At the beginning of the day, I started in on this weekend's light novel (after finishing last weekend's over breakfast, having fallen a bit behind), figuring I would read for a bit and then get to the real work.  Within an hour of picking up the book (another of the oddest Inkling's), it became obvious that I would be better off sticking with the light reading today, maintaining focus, and keeping the mind in low gear.  So, reader, I did.

When golfing, there are some days in which you get to the course and realize that the wisest course would be just spending a bit of time on the chipping green and the putting green, rather than setting out on the long walk of the game.  

Likely a result of that odd episode a couple of days ago, which has left no evident physical traces -- almost certainly something I ate.  

Gently down the stream.  Particularly on certain days.  Slow and steady doesn't win the race, but it can help you from losing it, and then afterward, you can get about the business of winning the race. 

 The quest to find a travel alarm clock in Bosnia continues.  Shifting the focus to kitchen timers, but the Turkish hardware/housewares chain that I had pinned my hopes on came up empty, except for a doubtful-looking, bulky digital thermometer/clock with alarm function.  Which was vey cheap, but not what I was looking for.  

Odd.  I mean, even in Montenegro, they condescend to sell a few at the back of the hardware store.  I assume everyone here uses phones, or the morning calls from the mosques.

 Well, whatever it was now seems to have cleared the system, or, dark view, convinced the system to stop opposing it.  I don't often talk about the occasional feats of physical endurance or athletic achievements here, but it should be noted that if something puts me out of commission physically for a bit, it's highly unlikely to have been a function of the imagination.

The most obvious correlation would be the water service stopping at the apartment (municipal water projects have been a constant feature of visits here), but I only used the backup jug for second coffee, and the water had been refreshed less than seven days before.

Oats in the morning, garlic at night.

The story of Israel's exodus from Egypt has been thought worthwhile by people of many cultures over the last few thousand years.  A tribe leaves the swampy Egyptian floodplain where they had been living, working as forced labor.  Part of this was leaving the bowls of  leaven behind.  They then walk through the desert on a journey of purification, occasionally pining for the fermented pots of their old home.  Microbial balance is a thing.  It changes people, and as it changes people, it changes a culture.  And, to a visiting American, these things are sometimes perceptible -- in the country to the south, even in midwinter, whenever I returned from leaving the apartment, even if only to go to the market down the street, I took a shower and changed my clothes.  Sunlight and fresh air.

Dark, airless spaces seem to be sought out by many sorts of religious people.  I certainly suffered through many an airless Mass in the Midwest, occasionally after having run up a large hill in the morning to get there.  But it's my understanding that this physical reality is only incidentally, not essentially, connected with religion.  People feel comfortable in the old cities, in the old places, for reasons they don't fully understand.  And they're fond of the fermented foods and drinks of the place. And part of this is necessary -- if we don't have the right microbial balance inside, our bodies can't function.  But over years, and generations, and even centuries, the grime of the past can cause people to cultivate unhealthy habits, as they focus on creating a circle of life that preserves this sort of physical reality.  And the circle is necessary, and the physical reality serves it, but occasionally, there is a better way at hand.

There is a deliberate sequence to this progression of places, after the winter on the lonely ice floe.  First, the mountain.  Second, the old city.  And next, the city of the Republic, the Enlightenment. (Which is also in this city, but not this part of this city.)  

 Hm.  Well, clearly I ate something that should never be eaten, or touched something that should never be touched, or perhaps just was nearby something that one should never be nearby.  Quite the odd day or so.  Not an illness, just a pervasive feeling of toxicity, mild fever, an entirely conceptual mild nausea, etc. But very intense.  I'm not generally susceptible to those sorts of things, and I have had the good fortune in my adult years of very rarely being ill.  

Perhaps with the chill in the evening, the microbiota of the old city were able to make inroads.  Or something was off in the kefir at the supermarket cafe.

The closest correlative would be the second half of the first bar exam that I took (and passed with flying colors).  On the Upper West Side, a large armory gymnasium.  At the lunch break, I think I had the sweet and sour tofu from a cheap Chinese place nearby.  And I assumed that it caused the mind-bending unease that I felt in the second half of the exam, but in retrospect, I don't think that was it.

There was also a very peculiar episode in the second year of the JD that had something to do with environmental toxins, but I've not talked about that, for a few different reasons.

But this was much the same, in that the unease, aside from the mild fever, was entirely conceptual -- to put it bluntly, there was no chance of my revisiting my lunch. (I can't recall the last time that that happened, tbh.)  But very intense, and some lingering feelings of toxicity.  Will hydrate, rest, and try to get back to the morning exercise, but certainly not for the next few days.

Once I was ambulatory again in the (late) morning, I washed out all the clothes recently worn, swept all the floors and wiped the surfaces.  Seemed wise.

 Well, that was an interesting 24 hours or so.  Seem to be okay for it.  #breadcrumb

 Went to the good supermarket (source of cheap good vegetables) for a bit of rooftop cafe philosophy reading with some kefir.  Which, for some reason has become one of my paradigmatic habits when visiting here.  It's a decent place, right across from the national legislature and the old museum.  But they've made some upgrades since I first stumbled on it a few years ago -- outdoor air conditioning (water spray) in summer, and a net around the place to keep the birds, and perhaps other flying things, away.  And, of course, the ubiquitous piped music.

But the habits of the city are quite strong.  Despite the fact that its literally on top of an abundant supply of vegetables and fresh dairy, everyone seems to eat greasy food and smoke a lot.  That's the way of this part of the world, admittedly.  It's presumably the default reaction to public space.  Perhaps a Shavian cult of vegetarianism and aerated bread could take hold, or something.

At any rate, it's better than the vaping, but I still relocate myself, with my kefir and book, whenever I find myself downwind of smoke.  When I first visited the city, it was during the film festival, and there was an outdoor showing of an old restored Yugoslavian Stakhanite film about coal miners in the country -- wives in veils (lifted above their faces by visiting Party functionaries to greet them with a kiss (2, not 3)), and train engines co-opted to serve as vehicles to the wedding.  It was very interesting, but a group of American tourists who had sat near me began to smoke, so I moved, and then someone there started to smoke, and I moved, and the sequence repeated itself, so I just slipped out the back.  I suppose if if anyone had been observing, they might have thought I disliked the film, but it's simply a question of healthful air, water and food.  

In the neighboring country, there's a standing joke -- "eat a salad, live forever".  Which is a good humility, I suppose.  We know not the day nor the hour.  But, you know, the odds are that that sort of thing might give you an extra few days or weeks, if you made it a habit.

Memorial of St. Jerome, priest and doctor of the church.  Rather vulgar fellow. 

"Parce mihi Domine, quia Dalmatia sum"  --  "Forgive me, Lord, I'm from this kind of place."  (Dalmatia, technically.)   A surprisingly common prayer in this part of the world.  Borderlands, and the proximate strangers.  The mimetic competition to exceed in virtue is good, but it soon turns to violence, and the violence becomes habitual.

The melody for "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" was an older French song, "Malbrough s'en va en guerre", about the rumored, but ultimately only rumored, death of Churchill's ancestor, whom apparently the French disliked.

Perhaps the French thought up the new lyrics just to get everyone in England and America to sing it.  Which would be pure Gallic genius.  The divine anointing oils of the first court of Europe did some fine work there.

Clipped under fair use from today's Times -- a photo of the large protest last year in the country to the east.  The photoshop-genius arrow indicates my Humble Quarters at the time, which was either the lit windows in the frame or another set of lit windows just above the frame.  Quite the ruckus.

As I was a neutral tourist, I thought it wrong to swell the crowd by adding one to the number (presence is protest in these situations), and I thought (correctly, as it turned out) that it would be impossible to get back to the apartment afterwards, so I stayed in that day, but I did wander the city the night before, which was interesting.  I still have the sleeve from the Sbux (at the bottom of the cylindrical building on the right) from the day before. (Sbux name: "Gandhi.")

 Tried the local kiln yeast flatbreads (of the nan, pita ilk) yesterday after Mass.  Went to the place famous for it, and took a couple back to Humble Quarters for the Sunday reading.  There are relatively new blue laws here, so the malls and shops are mostly closed on Sunday.  It's my understanding that it's a revival of an older practice, which would make sense, since the country to the south does it as well, though it's a much less metropolitan-based economy there, mostly the beaches and mountains, which tend to stay open non-stop, as the country to the west puts it.  There's apparently a political angle on it, as the mostly Orthodox Christian suburb to the west (but called the eastern part) doesn't observe similar laws, and it sort of stalls the economic engine of the tourism-based city (mostly Muslim, as of this writing).  

At any rate, although the fresh bread made the knap smell idyllic, I think I'll keep to the traditional loaves from the older bakeries.  It's a bit oily, a bit like street food, something I've avoided for many years (realizing that neither the hot sauce nor the white sauce is a good bet).  When I first realized that  parsimonious travel abroad was a possibility (I was sitting in a Starbucks near my undergraduate in the mountains of the Shenandoah valley of Virginia at the time), I landed in a place in the newer part of Belgrade, across the river from the old (named, for some) houses of Belgrade.  It was apparently the epicenter of Balkan street food, but I never partook, with the exception of the 24-hour bakery chain.  Fresh bread is something I gravitate towards.  When I'm based in a place for some time I usually get into a cycle of baking my own, though that rarely happens on these travels.

Panem quotidianum.  But this isn't just an upper bound for the purposes of humility, as the Greek εχουσιαν underneath the vulgarization stands to witness.  It also speaks of bread worthy of the day.

All relatively inexpensive, of course.  Everything about a dollar, even at the centuries-old bakeries near the mosques.  Between the first and the second Balkan peregrinations, I went back to the libraries of one of the Midwestern universities to build a few courses that I was under the impression that I was to teach in India, come the autumn.  (This did not  come to pass.)  After being in cities where everything was walkable, suburban Illinois was a bit of a challenge.  I would walk for over an hour to the Starbucks by the mall to read for a bit, and then walk back.  On the (long) walk to the gym, I was excited to notice a building with the sign "Pekara" -- bakery.  Imagining that I would find a bit of the old world, I made the slight detour from the long walk, and walked in --  to find that all of the loaves were wrapped in plastic, and and averaged about 8 or 9 dollars per loaf, while the majority of the business seemed to be at the deli counter.  Musing about it as I walked on (bread-less), I realized that as soon as the commodity was outside the normal course of life, it became an object of desire, and the price crept upward, and the distance from the trade routes of life increased.  

So, yes.  Daily bread.

CV casting upon the waters continues.  Nary a one has floated back, let alone with a scrawled reply.  I had a burst of replies at one point earlier in the year, when things were extraordinarily difficult, and followed up with all of them, and promptly never heard from any of them again.  Which was odd.

I'd say it's a fair bet that much of this has to do with the corrupt folks who seemed to gravitate towards me -- I played by the rules and did my best work, which was usually ignored amid much talk of networking and cultivating relationships so one can have a career.  Humbug.

But a path to a basic way of life and work does need to arise somehow.  If I keep working and thinking in the Christminster in my mind, I'll be off to the asylum long before I'm able to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The work is at hand.  And this will sound odd, but I need to recover the person capable of doing it. And though I do mention it often, it is about restoring the mind and body from last winter (even as the evening chills of the impending one begin to intrude on the velvet late-summer in the Balkans).  Hence the mountaintops and the reading Hegelian philosophy amid the cries of the muezzin.  (Which in the old city here are sometimes quite cacophonous.  Putting the din in the din and devlet.)  

Nice line by Tolkein in the Times books section from a couple of weeks ago (still mulling whether I should re-up with the TLS, or if that would draw me into the web rabbit-holes -- the only reason I subscribe to the Times at one pound per month is that there's a facsimile of the print paper available for the efficient mornings); Tolkein was wandering the colleges during an electrical blackout in his quasi-retirement, musing that "e" meant out from it, and "meritus" meant deservedly so.

 Reading something Hegelian.  Russian, but old Russian, of the right kind of Hegel.  To do this kind of thinking is an uphill battle -- and most of the work coming out of he universities is of very little help  -- a few prominent exceptions, and thankfully a lot of their stuff is available.  

The universities sometimes take useful thought in odd directions.  Consider Peirce, polymath philosopher, one of the most brilliant American minds, and in profound dialogue with the central philosophical force of the last century in James/Dewey pragmatism -- and the majority of work on his stuff focuses on very thin slice of semiotics, obsessed over as a superficial framework for a heavily left-leaning critique.

So I trust my own lights, of necessity.  Sive necessitatis.  And the transcendental focus that's essential for my thinking is grounded in the sacramental character of the Catholic faith.  Some might say this risks falling between two schools, but the reality is different.  While Socrates might have had some reservations about the cult of Asclepius, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was largely written by folks well-steeped in Christian concerns, and with the seed of faith, certain purposes were being fulfilled.

And coming to the schools with a sacramental faith provides a purposiveness, something far more productive than simply using the professors as mimetic models, and taking on their concerns unreservedly.  Wittgenstein didn't knock on Russell's door as an acolyte -- they spent the evening arguing, and BR wasn't able to prepare for the lecture he was to give later that evening.

You must have your own purposes.  The sacramental character of life can ground you in the life you seek to examine.

 If the world could sense how forcefully its own way of living carries it past experience, things might be changed profoundly.  This is perhaps the root of the old Jewish teaching that if a sabbath were to be universally observed, the reign of heaven would begin.  

But attempting to systematically accomplish this gains little.  It is like Aristotle's metaphor for thought -- the army is in flight (to death), and then one soldier stops, turns around and looks, and then another, and then another.  The army can't be commanded to do that.  Its command is flight to death. 

It is an age of industrial prosperity, so it's a sort of venial sin to pause from work.  But the mechanical logic has to serve humanity, not govern it.  And now that the logic of machines is encountering the linguistic turn, it will start to get an ascendency over the mind, a power based in words, and we will again have the same old danger of adoring the work of our hands.

 #saturdayradio #stuporintelligence

https://archive.org/details/hhgttg-radio/HHGTTG.Phase1.Fit04.mp3

One element missing from the usual kit: waterproof windbreaker.  Will have to source one locally, along with the Quest for a Proper Travel Alarm.  

The setup in present Humble Quarters is a bit more comfortable than the last two, as cheap proximity to mountains was guiding those choices.  Still quite economical -- dramatically so, compared to US apartments, but a conscious decision to put myself into the center of a bit of civilization after the rough bits.  There's a reason that James Bond goes to a proper restaurant after slogging through the mud all day.  Completely apart from civilization, I could make an ideal Rousseau-like existence, given sufficient books and a properly set up room, but on the fringes, especially in Southern Europe, it's impossible to stand entirely apart from things.  So I read Henry James.  The λεγειν.

When I was slogging through the graduate work in the Midwest, one of the interminable number of electronic assignments that I was told to grade was a short film  project made by the students.  I caught glimpses of the workspaces of the students (this was before the pandemic, when these spaces became public spaces).  I was very surprised to see that almost invariably, their working desk or table faced the wall.  At first, I thought this might have to do with Asian culture, but it proved to be general.  As someone constitutionally incapable of functioning when staring at a proximate wall, I was very surprised, and even thought about mentioning the possible repositioning of workspaces in one of the group emails.

Similarly, when I had a day job developing and then editing a theatre website in the city in the early Aughts, during office setup, I was given carte blanche as to size and style of desk, within the inventory of the used office furniture store.  The other full-time employee, more natively a tech fellow, while I was more subject-matter expert and content, elected a large conventional desk and overstuffed chairs around it.  (The concept comes from bank practice of standing behind something so that only the top part of the body is visible, through the Portuguese banca.)  They were quite surprised that I insisted on two tables, one large, one small, a desk chair that was actually a chair, and two guest chairs.  Of course, tables became the standard tech office furniture within the decade, most famously at Amazon, with the legendary door-table, an old door propped up at the four corners.

The old Russian practice of extending the center of the desk with a second, orthogonal table surrounded by chairs has some merit to it.  There's an interesting production of a Serbian piece at JDP about an industrial operation in the days of state socialism, where at lights up, you see the desk of authority center stage, while off to the side is the table that had clearly been built as an extension to the center of the desk, (metatheatrically, as it fit the rake of the stage), while the guests and collaborators in the office were relegated now to a distant couch.

The present Humble Quarters, although absolutely ideal for my purposes in many respects, has the one flaw that all of the surfaces that I might use for work are bound to walls.  So I turn the chair around and face the window, and use the laptop just as I used it in the last apartment, when there was only a deck-chair and a small patio table in the room.  

If I can set up what I need, and how I work, it's been my experience that I can do rather useful things.  But both the things that I do and the setup that I do them in are usually at odds with what those around think would be the best things to do and the best setup with which to do them.  I know what I'm about.  One of my chiefest difficulties has been that others have invariably seemed to think that they had better ideas on the subject.

Thinking about past professors, it strikes me that two of my three betes noire in that department would either tell stories about past students who claimed that they had ruined their career, or explicitly state that they'd almost certainly be called for a reference, and explicitly say that if people didn't play along, they wouldn't have a career.  (Both were at state universities.)  The thing is, most of these experiences were actually in the classroom, during seminars that they were being paid (sometimes quite handsomely) to teach, and as I think about it now, I can't fathom how the subject might have come up.

(The third bete that happened to be noire was in conservatory, and probably judged (correctly) that we wouldn't have let her get away with that.)  

I recall JK Galbraith's musing on the universities of India, when he was travelling with JFK -- they struck him as being like the American state universities: either play along with things or find yourself back working the fields.  Hardly a fringe figure.

 

No one should go to war for God's sake.  He's perfectly capable of caring for his own.  People go to war for societies based in their religion, which is a noble, and slightly different thing.  As I look at the long story of Milocz called the history of the cross and the sword, some common themes seem to emerge.  At least in the popular mind, in the mind that comes up with a reason for a war that the rulers might have embarked upon for a completely different agenda, a Christian attack on another Eastern monotheism often comes off as a bit of an attempt to wake a sleeping brother, to bring them into a more active and enlightened form of life.  And of course, if the one you are trying to wake starts kicking and punching you when you try to wake them, you usually aren't dissuaded from the task.  Many societies based in Eastern forms of religion veil their liveliness from the public area, from the marketplace.  Perhaps if they were to show more signs of life in the public sphere, there would be less of a sense among the common people in the other countries that their spirits were asleep.  The Middle Eastern societies do this with their immense construction projects and business deals, but so aggressively and ostentatiously big-project that it doesn't always ring true on the street.

Somewhat relatedly: I recall a column in the Washington Post by one of the Steppenwolf actors who went into the film world.  He was talking about working on his first big-budget action movie.  In one scene, he was on a plane, and he was supposed to hear terrorist gunfire, and then attack the terrorists.  In situ, he heard the sound cue, and realized that it could have been any number of things on the plane.  It was only the logic of the action movie that required him to think that it was terrorist gunshots.  But he was being paid an immense amount of money.  Anyone can sleepwalk their way through a Hollywood career on such terms.

It's an interesting neighborhood.  Anciently where the schools stood, and very quiet, so they apparently knew a thing or two about the acoustics of the city and the mountain.  Audible backyard chickens from time to time (very Brooklyn), and sometimes automatic rifle fire from the shooting range closer to the top of the hill (less so).  But I suppose, given the usual way of things, I can't fault the birds for using the time to get a bit of small-arms proficiency training in.  

Perhaps they'll make it in Hollywood someday.

It doesn't augur well for a town when alarm clocks are so difficult to find.  I did find one store, but it was a bedside, not a travel unit.  Will check the outlying stores, but if not, I'll shift my focus to digital kitchen timers.  Merely requires a bit of math at night.

Historically, I've been using the travel kindle (broken front panel, highly unattractive to thieves) for things like alarm clocks and showing transit tickets, but a smaller, simpler device seems wise.  

Whenever I go to the theatre or a concert, the next morning, I have some clouds around me.  Like a desert hermit the day after stopping into the local tavern for an evening of conversation with the locals.  Clearing my mind of the less strong ways of thinking.  Of course, the difficulty might also be a sign that I've been more strongly grounded in existence, and therefore feeling the headwinds a bit more.  So, the wisest course seems to be continuing on with the occasional $6 play or concert, but getting as clear as I can the next morning.  Labora et ora.  

Plays and concerts are actually work for me, work in the true sense (despite not having been able to find such work in the city or the Midwest).  If more people thought of them as a worthwhile social obligation rather than something guaranteed to entertain them, we might have more meaningful plays and concerts.  People didn't go to the spring and winter theatre festivals in Athens for a good time, I think.  

Those were had at the local tavern, with an an evening of conversation with the locals.

I'm being drawn back to the Inklings, edging back in with some Charles Williams, likely to return to Lewis's sci-fi trilogy for the umpteenth time soon.  I think some of it comes from the fact that they would read chapters to each other at the pub, and you can kind of catch the tone of that, the occasional reference perhaps missed by the huddled masses reading the mass-market printing in outer Slough.  Still plowing through the complete novels of Henry James, approaching the end of his second tone, with The Other House.  Clearly a stage play of his own that he made into a novel, so it's a sometimes uncanny look into what an evening at the theatre was like then.  The staginess of the characters is very different from the intimacy of his novels.  Perhaps one day he was wandering through rehearsals, and then said he would take it back to the house to work on it.  Perhaps the theatre folks then asked if he wanted a table and a light at the back of the auditorium.  "No," he said... and then he had the title.  

 Interesting dance piece at the national theatre tonight.  I was expecting something completely different, based on the tiny portion of the source novel that I was able to auto-translate, but much food for thought, especially in light of the political situation in the Visitors' country.  Bit maenadic.  

Immense political divide between the visiting country and the hosts, but the art made it across.  I've actually seen a national theatre/ballet of the third country in the equation of the recent wars at the national theatre of tonight's visitors, and it went over just as well.  Themes of the source were much the same, but the interpretation was vastly different.  

Thinking about the peculiar production of a Joseph Heller play that I saw in Romania's second city (Romania's first city in terms of real estate prices, and with a high number on the Hungarian waiting list).  They somehow managed to stage it completely without irony, or any metatheatrical sense.  It simply wasn't in their cultural vocabulary -- it ended up being a rather heavy-handed Brechtian parable on war.  I like the theatre there -- completely unrestored from its construction over a century ago, and the Hungarian theatre down the street, in a restored old summer theatre by the river, is very worthwhile.  I hope to not be priced out of the city in the winter, if I'm fortunate enough to keep up this wandering through the holidays.

But it was tremendously odd.  I sat there, deep in the balcony, sort of looking around to see what people made of it, and everyone seemed quite dutiful.  It's saultary to remember that we can often be of the most service to a strange place in preserving our own ways of thinking.  Sort of why I spent one January in this city listening to a tape from the RSC every night.  Preserving the λεγειν -- the way of making the world reveal itself to other people.  Another example, from last week's reading, Chesterson's trifle The Flying Inn, when the Englishwoman mulls over the Gurdjieffian teachings of the strange prophet, and compares them to her own sensibility, realizing that while the ideas were logical, they revealed themselves as not aware of the deeper reality that surrounded them.  And simple logic prevails when speaking about a machine, but deeper logic prevails when speaking about the world in which we have our being.

On a prior visit, I saw a production of Streetcar at the war theatre here.  No subtitles, but in addition to knowing the play well, I had worked on it in one of the more worthwhile method-based training programs in the city, with a very highly regarded teacher.  I watched them, and though the production was a bit of a trifle, I could see that they were using it cut across the open field,  no road being there, but the simple matter of a quick improvised decision or two, and they were in the same place that the folks in that room in NYC were in.  This despite the fact that with all of the cultural revolutions hre, the acting pedgagogy has been completely emptied out -- they've collectivley thrown out the Stanislavskian bath-water, and something was peculiarly heavy in it, and landed outside the door with a thud.  But in scattered moments, they got there.   

And the peculiar slow, Pinteresque production of the Sam Shepard piece in Bucharest, walking down the street afterwards wondering if the the instruction at the beginning of the play that it was to be performed relentlessly and without pause was lost in the fact that the local word for intermission is "pausa".  I recall a well-heeled gentleman in the lobby expressing some concern at the fact that I didn't speak the local language, and there were no titles -- I refrained from telling him how many nights in undergrad were given over to arguing about the nuances of Sam Shepard's work.  I skimmed through a biography of his that suggested that many of his experiences in the city were similar to mine -- if you don't engage in certain social rituals there, you'll have plenty of time to sit in a coffeehouse and read.  Which isn't entirely a bad thing.  Spent quite a few evenings with Gurdjieff, as I recall.

Back in the Romanian second city, I recall visiting a statue in the neighborhood (that, full disclosure, I had found on Google Maps), and then tracking down a cumbersome translation of his works at the local university library, which made for a pleasant afternoon.  That's the sort of thing I try to do, and the sort of person that does those things is the person who is a bit of a stranger to the place.  So to encounter the place, (and perhaps say some things that might help them understand things like Joseph Heller and Tennessee Williams), I must be a stranger to it.  Three's a reason the Bosnian Serb border guards call me "cowboy", and the Sarajevo Canton veterans marching in the parade call out to "Indiana."  I am simply from the other place.  And if that's the case, one might as well be that, if only in order to meet the strange place.

This begins with writing.  And as I try to rebuild things, despite all of the interposed forces and faces, I'm going to have to start getting more words down on paper.  Or whatever paper's become these days.

 Large parade in the city today.  Using discretion in my comments on it, given the Prime Directive, though there was a great deal of bonhomie about, especially for the older veterans in the back.  The folks up front were marching with arms, and some very heavy machinery, so I entered "travelling neutral" mode.  At one point, while I was wandering alongside, one of the old veterans called out "Hey, Indiana!"  (I was wearing my tan traveller's hat.)  I hoped he didn't take amiss the fact that I responded only with a smile and a nod -- no signs toward the marching columns, just observing.  Just in the same manner as when I had to cross the paths of the marching students in Belgrade, I made sure to cross against the flow.  Neutrality is a vanishing practice in the world -- given the 24 hour news cycle, everyone generally picks a side based on the information at hand -- and this has resulted in the loss of neutrality generally at the state level.  The Alabama arbitrations after the American Civil War described a completely different world.  But when armed forces are marching, I don't cheer or join in, I observe.

I cut through the city to the destination point, the large concrete complex built for the Olympics. there was a small band playing there, mostly marches unfamiliar to me, but at one point they broke out into a march time/ragtime "Hold that tiger".  I watched the faces of the veterans and the recruits as they reached their destination, just like I used to stand across from St. Pat's and watch the faces of the marchers as they saw it.  Marching in a parade is an event in someone's life, and as they reach the important place they were marching to, you can catch a bit of the glint of the soul in their eyes.

Most units marched down a set of stairs at the end of the concrete plaza, vanishing like the soldiers marching into the mountain in Kirosawa's Dreams.  But they sent some of the units, including many of the older veterans, through the side door, and it was interesting watching these retired mobilized police officers (combatant status varied during the conflict, but given the way wars are generally fought here, that was largely a post hoc determination), who had clearly been out of uniform (and training) for many years, attempting to school one another on keeping the lines straight and heading in the right direction.  Humans.  Those sorts of Dogberry and Verges moments were perhaps my favorite part of the parade. 

Afterwards, did a supply run.  This is a good city for that, because unlike some other places, there are very good supply lines coming to it, and unlike some other other places, the prices are very reasonable. Some bits of the kit were were wearing very thin. 

Opera last night (~$7, side balcony).  My return to theatregoing in the Balkans. The opera was a new one, contemporary sung-through theatre, no breaking the gesamtewerke for aria applause, with only one or two exceptions.  Orchestrations heavy, and basically equally weighted throughout.  Score an interesting balance of influences -- I heard Orff moments, and a good deal of populist Shostakovich/Janacek.  But mainly a popular piece of sung-through theatre.  The story of the legendary 14th c. king (Christian, I think, though the local church didn't really see eye to eye with Rome or the East at the time, and that part was underplayed), who also ruled some areas that are parts of adjacent nations.  But many heartfelt paens to the present motherland, speaking its name reverently.  

If you didn't know what a country was, and you witnessed a human singing about or speaking about their country you might observe something interesting about their manner of expression.  More to come along those lines, I think, once I set down some proper writing on the evening.

 

 

 

 In every place, dividing the chance for a brief repose from the sleep of the place.  Every place has its own unique form of sleep, and they are all uniquely dangerous.

This is a consciously sophisticated city, long looking askance at the emissaries of distant powers.  The dominant faction and faith here are the Sadducees, not the Pharisees.  In contact with the distant center, against the local rebellions, keeping to a faith they hold to be true, despite the wraiths and wreaths of the mountains.  And, in an entirely pragmatic sense, the danger this presents to me as a visitor here for a brief moment is the ease of quietism.  At the end of the morning runs (now back to four days per week, and pushing onward, still rebuilding from the disastrous winter, even as the chills of autumn begin to appear), I can see the three parts of the city -- the pre-Enlightenment, the Hegelian Republic, and the post-Enlightenment.  Each essential for the present recollection of our purposes.

So, to the λεγειν, to the division and unclosing of the world through philosophy and art.  The work continues.  

 "My solitude is the garment of my pride."

(Old Bosnian writer)

 Interesting, I attempted to weigh in on the UK Reform/US crypto money dispute in the Times, but my comment was rejected as noncompliant with the terms of use, with a speed that could only have come from an AI screening.  Two quick lines, the first a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could work around the potentially ex post facto law by giving the donations themselves retrospective effect, and the second the Lord Chancellor's line at the end of Iolanthe about the subtleties of the legal mind being equal to any emergency.

It's odd, not only has the mediated world of the present politics created a sort of tone and banter that's unilluminative and instinctual, but the mechanism itself has been trained to recognize it and filter out any discourse that doesn't fit the expected pattern, as it's likely off-topic, and a complete waste of time. 

And it's not wrong about that, just a bit inaccurate.

 The digital economy can be a mixed blessing.  When I was helping to start up a new website in NYC, I consciously attempted to leverage the opportunities for people to job-in to the work flow.  My phrase for it was "giving a home for the birds."  This was natural, as it was a theatre project, and there are many very capable people in the city who, like me, were working at day jobs for which they were very overqualified in order to pay the rent.

The dark side, though: Eventually, that job, which I had taken only on the clear understanding that it was a day job and that I was doing it so I could live while trying to make theatre in the city, eventually began to take up all of my time and focus.  This was because of some peculiar choices taken above my head about how to build out (vel non) the back end of the site, and meetings with the CEO (an estimable executive in the city) were rather difficult, as I was constantly fighting the pressure to commit to a full-time, first-priority job there.  After seven years, I walked away from a peculiarly broad-reaching post-hoc NDA/nondisparagement/release of IP, forfeiting severance (downsizing after the dot com crash) largely because I thought I had been tricked into something that had cost me my life's work.

Then, later on, the Ph.D. program, which looked great on paper, but the reality was that I had to spend 30+ hours every week sitting in a room electronically grading first-year papers, which wasn't typical, either of the program or of the university at large.  And there has been subsequent work, as with many in the world now, that largely forces me to sit in a room tapping into a laptop for the majority of a day, with very little remuneration or intellectual reward.  It's better than delivering food on a bicycle (though I've done that too, in my NYC days--ice-cream delivery in midwinter), or trawling through the smouldering refuse dumps of India looking for metals and recyclable plastics (I've managed to avoid that), but it seems to serve mainly to keep me out of the way, and it has taken many years of my life.

Having gone through many periods when there wasn't even a trireme to be rowed, I am grateful for the opportunity to survive, but the whole setup seems to be calibrated to use the general prosperity to almost unnoticeably sideline certain folks.  

So, I do the work at hand, and I try to figure out how to live a proper life and do the work that I was born to do, despite finding myself perpetually sidelined.  Having gone through conservatory, a decade of practice in the art, and a first-tier law doctorate, I have a good sense of who it is that the gatekeepers let through, and how far things are from a meritocracy.  And again, all of this is made possible by the general industrial prosperity.  But those of us on the outside of things might yet have a role to play in the world.  The stones the builders rejected.

 Exaltation of the Cross.  Notion: as we try to understand things, we try to synthesize the many inside of the one, as the one is defined by the concept.  So to answer the question of why the method of execution is venerated requires us to incorporate the process of execution into the thought, and in synthesizing this, we come up with the notion that this motion, this event, was the cause of the worthwhile thing.  But the killing wasn't what caused the grace.  

When we consider the concept, we have to say that although we use it as a referent, there are parts of it we don't understand, and that the event might not carry its significance as events are usually understood in the world.  The fact of the event, yes.  But If I think of someone going to to the well for water, and say that something happened because of that, the listener's Newtonian mind starts wondering what sorts of reactions and consequences might have been brought into the world by that physical action, but my statement might equally have referred to the fact of the event.  The fact of having gone to the well for water had a result in the world.  In the same manner, the fact of having been killed might be the cause of good, rather than thinking of it according to the mind of sacrifice, and concluding that the murderer provoked the grace.

Weekend reading: Chesterson's The Flying Inn.  An enjoyable trifle, valuable more for the incidentals of the lexis than the mythos of it.  The λεγειν.

When among strangers and traditions that are strange, it's good to keep a handle on the fullness of the things you were thinking about beforehand.  Otherwise, all of your own ideas become as one-dimensional as you (mistakenly) suppose the strange notions and traditions you encounter to be.  We don't just know things.  We ourselves have knowledge of things, and if the things get all flat and one-dimensional, so do we.  We shouldn't admire our own complexity, but it's good to keep an eye on it so that it doesn't vanish completely.

I think the Dolly Parton tribute sort of set the tone for that LNOP.  Bit of a split on whether Britons never&c shall be slaves or never&c will be slaves.  Quick look to AI indicates that the latter was the original, and in the source poem, with the former coming in with the Victorian changes.  Well, they're certainly not slaves to the lyrics. 

Beforehand, dropped by one of the old historic houses for a culture in the streets event -- opera arias.  Elected to stop a a bakery for a bit of bread beforehand (end of the night, only the heavily sweetened kaiser rolls), so the back of the entryway was as close as I could get.  (Fitting, as I always go for partial view at the opera for the cost savings.)  Interesting pause for the last call to prayer of the evening.  In the older part of town, unlike the city generally, they're pretty closely synchronized, but there are many of them -- putting the din in the din and devlet.  When I was here in the winter a year or two ago, I had a great place overlooking the whole city from across the river, and could stand out on the balcony and track the different timings.  They're very interesting to contemplate, and I'm usually drawn into thinking about God for a bit (though not according to the local formulas), so I suppose they're effective.

The core opera repertory, the sort of energy that unified the central piedmont and birthed Garibaldi, is very interesting to listen to here.  This is a consciously sophisticated city, but some (though not all, or even most) aspects of it are also pre-enlightenment, so you'll sometimes have a neo-Romantic 19th c. piece solemnly observed with the respect due to a cultural effort, rather than sparking the effect that it was written to achieve.  At the same time, they're closer to some aspects of it than the usual international style or the post-Enlightenment crowd.  I recall attending a memorial concert here where the Kindertotenlieder was the main piece, and I thought it odd that the community here would look to a Viennese composer at a time of very personal grief, until my slow-moving mind registered the fact that I was sitting in a concert hall built by the Austrians almost a century and a half ago.  Every lineage is composed of many threads.

It struck me that the amplification was entirely unnecessary, given the setup, but these are legitimating devices -- I learned that observing the first piece of theatre on the last peregrination, a street piece in Bucharest.  A sound system makes it clear that things are official -- whether on the Upper West Side, a stone plaza in Transylvania, or a 16th c. caravanserai in the Balkans.  It says that this is an official performance.  Otherwise, it would just be people singing.  Again, it's universal, but perhaps places like this will rediscover the natural sound of song first, likely long before the street performances in NYC step outside of their girder stages and sound systems.  After all, as I understand it, the reason that the call to prayer is spoken rather than sent out using bells and such was the power and simplicity of the human voice.  

 Last Night of the Proms -- so apparently, autumn is here.  The locals here have a theory on springtime, apparently Turkish in origin, that it comes in three shocks on air, water and land.  Perhaps there's a correlative theory of autumn, with the land most tenaciously holding onto the life of summer.  Will likely tune in to the festivities via wireless (that word still works) after wandering the old city again for a bit in the evening.  It's not my cup of tea, tbh, I'm much more in the Yugoslavian enlightenment/post-enlightenment camp, but for what it is, the old shadows and passageways are meaningful.  In the same sense, the only reason that I'll likely tune into the shindig from Royal Albert Hall is because I have some sense of the place, and the meaning of it.  Though it won't occur to most that this is something that has to be imagined in a positive, outward sense, so they'll just accept the programming.

There's a danger in taking life as read.  When people talk about the meaninglessness of modern existence, it's not because, as Hegel thought, there's a simple mismatch between the enactment of life required in pre-Enlightenment times (Habermas) and the modern free and harmonious rational arrangement of life.  Meaninglessness is simply a lack of imagination.  You have to reach for the world, whether it be the pageant or the game.  The world might be announced to you when it walks in the door, but you still have to go up to it and make conversation.

"Live all you can -- it's a mistake not to."  When people quote that bit of Henry James, they usually miss the fact that the American adventurer seeking a bit of freedom in Paris is at a party with an artist whom he admires and his friends, but instead of going inside and attempting to enter into their society, he sits on a bench on the lawn and waxes homiletic to his young misfit artist friend.  Presumably because they hadn't invented blogging yet.

 

 

Interesting small rabbit-hole this AM in wondering why a ballet was called a "white ballet" (technically, in the original, a ballet staged in the white manner).  As it turns out, at least per Gurgle AI, it is a reference to the white costumes, and indirectly to its classicism.  The interesting thing about this is that "white goods" in this part of the world refers to large appliances -- glancing down that AI rabbit-hole as well, I learn that it is from the white enamel that defined expensive household goods in the middle of the last century, and that "brown goods" are rec-room wood-colored entertainment devices and "grey goods" are computers.  Germany is apparently locally the source of the white enamel on appliances, with that industrialized technique dating from the late 19th c.  I recall Hari Kunzru's recent Red Pill, where the writer visits a foundation in Germany funded by the estate of a chemist who had formulated a brilliant white for just that purpose.

Naming things in that manner is perhaps profoundly democratic, in the Deweyan manner.  One of the oldest mosques here, dating from the 15th-16th c. had a madras nearby  which was formally named after its benefactor, but according to a caption in the museum, everyone called it the place with the lead roof, in comparison to the timber roofs hereabouts (much later shifted to ceramic tile).  Similarly, the fortresses overlooking the bend in the river (which must have been much larger in the past, as I can't imagine ships of any size navigating it) have formal names after their respective parts of the city, but are universally severally known by the color of the stone.  The people talking about it came up with the name, according to the logic of their conversation.  Sort of an unlikely Dewey/Habermas nexus there, perhaps.

In general, this is a very pleasant place to visit -- despite the niceness, there's also some deeply rooted ethics of hospitality.  (One doesn't often get the Kirk Douglas kebab, thanks to local vigilance.)  You can learn a lot from the micro-gestures of the locals in public.  One picks up subtle clues from the way the older women stand at the check-out counter, or shift positions when a stranger arrives on a path or to a bench.  I've muttered to myself on more than one occasion on the morning run in past visits, particularly in winter, that in NYC, people use sidewalks for getting from place to place, but in this part of the world people use sidewalks for fighting over the sidewalk.

But this has to do with the nature of the society.  When I stand aside to let someone pass on a narrow path, they might understand it as a meaningful gesture of deference and courtesy (one that at one time might have been legally compelled, as such things were in the deep South of America not long ago).  The visitor from abroad, however, sees it as a logical thing to do for two people on a crowded sidewalk.  The meaning for the visitor is different.  The one who sees the meaning as courtesy and deference makes the encounter more meaningful to them by enacting their role in the action of courtesy and deference, while the person who sees the meaning as being in efficiency usually expects the other to at least lean a bit to the other direction in reciprocal efficiency, and thereby make the encounter more meaningful.  As a result, there's sometimes a slight bump or a grazing of clothing.  (Which is where the mutual ethics of courtesy and hospitality come in, and it remains just a small stumble, and perhaps revelatory for all involved.)

The uniqueness of this city is that it preserves the strata of pre-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment as living realities.  All are necessary to some degree, as those cities composed entirely of the avant-garde are coming to understand.  But this makes the reciprocal obligations of genuine hospitality and genuine courtesy essential.  (As for those only capable of niceness, they're generally well-off enough to afford an insulated vacation in which everyone around them is being paid rather well.)

The capital city of the last country I visited is unique in preserving the Roman and pre-Roman ruins as sites to be walked through beneath the 19th c. & modern office buildings, in addition to the subway stations.  That same stratified reality can also be present socially within a culture, but only when each of the levels is in fact a living reality, sometimes lightly bumping into the others, but carried along by genuine interest and care.

 Wandered down to the piazza in front of the national theatre (that term has a different meaning in these parts; many cities in a country can have a national theatre in them, though this is the principal one here, built for entertainments in 19th c. Austrian days) for a summertime outdoor free piece.  The local opera choir (whom I've heard at a similar event) and the ballet company (doing their Bolero, which I saw indoors as part of a Carmen/Bolero double bill some time ago).  The choral part had some local songs, but I kept struggling to hear the song itself beneath the conventions of modern choral singing/arrangement.  Much more in keeping with the style were the American bits, "NY, NY", "Wonderful World," etc.  And then the Bolero.  The company, from what I've seen is much more of a (skillful) modern ensemble, and while there was a bit of Jerome Robbins-type classicism, even though the movement were very broad and semiotic, it was basically a modern piece.  If Robbins had choreographed Rite of Spring from scratch, perhaps.  Very enjoyable.  

Oddly, from where I was standing, there was a clear echo from the buildings in back, and during the dance piece, it created a second snare line, just a fraction of a beat behind the first.  In any other city, it would have been interesting (and presumably a huge challenge for the dancers).  In this city, being between two drum lines, with the dancers holding firmly to the first was positively unheimlich.  

 Odd headlines about AI.  Apparently, the people building it say there's a ten percent chance it could wipe out the species within the next decade.  Suspicious double use of the order-giving, easy-thinking order of magnitude.  Why not a seven percent chance across the next twelve years?

The fundamental error of thinking on it seems to be thinking of it as a substance.  It's not a disease or a chemical.  It's a way of connecting existing, conventional machines so that they act more erratically in relation to human understanding, hopefully in a beneficent manner.  Quite simple.  If you don't have a handle on how the machines might act, don't connect them in that manner.

 Near the end of his life, Grotowski seemed to place a peculiar importance on not being divided, not having incompatible things and contradictions within himself.  We might very well contain multitudes, but it would be best, if the multitude had, as in Aristotle's metaphor of thought, changed from being a fleeing army, first by one person, and then more and more, stopping their flight and turning to look at something.

The basis of everything was the conservatory training, and whether it was the right part of the country or type of program for me isn't really a question worth asking.  Once you set off down that road, it is yours for good or for ill.  Then the decade or so trying to get a foothold in a very commercialized and compromising industry while keeping my hands clean.  Not in a moralistic sense, just knowing that I might need my hands to defend myself one of these days.  Heading off to law school wasn't a reversal, there was no farewell to the muse, which perhaps explains why I was once again the odd man out in the Midwest as a NYC method actor.  It served me well in the studies, unrelenting focus, memorization, etc. But it seemed that while I was looking for the marrow of things, the others were eyeing the dessert cart.  Then, after several years of rather dramatic struggle, a sort of last redoubt in the academy, and another misfortune in the Midwest, as it proved to be a very corrupt and craven faculty, so I just set myself up in the library for four years, read, wrote, and took philosophy, history and literature classes in other departments.  After my first philosophy coursework there, the professor took me aside and asked if I wanted to do some independent directed study in the following semester -- but even though the corrupt faculty and mediocre program in my own area was interposed between myself and the art, my stand there was firmly set in the theatre, which was my basis for being.  In the years since, I've read far more philosophy than the PhD candidates at even the most rigorous programs (there once was an Oxon. prof who greeted incoming students with the suggestion that they just spend the first year reading novels, and presumably observing their response), so I have a good grounding in that field.  But perhaps its right that after trying these three paths in the culture, the consolations of philosophy are apparent to me in another context.

Apparently, the pumpkin spice lattes have returned to Romanian Starbucks, perhaps the monoculture equivalent of the new beaujolais.  (And, as it's entirely artificial, it can be rolled out much earlier in answer to demand, not being tied to the pesky material reality of maturing wine.)  The Sbux there are a huge status symbol, apparently.  More expensive than midtown NYC, so I usually go to the local chains.  Contrastingly, the ones on the western (Eastern) part of the peninsula are much more reasonably priced and less crowded.  I apply the same logic to coffeehouses as I do to vegetable markets -- very scenic and an enjoyable atmosphere, but difficult for an outsider to determine which of the vegetables weren't grown with incredibly noxious chemicals.  Hence, I tend to trust the German supermarkets, on the theory that they're doing some supply-chain oversight.  And make my own Balkan coffee to enjoy in a thermos in the park.

McDonalds initially thrived in the US because it was the only place a traveller wasn't at the mercy of unknown kitchens in strange cities.  The ethic of hospitality runs deep here, but given the unknown hygiene of back-room kitchens and all of the political anger about, I tend to bring my own food on the journey.

Interesting, one of the last presidents of the old Republic being laid to rest in the city today  Apparently the last head of the collective presidency whose tenure was entirely held under the old communist party of the Republic.  

I practice a learned incapacity as to these things, and am only an amateur tourist, but the layers are interesting. Andric was a diplomat for the kingdom, and then apparently became a bit of a figurehead under the republic.  Tito apparently stands for the proposition of the synthesis of peoples, and apparently not all nationalists are all that fond of him.  (The old Serbian forces whose name is now an ethnic slur were offered amnesty in the peace after the second world war, which is perhaps slightly different from being merged into the new country.)  But Tito and the ubiquitous Walter are apparently generally popular in several of the old national capitals.

While the doctrinaire tilt of the Republic was perhaps regrettable (being not aligned apparently allowed for a bit of a lean to the east), the scientific theory of government was perhaps the elixir that synthesized the political structures of the different nations.  

The bio of the fellow being laid to rest today is interesting, at least from what I've gotten from a quick web trawl.  Gentlemanly fellow, described as coming from one of the old Bey families.  And then an ardent communist, with a red star on his death notice.  Many layers -- classicism, scientific governance, the old courtly sensibilities.  

Perhaps part of the point is to find a theory of working that allows sufficient space for the transcendentally human to emerge and guide things.  The doctrinaire commissar of the old novels, like his fascist counterpart, has no space to think, none of his own leaven, only that of his pharisees.  

Looking up random bits of history, I'm struck by how many of the wealthy citizens of past centuries in this city are described as scholars and poets.  Perhaps it was part of the old courtly ways, an obligation of the nobility to practice poetry and scholarship, as opposed to the career-oriented vocation of present times.  Instead of seeing this as a cheapening of the art, perhaps we see it as an indication -- if you are free enough to  make poetry and pursue scholarship, there is something about humanity that makes it a good idea to do so.

And then, when you find yourself among the pharisees of your time, there's a measure of grace to be had.

 If the material prosperity of a healthy preponderance is sufficient for democratic legitimacy, we might need to think carefully about certain elements of the theory of democracy.  In the context of industrial prosperity, there are an awful lot of ways to ensure the material prosperity of a healthy preponderance, and it can easily be accomplished while any number of bad people are getting away with any number of bad things.  

Admittedly, though, the historical practice has been to concentrate political influence among a much smaller circle, and then ensure that they are even more prosperous.  So the question becomes whether widening (and heavily mediating) this circle of influence, with the consequent broadening of the distribution of resources, is better, worse, or perhaps just not good enough.

Fairly certain that there were a good bit of environmental toxins around the last Humble Quarters.  Bulgarian vacation property, studio, foot of the mountains in a ski resort area.  Quite popular with domestic tourists in August, as it turned out.  Loud party outside the windows until 5AM during my last night there, though there were some quiet stretches as well.  Very inexpensive, apparently a broker in a third country handling it for the local developer.  Woke many mornings absolutely exhausted.  Air unbreathable at occupancy, took a few days for the chemical scent to lift. And then the 4 mile walk up the mountain with the groceries, though I knew about that in advance, and even looked forward to it.

And yet.

The purpose of the visit was the mountains, so for all the difficulties (no washing machine, etc.), the proximity was sufficient.  The way in which the mountains were good didn't bear relation to the ways in which the place was difficult.  Much like the difficulties with the local grocery in the town before, it was simply in the foreground, only possibly obscuring the more full image in the background.  

Much the same here.  Decent place, almost everyone very friendly, and I've wandered the Balkans enough that I don't take the occasional discouraging word amiss. (And, on those rare occasions, the worst of it invariably is associated with an American accent.  We genuinely don't send our best folks to these climes.)  But the way in which I'm paying attention to this place has nothing to do with the usual modern creature comforts or their absence, or the social niceties, vel non.  The most egregious thing could happen to me here, and my consciousness would still be in the large-frame world on a timescale of centuries.  The only thing such distractions could accomplish would be obscuring the view.  The things that could possibly go wrong simply bear no relation to the good presently at hand.

Small things could go wrong.  The local culture is at a bit of a crossroads, so even existing here is a bit ad hoc.  But if you traverse the time, not by getting away with what you can, but by doing the best that can reasonably be done and not allowing the larger picture to be obscured, then -- sufficient is the day.  Inshallah.  Which is, being translated, God willin' and the crick don't rise.

Grand reopening of the museum at the local Islamic foundation (trust-busting having been thankfully unknown in Turkish circles in the 16th c., resulting in many schools and water fountains).  Free admission, and therefore I was there.  If you've never seen the strongbox of a 16th c. Turkish potentate, it's quite impressive.  Folks in town for the local security conference would likely swoon.  Interesting curation, good mix of the quotidian and the large-scale.  A modernist 1979 mosque that the national government might have had something to do with looked very impressive in photographs.  The photo of the installation of the local religious head at around that time shows him signing the bureaucratic documents, rather than preaching or holding court.  Tito's compact with the peoples.  (And there's a fellow off to the side who to my amateur eye looks like Andric, but almost certainly not, as he was in Belgrade retirement at the time.)

Tapestry that rested on the tomb of the founder of the religion accorded a place of honor, apparently a significant cultural possession.  All of the holy books appeared to be in Arabic-eque (Persian, Turkish, etc.) no codices in the exhibits in the vernacular, and certainly not the 19th/early 20th c. Cyrillic form.  Apparently a classicism that required a sense of distance.

Emphasis on collaboration with the West -- a few photos of the local head, at his installation, processing past the onlookers on the arm of the Austrian/ A-H authorities.  A permission given to the Franciscans in the 15th c. on behalf of Catholics generally is described, perhaps correctly, as a foundational document of enlightenment religious freedom.    

Interesting capsule biographies of the many scholars who have used it as their base over the centuries.  Individual souls are the point of these grand schemes.

There's a production of Loves Labours set in this sensibility that's still percolating in my mind.  Matched perhaps with a postwar Much Ado, in the manner of the recent London staging.

There's something about the language-based elements of the digital age that causes us to see these ewers and lamps and other bric-a-brac with decorative text on them a bit differently, perhaps.  These are social practices, reinforced by a sort of code, programming the mind through text.  But unlike computers, the point isn't running the program.  The point is lifting up the life so that the individual mind and spirit can be freed.  Hence these social compacts and compulsions, and their (largely textual) social transmission.

 Having visited this city in winter, I'm used to the smell of the toxic brew in the air, especially during periods of temperature inversion between the hills.  Simply price in the cost of an air filter to the rental, spend as much time as possible near it, and when outdoors, mask up with a finely spun cotton weave.  (I started using shemaghs during Covid, even before masks went into wide production, and kept on with the Jedi vibe until it inarguably had become a political symbol.)

I'm mystified, though, as to why it hovers over areas in the old town during summer.  It's not the fires in the distance, and it's not the industry.  But this place is very far from California.  My first place here was across from the pharmaceuticals plant, and in addition to the occasional clouds (when you locate a plant at the bottom of the valley, presumably for rail access, smokestack height gives you diminishing returns), on one or two occasion, particulates in the forms of caplets came down.

So, it's not California (continental purity), or Germany (strict regulation), but if you keep vigilant as to exposure, it's still fairly idyllic.  

My last two Humble Quarters were extremely humble, for many reasons, so I'm consciously balancing that out with one or two stays that are closer to the usual median (well below US, and also well below tourist averages in the regions -- when you can look across many countries to find the most logical accommodations, you can usually find a discount or two).  If you book a string of extremely spartan quarters (no washing machine, etc.), the travelling conditions can start to deteriorate, and the ability to work suffers.  Still hewing to a strict budget -- the quintessential 'tomato tourist.'  

(But none of those this week, as the other vegs were on sale.  Might splurge on some cheap cheese next weekend.) 

As a general rule, I try to avoid politically contested ground, several species of which, this being the Balkans, are close at hand.  Not necessarily because of the occasional missile attacks or subsequent passport difficulties, but because the conflict clouds my own status there, and a visitor changes the calculus of any contest.

Religiously contested ground within a stable political order is another question.  Religion has both its political aspect (re-ligare) and its personal aspect.  In its political aspect, it is subordinated to ethnic or political identity.  A culture may be based in faith, but exists first in itself and as itself.

More concretely, in the personal aspect, if you think of faith as a sort of ladder that each person carries around with them, it's a bit of a reach to think that sabotaging other people's ladders is a thing.  Also, if you look closely at the worn spots in the wood, you can tell which ladders have been used, and which are just for ornament.  And then there's the matter of all of those folks walking around without ladders, even for use in their own homes.

I've honestly worked, attempting to do three different things, and encountered some rather peculiar difficulties in my own country and among my own folks.  At the moment, I'm a bit far away from my usual haunts, but I have to assume that there is a purpose to that, which is to say, the forces that have brought me to these places are associated with concomitant forces to which I also bear relation, and can encounter.  Watchmen of the house of God, not partisans of its factions.

Somewhat predictably, the head-feint towards the (bad wines, with all for one, initially) results in the portentous Saturday thinkpiece in the Times on American decline.  More interestingly, the review of the Roy Cohn biography seems especially bare-knuckled and lurid, with some usually disfavoured lines of attack.  The new politics.

I see with some amusement that the pro tennis players are complaining about all of the marihuana smoke and oblivious influencers in NYC.  Elsewhere, visitors to Newcastle are complaining about being surrounded by all that coal.

The age of corporatism, and those taking advantage of it.  A predictable result of the Woodstock to Wall Street generation.  

Beware the children of the winners of great wars.

Sometimes it occurs to me that if I had been Jewish, or more Midwestern in my outlook, I might be a multimillionaire, very powerful lawyer now.  But I didn't go to law school to become a multimillionaire.  After I transferred law schools due to the professorial shennanigans, I ran into some folks from the old school, and as the new school, although in the same tier and in NYC rather than the hinterlands, was ranked a bit lower than the old, their condescension was palpable.  An uncanny moment that helped to teach me that my ways were different from their games.

If you listen to the gossip of the folks surrounding me, who have always surrounded me, you'll likely not think that much of me, but if you take the work on its own terms, you might find it to be worthwhile.

That much for a brief apologia -- απο-λογοσ.  A brief word directed to the present ways of speaking and thinking about things.

Onward.

One of the few times I've been unable to refrain from commenting on the Times/Sunday Times website was when the Japanese lunar lander ended up making a hard landing on the surface of the moon, upside-down.  Underneath the photograph of the event (made by an adjacent probe), I left a simple caption.  "Made it."

It's good to be back at the ancient caravanserai capital in the mountains of Bosnia.  Setup on the Humble Quarters is now complete, and I'm setting up the tasks for the coming weeks.

Made it.