20 June 25
Bread and Roses
As Pica discussed yesterday, we have both recently read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and I have just finished a good follow-up book, Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. This is a beautiful account of how despite his fierce political activism and writing, Orwell had a side to him that was rooted in the countryside, tending his vegetable garden, planting his beloved roses. For instance in 1946 Orwell wrote an essay praising the common toad. From its second paragraph:
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.
The phrase “Bread and Roses” is the title of the third section of Solnit’s book. The phrase originates in 1910 in a conversation among several woman suffragists. One of the activists, Helen Todd, later declared that women’s votes would “go towards helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter, and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, the government of which she has a voice.” The phrase soon got incorporated in the labor movement, and lives on today in the name of a socialist feminist movement in Latin America, Pan y Rosas. Orwell has similar sentiments. In January 1944 he writes:
A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.
19 June 25
Homage to Orwell
I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?
The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
18 June 25
Crucigramas
Our local newspaper on its comic page prints four of the New York Times crossword puzzles each week. Lately I’ve been enjoying trying to do these, a good pastime while at the kitchen table. Sometimes I succeed in completing them, sometimes not. I’ve been musing about how hard it would be to do a New York Times-level crossword puzzle in a language I’m learning, let’s say Spanish. If nothing else, these crossword puzzles rely on a high level of cultural knowledge.
Happily, I just found a source of crossword puzzles for language learners. I was looking for a platform to provide verb conjugation exercises and came across Linguno which has a variety of exercises in five different languages. One of these is crossword puzzles at a number of levels of difficulty. I’ve been doing the A2 and B1 level puzzles in Spanish. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to develop vocabulary. I showed these to Pica and she’s trying out the puzzles in German. Tonight she shared a puzzle with her German conversation group and the activity was a hit!
11 June 25
Stricken auf Deutsch
I think I’ve said elsewhere on here that I got back into knitting after a 35-year-break because I was supporting a bike ride as a radio SAG and ran into a Davis Bike Club volunteer who was knitting a sock. This was back in 2008: Ravelry was still in invitation mode and the knitting craze was really revving up. Since then a lot has happened, a lot of drama, and the community is as fractured as the political landscape.
I’ve been able, however, to combine my hobbies a bit. There are at least 30 groups on Ravelry that are at least partly in German (Deutscher Stricktreff is a group I’m a member of). I’ve been watching a lot of German YouTube content and a new favorite is Sylvie Rausch of CraSy Creative Things.
This book was brought back from Germany last year by a friend of mine. She’s returning there on Sunday and has asked whether there’s anything I’d like her to bring back this time…
10 June 25
On Catalan and Occitan
As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’m now dabbling in Catalan. I think I got drawn into the language in the following way. Pica just related how she herself started dabbling in Catalan because of the arrival of our Catalan neighbors. At that point, I watched a couple videos from the YouTube channel Easy Catalan. Easy Catalan is part of the Easy Languages network of language learning content that is built around street interviews that are doubly-subtitled in English and in the target language. When listening to these street interviews in Catalan, I thought to myself “Oh, I really like the sound of this language! It sounds a good bit like Old Occitan.”
How on earth do I know what Old Occitan sounds like? I don’t, of course, but long ago I discovered troubadour song and became enamored of that 800-year-old world of music and poetry. I collected many recordings of modern performers interpreting troubadour songs. One of which that stands out is a 1991 recording by the Camerata Mediterranea entitled Lo Gai Saber. The salient feature of this recording is that the singers all had contact with modern Occitan in their youth and assimilated the sounds of the language. Modern Occitan is not the same as Old Occitan but this is probably as close as one can get to recreating the medieval language’s phonology. This recording is at the present moment streamable on YouTube.
Catalan and Occitan are very closely related languages, described in an article in a site on troubadours as being one diasystem, two languages. Here is a YouTube video showing their mutual intelligibility. In it Laura (aka Couch Polyglot) has a conversation with Gabrièu (aka Parpalhon Blau), with Laura speaking Catalan and Gabrièu speaking Occitan. Laura has had very little exposure to Occitan prior to this point.
9 June 25
Why Learn a Foreign Language?
As Numenius mentioned in his blog post yesterday, we’ve both been actively learning new languages. In my case this deep dive into German has now moved into its fifth year. But why? I don’t live in Germany, nor do I intend ever to move there; I haven’t even been there. Most people in Germany speak good English (at least in the cities) and will reportedly answer in English the second they get the sense your native language is English. No: my reason for learning German is to get a massive monkey off my back.
When I went to boarding school from Madrid at age 13, I was compelled to choose three of the four following subjects: history, Latin, geography and German. Latin and history were obvious choices to me; geography seemed like it would be a lot easier than German plus I still had a residual antipathy to German (it was the early 1970s and English war comics featuring hollering Nazi officers were a staple in our house.) In the event I got invited to leave my geography class only three weeks in because I kept correcting the teacher’s pronunciation of Spanish place names like a brat. I should have joined the German class but thought I’d never catch up. (I would have, of course: three weeks is nothing at beginner level.) The monkey? It settled in and looked forward to a lifetime of mischief.
I’ve started other languages in the interim (having taken Spanish and French at University): Italian A Level in Cambridge in 1982 because a friend had, Irish at Harvard so I could calligraph 18th century Irish poetry (this was too hard and I never made it very far), Hebrew so I could calligraph a ketubah for some friends (and read prayer book Hebrew, later), Catalan because our Catalan neighbors gave me a good excuse in 2024; Ukrainian because fuck Putin. (Keep your armchair neurodivergent diagnoses to yourselves, please.) But German? I am determined to reach a C1 level sometime and am finding Lingoda classes to be well-suited to my learning style. I practice daily (I find myself writing more postcards in German than in English through Postcrossing) and am now running the Advanced German Conversation sessions for International House on Zoom. (I also delved into writing Chinese script so I could write addresses in Chinese on postcards, though it turns out I send most of my postcards to Germany, the Germans are avid postcard writers.) Languages keep my brain a) active; b) distracted from the cacophony of political turmoil. But mostly: it’s stimulating and incredibly fun to do this.
8 June 25
Journey Into Language Learning
Language study has become a major activity in our household. In common with many people, this is something we took up when the pandemic began early in 2020. Pica decided to rectify a lacuna in her prior language studies and began working her way through German in Duolingo. She has continued with her German studies to this day (she had a Lingoda lesson in German late this afternoon) but also had side excursions into several other languages. I followed in her path: soon after Pica started her German I decided to work my way through the Hebrew Duolingo tree. Having last studied Hebrew seriously as a child, I wanted to see what I retained and could pick up.
I completed the Hebrew tree in about two years, and settled upon Spanish as my subsequent Duolingo language. Previously, I had taken three quarters’ worth of Spanish at the local community college about 20 years ago. This is not the spot for a Duolingo rant, but I was quite glad I discovered the concept of comprehensible input before I got very far along in Spanish Duolingo, starting with the wonderful program Dreaming Spanish. (Dreaming Spanish has been a commercial success, and their team has just announced they will be launching Dreaming French very soon). Nowadays I try to get at least an hour of Spanish comprehensible input though Dreaming Spanish and other sources each day, and also do a bit of daily Duolingo, and participate in a weekly conversation group through Easy Spanish. Looking ahead, I’m also dabbling with Catalan right now, watching some of the comprehensible input videos mentioned here.
13 November 11
A Dab of Tolstoy
I just finished reading War and Peace for the first time. It’s a delicious book — not a slog at all, though I started it well over six weeks ago. There’s something very evenhanded about Tolstoy’s writing, how he’s able to move seamlessly from historical narrative to the lives of his characters. The historical narrative is what got me inspired to read the novel: I had just finished reading David Chandler’s definitive one-volume history The Campaigns of Napoleon and thought that War and Peace, the quintessential novel about the Napoleonic era, was the perfect follow-on. That the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation was on our bookshelves helped matters. As for why I read the Chandler, this was a result of our calligraphy workshop this summer. Our teacher Sheila Waters designed and calligraphed the maps for the Chandler book back in 1965, and I was able to see many of the mylar originals!
The next work of fiction I’m going to read shouldn’t take me as long: Terry Pratchett’s new book Snuff.
22 June 11
John Ruskin, Meteorologist
I just finished reading Paul N. Edwards’ excellent book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. This book is a history of the information infrastructure that has grown as the sciences of meteorology and climatology have developed since the 19th century. The title of the book comes from the following quote, which Edwards uses as the book’s epigraph:
The meteorologist is impotent if alone; his observations are useless; for they are made upon a point, while the speculation to be derived from them must be on space…The Meteorological Society, therefore, has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine, and it feels that unless it can be this, it must be powerless; if it cannot do all it can do nothing. It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface. — John Ruskin (1839).
John Ruskin as a twenty-year-old was into meteorology. Who knew?
8 March 11
State of Siege
Last week I finished reading Fernand Braudel’s masterful tome The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a book which I’ve been wanting to get through for about twenty-five years now. Looking around for other retellings of the same theme I came across the author Roger Crowley, who has recently written the books 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West and Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. Crowley is an able storyteller, and I finished both these books in rapid succession. Sieges are at the center of both books: the siege and the fall of Constantinople being the subject of the first, and the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 being the centerpiece of the second book.
After reading Crowley’s narrative I decide the siege of Malta would make a great movie, hitting a number of good storytelling tropes: an epic defense against overwhelming odds; the sacrifice of one contingent of the defenders to buy time for the rest; and finally rescue by the arrival of reinforcements just in time (delayed by the ditherings of Philip II off in Spain). Sieges don’t seem to make it into war movies very often though. What comes to my mind is Helms’ Deep in The Two Towers, and switching from fantasy to history, the 1964 movie Zulu. This list of top ten siege movies doesn’t really add any other examples of siege warfare, most of the movies on the list being thrillers or horror flicks. I don’t think the siege of Constantinople has quite the potential for being a movie as does the siege of Malta. Not that 15th-16th century Mediterranean history has the slightest chance of making it into the movies: how can you film a historical drama without there being any English royalty around?