It's no exaggeration to say that I have to rebuild the tower in each city.  The texts there come from a different construction of things.  Like the fellow in the back of the caravan who rebulds his house of cards each time they stop for the night.  

It could be much worse, of course. I think of the roughest times in the city where the days basically amounted to continuously taking a small hammer (or perhaps a large rock) to the intricate pocketwatch that I had constructed in conservatory.  Here, there is a point in the rhythm for the creation of the means.  A time of flowering.  That point in the dance.

 

 After the dreams of last night, it seems wise to give the souk a wide berth for the remainder of the visit, at least in the evenings.  Spiritually unsettling, but none the less true for that.  

 Listened to a talk by a world-famous philosopher over dinner.  Read his latest book a few months ago.  The talk was recorded in 2018.  Not only did the talk (on politics and philosophy generally) immediately drift briefly to the Balkans, but the philosopher, sotto voce, as part of it, mentioned a national holiday of a neighboring country.  Which is today.  More things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

 It occurs to me that part of the reaction in Venice is that a few centuries ago, a visiting potentate would have thrown a party for the city generally as part of the festivities.  But wealth is private good these days.

Walked around the souk after a couple hours of reading with a bit of kefir in the cafe.  Quite different at night.  There's a qualitative difference between these sorts of bazaars/markets and the attempts to replicate them at theme parks, etc.  Three hundred years ago, someone (along with several dozen others) thought it might be a good idea to put a booth with some baklava and coffee across from the mosque, and it's still a good idea now.  They didn't set out to construct the atmosphere of the place.  (Though the modernization does smooth things out a bit.)  Much kitsch, of course, but there are still worthwhile things if you know the right sections of the market to look.  Very famous section of hammered copper work hidden in a small side alley off the main spot. 

Completely modern city, of course, bars and nightlife blocks packed full of folks with their drinks, tables set out on the road wherever the yellow line bounding the driving space allows enough curb.   Distinctly Turkish vibe, in some tension with the Moorish style of the brightly lit Austro-Hungarian architecture.  Rock music blending with the evening calls to prayer.  

Lingered outside a mosque, looking in for a bit -- the fountain, the oudoor prayer spaces.   Comparatively, filing in and briefly sticking a fingertip in a bit of water before finding a place in a pew seems downright puritan.  Liturgy opens us up for the encounter with these things. God doesn't need liturgy. And sometimes a more careful approach to the building itself can be very useful.  In the Midwest, they don't even use the door anymore.  Since everyone drives to the church, and the parking lots are usually away from the road, people just head in the side entrance, bypassing the carefully designed entrance to the space.

 An appropriate In Our Time for the week of the thirty-first of June.  I've come across a few folks who think that the old tales of the serpent are something more than a metaphor, but I've never followed up on those lines of thought.  Seek and ye shall find.   #saturdayradio

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002dzy4 

 "Only the future is certain.  The past is unpredictable."

(Old USSR joke) 

You do have to be careful when forming ideas under conditions of adversity.  Often, it's just kicking at the pricks, attempting to keep the stinger (Canetti) at bay.  

I was cafeful not to form dogmatic opinions, but after many years of subsequent work, I think I can trust my understanding of what I saw when, as a method actor from New York, I went to a (top-ranked) Midwestern law school, and understood that there were some peculiarities there.  I then transferred to another (top-ranked) school back in New York, and I learned something completely different.  (While actually devoting myself to the work, incidentally, taking as many credit hours as I could, getting strong grades, and briefing every case.)

Subsequent work has been instructive.  I'm confident that my keeping to the academics then wasn't illusory, and it is what a scholar within the larger academic tradition would have done. And I learned some other things about the culture during that return to the university.  Many of the authority figures in the Midwest were like the police officers who would stop me from time to time on spurious bases, mainly because they wanted to keep the bicyclists and pre-dawn runners under control.  At least they explicitly used the phrase "I want to teach you a lesson."  And there's a long story there, about the land-grant state universities built in the 19th c. by nativist legislatures some distance from the cities, and their relationship to the immigrants drawn to them from the cities.  Every institution is but the lengthened shadow of its founders, as Santayana said in his lectures on the university.

As to the culture of the continent writ large, I have come to the understanding that there's a lot of wrongdoing going on inside the prosperity brought by these industrial forms, perhaps largely because the postwar industrial forms are strong enough to function whatever the condition of the culture.  But there are relics and useful things within these places.  The old basketball gyms at I-----.  The immense, usually empty, library stacks at I-----------.  Useful things are there, but you won't find them if you think as the people of our time think.  

 They said, "You have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are/  Are changed upon the blue guitar."

Caesura. 

If you've thrown in your lot with truth, don't expect to find justification.  The vindiculum is reserved to the purposes of the collective, not the saving of private truth.

Heigh ho, the wand and the reign... 

Notably, Pisistratus was a very successful leader, despite bringing a tyranny that defeated the arisocracy completely.  Poets and playwrights (I think) gathered at his court to enunciate the virtues of the reborn state.  People generally stayed on the farm and prospered, rather than flooding into the cities in search of work and food.  (One historian said that they didn't come to the cities because their pro-Pisistrates garments would be laughed at.)

I would say things are going just as one might have thought they would go, with the rise of a businessman from New Amsterdam.  (Who, it should be noted, was relentlessly publicized on network television for many years.)  Both the tactics and the alliances are what one might have expected.  And the successes have been real, because running public policy with the herrschaft methods of private industry is like having a pro baseball player as a ringer in the company softball game.  But the point of the company softball game isn't always about softball.  And in the political realm, the success of an executive doesn't make a state.  (See every book written by a king for his son, 1300-1650.)  Statecraft, which is the game the others at the table are playing, is a more complicated endeavour.  

That's the logical view.  The best response from the paritsans of the current leader would be that the corporate mindset rewrites the rules of politics, and allows politicians to be more effective.  All well and good, and the quintessence of the sort of pragmatism that birthed the phenomenon, but we have been here before.  An expansionist corporate state led by a fellow whom they called their "guide."  Perhaps because the image of the effectiveness of the leader was the only thing fashioning the state.  

Things could still turn out well.  But the aristocracy, even if kept from effectively governing things, does need to stake out a position in the collective mind.  The idea of the Aeropagus, an institution for which the present leader has no use, must somehow persist.  

Ambroise never indicates his role in the crusade: the only detail he gives about himself is the remark 'nos autre qui a pié fumes' ('we who were on foot'; Ambroise, verse 12039). 

https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66813 

This is a rather spiritually dark city.  Though very powerful--it hasn't been emptied out.  These things are still living questions.  But a jedi (shouldn't it be jedus?) has to tread carefully, wake early, and avoid the crowds.  Rooms a bit lightless and airless, and some other difficulties there.  Slogging through.

On my last visit, it struck me that it was a city under two shadows--the second being the realpolitik alliances with my part of the world, among others.  And there is some distant Jeffersonian gleam there of a religiously devout, yet diverse, republic.  But at the same time, speaking as a patriot, our realpolitik-inclined apparachiks aren't our best folks.  And the local tendency seems to be to polarization and possession rather than founding a diverse republic.

The jedi wakes early, runs, reads, and tries to avoid thinking about the theatre festival in Transylvania that he'd much rather be at this week.  Not pining, exactly, but one does plan these paths so that one can tap the wells and replenish the inner strength, and while there's safe quarters and reasonably priced coffee and kefir nearby, this oasis is not inhabited by my people.

 

What Britten is picking up on here (@ around 1:50) is the reversal of the iamb into the trochee -- strong/weak as opposed to weak/strong.  Shakespeare uses it carefully.  Sometimes it's called his "magic speech."  Usually hexameter as opposed to pentameter.  Generally it happens when someone is causing something good to happen. 

 

 Midsummer night.  

  The Eve of St. John is a great day among the mason-lodges of Scotland. What happens with them at Melrose may be considered as a fair example of the whole. 'Immediately after the election of office-bearers for the year ensuing, the brethren walk in procession three times round the Cross, and afterwards dine together, under the presidency of the newly-elected Grand Master. About six in the evening, the members again turn out and form into line two abreast, each bearing a lighted flambeau, and decorated with their peculiar emblems and insignia. Headed by the heraldic banners of the lodge, the procession follows the same route, three times round the Cross, and then proceeds to the Abbey. On these occasions, the crowded streets present a scene of the most animated description. The joyous strains of a well-conducted band, the waving torches, and incessant showers of fire-works, make the scene a carnival. But at this time the venerable Abbey is the chief point of attraction and resort, and as the mystic torch-bearers thread their way through its mouldering aisles, and round its massive pillars, the outlines of its gorgeous ruins become singularly illuminated and brought into bold and striking relief.

The whole extent of the Abbey is with "measured step and slow " gone three times round. But when near the finale, the whole masonic body gather to the chancel, and forming one grand semicircle around it, where the heart of King Robert Bruce lies deposited near the high altar, and the band strikes up the patriotic air, " Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled," the effect produced is overpowering. Midst showers of rockets and the glare of blue lights the scene closes, the whole reminding one of some popular saturnalia held in a monkish town during the middle ages.

Wade's Hist. Melrose, 1861, p. 146. 

https://www.thebookofdays.com/months/june/24.htm 

From time to time, I drop a few thoughts into the timeline as possible breadcrumbs, likely only to surface at Senate confirmation (or impeachment) hearings.  There is a way of reading the occasionally spectacular adversities of many years as a means of steering my work, possibly towards government work of a confidential nature.  (This is not as outlandish as it might seem; I could a tale unfold.)  Even if the dystopan nudge-nightmare were to be the case, though, I think I would be permitted to record a brief minute noting the fact that I haven't ever agreed to do such things, and would likely never agree to do such things.  (Having seen what doing such things can do.)   Onward.

Interesting Mass at the cathedral.  English-language cancelled, so I went to an earlier one.  Tried to time it for the Mass of the Faithful, as the readings and homily would have been lost on me.  Small, grizzled old man at the door apparently thought I was a gawking tourist and tried to physically grab me as I went in.  Kept walking, saying I was there for Mass (in Croatian and Latin).  In both the Croatian diaspora and Hungary, I've encountered a fair amount of such things.  In this city, the church bells peal loudly, but the church doors are frequently bolted.  War-weariness, perhaps.

Interesting free concert of local music scheduled in town tonight, but 9PM on a Sunday.  I wonder if there might be some unconscious cultural habit of staging culturally meaningful events at times when the German and Austrian ambassadors would be certain to send their regrets.  

American kitsch piece scheduled at the national theatre, Almost certainly going to give it a miss.  

I get the sense that things are going just slightly -- but sufficiently -- askew.  Perhaps a trick of the mind.

Beautful weather, though.

Oddly there seems to be a push locally for 1950's-style blue laws.  The malls and groceries closed on Sunday.  (The orthodox coastal bit of the old Republic to the south does the same).  It's odd, though.  Why would a largely Muslim city absolutely reliant on the tourist industry close up shop on a Sunday?  (Though all the tourist things appear to be open -- it's just the malls and proper groceries and most of the retail shops, apparently.)  Not that inconvenient -- the western cheap coffee places are still open, so I can get out of the rooms for a bit, and I generally do the grocery shopping on weekdays to avoid the crowds.

Curiouser and curiouser.  Gently down the stream -- inshallah. 

  

 

The lacuna in the Levant is not necessarily good news for peace.  Things tend to stop and go off the public radar for a bit when the largest wheels are turning.  There was an odd silence between events in Sarajevo and the beginning of hostilities in ww1.  I read a Whitehall memoir once that talked about how even foreign office civil servants thought that the lull meant that peace had a chance.  

The democracy putting highly mercurial people in charge in order to make a political point would seem to raise a fundamental problem for democratic republics.  #notexpert #wiseacring

Ballet.  ($5, back balcony.)  Quite good.  Carmen, which is sort of a local cultural touchstone, and a Bolero.  The ballet here is very much of the place.  Lyric, modern-oriented.  Not the classical lyric of Mariinski or the austere abstract of NYCB, but a half modern/half classical vocabulary, very good at storytelling.  Extended critical piece TK, God willin' & the crick don't rise. 

 Part of my reaching back to 19th c. philosophy and fiction is looking for a grounding in a way of thinking that was current before the modern, the sense of going along with things even if you didn't precisely understand what they were, came over the world.  The latter, which came to ascendancy after the second world war, has its antecedents in idealist/pragmatist philosophy, and has much to do with industrialization.  Even our unthinkingess is historical in nature, if you think about it.

What makes this essential, rather than capricious, is my particular situation.  I've been through these things, and I've been to these places, and I know that much about them is false.  It is simply a mistake to go along with these sorts of things even if you don't precisely understand them, and the present order of things seems to rely on some fraction of the population doing just that, and the rest proving manageable.  

My slate is not clean.  It has valuable inscriptions on it.  Not quixotic, but Socratic. Onward.

 #bookmarking 

https://www.ejiltalk.org/is-israels-use-of-force-against-iran-justified-by-self-defence/ 

https://lieber.westpoint.edu/select-ihl--arising-israel-iran-conflict/ 

https://www.justsecurity.org/114641/israel-iran-un-charter-jus-ad-bellum/ 

https://lieber.westpoint.edu/israels-operation-rising-lion-right-of-self-defense/ 

https://legal.un.org/repertory/art2/english/rep_supp10_vol1_art2_4.pdf

https://legal.un.org/repertory/art2/english/rep_supp9_vol1_art2_4.pdf 

 

Kefir ($1.85) and a biography of Christian Wolff on the rooftop cafe of the grocery, before buying the week's potatoes, rice, etc.  Having a notion of what Kant had to work with at the beginning is proving very useful in understanding the directions things took.  Not annotating -- the annotation pace has slowed so much that I'm going to just read a few to get back up to speed.  

The thing that I shall miss the most about being circumstanced out of the theatre festival in Transylvania this year is the Noh troupe.  Extraordinarily worthwhile.

The attraction to Japanese ritual and contemplative forms might be historically and culturally inflected.  In the late 19th c. many Slavic immigrants had just come over to the Midwest, and Japan had prevailed in a stunning triumph over Russe.  So there was a fascination among the eastern elites (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt) with Japanese culture, and this perhaps became a cultural force, perhaps displacing or preempting the Eastern forms that had reached the US by going west, instead of east.  Just a notion, but the outlines of the facts seem to correspond. Far and few are the ikonostases and Holy Doors in the Midwest.  In fairness, even the Roman church was explicitly equated with the Hindu pantheon in the correspondence of the Framers.  A protestant nation at founding, but a permissive one (hence Baltimore).

But for whatever reason, the eastern forms do stand in my mind for the necessary focus and mediation that keeps a traveller on his path in summer heat and winter cold. 

 I'm beginning to realize that the most dangerous misreading of the present American politics might be that the obvious difficulties are somehow an exception existing only at the top.  The nature of the shining city on the hill is that its characteristic nature is evident to every passerby.  And whether from admiration or from scapegoating, the present difficulties in leadership seem to point to some characteristic sins.

 

Aha.  The German pharmacy chain comes through with reasonably priced muesli and oats.  Was almost reconciled to a time of sweetened corn flakes.  Not to mention the store-brand toilet requisites.  Inexpensive German dry goods and good brushes (tooth, clothes, bath, shoes) can help one go far.

 https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-171/issue-104/senate-section/article/S3411-1

Vis a vis the conduct of foreign affairs, someone might want to point out to the present chief executive that some of these Gordian knots are structural and load-bearing.

Minor Verdi (Attila) at the city's national theatre.  ($5, deep balcony) Excellent programming choice, apparently the full symphony orchestra in the pit, capable soli, large chorus.  The sort of country-house stand-and-deliver Verdi that you might have heard at the beginning of the last century in a regional Italian house in a city of decent size, which is to say, a far more worthwhile evening than you'd probably have at one of the international houses with everything over-designed and planned.  The essence of Verdi.  Much like Shakespeare, it is the psycho-physical condition of the singers, demonstrating the revolutionary practice of freedom.  Some clear local meanings in the staging, to be developed at too much length in a proper reflection TK.

Modalisms and modernity.  Perhaps not unconnected, the point of the latter being that there are deeper currents of being made accessible by simply going along with what seems to be important at the time.  As opposed to living within the already-understood.  Being cool, not all doctrinal, which is to say living within experience, and not experience as divided and structured by words.

And yet, acting according to the spontaneous prompting of the mind and what seems good to the others--there are some obvious dangers to this.  There are many things that can make us think things.

The local church is war-weary.  Perhaps the same war-weariness is also in the Orthodox and Muslim places of prayer.  At the Sanctus at the English Mass, the entire congregation stared silently, and it seemed, sullenly, at the violinist intoning the melody.  Eventually a few voices murmured something corresponding to the text.

 I'm not a fan of the English Masses in this part of the world generally.  Functionally, it's useful as a sort of lingua franca Mass, but a traveller shouldn't expect a Mass in their own language; a (novus ordo/modern) Latin rite would do just as well for diplomats, travellers, and foreign workers.  Perhaps the reason why the Masses  were Latin in the first place.  If you know the liturgy well enough, and have the readings, the only longeurs are in the homily, and studying the decorations of the church can easily substitute for listening to the meditations.

The point is the spiritual exercise, the focusing of the mind, the meditation, and the meaningful act.  And it seems no one's doing any of these things anymore.  In American suburbia, they're worshipping their lawns, in the cities, they're playing to the televisions, and abroad, most seem just to be looking to participate in a social event.  Omnis homo mendax.  But one honors the obligation.  Harrumph, etc.

 Oddly soul-less Beethoven's Ninth from Warsaw to close the season.  Like a waterfall of flower petals rather than water itself.  Beethoven without the political danger.  Speed, when it finally came, without passion or fear.  Perhaps deliberately created as a consumer good of comfort. 

Still, though, the ability to just eavesdrop upon a major ensemble playing the Ninth as a matter of course is a good thing.  There must be a better way to get all of the remarkable things going on in the world at any given moment to the attention of more people. So much of the present media mindset was created by bursts of transmission over the air at set times to those in reach of the transmission.  The internet is fundamentally a different thing.

I tend not to write and think about foreign wars, as it's generally not my business, even though the hard-won doctrines of neutrality seem to have slipped away in the last few years.  I doubt that there will be the equivalent of the Alabama settlement after the dust settles in Europe, for example.  (Interestingly, the U.K, as a dominant naval power, always sidestepped the 19th c. neutrality conventions.)  The events of the last few days or so in the Levant are troubling.  Going after general command and control seems to signal an all-out war.  I don't think a conflict can get more across-the-board than that.  These are not proportional attacks in pursuit of declared objectives, nor are they claimed to be.  Which is why I'm puzzled that the news seems to treat it as the sort of one-off strikes that happen from time to time.  Hold on to your... whatever it is that you think that you should grab onto.  #notexpert #justwiseacring

 Muesli has gone up by 33% since my last visit.  Mores, tempore, &c.  Will have to check the German drugstore, but the new version seems to be the prevailing price.  Backup plan: corn flakes and boiled apples.

Back in the city of the Jedi Council.  Interesting trip.  En route, stopped off in the capital of the old Republic to make the pilgrimage that was blocked earlier, as the national church had been celebrating a pontifical liturgy when I arrived, and wanted only those of that nationality inside the building at the time.  No matter.  Some odd dreams in the interval.  An interesting visit to a favorite city.  But traveling by bus in summer does have its peculiar difficulties.  Must find a magic carpet or something.

The rooms here are a bit pricier than the usual budget for these travels would allow.  Some financial shenanigans forced me to book relatively last-minute, off the price curve.   Had wanted to return to the theatre festival in Transylvania this month, but all of the places in the old Saxon capital were outside of the budget.  As it turns out, with the last minute booking, what I'm paying now would have put me in range of a cheap set of rooms timely booked there, so that's a mite frustrating.  But he moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.  Mainly arm-wrestling the invisible hand of the markets, it seems.

Hoping for a productive month.  It is familiar territory.  Hopefully the shadow of war in the Western Balkans will recede once all involved realize that everyone else in the world is panicking over trade routes and there's very little support for vindicating claims of ethnic right.  A peculiar world.  For my part, I just read philosophy and visit the theatres.

 Racine's Berenice, apparently a new production at the Comedie Francaise, at the national theatre here as part of a festival/conference -- back row, top balcony, $10.  Closed my eyes and listened to the Alexandrines for most of it; cast quite skillful.  Interesting characters in the top balcony.  At the end, I might have been the only one in the house standing to applaud, but I was right.

 

La Gioconda at the opera house.  Upper balcony side, about as far from the plane of the plaster line as the conductor was.  ($5.67 via half-price site.)  Consciously summoning up memories of the visit and performance here as an undergraduate.  After that visit, the theatre of this city stood for a certain thing in my mind for a very long time, and I tried, with modest success, to inhabit that idyll.  I suppose you can't go unheimlich again.  But a very powerful evening.

 Oddly, as I stood up at the end, I realized that what had seemed to be a robust zipper on the jeans had somehow given out completely.  Luckily, simply buttoning the coat solved the problem.  Always wear a coat of decent length.  

Interesting that it's on the feast of Barnabas ('Barnaba' is the Inquisition spy.)  Possibly a noticed holiday in these parts--traditionally the midsummer day in old style dating. 

Under no illusions as to the character of the environs.  Though I've stumbled into a reasonably comfortable place for the several days I'm here, this is still the most commercial, class-conscious, and ruthless city on the itinerary.  Sometimes you need to take the low path through the old city.  Though I didn't have any choice in making the interstitial jaunt, I'm hoping to make the best of it.  It does bring some shadows into the mind, but the dawn runs are easier here than in sleepy Transylvania, and much more than the other place before but one.  

The immediate  environs are the biosphere of the Euro-jaunters, which I find a bit frightening, tbh.  But on the periphery, the familiar chain coffee stores where I can sit for a bit with a book.  And the museums and theatres are very reasonably priced, if you're willing to take the most distant seats in the house.  Which has been my course for lo these many years.  A habitual resident of the heavens. 

Adventures in foreign grocery guesswork, cont'd: if the fresh yeast looks like butter, arguably it shouldn't be stored with the butter.  ($0.57)  My error, though--should have recognized the Serbo-Croat word on the alternate labeling. 

Interesting aside in one of the Frederick Forsyth obits in the Times.  He was struck by the women of Budapest.  There is a certain vibe amongst the folks of both genders here.  Perhaps centuries ago, a people from the east found good farmland and an especially defensible and auspicious bend in the great river, and decided to settle down and milk the happiness of the earth.  And the culture does still seem to have the fruitful-and-multiply stance about it.  At least in the capital.  The outer districts are likely entirely populated by unshaven Kraznahorkian madmen living in castles of dirty, discarded styrofoam construction paneling on the windswept heath, staring listlessly at the groundhogs.  

Aside from travels in university days, one of my first encounters with the place was a bobbled bus transfer -- as the stops hadn't been announced, and I didn't know that there were two stations in town, and it was the middle of the night, I got off the bus and realized my mistake as the bus pulled away.  Looking around, I saw a subway station (above ground) nearby and decided that there must be a map there.  I walked over, and just as I arrived, what turned out to be the last train of the evening arrived, and I got on, although I hadn't yet got to the map on the platform.  As it turned out, it was going precisely where I needed to go.  I stacked my bags on the seat opposite, and as I did so, a young woman with long dark hair and a long flowing skirt, seemingly the genius of the place herself, waked past and smiled.

It takes the power of decision to decide to milk what joy you can from the earth, and though I've never seen eye to eye with the Epicureans, the stance that sets itself to live in such a manner does has some faint tincture of Eden to it. 

One of the difficulties in (finally being able to start to make a return to) the Jedi dojo is that folks tend to think that it is a message to them.  Another consequence of the triumph of pragmatism.  But disciple isn't a demonstration of virtue; it wants nothing to do with the observer.  It's not a message, at least not a message from me, and if it's a message from someone else, I have nothing to do with either the sender or the recipient.  The original meaning of virtue is strength.  The shining city on the hill was not built, and does not function, in order to send messages by semaphore or flashing lights.  What this age misses is the reality of the thing itself.  

Aha, pasta paprikash.  

 Apparently, the thing in the tube wasn't tomato paste.  Will have to see how it tastes with the pasta. #adventuresinforeigngroceries.

 One thing to be wary of: dissipation.  Not in the wastrel sense, but in the reaching-towards-everything-at-once sense.  The world has meaning for us only when the shapes on the outside are as clear and distinct as the shapes on the inside.  Having nothing better at hand, we think using ourselves.

 Two productions I've seen recently, the Cyrano at JDP and the Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj seem to underscore the danger of staging the Western canon according to the pop-culture view of the West.  The 80's glam-rock vibe of the former, and the unfortunate cage-brawl duel at the end of the latter seem taken from television and film, rather than a consciousness of the source culture.  I mean, you wouldn't stage a Noh piece with a manga vibe, or conduct a Beethoven based on the late 1990s MIDI versions on the web.  

 In fairness, many if most directors stateside would do the same thing.  Tempore, mores, etc.  But Hamlet or Cyrano being unable to speak to the folks who are perched a bit precariously between East and West (as, I suppose, technically, every spot on earth is) is a loss all around.

 Also: colloquial English versions of the verse on the supertitles (text is the famously peculiar Hungarian adaptation from the 19th c., I think) are supremely disconcerting to those who know the plays. I find myself closing my eyes, so I can think through the actual structure of the text (which, in fairness is possibly not available to the actors in the adaptation).

That said, the Hamlet there is worthwhile.  I saw it three times this year, taking careful notes each time.  (tickets a bit pricier than the usual Balkans budget, but still under $15).  Mulling a longer piece on it.  Not for any audience, just to think through a few things. 

I worked several times with a great Czech scenographer whose talk-back schtick was to ask people to raise their hands if they (a) liked the play, (b) disliked the play, or (c) had no opinion about the play.  He would then scan the room after (c) (quite a large percentage, always), and hang his head and say, "Now that frightens me." 

Perhaps the reason that I kept coming back was the discovery that the odd building I ran past before dawn every weekday in the winter a year ago had staged a Hamlet.  And I became very curious about what that might be.  It's a bit personal, and a full explanation of my interest (amply rewarded) will have to wait for that longer piece.

Living in a condition of life similar to that of Indiana Jones without becoming as reductionist and cliched as Indiana Jones is a bit of a challenge sometimes.  Imagine Proust attempting to go around the world in eighty days.  The task is Wellsian, so the story must be according to the terms of H.G.

Incidentally, those Spielberg films are parables of American spirituality.  Ark and Grail, obviously, but also Eastern spirituality (Temple of Doom), esoteric faiths, and sci-fi parables in a spiritual context.  Essentially, what happens when the older notions of religion play out against an American ontological context.  And "Indiana" stands for the new world, the discovered place; his dislike for the name comes from the fact that the name was used in a derogatory sense against the people who lived there originally.

Perhaps. 

#saturdayradio  BBC adaptation of Priestley's Good Companions.  Priestley is a real touchstone for me.  Like Fowles, he managed to smuggle a few worthwhile things into mass-market printings.  A novel is always about the experience of a single person within time, divided among the characters, and therefore analogous to the act of creating the novel.  But this is only an analogy.  The point of the work is to say that this is the experience of a single soul.

I try to avoid the news--entertainment of the present national politics, but in a more abstract sense, when you sense the falseness of things at the center, which is necessarily a function of ideas, perhaps there is some concern that things closer to you, which necessarily tend more to the empirical and mimetic, might similarly seem to be tending to the false, if they were to be subjected to the scrutiny of ideas.

 When you encounter a foreign culture, whatever its nature, as you perceive its limits and dimensions, you are seeing that of your own nature which is invisible to you, transposed.

 On second thought, it's no error of the Beeb to keep close that which is their own.  Probably a weakness on my part to have drawn from the public trough during the rest of the weekend.  It was useful when I was in dicey circumstances (not in the constitutional sense), but there's no reason to tap into the matrix first thing on the day of rest when there's a sound cabin and library.  Independency.