Saw a photo of a famous writer the other day, and from the photo and the biography, I'm wondering if a past acquaintance of mine was some form of unacknowledged relation.  One of the state-school undergrad folks, none of whom I was especially close to at the time, or afterwards.  He proved to be astonishingly well connected in the city, and got away with quite a bit at the school.  Enjoyed his regular nickel-ante games in the city until someone pointed out that he was using marked cards.  

The state school of the undergrad has changed very much from the liberal arts/experimental theatre/debate team paradigm that defined my time there.  I've visited the campus a few times.  The university police are using the old building that had the debate office (the police also took over the old theatre where I did my MFA soon afterwards; apparently they're rather into real estate these days), the experimental theatre has been torn down, the old theatre is no longer in use, and most of the campus is now across the highway in a school of integrated sciences and applied technology.  

So less dreaming spires than seemings dire. No intimations of eternity in stone palaces, but on the bright side, it's sometimes possible to find a useful book or two, perhaps have some coffee while reading it, or even find a place to do a bit of theatre.  Ca suffit. Ca toujours suffit.

Given the inexplicable and impenetrable (and, I must point out, late-arising) walls blocking the arts & the learned professions stateside, I might have to try to do do everything as a writer.  Which is probably the same sentiment felt by a lunatic in an asylum who gains his only satisfaction each each day by tracing apparently random patterns on the wall.  So, you know, good company.

Admittedly, wandering the Balkans, reading philosophy and visiting the theatres isn't the most logical response to adversity. 

Which, if you think about it, is rather instructive as to the nature of a logic.

The sound of the bells does carry the nature of the sanctuary with it, but that is perhaps not its primary function.  Not at all an expert on campanology, but there are some interesting things about it.  The Orthodox in Lent, or perhaps in monastic austerities apparently prefer hammers on wood--kontakion, or something like that.  The founder of Islam wanted someone to call from the place of prayer, thinking a human voice was better than the sound of iron.  Of course now, those voices are modulated quartz and electricity.  A mathematician at Oxford once founded a new college (I think) further away from the dreaming spires, because the bells kept breaking his trains of thought.  In folk beliefs, they have the power to avert storms.  In Puritan New England, the largest one would be slowly tolled when word of death was received.  

Interestingly, at Rome, at least according to Fortescue (I think), the bells at consecration were omitted from the papal liturgy, and from the rubrics for bishops in their own dioceses.  

Something about source and emanation, perhaps.  They're quite idyllic in the present context.  Which is perhaps to say, the unsettling effect is welcome.  Indications of the source.

You have to listen carefully.  When Orwell warned of the dangers of the Ministry of Love, people only heard the warning about what the Ministries might become.

Again.  Read the books written just under a hundred years ago, and the works before them.  Come to a certain understanding of the world that is adequate to phenomenological reality, and that offers a method (μετ - οδοσ) of thinking about it in a clear and distinct manner.  No one is to this manner born.

Then, endeavour to understand what happened.  Using the forms of disciplined life of the past, and not categorically rejecting the novel aspects of the world, categorically reject the notion that they must be thought about in a certain way.  Be wary of intellectual apprenticeships.  Power is a transcendent aspect of human experience in history, and being in the spell of another, whether in person, or through the medium of technology, can damage your ability to understand the world.

The old disciplines of thinking provide you with the means to understand; the novel aspects of the world are the objects of this understanding.  Be wary of the reversal of this.  (The actual, and helpful, reversal is: adequatio: perception / clear & distinct : understanding. Perhaps.)

Gently down the stream.

The difficulties encountered in these years of trying to find a post abroad leveraging the J.D. have likely proved insurmountable.  (Thankfully, this is only one of my university teaching qualifications.)  Away from the Anglo-American context, the J.D. is often rated as a first degree (akin to a B.A.).  So even with my coursework and training in international public law, structural elements get in the way.  (International public law wasn't my central area, but I took a few seminars and worked as a research assistant in the area, so I had a competence, in addition to my more central work in American criminal, commercial, and constitutional law; since I took as many courses as possible, I was able to develop a few more competencies than those taking the usual minimum number in quest of an uber-high GPA).  

This false equivalence of the J.D. is likely by design, a device of the Powers that Be to keep the common law folks from the door.  (Even though their private law is almost invariably based on common law principles and pedagogy, and the civilian aspect is only in the public law systems.)

I've had some leads, and even a signed contract in hand.  But in the event, things did not eventuate.  

Which is perhaps fortunate, since I've had to fold that work back into the other research work, which might yet prove fruitful, if the crick don't rise.

 The last few years have been rather brutal for the 1% of international law that dominates the headlines and the average person's view of international law; the other 99%, mostly involving routine global trade and travel, might now be in their sights.  #justwiseacring 

 Mystified by the trade numbers.  International trade isn't something that I have more than an average citizen's understanding of, but the overstory of matching numbers falls apart completely once you realize that one number is the imbalance in trade and the other is the tariff imposed, and the blunderbuss nationwide targeting of foreign states would seem to shut down trade from that country completely. I would have to assume that if your margin is 6% to 7%, any tariff above these numbers means that the goods simply don't ship.  Else, the foreign states would have to come up with a scheme to favor particular industries.  Apolitical, as always, but it does seem that some slide-rule work has been done in crayon.

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists

 

Tips for the marooned, cont'd:  When surviving on the desert island, be careful with the sprezzatura.  If they think you're having fun, they might send the SEAL team rather than the Coast Guard.

 Interesting -- apparently the non-self-executing ICC jurisdiction inside the Magyar state is being held up on a question of head-of-state immunity.  International law consists of many sensibilities overlaid, not just in space, but also in time.  And there are some jus cogens rules that antedate any legislative enactments.  Of course, in the present case, this presents a difficult political question.

 https://szakcikkadatbazis.hu/doc/8612513 

 I continue to think that the Matrix films were basically right, but in a way that, unsurprisingly is not apparent at first glance.  In brief, if you ground yourself in the prevailing norms of this society, look to this sort of participation in the world to gain meaning from the world, and attempt to become skillful in this manner of life, you will miss the fundamental truths of existence.  And yet the order of things is governed by those who have prevailed in the realm of the third.  This is not a society in which you can live in the language's downtown.  (And there are societies in which such things are possible.) Your truth must come from your house in the country. 

 New rooms much more civilized than the last.  The last were chosen for being right across the street from the parliament, near a church I remembered from the first visit, and close to the theatres.  Turned out to have a Sbux very near as well.  Which, if you consider it as a systematic means of turning street-level retail space into a means for sitting quietly with a book and some coffee, is not a bad thing.  And doesn't weave you into the local mode of life as much as the seated cafes with table service--have avoided the latter in every country that I've visited, with very few exceptions.  

I suppose it would be possible to have civilized quarters squarely in the center of things, but those sort of digs are generally reserved for those whose minds are not their own.  Not to mention that the desire for such things leads to people gaining them as ends, not means -- e.g., new New York.

 Exercises in situational nutrition, cont'd:  When a cheap bakery chain offers a whole-grain bread as a concession to health, the batch system and the usual methodology sometimes means that it doesn't bake long enough, as whole-grain requires a higher temperature or more time.  So when the outside looks like the cheap, likely additive-filled finer grains next to it on the shelf, the inside is quite possibly dough.  No one principle can identify the healthiest choice in a given situation.  Sometimes the thing the place makes best (and most often) is the healthiest and freshest choice.

Coming to a Ricardian notion of countries and heath-consciousness.  I'm not saying that the present country is necessarily in the recipient category, but the phrase "Eat a salad, live forever" seems to be a bit of a motto.  Not to mention the usher with a respiratory infection a few yards away last night.  (Though in fairness, the ventilation improved with the warm weather.)  And this sort of thing is actually pretty common on the peninsula. Not to mention the abundance of $5 packs of cigarettes.  California, in a Ricardian sense, has an abundance of health-consciousness.  The excess of it in the local market drives them to madness.  It just needs to be transplanted to the Balkans somehow.

 

Absolutely exhausted.  Woke, cleaned out the rooms, carried the road-kit personalty across the river to the new city, did a quick grocery run, showered, changed, walked back across the river for an absolutely abysmal bit of theatre ($6 balcony seat, but given the crowds, elected to stand in the empty standing room), then walked back across the river to the new rooms for the nonce.

Particularly disappointing, as I had chosen that one over a Greek adaptation (with English titles) at the other theatre.  Opportunity costs. And sometimes, opportunity costs a lot.  An interesting concept, sort of the sins of the city on full view as the artist faces his own immolation, but the one making the confession gets a bit too into the storytelling, blurring the confession and the sin, as it were.

Eastern European productions based on Russian novels, or of Russian plays, seem problematic.  Or maybe the Vaktangov and MAT productions just come across well on tape.  I've seen several in the Balkans over the past few years, and they always seem a bit split between the thing itself, and what I can only call the "unbearable lightness of being" element.  That sensibility mainly in Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc., a sort of quiet, ironic self-protection against the cultural colossus to the East.  Which in itself is great -- think Czech films like Larks on a String, etc.  But when you decide do a play by a 19th c. or early 20 c. playwright from a certain country, you can't put too many obstacles in their way based on the current geopolitics. Not to mention the revolution against Stanislavsky, which would have gone much better if a suitable second master had been found. The extreme of these cases was a Moldovan Vanya last summer (at a festival) that was (understandably, given the geopolitics) basically about the fear of the land to the east -- which actually made for a rather chilling evening of theatre.

 But I continue to believe, despite the nature of all the evidence, in the thing itself.

Excellent theatre tonight, shifting rooms tomorrow.  Getting used to this itinerant mode at about the same rate that I'm wearying of it.  For some reason, the Harper in Goethe's Willhelm Meister comes to mind, perhaps because the theatre was an adaptation of a novel of the era.  

Not just whistlin' dixie here, and not just because no one in earshot would have the faintest notion of the melody, let alone the meaning.  It's a bit like carrying the most important thing in the world--a delicate and irreplaceable object--on a rather difficult journey through masses of inexplicably sedate and reasonably prosperous folks.  The incongruity between the CV and the circumstances does lead one to a quiet radicalism.  A peculiar monasticism; if it doesn't become a discipline, the valuable things begin to be lost.

Tuned into the NYC parish and another midtown church when I returned from the theatre, both apparently  opting for the scrutiny lectionary portion -- one line, heard from both houses: "Fill your horn with oil, and be on your way."

As the evening is starting to wane, probably best to set about doing what the fellow suggests.