa Cruz, California (Got engaged over the clock tower.)

2009-Mojave Desert, California (Kelso Dunes, an iron portal, fire, and song)

On Winter Research

2009-01-24T00:01:00.003-05:00

     This time I am deliberately not writing about winter and its experiences poetically, but am instead approaching it from a purely scientific viewpoint; for we boys had lots of time to experiment with winter from a passionately scientific, technical viewpoint; we tried to ascertain what winter’s consequences were and what were its practical applications. Today’s younger generation does not get as much from winter, maybe just skis and hockey; their interest in winter is sporting rather than scientific. Only Papanin and his colleagues on the ice floes continue the sorts of practical testing of winter that every proper boy attempted in his day.¹ From a technical standpoint it is possible to undertake a great number of experiments with winter, of which I shall name at least a few:

     It is possible to chase snowflakes with your hand and watch them as they fall; but no one has yet succeeded in catching one no matter how numb the hand gets.

     It is possible to test what flavor the frost has; I once tried this on the brass doorknob of the house and tore off a bit of my tongue when it froze to it;

     it is also possible to breathe circles or stamp your nose onto frozen windows;

     and also to write with your finger on windows and prove your creative or literary talent in this way.

     It is possible to lick icicles with the goal of ascertaining their taste and nutritive value.

     and also to knock them down with a snowballs or rocks to verify their fragility and their glassy voice;

     and lastly to test how they thaw, namely by secretly placing a piece of icicle into your father’s pocket.

     One can successfully try sliding according to the proper rules of motion (standing, sitting, on one leg, or even with a pirouette).

     Skating has also been tried successfully with twigs tied to one shoe, or even (entirely exceptionally) to both.

     On sleds one can ride facing forwards, on one’s stomach, or (normally with terrible results) while facing backwards.

     Packing snow or making snowballs depends on the type of snow; soggy snow must be greatly compressed in the palms, which results in a smaller caliber but higher potency; normal, malleable snow allows the use of snowballs of the largest size; dry, dusty snow is only recommended for use in attacking with loose snowy clouds.

     Shaking snow or other things from tree branches offers valuable experience in how quickly snow can get through one’s collar and into one’s shirt, and where it goes from there.

     Snowmen are important, and, for most people, their only attempt at figure sculpting,

     Whereas making snow angels in freshly fallen snow betrays an interest in one’s own figure and size.

     Footprints in the snow allow you to sign the world with the letters of your own name;

     you can similarly try signing your name another way, about which we will say no more.

     The creation of avalanches can be performed most effectively on barn roofs by throwing snowballs at them.

     And let us not even forget kicking a piece of ice along, especially when they're delivering ice to the bars; we sometimes even seem entirely serious adults engaging in this pastime on their way home from the office, and think that no one is watching them.

     Just look and see how pitiful winter sports appear compared to everything that winter offers the normal boy with a technical brain and thirst for knowledge!

1938

______

1 Ivan Dmitriyevich Papanin—-Soviet polar explorer and participant in polar expeditions since 1931, and leader of a scientific expedition which examined the geophysical conditions of ice floes in the winter of 1937-38

Literature in Finno-Ugric Linguistics

2009-01-22T22:35:00.002-05:00

I occasionally dabble in translating things out of languages other than Czech and Slovak. College was an especially fertile time for that, what with the three years of Sanskrit I somehow managed to take, the ancient Greek, and my high school French and Latin not nearly so rusty as they are now.

German's been a lazily-pursued hobby of mine for almost ten years at this point. There's not enough time to pursue all the languages one wants to, and I mainly seem to be happy enough with an incredibly loose definition of "reading knowledge."

Occasionally I do something useful, and this is a parallel version of a German page on Finno-Ugric study materials I translated last summer. Thanks go to Prof. Laakso for her pleasant response to my enthusiasm. I'll never be a Finno-Ugrist, but I can at least try to help them out.

Crème de Menthe Bars, What Not To Do When Making

2009-01-21T20:37:00.002-05:00

Now that I've apparently mastered my father's molasses spice cookie recipe, it's time to turn to that other family holiday stalwart, these bad boys.

I'd never really creamed butter by hand (had to do that for the bottom two layers), not had I made my own frosting. (<---lots of fun, though I think I have a headache from coming down from the sugar rush I got when I was sampling it.)

Things to do next time: wait for cake layer to cool more, to preserve frosting integrity.

Make more of the top layer, and wait longer to apply it.

Actually, that's about it (unless the cake/frosting is too granular from not enough processing, which I don't know yet.) The

We'll see what else I did wrong (not creaming the butter enough for the mint frosting? Might that be a little coarse?) later.

104 words, 1/21/09

2009-01-21T04:36:00.003-05:00

My single-speed groans up the hill from downtown. I need to turn left at the top from the rightmost bike lane--I don’t ride in the left lane up that hill--I don't have the arrow and figure I'll go anyway. It turns green while I'm making a wide turn. A car follows me, haltingly. Lights flash. The one behind that is a cop.

My lights are on, but not my helmet. Didn't signal at the top of the hill, let alone the lane changes. I am already guilty of a dozen things when he drives on, pulling the car over.

Lucky me again.

103 words, 1/19/09

2009-01-20T00:08:00.004-05:00

I hit the speed bump too fast and accidentally let go. I used to ride with just the bar until Mike gave me some old bar ends of his to lengthen my ride (the top tube's a bit short). Seventy cents, when you factor in the replacement Allen screw one of them needed.

These changed the architecture of the handlebars. When I went flying backwards from the ends, the straight bar played cleanup. It waited patiently to receive my hands, which knew what to do (without benefit of thought), curling two fingers per hand around just enough to catch myself.

Lucky, lucky me.

Prague in the Snow

2009-01-19T00:01:00.003-05:00

I don’t mean to get myself mixed up in the livelihood of Mr. Šimon, Mr. Stretti-Zamponi¹ and the other graphic artists who earn their living on monochromes, dry-needle engravings², India-ink aquatints of snow³, eaves, Charles Bridge and other winter scenes. I just want to make a single column out of snow—for alas it no longer suits me to make snowmen the way I used to. Snow forts were very beautiful too: we would pour water over the ramparts and allow it to freeze overnight, make snowballs in the morning and then wage war, with conquests and shrill cries everywhere. We fought especially fiercely with the boys from Sychrov⁴ for territorial, legal, and social reasons. Today, however, I cannot call upon even my greatest enemy (if indeed I have one) to draw up plans for a snowball fight. And that’s why I can only produce a column out of snow.

     When the snow falls, Prague suddenly turns into a quaint little town; overnight we go fifty or a hundred years into the past, all at once the Malá Strana is medieval, grandmotherly, baroque, nestled in the palm of your hand, more naive and antique. Out of nowhere you remember your grandmother and her seven pairs of undergarments, apples cooked in the oven, the smell of wood smoke, old rooms and flowered curtains. People are happy on the street, carving out their footprints in the snow as though they were tracing wreaths, crunching away as they did a hundred years ago. And the quiet, sir—such rural quiet—the Vltava does not even roar, the trams make no more noise than the Christ child, and no one would bat an eye if the automobiles started to jingle as if they were horse-drawn sleighs. O holy world! Suddenly the world of old things and old dimensions is here. Small-town magic. Antique character.

     Just so you know, the only real snow is the kind we get in the Malá Strana. That is why it lasts longer than elsewhere, and when it is all blown away on the other side (for they just get flurries, nothing at all to brag about) we still have it heaped in drifts, by the grace of God, with only footpaths through it. That is our domestic right. Just us and Hradčany.⁵

     But no graphic artist could depict how pretty a snowflake is resting in a girl’s hair or the sorts of tracks left by a blackbird or sparrow on a snowy roof. Those look like little poems written in Oriental script or calligraphy. An entire poem composed in a single row. I’d love to be able to translate it.

Then, when the moon shines over everything, what happens then cannot even be described: Prague shrinks and makes itself tiny, scarcely even breathing: the snow sparkles like glass underfoot, the roofs press close to the earth, everything bristles with frost and it is so bright, so bright that you fear the darkness of your own core.

And you, red spark in the stove, you emphasize the blue of the winter twilight with your ruddy companionship. How wonderful is that duet of glow and quietude!

In the summer we see trees, clouds, water, and everything under the sun, but when the snow falls in the winter we see what we scarcely noticed in the summer—that is, the roof. Once a roof is snow-covered it is creditable, prudent, and above all, it is visible. Only then does human roofing fulfill its purpose. And we only see in the winter that our dwellings exist under roofs. The whole of our city is a city under roofs set up over our heads.

Let us praise the snow for showing us the dignity of our roofing!

1923

______

1 Jaromír Stretti-Zamponi (born 1882)—painter and graphic artist, creator of graphic designs with an old Prague themes, who published in 1914 a cycle of four colored prints called “Snow” depicting the Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter) area.
2 Copperplate engravings (more rarely zinc-plate) made with a steel needle or a cone-shaped diamond nib.
3 Prints made without any engraving mechanism, but through the gradual deposition of material on the work surface.
4 i.e., from the industrial suburb of Sychrova in Úpice, where the author spent his childhood and adolescence.
5 [The Castle District, up the hill to the north of the Malá Strana and on the same side of the river as it.]

A Chronology of Anterior Subluxations

2009-01-14T02:12:00.005-05:00

#1--(Spring of 2003) The Progenitor. So far back in time (junior year of college) that I didn't even have a blog and Facebook was a year away. Basketball trip and fall. Hours in the ER. First time on morphine.
#2--(8/26/03) Separation of What Now?
#3--(10/22/03) See August 26...
#4?--(3/5/04) False alarm...
#4--(3/19/04) From hero to...
#5--(Third Week of July, 2005) Came out during forward crawl, self-reduced.
#6--(Fall of 2005) Drunken fall at co-worker's house, self-reduced.
#7--(3/14/06) Oh good.
#8--(12/12/08) No link unless I decide to get all cute and self-link.

Two days after a huge rollerskating fall left me with the biggest bruise of my life, I was finally (for once!) beating my housemate in a game of one-on-one and had the arm pop out as I went for a layup. We walked back to the house, got directions of the internet, then he reduced it for me. I'm actually doing rehab exercises, for a change. May the next one not exist, or at least be more than two-plus years away.

The Score So Far:
Basketball: 5
Drunken Stupidity: 2
Swimming: 1
Andrew: -8

Sort of a translation story.

2009-01-14T02:11:00.002-05:00

Dusting off some old blogs, I found this piece which was a story a suitemate told that involved he and I (I'm "Tall," unsurpisingly), dealing with a package of German soup mix we'd come across. I attempted to filter them through Czech with a German-Czech online dictionary.

A quote: "I scientifically examined the package as Tall perused the various translations of Beutelinhalt."

It's probably tellingly recursive that I immediately set at figuring it out: (inner monologue: "Inhalt" is 'contents' and Beutel looks like 'bottle', only it was soup mix, so probably the whole thing together means 'Contents of package,' and then spent five minutes checking that out on google, and being proud I could read the rest of the instructions better than I could five years ago. No. Scratch the "probably."

From a potential cousin in Slovakia...

2009-01-12T00:21:00.003-05:00

My potential cousin from Slovakia:

"Pamätám, že môj dedo hovoril, ze ma niekoho v amerike, dodnes dokonca pise listy tam. ale zabudla som, kde konkretne. vies, my sme veľmi hyperaktivna rodina..."

"I remember my grandfather told me he had some [relative] in America and even still writes letters there, but I forgot where exactly. You know, we're a very hyperactive family..."

a) This is quite interesting to me personally, as I hadn't anticipated Facebook would have genealogical applications.
b) It's good to know I at least have reasonably independent corroboration that it's a crazy family to be a part of. (I know, I know, that's true of everyone, but it's nice to hear that coming from a Slovak to a mere Faux-vak.)

Snow

2009-01-11T21:01:00.000-05:00

     Everyone says that there used to be more snow. Where the snow has gone I do not know, and the meteorologists have not yet explained it in the least. But the fact is that in some olden times there was snow like crazy (for example, Prague appears completely snowed in on Šimon’s etchings¹) and in the old engravings you see sleighs in the Prague streets; every year as kids we employed snowballs, long toboggans and sleds and wrote figures in the snow and stomped out signatures and faces and built snowmen far superior to those of the current generation. That is a phenomenon as indisputable as camping by the river, fires, and other natural occurrences that enchanted our childhoods. What made it happen I do not know; but it is not, in short, the way is was. In any way.

     Recently I saw a snowman, right in Brno, I believe, and I wondered if the scales had not fallen from my eyes. Out of nowhere, a few steps from the tram lines, I met a pagan deity, blood brother to some prehistoric stone carving. Fat, gigantic, monumental, terrifying, and official: an idol, simply. A snowy god. Kids have forgotten the proper rituals (they do not bow before their god or bring it human sacrifices) but they have set up an idol anyway out of some atavism, the bigger, the better.

     A bit farther on I find an attempt at a ramp: only a few fingerlengths long and still sprinkled with sand, and every little kid comes running that way trying (in vain) to get a good amount of sliding in. And a bit farther on the street they endeavor to make a mild slope; and already it is full of sleds, one kid lying on his stomach on each one and straining to get five centimeters downhill. Well, it won’t work, there isn’t enough snow, it barely covers the uneven and frozen mud; but they kick at the earth, rebound, dig forward inch by inch in the eternal hope that their sleds will suddenly burst into motion and go—and go—hey, is that not the eternal dream of flight, that a bit of magical power bearing one effortlessly from place to place? Is that not at the core of the ancient fairy tales about the magical cloak, the seven-league boots or winged horses, that ancient myth of superb and enchanted flight? To be borne aloft! If not over seven mountains and seas at least down half a meter of road; to be conveyed instead of ordinary walking by a magic vehicle which runs under its own power, albeit one you have to help. To drag a toboggan or sled up a hill and then loose it downwards: this isn’t just sporting delight in movement, but a fairy-tale, wondrous delight, an instinctive dream of physical thrill. Kids are living mythology, children are the pagan prehistory of humanity. The oldest tradition in the world is being a proper kid.

     You see—scarcely had I begun to worship snow than gods displayed their agreement, for as I wrote—flake by flake—snow has begun to fall on the city. Truthfully, it is only a light and wet dusting at the moment; the first sparrow on the opposite roof is hopping through the snowy crust right up to the eaves; it would be difficult to make a proper snow diety out of this, and even harder to fly down the bumpy slope of Říční Avenue² on some magic vehicle. But this thin white covering at least signifies that in these awful, corrupted and right gloomy times there is still a place for the pagan strength of life: for fairy-tale elements, telluric³ traditions, magic and wonder, that still remain-—nothing at all: for the snow melted before I finished this paragraph and it has again become dark and soggy wherever I look.
There can be no doubts: there used to be more snow, and the snow itself was better, more solid, more substantive than the flurries of today. Entirely right: où sont les neiges d’antan?⁴

1923

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1 Painter and graphic designer František T. Šimon (1877 to 1942) created a cycle of tinted engravings called “Prague,” published in 1911)
2 In the Malá Strana in Prague. Čapek lived at No. 11 for many years, and wrote many of his books there.
3 terrestrial, extending from our globe
4 [French] “Where are the snows of yesteryear? A verse from the “Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times” by François Villon.

I know my onions.

2009-01-11T20:50:00.000-05:00

The first grocery store I ever worked at my father, ever the wag, called "Grand Onion" for "Grand Union," and he wasn't far off.

Like every other (well, each of the other two) food items, the English was cheerfully stolen from Middle French. Ah, the Norman invasion. Anglo-French (and Mod. French) oignon gives us our word, and comes from the Latin unio(n). Yes, it means "union, single thing," a reference to that big unified bulb.

Bah: unlike with quince (I hope) the allium spices have already been covered better in more excruciating detail than I ever would have bothered with. With quotes from Homer, and the Greek borrowings into South Slavic, and the connections between Latin cepa and many of the European words for "onion" [and English "chive"!], proceeding on to other pages on leeks and garlic (Old English gār.lēac "spear.leek") and cloves and going on into the cloves the spice and it's all just wonderful.

So wonderful I have nothing else to add and throw up my hands at my own modest efforts. I hope, at any rate, that the link provides as much fascinating clicking for anyone else as it provided me. Quick, I better distract everyone with a pre-prepared piece of Čapek.

102 words, 1/11/09

2009-01-11T20:41:00.007-05:00

Everything is a story, every -ism and -ology and -istics just a framework we cast out into the data brought to us by our sense organs. We like sharing our stories with others and we like living in the same tales as the people we care for, especially things that hang together well, that are funny, and that are true, or a convincing approximant. Like matryoshkas they nestle inside each other from the largest-scale Weltanschauung down to the seemingly insignificant things we tell ourselves or our friends. You don’t have the whole world figured out? Sometimes inside jokes have to make do.

101 words; 4/23/07

2009-01-11T10:48:00.002-05:00

The first split second he didn't believe the evidence of his eyes and the course of the subway bore him away. Curiosity and the urge to explore had brought him out that way in the first place. Could it really have been-- By the time he got to the end of the line, he had dismissed what he had seen, but as the days and weeks passed, he found himself returning all the more frequently to that one stretch of track. He stopped believing a thousand times, but tensed as the spot neared, straining for a second glance at the miraculous.

Toponyms in Produce; Part 2 of a Series.

2009-01-08T23:33:00.005-05:00

Having hitherto discussed the etymological hyperspace of the quince to a somewhat alarming degree, I thought I'd move on to a slightly smaller morsel:

The shallot. (image cheerfully stolen from Wikipedia)

I've been cooking with these (oh, man, sautéed in butter with just about anything, going to be roasting some on Monday) and have enjoyed expanding my spectrum of allium tastes. (now if I could only see the benefits of leeks except for dissolved in soup). But I'm already digressing. I'd been made dimly aware that the word for shallot (and scallion) had been traceable to the name of a Palestinian seaport, Ascalon (modern Ashkelon).

It was only after the quince intruded into my thoughts that I realized that this had to be analogous to quince.

quince : Cydonian (apple) :: shallot : Ascalonian (?).

I assumed it would be 'onion,' A bit further research confirms this: Latin ascalonia (caepa) 'Ascalon (onion), late Latin escalonia. Early/Middle French escaloigne-->eschalotte-->échalotte, English 'shallot'.

I've yet to use them in salad dressing, but I hear that's a reasonable idea as well. What I'll likely try: chopped shallot, olive oil, vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper, maybe a little mustard. I suspect I'll report back on the success or failure of this absurdly simple salad dressing when I'm back to discuss the proliferation of Lat. caepa/cepa "onion" throughout the languages of Europe. (French and English excepting.)

From New Year’s Eve to the Feast of The Epiphany

2009-01-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

As far as I can remember, people say each New Year that the last New Year’s Eve was more fun; why, this year was nothing, but last year’s, there was a party for you! Last year they said the same thing about the year before last, that year the year before that, etc. God, if this decline of New Year’s gaiety has been going on forever, how heathen and debauched must it have been in the youth of Wáclaw Wladivoj Tomek!¹ Or during the reign of Maria Theresa! Or in the times of Boleslav the Cruel!² But I think that even back then they said in a flight of New Year melancholy: “Why, last year with prince Václav, that was an even better one; now that was such a riot, oh, you just had to be there!”

Everyone I speak to—not just skiers and chestnut vendors— says it should just freeze over already and start snowing. What sort of winter is this? Once it is winter, things should crunch underfoot and nip at your ears and you must slide on the ice and everything: everyone should have bright red noses, there should be icicles on the roofs and flowers of frost on the windows and beautiful heaps of snow along the walkways, so you can collect a handful and hit someone in the back or the back of the head (especially the back of the head). From this we understand that the human need for order has not yet died out, nor the inclination to have things be as they always have been. Humans have retained some firm conception of what is proper and belongs in nature, at least. In such vital matters as snow, we tenaciously remain traditionalists and do not want to see any climatic changes perpetuated. If we were to create the world, if that was in our hands, we would come up with assumptions just as firm as the one that says there must be snow in winter, and we would find a large amount of things that just had to be because they were supposed to be there. In every orderly and healthy thing there is some “has to.” In the republic, in parliament, in the army and in people. We gladly seek out some sort of tradition. The only thing is that tradition is not what once was, but what has to exist right now. Tradition, that is not last year’s snow or the year before’s, but the pretty and fresh snow of this year which just had to be there. I swear it had to; everyone says so.

It is the ancient experience of occasional poets and columnists that as soon as they praise the snow it begins to thaw outside: as soon as they aver that outside it is black and wretchedly muddy, a blizzard begins to rage. It happened to me just now: scarcely had I written the previous paragraph than a few flakes began to fall outside, as though there had never been a blizzard. I don’t think we scribblers have any influence on it; I think the gods just want to prove that the news is never right. Just let a gambler bet that there is no snow, and lo, snow there is; let him bet that there is snow and lo, there is none. Perhaps there is some meaning in it; perhaps right when the editor writes in the paper that the situation is tense that it is not a whirling maelstrom nor a contorted jumble. Perhaps when the newspapers tell you it is a critical time, the time is not at all critical. Perhaps it is not true that that words of the ambassador Dr. Kramář have created a deep impression. Perhaps it is not even true that commissioner Švehla³ is negotiating with the populists, but the other way around. But if it is true, it is not the journalists’ fault, for it depends on the particular intention and arrangement of the gods that no one else be omnipotent.

Just the other day I met the Three Kings once again, but there were only two of them, and the bigger one of the two was thin as a rail. Nevertheless they were staunchly singing: “We Three Kings Of Orient Are.” At every door. If they had admitted that “We Two Kings Of Orient Are,” they might have been telling the truth, but they would have ceased to be the true Three Kings and no one would have believed that they were “bearing gifts,” and wouldn’t have given them a thing. And listen, children, we adults do the exact same thing: we sing our political carols, “We, the greater nation,” or “We, farmers,” or “We, the Worker’s Party,” and so on. If we sang “We, the party secretary,” or “We, the high executive committee,” or something similarly honest, our carols would lose all their secret power and no one would give them the least bit of credit.

1927

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1 Nineteenth-century Czech historiographer.
2 Tenth-century duke of Bohemia; killed his brother and predecessor Václav (Good King Wenceslaus)]
3 Karel Kramář was the first prime minister of Czechoslovakia, and a member of the National Assembly thereafter. Antonín Švehla was thrice prime minister of the First Czechoslovak Republic during the 1920s

Von brigði

2009-01-05T02:02:00.004-05:00

     Von brigði is the name of a remix album of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, a remix of songs from their first album Von. The name is a pun in Icelandic--Brigði means "alternation/changes", so its title means "variations on Von." Von itself means "hope," though, and Vonbrigði (no spaces) means "disappointment." It's been out for ten years, and no doubt many a critic has used the rhetorical maneuver of saying "name aside, it's no disappointment," but I'm going to do it anyway. I already had a soft spot for Von, and at least two of these remixes are made out of bliss.

     A structural note, at this point, on the Čapek. "From New Year's Eve To the Feast of the Epiphany" comes out on the sixth; "Snow" a week after that. Beyond that I'm playing my cards closer to my chest, though I've got enough to run with for a little while, and autoschedule guarantees that these next two will be out at the promised times. (Oh, and Dad, the autoscheduled first one was what caused you to believe I was back in Santa Cruz for New Year's. Also, hi Dad. Not something I ever thought I'd be saying here, but for what it's worth I am glad you're reading).

     Nick's new posts (to say nothing of the old) are a delight. I've enjoyed the opportunities presented so far this year, and would be nothing short of delighted for a reprise of a few of the tea-swilling insomniac nights of yesteryear.

Postmortem, Mojave Desert New Year's Expedition.

2009-01-02T03:50:00.004-05:00

Notes from the field: (editorial remarks after the fact)

"Surfeit of oaty goodness." (probably not, actually. .75 cup/person/day you're willing to make oatmeal.)
"Extra propane" (nope, we had plenty, the first can just leaked)
"Fingerless gloves" (warm fingerless gloves. Preferably, mittens. I wore socks on my hand one night, by the Jeezum)
"Club soda" (just to be prepared. Someone asked. We probably could have brought it instead of the ten gallons of water we brought and didn't need.)
"Chairs." (No editorial comment; it's just a good idea.)
Sand Castling (maybe a bucket? We had a moustache sculpt-off anyway)
"Nooch." (someone actually had a bunch of nutritional yeast with 'em)

Cookies were well-received. TetraPak milk is bizarre but passable.

A list of what I brought for clothing and used: (three nights, though I would have made it stretch to four no problem)

5 pair underwear,
2 pair long underwear,
1 pair pants
4 pair socks
4 T-shirts
2 tops
2 light coats
1 jacket
3 hats
1 scarf
1 pair of shorts
1 pair mittens

Things I brought but did not use:
notepad (except for kindling once)
2 pair socks
1 pair underwear
1 pair of pants

Biggest "mistakes":

Bringing the bike bag: unwieldy, hard to get at, hard to get into, probably didn't even need it. The biggest hassle from a getting-at-things point of view.
Bringing extra pair of pants: maybe a mistake--I'm happy in one pair of pants until the cows come home, but what if I'd been spilled on or tore them or something? (Duct tape?)

Too Much Water: we used maybe six, seven gallons for two people for three days, and brought 17.5. We maybe should have been drinking more, and didn't use too much for bathing (ahem)--but we could have saved sixty pounds worth of weight or so.

We packed well, but man, did it take a lot of bedding for semi-comfortable sleeping. The last night I wore two pairs of socks and both pairs of long underwear and three shirts and a hat to bed on an air mattress with a blanket on top then a mummy bag then three more blankets on top next to another person. Which was comfortable and thought-free once we get it set up, which really didn't take that long. Backpacking cold-weather camping would be significantly harder, since it's impracticable to bring five huge blankets with you.

Ah, the post-vacation brain dump. Hopefully I'll need to tap into this resource again at some point.

EDIT: Holy hell we were at ~2500 feet? No wonder it was so cold.

If I...

2009-01-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

     If I awoke on New Year’s Day as the Lord God—no, wait, that wouldn’t work, the Lord God doesn’t sleep—then if I awoke on New Year’s Day as St. Peter, I would say: “What should I do this year for those confounded Czechoslovaks? They are such heretics, and sometimes entirely ungrateful, blast them; there must be some good in them, though. I think that their weather is too extreme; maybe that is why they are so cantankerous and stubborn. It is hot and stormy in the summer, so they grumble irritably; in the winter it’s so freezing that everyone can only think of themselves, acting icily to others. The climate does that. And so they don’t like anything; winter is too cold and summer too hot; if something is black, it is too black for them, and if something is white, it is too white for them; never in their life is anything just right. They are accustomed to this from this weather of theirs. Wait just a moment, you rascals, I’ll show you; I’ll give you a nice bit of summer, like they get by the seaside; I’ll give you mild winters (with snow, naturally, a little bit of snow is a good thing), and comfortable summers with sun and plenty of moisture—it would be deviltry if I didn’t alter it for you. If you were milder to yourselves, your weather would seem nicer; but if you won’t do it yourselves, I will do it for you. Let the Lord God help you in the New Year!

     If I awoke on New Year’s Day as prime minister, I would marvel greatly at this turn of events and stroke my chin at a total loss. (Aha, I would say, I have to shave.) When I got used to the miraculous change in my existence a moment later, I would stay in bed for a few more minutes, as I had done hitherto as an ordinary citizen, but I wouldn’t go back to sleep. I would ponder. “My word, we have the anniversary of the republic to celebrate this year. I know what; I’ll call the ministers together and say: “Boys, last year we presided over the monument to Austria; this year we have to preside over the monument to the Republic. Look, we have to put things together somehow; left and right wings are for the birds; the republic, it’s like—a circle; how can there be a left and right wing of a circle?” Then a number of other arguments would occur to me, but I would put those off until the ministers arrive; then I would get up, making sure—for luck in the new year—that I got up on the right foot.

     If I awoke on New Year’s Day as the Lord Mayor of the city of Prague, I would gaze a while into the far future and then I would say: “It seems to me that Mr. Čapek is right; they really should have started in with that green ring around our city.¹ When I imagine those beautiful lanes...and the clearings for the children...and little groves here and there...well then, let’s get to it.”

     If I awoke on New Year’s Day as a millionaire and a man of the upper class, I would say: “It’s already ‘twenty-eight? God, how time flies! Ah well, this year I’ve got to do something with my money, got to set something up in someone’s memory or establish something so long as it’s worthwhile. It’s worth some thought, but the money will be there; we will take care of that.”

     If I awoke on New Year’s Day as a twenty year-old, I’d turn over to the other side and keep sleeping; I’d have lots to think about after New Year’s Eve.

     If I awoke on New Year’s Eve as my puppy, I would scratch myself a bit with my back leg (having some disorderly flea on the nape of my neck) and then I would say: “This year I won’t anger my master any more, I will go outside peaceably, I won’t scatter bones on the stairs, I will keep clean, I won’t sleep on the couch and I won’t run through every row in the garden.” For that I would receive a cube of sugar and be immeasurably overjoyed with life.

1928

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1 Karel Čapek himself had suggested the reforestation of the area around Prague and often returned to the concept of the “green ring” in his newspaper articles in the period around 1927. [Unbracketed footnotes are from my 1946 posthoumous edition. Bracketed footnotes such as this will be my own additions.]

Here we go again.

2008-12-28T02:41:00.004-05:00

Last year I had fun translating this piece of Karel Čapek's online.

Now it's soon to be 2009, and though I have those short stories to edit and that novel with a bunch of prep notes or that other novel (or two collections of short stories) to edit...I have the itch. Another posthumous collection of short writings, this time on the seasons.

Almanac, or How Long The Year Is!

Edit: Oh, autoscheduling! All right then, we'll all have to wait until 12:01 on New Year's Day. I'll be in the Mojave Desert then, if all goes according to plan.

Iterations

2008-12-16T12:32:00.003-05:00

I've been interested in honing processes recently, and I just had a conceptual breakthrough this morning. Stupid at it may sound, I had only been using my bookmarks as a repository for crap I might want to look at later.

Now I'm trying to take some of those links and the interests they point to and view it more as a to-do list. Actively try to use my bookmarks instead of just letting them sit there. There's a beauty in that.

The Last Week and a Half

2008-12-07T03:25:00.003-05:00

Two sunsets over Monterey Bay. Two long oceanside jaunts at night. (I must start in again with the astronomy.) I've learned to crossover turn in rollerskating, and am hoping Wednesday I still remember how. My blisters may be settling into callus. I'm tinkering with a strawberry-red vintage Peugeot, with thoughts of trying my hand at restoration. This will involve a bunch of liquid wrench. I've had lutefisk on lefse and washed it down with sotsuppe in a midwestern Norwegian yule (tonight!), and gotten an in on a garden that may need lots of weeding. I've read "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" and am trying to get my hands on "Transmetropolitan." My hook shot and one-handed dunk are progressing, as is my foul shot, though I'm trying not to get too caught up in how awesome I seem to be at basketball. I'm prepping a novel to translate, and editing a short story I've already translated.

I'm going to replace my own doorknob tomorrow, if nothing else, and I'll be in the Mojave Desert on New Year's Day, if all goes well.

Can't think of much else to say right now--besides, there's work to be done.