Urbane

Went out last night to meet with Natalia. I was really looking forward to it, but there was some outside turbulence which tinted the overall feel a different shade. Natalia texted me that she was going to be quite a bit late, and I was already on my way, so I decided to make a pit stop at Filip's. I was clear from the start that I was only popping in for half an hour or so, and tried to be vague about my plans for the evening, but when asked point-blank, I told him who I was meeting. As soon as I did, I knew it wasn't a good idea. The room soured, though Szymon did his best to diffuse the situation. Either way, I bolted.

And then once I got to the club, I bumped into a guy who had been hitting on her and whom I thought she was avoiding. I decided I should probably let her know before ordering any drinks, in case we needed to relocate, but she said it wasn't an issue anymore. And after I got back to the bar, I found out that my reflexes were as sharp as ever in that I had actually already ordered a drink, and then promptly skipped out on the bewildered bartender to make clandestine phone calls, because I am smoothness incarnate.

The guy was amusing, but completely hammered, and kept popping by to share stories about his CRAFT (he's an actor), And then about an hour into our meeting, Filip called Natalia asking if they could come by. She replied in the diplomatic (and stilted) negative, and thus the whole thing became "an issue". All in all, too much drama for a late night catching up. And none of it mine.

And today - an hour-long breakfast at my local cafe, with Harold Nicolson's diaries.

August 13, 1941

[Dorothy Thompson, the American journalist] says that we must always remember that America is composed of many millions of people who left Europe because they hated it, and that there are many millions of Italians and Germans whose hearts go out to their mother countries. Although these emotions pull America apart, they feel at the same time a strong longing to remain together. What we don't filly understand in this country is the actual dread of the American soul at being split. There is always the fear that they will cease to be a nation.

I teared up a bunch of times. I still find it hilarious that nothing makes me bawl harder than grand geopolitical narratives.

And once again, I regret I've stopped writing things down. Maybe the solution is a private diary?

Harness

I have a confession: I believe in petty magic. Or rather - I believe that once it has produced some sort of effect, the nature of a cause is irrelevant. And that the entire human experience is completely dependent upon one's brain/consciousness - which is very fickle. You can have all the reasons to be happy, and still feel miserable if your head doesn't buy it. Therefore the subjective always trumps the objective. And the subjective isn't always rational.

Of course this doesn't mean that I sacrifice goats or try to make sparks fly out of my fingertips, but I do allow myself some leeway when it comes to various trifles. For example, I've always really liked the Moon, for no particular reason. Whenever there's a full moon, I feel a little bit better - and happier. And so, I have made a conscious decision to avoid rationalizing it. To suspend my disbelief just enough so that something as random and easy to come by as the sight of a chunk of spaceborne rock continues to improve my well-being. It's a small price to pay, and I see no harm in it.

Which brings me to The Song of Ice and Fire. I've realized that I respond very favorably to stories that walk that fine line between my brand of "magic" and full-blown fantasy. I really like it when the choice is left up to you - when you're given enough loopholes and backdoors to reality to be able to stitch together a "it's all in their heads" explanation. It's why I loved The Prestige as much as I did (even if my very convoluted alternative reading of the film eventually collapsed under its own weight). And I think it's why I had such a negative response to the appearance of actual dragons at the end of the first book. There's no grey area here, it doesn't get any more high fantasy.

Well, I've almost finished reading book 2, and it only gets worse (or better, depending on your perspective), up to the point where my favorite background player got offed by supernatural means, and the Daenerys sections read like the 1001 Nights. And I have to say it spoils things a bit for me. I feel like this isn't exactly what I signed up for. Granted, Martin worked up a very nifty explanation for this shift, which I totally bought, so the book still gives me a lot of pleasure, but I can't help feeling that the political aspect suffered due to the slew of new dei ex machinae.

Yeah

I was at my very funniest that year. This was not the Humor of Cure; it had nothing to do with the healing power of laughter. It was more of an airless, relentless kind of quippiness (...) Every time a complex human emotion threatened to break the surface of my consciousness, out would come some terrible cleverness.

I was Thanatos' rodeo clown. I still am. And Eros' as well, as it turns out. Years later, in a tender embrace in bed with my first real boyfriend, he said my name. "Oh, David." I stopped, sat up, and responded in my best Ed Wynn. "Yeeeesssssss???????" This kind of behavior more or less killed things between us.

David Rakoff, Fraud

Finished reading it. Waiting for the paperback version of Half Empty.

Out of sequence

I have ended up for the weekend at a spa that refuses to call itself a spa; an "institute" with a terror of the world so crippling as to have no newspapers. No surprise, really, had I but taken the time, prior to my arrival, to seriously parse the terms "self-help" and "retreat." The former unabashedly egocentric, the latter alluding to defeated flight.

(...)

The word I most overhear, flying from mouths like spittle, is "intense." But it usually seems to apply to a massage or a movement class. When I do chance to overhear of a true test of faith and character, one person telling another, "My father died last Christmas and it was fairly intense, so I went to a bereavement workshop, which helped a lot," the response she gets is "Yeah, when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force."

(...)

The evening's concerts are held in the Lake Theater, a barn-like structure with a small stage. The overhead light is grimy and yellow and flickering as moths and June bugs ping against the bulbs like rice at a wedding. A young folksinger on guitar and piano is accompanied by her ponytailed husband on bass. The audience is sparse, mostly women, alone and in pairs, the demographic hinted at on the first day. They sit with the studied serenity, the composed posture, that broadcasts for all the world to see "I go to things all the time alone. I don't mind."
In Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, the heroine Lily Bart - no longer as young as she once was, the financial promises made to her failing to pan out, her prospects at marriage dwindling daily, has a friend named Gerty Farish. Gerty is also unmarried. Gerty has no annuity. Gerty takes her meals in public dining rooms with other single women. And she does so good-naturedly. Every time Lily sees Gerty, she experiences an interval of panic. Wharton writes: "...the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded [Lily] too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking."
After a day of angry, dismissive contempt, the blood beats behind my eyes with identification. I am uncoupled by this unexpected Gerty Farish moment in this crowd of women trying to make sense of a world that has ruled them out of hand for the cardinal sin of having dared to remain single past the age of thirty-five. I have sat alone in theaters, restaurants, parks, my back straight, a book, perhaps. I am acquainted with this good posture.
At one point the singer looks over at her husband and they give each other a smile of such amiable companionship, a look of such pleased and secure partnership, that it reaches all of us with the cold immediacy of a slap in the face. It turns out to be true: when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force.

David Rakoff, Fraud

He's not always this good, but sometimes he is.

Unfailing

Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations - boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with the faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your left hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you..." over and over gain as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interested and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary.

David Rakoff, Fraud

Census

In 1593, John Sanderson compiled a list from information given to him locally to show the population of Istanbul, which arrived at a total of 1,231,207 inhabitants, but what is really interesting about this list is how the census is framed:

Viziers (I say Viseroys) ....................................................................................... 6

Muftie ................................................................................................................. 1

Women and children of all sorts, christians, Jues, turks, etc .................... 600,000

Books

This one's long overdue, but oh well.

I've finished reading The City and the City a while back, and was really impressed, though it resonated mostly on an intellectual, rather than emotional level. Which was either an inevitable side effect of the way it was constructed, or indeed the whole point of the book. It starts out with a pretty fantastic premise, and then, as the plot develops, the mysticism is gradually, almost imperceptibly chipped away. When you reach the final act, there's almost a sense of disapointment in how... realistic the entire affair has become, but still - there's never a big reveal, any sort of "Ha-hah! And in reality, this is what's been going on". It's still an evolution, and the best part is that things are not revealed as being different than previously described - they're instead simply being described in ever greater detail. The book doesn't change its course, it's the reader who is forced to gradually abandon his overblown preconceptions.

Another cool thing is that the mercurial aspect of the twin cities is carried through the entire novel. At first I felt this itch at the back of my brain, because I couldn't quite place the city on the map. But with time (and information), it turned into another kind of frustration - one born out of being unable to visualize the actual layout of the cities - the way they intersected, and the way their boundaries worked (or didn't).

But the best part, at least for me, was that once I resigned myself to the tedium of truth, everything clicked into place. Again - there's no twist. It's just that everything could be now interpreted differently, in retrospect. And you could actually come to the conclusion that there were absolutely no supernatural elements to the story whatsoever. You didn't have to, but the door was at least half-open. And I absolutely adore such stories, to the point where I cooked up a ridiculously convoluted theory* about The Prestige where you could completely dismiss the Tesla part of the plot. It's also why I really love Like Minds, which I have to admit is a middling film at best.

And now I've moved on to Lords of the Horizons which I was really disapointed with for the first 10 pages, and now can't seem to put down for even a moment. So much hilarious Ottoman trivia!

* unfortunately, it collapsed under its own weight; still like the movie though

Crosshatching

Back in Warsaw. The festival was great, and I'll try to do a proper post about it, but only after I've gotten some sleep.

On my way back I dug deeper into China Mieville's The City and the City, and I really like what it does with my head. It starts out as a pretty straightforward noir crime novel, but as the camera pans out, you learn it's something much more complex. And you're not really given any sort of systematic backstory to all the weirdness, you have to kind of reverse-engineer the big picture from various everyday practicalities. These hints are delivered so subtly that at first I actually took them for witty turns of phrase.

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling way. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

And with a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrasz after all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent (...) after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away...

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite literal. Without giving away too much, it's the story of two cities (city-states, really), Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupying the same space, with parts belonging to just one (referred to as being "total" from one's perspective, or "alter" from the other's), and a whole patchwork of shared areas. The citizens of both are trained to only perceive their home city, or rather, to fail to perceive the other one, and its inhabitants. Openly and deliberately noticing the other entity is a very serious existential offense (again, trying not to reveal too much), and inadvertently doing so causes great unease:

I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passerby who tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintly over fucking couples they assidously unsaw.

The fun part is both cities are sovereign entities and it is for example revealed that they were on opposing sides during World War II, and that to this day Ul Quoma is the target of an American embargo (think Cuba). Another neat, and I'm hoping deliberate twist is that you can't pinpoint the city's whereabouts. You are given plenty of context: ther's mention of Balkan refugees, direct flights from Budapest and Istanbul, and Beszel street names sound decidedly Hungarian... but then, the city is a sea port. So whenever you are given another scrap of origin information, you feel this low-level anxiety/frustration as the exact location keeps eluding you - which echoes the descriptions of people "unseeing" its phase-shifted streets.

I read most of the book on the train from Wroclaw to Warsaw, and when I got out of the train station, I couldn't help but look for glimpses of the city I just left - fully realizing how silly it was. I couldn't shake it even on the tram home, and kept comparing the two, noticing how empty Warsaw streets look in comparison.

Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

Data dump

Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily at the rear of her ethical universe.

---

[hilarious perfection]

Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs, she sees the Coca-Colo logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan "NO REASON!"

---

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father's absence.

---

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.
It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.
An experience outside of culture.

---

"Thank you. Just a moment, please, while I find my key." Actually it's in the pocket of her Rickson's, ready to be palmed when needed, but she checks the bathroom, the closet, glances behind the black furniture, then notices a large gray carrier bag, with the Blue Ant logo on the side, at the foot of her bed. She kneels to look under the bed, discovers it isn't the kind you can look under, and comes up, still kneeling, with the key, a plastic mag-strip card, in her hand. "I've found it. Thank you very much."

---

[incomprehensible without background information, so you'll have to take my word that it's cool]

"Yes, it ends in .ru Observe the protocol H-B"

Baranov, emailing from the hyphen.

---

Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win's chargin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist.

---

[and an absolutely brilliant conclusion to the story, snuck in by way of an e-mail message from a background character]

Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery - revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in.

---

The ending wasn't exactly stellar, but it was a very enjoyable read nonetheless. Next up... The Graveyard Book, I guess.

Down for a Jack Move

Here's a small convergence of popculture flotsam that is probably only amusing to me and no one else, BUT each of the individual components is at least a teensy bit noteworthy in and of its own, so...

I'm still reading Gibson's Pattern Recognition. There will be quotes, at a later date, but this is about a chapter title - Jack Moves, Jane Faces. It caught my attention, because I thought it was verb-based (and thus vague in a pretty clever way), and implied a cause and effect thing. Later it was explained that a "Jack move" was actually the main character's ex-boyfriend's name for an unorthodox action, while "Jane faces" belonged in the bedroom.

Part two: Bohdan recently sent me this bit of genius. And today, as I was linking it to someone else, I found out that the best thing about Shortbus  seems to appreciate it as well:

So I listened to it again, this time actually paying some attention to the lyrics, and caught the bit around 0:52. Which gave me a smile. Then I started wondering if it's really kosher to mimic a dead person's lisp, but pretty guy guitar where was I?

The final bit of serendipity happened as I was writing this post and realized I have absolutely no way of working my new favorite photo into it. If you watched the above clip in its entirety you know that is no longer the case (the one I wanted to post originally had no umbrellas in it). So feast your eyes:

The entire glorious buildup can be found here.

White Dune

I just went out for Grownup Groceries (toilet paper and bread, as opposed to Chinese take-out and gummi bears) and realized why the pizza place lady had to consult the driver before accepting my order yesterday. There are literally mounds of snow everywhere. Whole embankments along the roads, as if the car people are preparing for a siege.

Still, life goes on. Unlike in Britain, which I hear is completely paralyzed because they actually got some snowfall this year. It's a full-blown crisis, with headlines like Death Toll Rises, Salt Supplies Dwindle! I imagine my compatriots must be looking around scratching their heads and going "Ale głupi ci Rzymianie."*

Actually, I read somewhere recently that during Napoleon's ill-fated foray into Russia, the Poles were the ones to cover his retreat, because they were the only ones not really all that surprised by the cold. It might have been in a collection of essays on the 19th century by Stanislaw Mackiewicz which my parents lent me. They're quite interesting (the essays) (well, my parents too), but I don't really care for his style. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to share that opinion with them a couple of days ago. I think they're still recovering. I imagine it must have been quite the Tracey Ullman moment: "I just read The Book of Revelation, and I have to polemicize with God..."

I went to Cracow last weekend and was reminded that most of the time composition is key. It was a perfectly enjoyable break from work, but that turned out to be neither here nor there, as the focal point of the trip became learning that my host watched the most fun episodes of Firefly without me (thus robbing me of my vicarious/parasitic joy), and then having to sit at some club right next to quite possibly the only person in the world I never ever want to see again. So that ended up being the snapshot.

Also saw W. recently. At long last. We've really drifted apart, but we're both quite intent on reversing that process. She saw 500 Days of Summer and thanked me profusely for recommending it. Said it fit perfectly into this particular moment of her life, and that she totally identified with the character. There was this weird intensity about the way she said it which made me ask, just to make sure: "The guy, you mean?". "The girl, of course!" she replied with matching certainty.

* "These Romans are crazy", the Polish translation of Asterix wins in this regard

Caspar Hauser

Ok, the time has come for the story of the Baden dynasty and Caspar Hauser. As told through a few choice snippets.

[Margrave Charles Frederick] was already an elderly man (...) when he felt the desire to have a companion during his declining years. This old man's whim was potentially dangerous, and Princess Amelia, the wife of the hereditary prince, was worried. Since the death of her mother-in-law, she had occupied first place at court and had no intention of yielding it to a newcomer who, during the old sovereign's lifetime, would take precedence over her. Only someone who has not been a hereditary princess can fail to realise how painful such a humiliation can be!

Indeed. I have, once, so I know exactly.

Princess Amelia went in search of a ncie girl, someone beautiful but unobtrusive, who would know how to charm the margrave's old age, but discreetly. She thought she had found the very person in one of her maids of honour, Luisa Geyer von Geyersberg [I am not making this shit up]. In the absence of great beauty the girl had spirit - especially a spirit of intrigue - and she revealed it by rapidly captivating the heart of Charles Frederic (...) It was decided that the children born of this marriage should have no other righrs beyond bearing their mother's name (...) [and] would only be called to succeed if the Baden line became extinct. In fact, there was little chance tht this would happen (...) Two years passed which apparently justified this assumption, and then, in August 1790, the [countess von Hochberg - formerly von Geyersberg] gave birth to a son, Leopold von Hochberg. From that moment there was no holding her: a second son, William, was born in 1792, a third, Alexander, in 1794, and in 1795 came a daughter (...)

In 1812 [the legitimate descendant of Charles Frederick] Grand Duchess Stephanie gave birth to a son, and the rage of the countess von Hochberg, on seeing the crown recede from her sons' heads, reached its height. It was then (...) that she had the utterly fantastic idea of stealing the new-born child and using it as a pawn in the game (...) The plan was crazy: she ran every risk of being caught (...) but through a strange combination of circumstances, the first part of [it], at least, was successful. Thanks to accomplices in the palace, she succeeded in substituting for the royal child, who was only a few days old, another child born the preceding week to a poor family in Carlsruhe (...) Unfortunately for the countess, her plan did not entirely succeed. In fact, no sooner had he been placed in the grand ducal cradle than the plebeian child was seized with convulsions and began to howl. This woke the girls who were looking after him. In the uproar this sudden illness caused, nobody noticed the exchange. The doctor summoned to the child could not have realised it since it was not he who had delivered the grand duchess (...). The child died the next day and suffering had changed his little face so much that not even his father could have guessed that he was not his (...) The court went into mourning and the countess von Hochberg found this grand ducal baby highly embarassing. It was a bad moment to suggest his return in exchange for the elevation of the Hochbergs to the rank of princes of Baden.

In short, the child was given to a peasant family, under the supervision of countess von Hochberg, who later had a falling out with her sons, for whose titles she fought so bravely, and decided to divulge his identity to the legitimate Baden branch. The legitimate Baden branch reacted by incarcerating the boy in some fortress, where he lived in total isolation for a few years, before being released by his jailer - who got fed up with playing nanny - into Nurnberg. A veritable caveman, who ate with his hands and knew only a few broken words of Franconian, but nonetheless bore a letter of recommendation adressed to the captain of the guard. Needless to say he became an instant celebrity. I was very surprised to find that I'd actually heard of Caspar Hauser before reading that story. It's weird, the places pop attaches itself to culture sometimes.

The Germanies continued

Time for some more Secrets of the Gotha, as the backlog is getting pretty big:

The Duchy of Brunswick and the Kingdom of Hanover

Brought up in England by his uncle the prince regent, the future George IV, he had lived there until 1851, when he had gone to France in a baloon and stayed there.

(I wonder if "Go to France in a baloon and stay there" was the 19th century version of "Fuck off and die")

The King [Ernst-Augustus I] who had spent all his life in England, had remained very British and did not care much for Hanover: his capital was too small for his lioking, and the sight of his subjects irritated him. His son was spared this irritation since he lost his sight when young through whirling a chain which flew out of his hand and struck him in the eyes. His Hesse-Darmstadt cousins, who were economical by nature, took advantage of this infirmity in a rather sordid way. They did not turn the fountains full on when he came to stay with them.

***

George V's son, called Ernest-Augustus like his grandfather, was, during the first years of his life, the hope of the dynasty and the delight of the old king, who had him brought in every evening after dinner so that he could play with him. This reunion between grandfather and grandson gave rise to scenes so strange that one must quote the countess of Muenster, who observed them during on of her visits to the court:

'It was very touching to see the old man, who tended to be very severe and impatient, hold out his arms to this ugly, but nevertheless well brought-up child, while the child seized the little tuft of white hair which still adorned his grandfather's forehead, and, uttering piercing cries and kicking at his neck, fought to get hold of the king's monocle. This last exploit was somewhat dangerous, and as a rule, at this point in the game, the king tried to get rid of the struggling, angry child - by no means an easy operation. The last amusement which the boy asked for and obtained every day was as follows: the king would open his mouth, put his tongue out, and the child would rub his hands and cheeks against it (...) When the rite was completed, the king would rise and say: "Now let us go to the nursery for the bath." A ceremony which everyone considered very necessary after the licking procedure. Once we reached the nursery, chairs were arranged round a bath tub full of warm water to which a sweet perfume had been added. All we had to do then was to sit down and watch the spectacle of the child and his bath. When the sound of splashing grew louder, or a cry of delight was heard from the child, the poor crown prince [sic], who was blind, would turn towards us and ask with a laugh: "What part of his body are they washing now?"

'I need not add that this question was sometimes embarassing.'

***

Instead of the kingdom of Hanover, the duchy of Brunswick, which had been administered since 1866 by a regent, was solemnly returned to the grandson of the last sovereign, as a wedding present. William II [Emperor of the unified Germany, which incorporated Hanover] gave his daughter [who was marrying the abovementioned heir] the famous Brunswick jewels, which had been confiscated [along] with the country.

I think confiscating countries is definitely the way to go. Think big!

The Duchy of Coburg

Their daughters' only dowry was great virtue protected by even greater ugliness. They found it hard to obtain husbands: the eldest, Sophia, had married an Austrian gentleman, Count Mensdorff-Pouilly; the second, Julia, had fallen to the Grand Duke Constantine, grandson to the Tsarina Catherine, who, when he had been asked to choose between the three sisters, had cried: 'If I have to have one of them, I'd prefer the smallest. I'll marry the ugly little creature!'

***

The new duchess, ex-duchess of Edinburgh, was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II, and thus born Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. Deeply conscious of her imperial origin, she had never been able to accustom herself to being in England only the wife of a younger brother of the royal house (...) She regretted in English fog the snows of her country, and when her husband was called to succeed to the throne of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha she went to reign in Coburg, delighted that she could at least satisfy her appetite for domination. Until her death she remained convinced that there was nothing in the world more pleasant than being a grand duchess of Russia. She never failed to remind anyone who in conversation forgot to address her as 'Imperial Highness' (...) She survived the 1914-1918 war only to see the disappearance of her former duchy and the collapse of the Russian empire (...) It is said that she died of shock on the day when she received an official letter from the new German government addressed simply to 'Frau Coburg'.

The saga of the court of Baden and Caspar Hauser deserves a separate post, so that's all for now.

Intermission

Will try to write something about Cracow, or the season premiere of Damages, or both, at some point, but right now I should really be working, so instead here's a glance at what is probably my favorite political entity of all time:

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Germanies, as they were then called, were composed of an infinite number of territories, some of them fairly large, most of them minute. Their masters, who were absolute monarchs as far as their subjects were concerned, were themselves dependent on an elected emperor, the head of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. In the past the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the virtual heir to the crown of Charlemagne, had possessed undeniable power, but since the treaty of Westphalia [ending the Thirty Years' War in 1648] his real strength had declined to the point where it was no more than a moral authority which made him, like the pope, one of the spiritual masters of Europe. This elective sovereignty had moreover become hereditary in the house of Austria, the most powerful dynasty within the Holy Roman Empire and the only one which commanded sufficient prestige to earn the votes of the great electors. [They] were nine in number (six lay: Bavaria, Bohemia, Saxony, Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Hanover; and three ecclesiastical: Maine, Cologne, Trier-Coblenz) (...)

The Holy Roman Empire had tried its best to unite the Germanies, so different from one another that the only link between them was the post conducted by the house of Turn und Taxis, in blue coaches which ran non-stop across the vast empire. The princes of Turn und Taxis, grand masters of the Posts since the early sixteenth century, earned from this privilege one of the most considerable fortunes of the period. It allowed them to indulge in ostentation far greater than monarchs with greater possessions could afford.

The electorates represented the great powers but there existed as well nearly eight hundred countries. Many only extended over a few square miles but possessed rights as deserving of respect as those of Bavaria or Saxony. The empire was divided into ten circles, and the circle of Swabia alone, for example, included ninety-seven sovereigns, four ecclasiastical princes, fourteen secular princes, twenty-three prelates, twenty-five members of the ban of nobles and thirty imperial cities. Some principalities did not possess a thousand inhabitants, but they considered that their princess, who often lived like modest country gentlemen, equalled the greatest monarchs on earth. They greeted them with remarks of the greatest respect: 'Your most serene pigs have condescended to eat my humble potatoes,' a peasant said to one of these potentates.

Having read all that, can you really blame me for hating Bismarck?

A pony?

Time for some more aristocratic hilarity. This edition is devoted to France (focusing on the imperial, rather than royal or - God forbid - republican episodes though).

The surprising dynastic ties of the First Empire:

One curious detail: his marriage to Joséphine linked Napoleon to the reigning house of Osman, in Turkey. A young cousin of his wife, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, had been carried off by Barbary pirates during a sea-crossing, sold as a slave in Constantinople and had then become the Sultana Validé, mother of the future Sultan Mahmud II.

Queen Hortense of Holland:

The marriage of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Bauharnais, the daughter of Joséphine, was very happy but inexplicably blessed by heaven. The queen, although she always lived as far away from her husband as possible, still gave him numerous and beautiful children. King Louis, who was horrified by such shameless behavior, had confessed his marital disappointments to the pope, and in one of his vehement epistles had compared his wife to Messalina. In fact Queen Hortense was no more than a charming flighty girl who was the first to be surprised by her pregnancies and confused those responsible. 'Hortense always gets muddled over the fathers of her children,' said Napoleon, not without indulgence, for some suspected that he was the father of her eldest son

And the reigning couple of the Second Empire:

The empress' well-known coldness soon extinguished the ardour of Napoleon III's passion, but she retained her hold over his mind. As General du Barrail subtly remarked: 'She dominated him not so much by her charms as by the memory of the numerous occasions on which he had failed to appreciate them.'

Napoleon III had only one son by his marriage, the prince imperial. His birth in 1856 had been greeted with the same demonstrations of joy as that of the king of Rome, but neither of them ascended the throne for which their births had been so ardently desired. The anxiety and joy of Napoleon III were so great at the moment of the birth that he could only reply 'no' by a shake of his head when the empress, anticipating the worst, asked him if it was a daughter. 'It's a boy!' she cried, relieved. But the emperor, becoming more and more emotional, again replied 'no'. 'Then what is it?' she moaned, completely panic-stricken.

Next up: the German countries, which is where the real fun begins.

Denmark

The anatomy of a name. How silly Karolina must now feel complaining about her hyphen:

While great dynasties live in the perpetual fear of not being able to arrange suitable marriages for their offspring, small dynasties - or more precisely the dynasties which reign over small states - live in the hope of concluding some profitable union. They draw a definite advantage from their political weakness: that of not being a cause of discord between their powerful neighbors (...) Following the example of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, or Hesse-Darmstadt families, the Holsteins, who were descended from the ancient house of Oldenburg, practiced a policy of matrimonial intrigue, which as the centuries passed ensured them appreciable possessions whose names went on being added to their own. Thus in the eighteenth century the reigning house of Denmark was officially called Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg.

And a handy tip for any social gathering:

The children were brought up in Spartan fashion, and Vladimir d'Ormesson relates in his Enfances diplomatiques that the young princes and princesses had been trained to hold conversation with empty chairs on which a label indicated 'British Ambassador', 'Bishop of X...', 'President of the court of appeal', etc. He tells amusingly that each week, at the Opera, in order to give the public the impression that they were holding lively conversation during the intervals, the princes and princesses had acquired the habit of counting up to a hundred and then starting all over again:
'1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,' said the Prince Royal.
'7, 8, 9, 10, 11,' replied the Princess Royal.
'12, 13, 14,' Princess Ingeborg would interpolate with determination.
'15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,' replied Princess Thyra, who was a chatterbox.
'How gay our princes and princesses are this evening!' the public would think with delight.

How gay indeed.

She is better than this

I'm about one third through Secrets of the Gotha - a slightly outdated who's who of European royalty, mostly focusing on the anecdotal and scandalous. It's a book that got referenced a lot in the stuff I'd read for my thesis, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find it at that huge NYC bookstore... damn, forgot the name already. Oh well, nevermind. The style is nauseatingly pretentious at times, but that's probably to be expected, given the subject matter. And there are some pretty priceless bits too, like this letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to Eugène de Beauharnais:

Cousin, I have arrived in Munich; I have arranged your marriage with the Princess Augusta and I have already announced it. This morning the princess came to see me and I had a long conversation with her. Enclosed is her portrait on a cup. She is better than this.

Or this one, about the daughters and the mistress of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, all cheated out of an enormous inheritance (Leopold was one of the richest monarchs of the 19th century, due to the fact that the Congo was his personal property - as opposed to being a colony of the Belgian state):

In order to occupy her time as she grew older and earn some money [Princess Louise] began to write her memoirs. They appeared as Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber (Thrones I have seen collapse), and are a long plea 'pro domo' in which she takes up again all her grievances against her husband, the Hapsburg-Coburgs and her own family. Shortly afterwards her sister, the Princess Stephanie, published her regrets for a throne which had escaped her under the nostalgic title Je devais être impératrice (I should have been empress). As for [the late King's mistress] Baroness Vaughan, who did not want ot be left out, she gave to the world a little book of recollections modestly entitled Presque Reine! (Almost a Queen!)

More to come, probably.

New angles

I think I got hooked on books again. It started on the way to the US - I took William Gibson's Spook Country with me, just in case there was absolutely nothing to do on the plane. That I even had it in the first place was a small marvel in itself. I'd already resigned myself to my loss of literacy and simply stopped buying books, but it was only 25PLN, and I had such fond memories of Neuromancer...

Anyway, the book itself isn't exactly life-changing, but it has this instant accessibility - you get gently pulled into it from page one, and experience the same immediacy whenever you pick it up. It also seemed to provide me with a sense of stability (even though the main characters are constantly on the move* - I guess it's easier to cope with imaginary displacement). I always had this handy reference point, whether I was waiting for Ana at the Mall of America, or stuck in traffic entering New York City.

As for the plot, Spook Country takes place in the present, and is something of a spy thriller. Except, true to Gibson's cyberpunk pedigree, most of the spies aren't affiliated with any form of centralized government, and there's also a near-omnipotent, irrational, corporate presence. It also flirts with things like the nature of celebrity (and its data-preserving powers), the future of art, or Where The Hell Are Our VR Goggles - but these serve as ornaments rather than foundation.

It reminded me of some of the esthetic pleasures of reading. I liked some of his turns of phrase, like "Outside, wind found the windows from a different angle" or "Dawn was well under way, lots of it". Or how he somehow made an English-speaking French character sound French without using some weird accent transcription (I think the key was having her use the word "disconsolate"). But the thing that really stuck with me is how he made it seem like what you're reading is just a snapshot, and the fact that you close the book doesn't mean the people therin won't keep on doing their thing. Obviously, I know shit about literature, but the books I have read always seemed very self-contained and efficient, every plot point contributing to the greater whole, every detail a foreshadowing en route to revelation. Meanwhile, throughout Spook Country I found several threads that weren't neatly tucked in anywhere at all. It was always the tiniest of details: an extra sentence here, a small paragraph there... Almost subliminal in their subtlety, and never drawing your attention away from the main plot, but nevertheless succeeding in making the characters feel totally real. Like the story was merely something that happened to them, as opposed to them being a set of narrative tools used to tell a story. Unfortunately, I don't think I can make myself any clearer, and the only passage I marked at the time probably won't be much help either, but it at least gives you a sense of this non-sequiturial vibe (it's the end of a chapter):

"Milgrim nodded. Got up. He wasn't going to run, but for the first time, he thought Brown might be bluffing.
In the washroom he ran cool water over his wrists, then looked at his hands. They were still his. He wiggled his fingers. Amazing, really."

I remember Stephenson achieving a slightly similar effect in... Snow Crash, I think, except he made his world - not his characters - seem like something too big for the book to contain by hinting at certain, intriguing details only to return to the main plot a moment after, leaving you high and dry.

And now I'm on to Secrets of the Gotha, which reads like a tabloid adhering to the rules of the Spanish court protocol, so expect lots of random and absurd quotes about 19th century European royals in the near future.

* their route even mirrored ours to a certain extent, as they travelled from New York to D.C.. Eventually, they ended up in Vancouver, which I intend to treat as a portent.