The Bad

• My grandmother disappeared completely. Physically, she’s still around, but that’s it. Her voice has devolved to muttering, with only a few coherent words that make no sense in the context.
• My lovely little guinea pig Daciana, on the close of 2011, developed a growth on her back leg that will kill her this year. The vet cannot do anything. We do have a surgery date for amputation n January 11, but no one has confidence that she will survive until then. I, on the other hand, am hoping for a miracle.
• Last January, I found out I had to work full-time seven days a week in two museums. Though ultimately the result was excellent, the seven-month schedule was tough.
• Other miscellaneous, annoying things that are now past me. Hopefully from here on, my life calms down a bit.

The Good

• I got a new job! I was almost in my last job for six years and there are some great friends I made there. It’s time to move on to novel challenges. And boy do I get challenges with my new job. But my new coworkers are great and the challenges are exciting! In May, when things were very frustrating, I reviewed my life goals and added one: to become a curator in a municipal museum. At that time I hadn’t even started looking for a job. Who knew that in August I would get two offers on the same day within minutes of each other? Though I could only take on one job, I hope to eventually work with the other museum too as I much admire what they are doing as well. The lesson here: a ton of work and many achievements made mincemeat out of the naysayers who warned me against a career in the arts. It took me fourteen years to decide on a career and hone my skills but I am there!
• I also finished my diploma work. I am a little miffed for spending so much time and money on something that’s not another degree, though I should be thankful that the diploma did pave the way for my bout of upward mobility. I am now excited about the possibilities of taking a class in something fun. Will it be another dancing class? A sewing class? Or a German class? Probably all of them!
• I got to know my book club friends a little better this year and I have the semblance of a social life. We even went on a group trip to Seattle on Labour Day weekend for Bumbershoot. For many summer weekends as my work schedule relaxed, we also spent some relaxing weekends at A’s cabin on Howe Sound, looking at the fjord.
• Matt visited France properly in September. It’s been years since I took someone up the Metro stairs for their first view of the Arc de Triomphe and since I walked through the Louvre courtyard. Now I knew a thing or two about French history, so with each step I could almost see the blood on the sidewalks. As part of this trip, we also spent a snippet of time in Switzerland and Germany.
• Matt and I also went to Whistler for a weekend of tea, games and reading. Matt decided after work one day that we were going and minutes later we were in the car and off north.
• For our contests contest, R won, with about $1000 in prizes. I barely cracked $100 with my 3.5 prizes. One prize never even got sent to me. The .5 prize turned out to be a cosmetics scheme to squeeze me out of money for pricey facial stuff. (Don’t they know I have more face creams than I know what to do with?) Oh well. At least, I now own a toy bear that boasts of its insane loyalty to chocolate.
• I only read 38 books out of my goal of fifty. Who cares? I had fun and I am trying for fifty again this new year.
• My new niece Claire arrived in June and my new nephew Oscar arrived in August. I haven’t met them yet, but forces are working to arrange a meeting between us in 2012.

Now for my new goals for 2012:

• Edit those photos already!
• Paint that polar bear.
• Read those fifty books. One of those fifty has to be a Romanian book – probably the book written by the priest in my ancestral village. Another one of the books must be a French book: I am torn between reading that short Turgenev novella in French or The Little Prince. A third book must be one of my Chinese books. I have a number of kids’ stories from Taiwan, so that must be a start. This is the year when I get back into Mandarin. (I am even vowing to make it out to some Mandarin meetups.)
• Study German. I will take one class and read one textbook.
• Also on the language front, I want to read one Japanese textbook. I have dreams of continuing my studies in Finnish, Estonian and Dutch, but that’ll be a bonus, not a required challenge. However, I am very close to signing up for a Finnish class I found nearby.
• Go to Europe. It’ll probably be Germany this year. Though we haven’t decided if it’ll be a Hamburg or Berlin trip. Definitely not Bavaria.  (I want to visit Japan again in 2012; however, trips to Texas for family reasons will supplant Asia for another year.  If I can’t go this year, 2013 will be the year and Uzbekistan will be in 2014.)
• Loan more money through Kiva. I loaned $100 to a baker in Kinshasa as part of my vow to donate some money in thanks once I get a new job. Coming from a baker family, I was so happy to help out another baker, especially one in the Congo, a country I am getting more and more interested in.
• I barely worked on my own books this year. In fact, I am losing hope in myself for ever writing anything that matters. On the one hand, R’s advice to prospective writers was sad. On the other hand, an acquaintance called J disagreed with me when I said failed writers should just stop. I wonder if I’ve been just too tired to write with my hectic work and study schedules. I also wonder if I should not stop thinking about other goals and concentrate on my existing career. Then I remember that I have a five-year goal to move out of museum work. (Unless I miraculously get a job with weekends off. The problem with museum jobs is that I can’t be with family on the weekends. Though I love museums, Matt is irreplaceable.) I am not sure if I should include a writing goal anymore, so instead, here is this rambling hesitant paragraph of a semi-goal. Lyn, thank you for your support in this!
• Another goal is to make some new friends and acquaintances. Yes, I want to start going to the local Mandarin meetup and I still want to make a bit more of an effort to play boardgames more often. I want to write to more people I admire and let them know. I also want to do some more work-related networking, including some European networking, since I eventually want to move there.
• Figure out why this blog can’t do accent marks. I hate that all my Romanian words look garbled. Once I do this, I want to go through my previous posts and correct the garbled stuff.
• Write real letters to my penpal in Austria, my penpal in Norway and my friends in Taiwan. Maybe a good goal is twelve letters, one in each month?
• Miscellaneous cleaning and getting rid of old tasks. A lot of them are boring, so they are on Wunderlist. But I need to get them done.

How was 2011 for you, dear reader?

The quotes below are descriptions of various parties and celebrations that the French court hosted.

From page 110, here’s a description of the marriage of the snot-nosed Francis II (when he was still dauphin) and Mary Queen of Scots, on April 24, 1558:

Among the fantastic entertainments laid on for the wedding was a banquet at which twelve man-made horses covered in gold and silver cloth were led in to be ridden by the royal princes and the small Guise children. The shimmering horses pulled carriages carrying singers glittering with jewels, who entertained their guests with their music. These were followed by the arrival of six silver-sailed ships that appeared to float over the ballroom floor, on board sat the gentlemen who were allowed to bring a lady of their choice. Francis invited his mother [Catherine de Medici] to join him and Henry chose his new daughter-in-law.

(Frieda got this info from Antonia Fraser’s Mary, Queen of Scots.)

In February of 1564, Catherine de Medici and her court began travelling around France. The trip was to take about two years and there were lots of triumphal entries, banquets, balls and the like. In Fontainebleau, “Catherine had ordered that each of the most important nobles give a reception or a ball”:

Both the Constable and the Cardinal de Bourbon gave suppers at their lodgings, and on Dimanche Gras, Catherine threw a banquet at the dairy of Fontainebleau which lay a little way out from the palace, near a meadow. The courtiers dressed as shepherds or shepherdesses for this fête champêtre, a precursor of the Petit Trianon parties thrown by Marie Antoinette nearly two centuries later. Everyone judged the day a huge success; the nobles having enjoyed their little afternoon of pastoral simplicity, albeit in February. Later in the early evening the guests attended a comedy in the great ballroom, followed by a ball at which 300 ‘beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth’ performed a specially choreographed dance. Henri of Anjou gave his banquet the next day, after which a mock battle was held between twelve young knights. On Mardi Gras an enchanted castle had been built in which six maidens were held captive by devils and guarded by a giant and a dwarf. Their liberators appeared, led by the four Marshals of France. Six groups of men came to claim the captive damsels. At the sound of a bell, Condé led the defenders out of the castle to fight a superb mock battle and the scantily-clad nymphs were rescued by their gallants. The royal children also played a role in the festivities giving a performance of a pastorale written by Ronsard.

(From page 182.)

In 1565, there was another big celebration:

…The spectacle on the Bidassoa river is considered to be one of the most famous of Catherine’s ephemeral works of art. After a waterside picnic, with all the participants dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, Charles [IX] appeared on the river in a barge that had been disguised as a floating fortress. As the other participants took to their own sumptuously decorated barges, a gigantic artificial whale appeared that was then attacked by ‘fishermen’. Suddenly a gargantuan man-made tortoise was seen swimming towards them, on it stood six tritons blowing cornets. The two marine gods, Neptune and Arion, surfaced: the former in his chariot was pulled by three sea horses and the latter carried by dolphins. The extravaganza ended as three mermaids glorified France and Spain with their siren songs.

(From page 194.)

Finally, after the capture of the Protestant stronghold of La Charité-sur-Loire on May 2, 1577, Henri III hosted a banquet for his brother, the Duke of Alençon: “The theme of the celebration was that all should wear green, Catherine’s favourite colour (coincidentally also the colour often associated at the time with insanity), and that the men were to dress as women and vice versa.” (From page 336.)

Frieda cleared up one mystery for me: why the royal family had so many castles and why they were always on the move. It’s related to food, its transport logistics and a little bit to hygiene. She explains how the food situation worked in the court:

..The king was fed by the cuisine de bouche and everybody else by the cuisine commun. The purveyors to the royal kitchens were kept busy finding enough for the thousands of dependents to eat. Food was divided into three sections, panéterie, échansonnerie and fruiterie (bread, wine and fruit). One of the principal reasons that the Court had to move, frequently after only a month or two, from one château to another was the lack of food available after a stay in one particular area. Sanitation prompted another compelling reason for leaving. After weeks in the same place, especially during the summer, the stench and filth became dreadful, and the risks of disease grew proportionately. The Court also moved to find new hunting grounds where fresh game could be found. When the King left one château to lodge in another of his residences, most of the furniture and hangings accompanied the caravanserai. The castle left behind was thus almost completely empty when the royal family had moved on.

(From page 178. Frieda credited R. J. Knecht’s 1994 biography Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of François I.)

However, there was one quote I did leave a receipt tucked into the spine crease. That quote is below. It is a piece of dialogue spoken by the Cuban torturer/police officer Captain Segura and it outlines who is in the “torturable class”:

‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal….

‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’

One more note to add to this. I recently met someone who tried to escape communist Romania during the bad old days and was caught. Now we know at least one of the worst case scenarios for capture: this woman was beaten for three days. They knocked out many of her teeth. (She was in her early twenties when she made her first escape attempt. Tooth loss is a common Romanian affliction.) Luckily, one of the secret police knew her father and arranged for the woman to be released. Yet, now she was on the bad books. More secret police came to her house. On one occasion, her father chased an agent away with an axe. Her family knew that they would never let up and she would always be in danger. Next time she was in custody, she may not be able to obtain a release. She had to escape again, successfully this time. And so she did.

The inventory of what’s lost are the heavily etched memories – again, I am separate from the person I was for my first thirty years – and the ability to do things. I look back at younger me, who went through a prolific cooking stage, a prolific drawing stage, a prolific reading bout and so on. The stages would last months or years and overlap one another. I can see why people liked me back then.

Now, I am lucky if I finish a book. That is the height of my achievements. I can no longer draw or paint. Cooking? I live on instant noodles if other people don’t feed me. I can still boil eggs but that is a passive endeavour. The water and the gas stove does most of the work. I am good at cleaning the house. I am good at my job. The latter might be the reason for this eradication of former-me. To be good at my job, I have to concentrate and work hard. One step in front of the other is what I have to tell myself every day as I face off against a thirty-page to-do list. Maybe the relentless pushing forward sapped everything else out of me.

The problem with living a surface existence is the lack of charisma. At the beginning of this year, a friend was listing everyone’s talents. “You are good at photography,” she said to my sister. “And I am good at writing.” When she came to me, she became confused. “You must be good at something,” she said. The subject changed and I never found out what my talents are obvious.

Earlier, Matt bought me a book about finding one’s strengths. Mine was finding information. Everything about this strength seems useless. At best, I have nothing to offer but linking A to B, linking outside information because there’s nothing I can bring of myself. At worst, I have a horrified feeling that this means I am a boring pedant who dominates conversations.

Since I like to solve problems, I came up with solutions to my mere survival. My favourite solution is to travel alone to tragic places. Suffering during said travel would also build some character and supply something of an inner life. I wonder too if I work too much. But how does one dismantle an apparatus that has taken so long to build?

“…Though they would believe they were passing judgment on someone else’s tragedy, in reality, they would simply be giving expression to their own.” (Page 37)

“…Albania would have to find new ways to defend itself. It had to create structures more stable than “external” laws and institutions, eternal and uiversal structures lying within man himself, inviolable and invisible and therefore indestructible. In short, Albania had to change its laws, its administration, its prisons, its courts and all the rest, it had to fashion them so that they could be severed from the outside world and anchored within men themselves as the tempest drew near. It had to do this imperatively or it would be wiped from the face of the earth.” (Page 145)

The book describes some of the other math genius tricks up the Venerable Bede’s sleeves:

Not only did he have to reconcile diverse chronological systems, he had to find a means to calculate them. The Arabic numerals we use today were not known in the world of Bede and his contemporaries. Roman numerals made complex calculations extraordinarily difficult and so Bede taught a method of calculation using the fingers and other parts of the body. By moving the fingers into different positions it was possible to represent all the numbers up to 9,999. By employing the elbows, shoulders and other body parts you could get up to a million!

(Page 207)

I read The House of Mirth with eagerness at first, then dread as Wharton dragged her character deeper and deeper into a quagmire.  There’s some writing advice for novelists: get a girl in trouble, then get her out again.  Wharton missed the last part.  I stopped reading for a few weeks, then spurred on by the looming library due date, I raced to the end.  Though the big flashing foreshadowing fifty pages or so before the end left no further doubt as to Lily Bart’s outcome, I still read hoping that my friends R. and M. were wrong and that Selden somehow swoops in to save the day.

Since finishing the book, I now want to re-read it, at a much later date when my depression for Lily’s fate subsides.  I revised my initial opinion that it was a pretty good book to it was a very good book.

*****

Wharton was a brilliant writer.  Does anyone know of a contemporary writer who can write as insightfully about merdeufs and hipsters and right-wing nutjobs?

A few of my favourite quotes from The House of Mirth:

• She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape she knew. (Page 18)
• Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity. (Page 21)
• But she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life. (Page 27)
• To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor. (Page 39)
• Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from redundancy. (Page 42)
• It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd. (Page 42, also describing Mrs. Trenor.)
• “…It’s rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people – the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.” (Page 43)
• “…It’s much safer to be fond of dangerous people.” (Page 46)
• One of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. (Page 72)
• [She] behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of itself, without extraneous assistance. (Page 106)
• No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity… (Page118)
• Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up. (Page 161)
• The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His façade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. (Page 168)
• “Peas?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a fellow can make a reputation cooking peas.” (Page 193)
• It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent. (Page 271)
• The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. (Page 293)
• It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff – a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss. (Page 337)

Louis was no match for the descendants of Genghis Khan…Given the history of Mongol behaviour, of which there was substantial precedent, the alliance would have been broken as soon as the Muslim forces were subdued. Louis, Charles [of Anjou], and Robert [of Artois] would have been beheaded with ruthless efficiency, Marguerite [queen of France] and Beatrice [Countess of Provence] would have been sold into slavery, and the course of European history would have been changed forever.

(Page 129)