Plague Time

The Wall Street Journal  has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic.  Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing.  (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting."  I thought they were quite interesting.  The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before.  Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

At the beginning of this week I finished re-reading another Gotthelf work, Die Armennot , a title I have never translated to my satisfaction (though it is not difficult)--something like The Poverty Emergency .  This is an outlier among Gotthelf's works.  His large output consists entirely of fiction, except for this one book, a study of rapidly increasing poverty in the 1830's. In it, he declares that poverty is the great crisis of the age, comparing it to earlier eras' fears of the Turks or the plague.  The poor are increasing, he says, speaking of the "proletariat" almost a decade before Marx and Engels published their "Communist Manifesto."  What is especially alarming, Gotthelf thinks, is not the mere fact of poverty itself, which always exists, but the growing hostility and aggressiveness of the poor toward those who are better off, which he fears could provoke a class war. Gotthelf attributes this phenomenon to various factors, some of them ...

About once a week I get an e-mail from something called the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.  I don't know why.  I know nothing about them and have no idea how I got on their mailing list.  But I generally take a quick look at the e-mail, because every now and then I see something interesting. The other day I got one of these and saw what appeared to be a potentially interesting lecture today.  It was by a professor named Stefano Jossa, currently at Royal Holloway, the University of London.  He was going to be speaking on his new book, in Italian, but the title of which in English would be The Most Beautiful in the World: Why Love the Italian Language .  It sounded intriguing, it was free, all you had to do was register and get a Zoom link.  So I did. It turned out that the lecture was actually being sponsored not by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, but rather by the one in Montreal.  But who cares, right?  As long a...

Back to Gotthelf!  I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink.  Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend  ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ).  This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor.  But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution.  Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Maybe I should take a temporary break from posting about things I'm reading to write about something else for a change.  How about church?  Today was the second Sunday we were permitted to return to church in person again.  Last week I was there just with a few of my children, today the whole family was back. It's not quite the same, of course.  Everyone is required to wear masks.  And of course there is social distancing enforced, with many pews blocked off.  For now we are permitted to operate at only 25% of capacity, which in our small parish means no more than 31 people present.  (Though we can sneak in a few more if need be by having my family sit up in the choir loft with me.) To make sure we don't exceed the limit, we have set up a system for people to reserve a spot if they want to attend, which they do by contacting yours truly.  I then keep a list.  So far it hasn't been a problem, though--I don't think word has fully gotten ...

Ingold's Alias  was not the only thing I read last Saturday.  In the evening I re-read Hinter dem Bahnhof  ( Behind the Train Station ), by the Swiss author Arno Camenisch .  Camenisch is from the canton of Graubünden and writes in both German and Romansh, the fourth of Switzerland's national languages.  This particular book has various Romansh words tossed in among the German from time to time, giving it a very unusual and distinctive linguistic feel.  There is an English translation available under the title Behind the Station . The book is actually the second Camenisch's so-called "Bündner Trilogy" (i.e., a trilogy sent in Graubünden), though I didn't realize that when I first picked it up a few years ago, so I will have to go back and read the first one, which I also have.  It's only about 100 pages long and is really quite delightful; I have read a few other things by Camenisch because I enjoyed this one so much.  It is told through the ...

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week.  And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf!  On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben  ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold .  Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise.  It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent.  The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...

I have gotten several things read over the last few days, but I keep forgetting to post any of it.  Some more Gotthelf, but also a couple of other things.  I'll try to break them up in order to get a few more posts out of them! Last Friday I finished another Gotthelf novella, Wie fünf Mädchen im Branntwein jämmerlich umkommen .  That title does not translate very well into English, or at least I don't think so.  Something like, How Five Young Women Perish Miserably Due to Brandy  (or literally "in brandy").  It is an early work of Gotthelf's and a piece of social criticism.  When Gotthelf was writing (1838), the canton of Bern had recently liberalized its system for granting licenses to operate a pub.  At the same time, new methods of producing cheap brandy from different sources, including even the ubiquitous potato, were developed.  As a consequence, inns and pubs sprang up throughout the countryside, creating a new temptation for poor...

Finally got it done last night: I finished re-reading Jeremias Gotthelf's second novel, Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters  ( The Sorrows and Joys of a Schoolteacher ).  It totals about 775 pages, in two volumes, so it was an undertaking. Gotthelf, a pastor, was deeply committed to the cause of educational reform, and the novel is not only literature but also social criticism.  It constitutes an extended plea to improve the conditions of schools and teachers.  In rural Switzerland in the early 19th century, teachers were paid very poorly, they received little training, and the homes they were provided to live in--adjoining their schools (sometimes in the same building)--were often in poor condition, like the schools themselves.  The local farmers often regarded the schools as of little value, sending their children only when they weren't needed on the farm.  They were uninterested in education beyond the minimum of some reading and writing, basic s...

I haven't been posting much--not sure what to write about.  I sit and read Jeremias Gotthelf all morning.   Then after lunch I either read a little more Gotthelf or work on my online classes.  Late afternoon, weather permitting, I go out and mow the yard or pull out weeds and giant thorny shrubs .  And in the evening its posting to the forum for an online class, or grading some exams, or reading a bit more.  Not a lot of variety!  Which is fine with me, but not very interesting to write about. I suppose I could comment on public affairs.  There might be a few things going on these days, like a country exploding in insanity.  But that is less interesting than Gotthelf, frankly. We did have a slight diversion this afternoon when a fellow showed up to replace the windshield on our minivan.  Right about the time we went on lockdown, a truck kicked up a rock that put a crack in the windshield.  I was trying to avoid unnecessary c...

A casualty of the pandemic: today I should have been in Poznań, Poland.  But of course I am not. I'm on the board of the Austrian Studies Association , which was planning to hold its annual conference this year in Poznań--its first European conference outside of Vienna.  The conference would have been wrapping up this weekend.  Afterwards I planned to spend a few days in Wrocław (formerly the German Breslau) before coming home. I had organized a panel about the Austrian author Peter Handke .  Handke won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that was very controversial because of Handke's pro-Serbian writings during and after the Yugoslavian wars of the 90's.  I was interested in exploring the relationship between his political utterances and his fiction. Now the conference is rescheduled for next summer.  Who knows what the world will look like by then?

Now this is good news: I just read in the Times  that cafés in Paris are once again able to open for outdoor service .  I've never even been to Paris, but that is still a welcome sign. I have written before--it probably deserves another reflection sometime--that this lockdown has not been a big deal for me.  I worry about the college, and naturally I'm not thrilled about a salary cut forced by the college's losses.  But in terms of my day-to-day life, the lockdown is more or less irrelevant.  It makes grocery shopping more of a pain, and it keeps me away from my office, but otherwise interferes with little that I want to do. But the thing that I do miss is the opportunity to get to Europe once in a while.  I had to cancel a planned trip to Germany with students over Easter.  And this very morning, as it happens, I was supposed to arrive in Poland for a conference of the Austrian Studies Association.  Alas, those trips were not to be. And ...

I haven't posted for several days, I see.  Partly I blame it on the time warp that is Houghton during summer break in the middle of a pandemic.  Partly I have also been deep in another Gotthelf novel--more on that at some appropriate time.  Partly I have taken advantage of some better weather to do a little work in the yard,  cutting out massive quantities of (I think) this plant. We have a bit of a slope behind our house, not very large, but over the past years it has been gradually giving way to various random things that take root and sprout up.  One of the worse offenders looks like the plant pictured here, multiflora rose, an invasive species.  When it blooms, it looks kind of like a wild rose, with pretty clusters of white flowers (though it tends not to bloom much in the shade).  It is, nevertheless, a genuine plague. The things pop up everywhere, sending out shoots to form new plants. They are almost impossible to get rid of.  They ...