Happy Emily

Wystan's new place:

*A pool! (where I can lay out and do my work simultaneously!)
*cookies in the building next to the pool (which is also a gym); I assume they've baked those cookies for me, and no one has told me otherwise yet.
*a balcony! Oh yes, a balcony is everything I'd imagined.
*paths and walkways and a lake bordering the complex (this is after North Carolina, which has no such things)

This is a serious improvement.

Update: AND tennis courts, a book sale (okay, at the library in the nearby town--where I found Chesterton's biography of Aquinas for $2), a church only a half a mile away, and an apartment complex pool party (complete with cotton candy and pizzaratis, which are like little pizzas).

The Blue Church

Also known as the Church of St. Elizabeth (although I've literally never heard it called that), Bratislava's Blue Church was built in the early 1900s in the Secessionist style. It looks sort of like a cake, dripping with icing. It is, of course, over-the-top. Nonetheless, when I was shopping for souvenirs I was inches away from buying a tiny blue church (count your blessings that I didn't, Wystan)--it's whimsical and charming.

Stearns: An OED etymology (PG-13)

“[f. BULL n.¹ + SHIT n.] course slang

1. Rubbish, nonsense

c1915 WYNDHAM LEWIS Let. (1963) 66 Eliot has sent me Bullshit and the Ballad for Big Louise. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry. 1928 E. E. CUMMINGS Enormous Room vii. 194 When we asked him once what he thought about the war, he replied, ‘I t'ink lotta bullsht.’ 1953 G. LAMMING In Castle of Skin vi. 135 Some say they had no time for all that bullshit. 1961 R. KEE Refugee World xii. 130 ‘What do you think of the criticisms..?’ ‘Sheer bullshit, frankly.’ 1969 P. ROTH Portnoy's Complaint 97, I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, these are the very words these women use.” [Bold mine]

The first instance—Wyndham Lewis’s—is referring to TSE’s “The Triumph of Bullshit” which, according to Inventions of the March Hare, was dated Nov. 1910, was written in pencil, and was never published.

TSE invented the term ‘bullshit.’

Travel by Roofs

Geneva roofs











Lausanne, France roofs



Little town near Budapest roofs











Turns out, I like to take pictures of roofs when I'm traveling (people always tease me when I say, "roofs"--"Rufs?!").

Thank Heavens I Live in the 21st Century

This is how they punished women (just women!) of ill repute in Levoca, Slovakia.

Gaudy Night, The DVD

As part of preparing for my fall class on feminist political thought, I watched the BBC version (I think it's the only version) of Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night. I declared to Stearns at the beginning that if with those two (let us say not typically Hollywood attractive) actors (I've never seen Harriet Walter play a sympathetic character before) the film succeeded on selling me on their kiss at the end, I would be content. And it did.

My bones to pick: the film adaptation left out the sonnet (!--the sonnet!--that is, the one that Harriet begins and Lord Peter later discovers and completes); additionally, the film left out what was, I thought, the key to the novel as a whole--the varying occupations that Vane's friends decided on in the course of the10 years since they'd graduated, coupled with the varying levels of satisfaction with those occupations. In no other place is Sayers's point that each person ought to find his proper job more clear.

That said, what stood out to me in the film (which never had in the novel) was the way in which each person discovering his proper job applies to both the academics and Shrewsbury, as well as to the servants. The way in which servants are not treated with sufficient dignity is highlighted. All in all, the film offers a critique of academic theorizing that neglects to consider women as wives and mothers. The film reminded me of how much I love the novel. And let us not forget--it convinces the reader all over again that oh-so-nerdy Lord Peter is desperately attractive.

Rousseau and Geneva

During my visit to Geneva, I saw both Rousseau's birthplace, as well as the statue of him on the Ille Rousseau (a small island accessible by a short bridge from one side of the lake to the other).

From the dedication of the Second Discourse, "To the Republic of Geneva":

"Could I forget that precious half of the Republic which creates the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good morals? Amiable and virtuous countrywomen, the fate of your sex will always be to govern outs. It is fortunate when your chaste power, exercised solely in conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the State and the public happiness! Thus did women command at Sparta and thus do you deserve to command at Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honor and reason in the mouth of a tender wife? ... Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of morals and the gentle bonds of peace; and continue to exploit on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue."

Gosh, if Tocqueville isn't lifting Rousseau here, then I don't know what he's doing. Also, Rousseau is so perpetually full of irony that I rarely have any idea of when he's being serious. It is interesting, however, that, in the title page of the Second Discourse, he identifies himself as a citizen of Geneva and in The Confessions he notes that he parents were both citizens of Geneva.

William Stafford

Percy lately recommended to me the poet William Stafford, with whom I've been immediately intrigued--he has a Midwest love of place and the rural life, combined with his conscientiously objecting fear of everyone mindlessly following the masses. Here's one poem:

Lit Instructor

Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean--
well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

Jet d'eau, Geneva

The first stop on my trip was Geneva. During the descent of my flight, my first view of the area was Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe, slicing through the clouds.

Before arriving, I had been skeptical of the Jet d'eau, a fountain in Lake Geneva (or Lake Leman, as the French call it). It is the tallest fountain in Europe, and people in Geneva are absurdly proud of it. I was surprised by how lovely it is--the water shoots up, and then gradually flows down in streams of mist in the wind.

I'm pretty sure that this is primarily (or entirely) Ilana's handiwork:

Cooking in Cogan Station.

It's oh-so-spiffy and I love it! "Posted by Casey" is the perfect touch.

Back!

Dear Readers,

My apologies for the long lull on this blog. Stearns and I are safely back in the States and have a renewed appreciation for shower heads attached to the wall. We've been settling back in and welcoming to Little Gidding a new housemate, Carrot.

I hope to tell you lots about my trip (and share pictures!) in the upcoming month or so. In the meantime (as a result of Stearns' request that Three White Leopards be a funnier blog [not that she would ever post and make it funny, but that I be funnier...]), here's a short anecdote from Stearns and my time in a Munich hostel:

At my old age, hostels are a bit of a shock--they are loaded with high schoolers who look to be around 12 years old. These kids just run up and down the halls screaming and have no sense of what time in the evening it is. Just after we checked into our Munich hostel, I was reading the internet, and Stearns was standing beside me with nothing to do. Almost immediately a random co-hosteler started chatting her up: "Hi. What's your name? Where are you from? Who's your friend?", etc.

Things got much more interesting when Stearns asked him about himself: "I studied history at UC Davis." (We're Pennsylvanians; we've never heard of that school.) "I'm going to go to law school to be a lawyer." (Ohhhhhh....is that what you go to law school to do? I wanted to go to law school to become a nurse!) Gosh, picking up women by reciting your CV is obnoxious--even more by reciting your potential future CV.

Stearns and I Greet You from One of the Beautiful Places of the Earth