Author: dkendall

2023 is approaching its end and once again I work on my annual plan for the coming year, the languages I want to concentrate on, what I want to read and learn about, where I want to travel, even improvements in personal habits, although that part is classified information. It’s not a rigid plan but a general guide as to my priorities. And perhaps three-quarters of it is unfulfilled as I am wildly overoptimistic and don’t take into account the waning energy of old age and the increasing need for footle time.

At the end of every year, I mourn the neglect of my school Latin and the lack of progress on resurrecting it (French I have retained and developed but not Latin). And the scant progress with Ancient Greek, which I regret not learning at school. My plan has never been to achieve a mastery of ancient Greek but to know the alphabet and how the language is constructed, to be able to be make better use of a language so important for etymology. My three languages for the following year will be German, Bengali and French. I am now so often in Germany that I am impatient to make progress on understanding as well as reading the language.  And Bengali excites my curiosity is it really impossible for a soon 80-year-old brain to learn a non-European language or is that just a crude generalisation? My powers of retention have clearly waned but perhaps the brain can be trained in other ways to compensate for this. In French, I hold my own and have no complaint although my grand plan of knowing more about the impact of the Germanic on the Latin language world remains in its infancy.

And every year I express a desire to improve my knowledge of the workings of the world, both in my home countries, the UK and Sweden (with Germany and Bengal waiting in the wings with “candidate” status). I’m becoming more systematic in my efforts but there’s much room for improvement.

There are also my home counties in the UK, above all Dorset and Somerset, where I know quite a bit, much more than when I took the ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in 1973. I love to revisit the same territory but from slightly different angles. My plan was ambitious  to study the county as if I was going to produce a comprehensive Germanic encyclopaedia of the old school, with sections on geology, archaeology, architecture, language, agriculture etc. I still haven’t really got beyond Dorset churches which attracted my attention long ago. It’s highly satisfactory though to know what I am looking at when I am there and not just skim by in false familiarity. I find it so refreshing to dip back into a time when I was less complicated, not split by exile.

My new world has, however, become increasingly important and I have become increasingly fond of Uppsala and Uppland, finding echoes of my own past in its relatively dense population with many villages and buildings of interest, stories and histories. I hope to make more progress on this front in 2024 ,but have to be systematic and well planned as links with families and friends pull me elsewhere and time is limited.

Music, the history of ideas, religion and philosophy have their place in my plan too. A long-planned website on Jerome, the patron saint of translators. has been inching forward and I am determined to complete in 2024. I’ve no ambition to play music but I would like to understand better what I am listening to. The last months in Germany have been satisfying on that front with two visits to hear parts of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in northern German churches and soon, today in fact, a Chopin concert.

I won’t be able to complete more than a fraction of my plans but the journey is more important to me than the end; to see life as a personal work of art where there is always some corner that can be changed, improved or embellished.  And while it’s sensible to come to terms with the physical aspects of aging, we don’t have to accept the socially conditioned and traditional; it need not mean the end of development or personal change, it’s still possible to remake oneself, to overcome the power of inertia.

And even if at some point, infirmity or a visit from the Grim Reaper interrupts the process, so what – I’m not responsible for the wonky nature of creation.

Tuesday, 12 December 2023

My spirits are soaring with the departure of the snow and the reappearance of attractive Warnemünde from the slush.

The last two days I’ve travelled into Rostock as I’m getting documents ready for my accountant and need to print. And buying a cheap printer to dispose of at the end of the month,  however sensible in terms of time and comfort, was unpalatable. Finding a print shop was serendipitous; I stumbled across it when I was looking for a tram stop, having not initially noticed that the tram lines dive down under the central station.

I had another such moment today, this time on the tram when, engrossed in sending a text message to an offspring, I went a stop too far. And got off right by the university bookshop, which I hadn’t found before and which had some books in English. I have the Nobel prizewinner Jon Fosse’s A new name Septology VI-VII in English. I don’t think I’m going to get through it. I admire his style of writing and like his resistance to filtering but his interests and take on the world are too far removed from mine. At the University bookshop, I picked up Scott Fitzgerald’s “This side of paradise”. I know nothing about Scott Fitzgerald but will learn more.

Full marks to my guardian angel on the serendipity front.

I also found a good second-hand bookshop and since I dislike filching the ambience without contributing anything I bought Winfried Löschburg’s Ohne Glanz und Gloria about the Hauptmann von Köpenick (published in 1979).

My stay in Rostock is drawing to a close but I will come back. Next time I want to explore the City Archives at the Town Hall but think I will prepare this by writing to the author of the book about the Bailiff’s House to see if I can get him to talk about his sources.

My German has developed in unexpected ways. My plan was for a radical improvement in my ability to understand, for example, TV news. I have made some improvement but the demands of everyday life have compelled me to speak to folk. And my German is weird. I have a large German vocabulary but have never been taught German. My communication consists largely of nouns with a few seriously overworked verbs scampering heroically around. I state the general area of interest and then whittle it down until it’s clear what I want. And it works fine at least for multi-socket plugs, stationery printing. As long as people concentrate and don’t panic like this morning when my clearly-designated cheese cake became a blueberry muffin.

And the New Year is approaching. I need to prepare my plan for 2024. This year I want it to be a realistic plan so that my plan for 2025 can be a step forward and not a rehash of unfulfilled goals. And that means developing sensible interim goals for, for example, languages that I would like to develop but can’t realistically concentrate on this year if I’m going to make a major effort with German and Bengali: Ancient Greek and Latin are in this category and I could, for example, aim to master the Ancient Greek alphabet by the end of the year, perhaps moving on to common prefixes and suffixes if there is time over.

I am pleased about one target that I have almost achieved, which is to replace about 50 notebooks which I’ve jotted things down over the years but always as an inglorious mixture. But now I’ve got about 20 books for different subjects and the fathers of the church will hopefully stay in their pen and not get tangled up with unemployed shipyard workers in Rostock after the Fall and the etymology of the obscure.

It’s low season here in Warnemünde but it’s still bustling with open shops and restaurants, a far cry from bleak and boarded up English resorts. I’m curious about who the bustlers are and what brings them here; I shall ask my contact in the tourist office or perhaps at the Neptune Hotel on the seafront when I get that far.

I’d planned to spend time on the seashore today but a raw chill kept me in the town, It seems very much to be a resort for Germans. Some information in English at museums but I have only found one book in English about Warnemünde, which makes me cringe because of its relentlessly chummy tone (this may be a matter of taste). It had some information about the Bailiff’s house, which I went to look at today. It’s just over the swing bridge, a remarkable old building, one of the oldest in the town with 1605 written on the wall, this being a replacement for an earlier mediaeval building, of which traces remain. Apart from the chortling of my guide, I was also irked by my having strode past the building a number of times without noticing it. I like to think that I have sharpened my architectural eye but my gaze is as inward as ever. The bailiff referred to was an official from Rostock, which has been in charge of Warnemünde from mediaeval times. I wanted to see the granite blocks in the wall that my guidebook assures me came from the island of Gotland and were used by the masons of the Danish king Menved to build a “palace” on the site, The Danes were powerful in the thirteenth century around the Baltic and ruled Gotland after the battle of Visby in 1361 though the king was Valdemar IV. I’m not sure where Menved fits in but the Danish connection seems not unreasonable. However, I am curious about the granite from Gotland as I’ve always understood Gotland to be mainly cretaceous in contrast to the Swedish mainland. The older rocks are there but very deep down below sea level and overlaid. Perhaps there are outcrops of older rocks. It’s a good question for me as I’ve wanted for a long time to know more about geology. I see from the net that they do sell slabs of something called Swedish granite from Gotland but these seem to be thin and mainly decorative.

I’m planning to visit Rostock tomorrow and will spend a few hours in the library to see what I can find out about the sources of the granite story. It need not be incorrect even if the granite was from elsewhere as it could well have been taken to/traded in  Gotland en route to Germany.

The old house also has the coat of arms of Rostock on its wall, two lions rampant and a gryphon (griffin) superimposed on the colours of Mecklenburg. According to sources on the net, a gryphon has the body, tail and back legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. A wyvern, on the other hand is a two-legged creature resembling a dragon with deadly breath that roamed the French countryside (and appears to have a special relationship with the English city of Leicester). I’ve yet to have any practical use for this information.

I was amused to find that Edvard Munch had been in Warnemünde between 1906 and 1908; Munch whose paintings I have often referred to to explain my distaste for the dark and dismal Nordic winter. And now he pops up in Warnemünde, my winter refuge. The house where he lived beside the Alten Ström is not a museum but a cultural centre tended by the Norwegians and the Germans with a library, artist exchanges and a small exhibition of Munch’s photographs. There is a fine restored gallery where the artist used to sit and peer out, seeing but not being seen, on the seaward side of what was once the cottage of fisher folk.

Initially, Warnemünde suited him well, calming his nervous disposition leading him to compare it with his youthful days in Norway, although that must have been his very youthful days before a series of misfortunes led to the deaths of his mother and some siblings, Munch talked of his healthy diet and being reborn. I agree with him, it is a relaxing and beneficial place although I shall go easy on the fish diet.

Munch was very productive here but after a couple of years, the picture darkened. Warnemünde was developing as a tourist location and the crowds of seaseekers displeased him. But there also seemed to have been a clash between Munch and the locals as he describes Warnemünde as a terribly bourgeois place. I’m not sure whether it was his lifestyle, his work or a mixture of both but I noticed that one of his most famous nude photographs of Rosa Meissner was taken at a hotel and not his atelier, which was presumably more easily penetrated by the watchful prude. His travails, however, were not just the work of the world; he suffered from feelings of persecution both by the living and (if I have understood the German correctly) the dead.

He did, however, live to the age of 80, although his last years must have been darkened by the applause of Europe being silenced by the Nazis who confiscated 82 of his works as degenerate art. By then he was back in Norway although the Nazis came soon after and he did not live to celebrate their departure.

For the time being, I am glad to think of him on my daily circular walk around Alten Ström. I shall continue to develop warm feelings for Warnemünde, hopefully without a whiff of scandal.

The GDR border officials at Warnemünde were not enthusiastic about my plans to travel along the East German coast to the ferry to Sweden at Sassnitz. And I made it worse by ignoring the call to visit the on-board visa office when a transit visa to Rugen might have slipped through as they tackled the flow to Berlin. Realising that I’m in danger of getting a formal record of refusal of entry, I beat a retreat and agree docilely to the administratively convenient solution of returning to the ferry for the “normal passage” to Sweden via Copenhagen.

It then gets hairy. No walk along a lighted bridge to a hole in the wall entrance to the ferry; instead steps down to the open-air forecourt and a vague wave in the direction of the ship. The story of the Italian communist Benito Corghi at the Bavarian-GDR border was fresh in my mind. Returning to his lorry on the western side to collect a forgotten passport, he was shot to death by a border guard. I walk, all alone, very slowly, to the ship, trying to look like a man out for a stroll enjoying the ambience of the border area. My guardian angel is awake; there is no sudden crack and sharp pain but I get to the ferry intact.

It was just as well. I had too little money and the detour was pointless, able to produce only a jumble of odd associations to add to my youthful foreign frenzy travel where beautiful cities became memories of salami sandwiches in motorway service stations.

Decades later, another trip to Rostock or rather Graal Müritz just down the coast where I stayed a week on a study visit. By then my tourist skills had improved along with the slow late maturing of DK.

But my associations were not all good – being taken by car back to the hotel by the local mayor to collect presents, coffee to be distributed to the folk we’d spent the evening playing skittles with. I didn’t begrudge them the coffee but the break in not unpleasant conversation for the act of charity felt shabby and unpleasant.

There was no Warnemünde that trip but now I’m here for a month to escape to a softer, lighter winter. So far better than I dared hope, a spacious and tasteful flat far from the leftover bits and pieces of furniture of my stoic imagination. It’s central too, five minutes from bed to bookshop. And the town is not boarded up and bleak like the winter seaside in dear old Albion but bustling with open restaurants, museums and galleries but no seasonal hordes.

Today, I’ll plan how to get to know the area (2024 is fast approaching so I need to work on my grand plan for next year too). And to think about what I want to get out of this month. Better understanding of spoken German is high on my list. I made a start yesterday grappling with cryptic zappers. The TV eventually came on, grudgingly accepting my refusal to be contented with sport and fashion. But I have no idea what was effective among my increasingly manic button pressing. So for the time being, it´s 24-7 TV time, although thankfully I have mastered the mute button.

I’m close to the centre but also to the “kurpark” which is unexpectedly appropriate. At home, I’ve glided into bad habits with too little exercise and an increasingly disturbed relationship to time. So now I have two months to work on improving my act so I earn a refreshing pat on the head at my heart check-up in February and not a furrowed brow pondering yet another exercise in damage limitation.

It feels good too to be in a spacious dust-free flat with sofa, bath and kitchen table rather than living in a soft existential corner of  a library. I love my hundred shelves of books but there are definitely some arguments in favour of a less eccentric life space.

I’ve learnt the word ”doxxing”, which is defined on Wikipedia as  the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet.  The usage of the term, originally from documentation, has broadened at Columbia University in New York where students  who had signed a statement that said, in part, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government.”, had their names and photographs displayed on the side of a truck driven near campus with a message “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”

Students protested against this doxxing by walking out of a lecture by Hillary Clinton, who is now lecturing at Columbia.

There’s an explanation of Alexander’s exploits in the bathysphere on the Getty Museum’s website https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RYQ in connection with another picture of Alexander’s aquatic derring do in their collection (artist unknown).

.According to their description, Alexander the Great, was a student of Aristotle and wanted to explore underwater. Accompanied by a dog, a cat and a cockerel, he had himself lowered into the water, according to this story which was apparently popular in Germany in mediaeval times. So far so odd but here the plot thickens. Alexander’s mistress is sitting in the boat entrusted with the chain holding the bathysphere. However, she is not alone but holding hands with her new lover who persuades her to elope with him, whereupon she casts the chain into the sea, leaving Alexander to work out his own escape (no info on how A achieves this). I can’t see the animals in my pic but they were part of the story. The social situation seems more complicated in my pic (which is at the Bodleian in Oxford) than in the Getty Museum’s version where there is not just a couple simpering and cooing but a whole gang of people, two of whom are holding the chain.

This seems remarkably naïve of a man who must have had a considerable intellectual capacity, Hardly a fitting end for a warrior. He certainly wouldn’t have been let into Valhalla if he’d arrived with such a lamentable tale (the guards on the gate would have laughed until they choked on their mead).

The name “bathysphere” comes from bathytroctes, a genus of the slickhead fish from the depths of the ocean. On this occasion, Alexander was anything but a slickhead. This may, however, be a fishy story or popular etymology rather than scientific as “bathos” means deep in Ancient Greek, bathysphere and the name of the fish are related therefore but they may well be cousins rather than parent and child. The picture of the fish shaking its head (or fin perhaps) at the dechained Alexander and thinking that this ain’t no slickhead is hard to resist.

The street names around my flat please me; on my side of the road, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Verner von Heidenstam, Stig Dagerman, Bengt Lidner, Carl Gustaf af Leopold, Frederika Bremer, Lars Värnlund and Elin Wägner are all there. The other side towards Gamla Uppsala is appropriately all Nordic mythology . Baldur, Idun and Mimer have their roads as well as Valhalla and more. Refreshing with resonant road names that stimulate learning rather than the trite banality of berry or sport names. Värnlund was a new discovery for me. I was impressed that a rather conservative city had the breadth of vision to honour Värnlund, not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. My latest exploration has been Leopold. I knew he wasn’t the monster of the Congo but not much else. Carl Gustaf af Leopold 1756-1829 is perhaps mainly famous as a poet, advocate of French classicism and the Alexandrine at a time when the steamier enthusiasm of Romanticism was waxing in the shape of the journal Phosphorus among others. Not surprisingly, Leopold was involved in various literary feuds, which at some point I’ll try and get my head around but not nowpoint. He was also active as an academy member and in standardising Swedish spelling.

Rather too prone to use his pen to embellish various royals for my taste but an interesting figure none the less.

And he led to me looking up the Alexandrine meter (with a sigh as I can never get poetic meters sorted out despite parroting about iambic pentameters in youthful exams). Googling Alexandrine led me to a pic by Jehan de Grise (1338-1344) of Alexander the Great in a glass diving bell.

Diving bells seem somehow post-industrial revolution or just before, nothing I associate with the fourteenth century. Also curious what Alexander was up to and interesting with de Grise’s choice of topic when art was full of martyred saints rather than the glories of Rome and Greece.

I´ve also learnt the collective word for a group of cats, which is a clowder. Apparently from the early nineteenth century thought to be from the dialect word cludder, which in turn is related to clutter.

And now I know the meaning of the American slang term “cat’s paw” meaning someone you use to do something bad. That feels like a gap in my education where folk might ask me “Didn’t you know that term?”. And, after a fashion I do or at least I’ve seen it before and not bothered to react.

Of interest in W.B. Lockwood’s “The Language and Culture of the Faroes Islands”

– There are a large number of words in Faroese to denote different kinds of waves and currents in the sea

(like the Sami in northern Scandinavia and Finland with their large number of words for snow)

– The orthography of Faroese constructed in the nineteenth century on etymological principles helps those familiar with Old Norse to read Faroese but “is often a nuisance to the Faroese themselves”, making it difficult to teach children to spell properly

– Apples don´t grow in the Faroes and were an exotic fruit until the last century. The potato got to the Faroes first; they took over the Danish word for potato translated literally into English as “earth apple” (jordepli with accents and a letter I can’t reproduce) and then simplified it to “epli”. This made things complicated when apples started to arrive so they are referred to as “surepli” (with accent), sour apples.

– Most Faroese people recognise far more birds than we would. They have no general word for gull but call different birds in the gull family by separate names, thus “gneggjus” for common gull, “rita” for three-toed gull and likka for lesser black-backed gull.

– They mix the words for sun (sol) and moon, Traditionally the moon was thought to exercise a baleful influence and its name became taboo, Thus the sentence “Tarvitrin matti ikki drepast i avtakandi sol” (“The bull had not to be slaughtered in the waning sun”). The sun, of course, doesn’t wane, it’s the moon that does that. However, as mention of the moon is thought to be unlucky, the superstitious replace the word for moon by the word for “sun”, which can be confusing for the uninitiated.

Lockwood also has some interesting information about the persistence of communal customs, how a large amount of essential work such as bird-catching, sheep-tending, fishing, whale and seal-hunting, milking, clearing paths and building houses was done by communal labour. There are still remnants of this, in, for instance, the whale hunt. On some islands, even as late as the last century sheep were owned in common by the whole population and in other places when bird eggs were collected, a portion called a “land part” was distributed freely to the whole population regardless of whether they had participated in collecting the eggs. Deep sea fishing, attracting away the young and vigorous for months at a time in return for individual cash wages has intensified the trend away from communal pursuits.

Source: Saga-Book, 1946-53, Vol 13 (1946-53), pp 249-268 published by Viking Society for Northern Research

My God of sleep, my personal Morpheus,  is on the autism spectrum. He knows what sleep is – he’s seen lots doing it but he doesn’t understand. So up he pops at inappropriate moments – on the bus just before my stop, at friends’ dinner table, but not in bed at 4 am. After a brief struggle to cling on to CET, I surrender to KVT (Kendall Variable Time) and get up.

Stimulated by Messenger, Alexandre Dumas makes his appearance with La Dame aux Camélias.

Only recently familiar, I now know that it was about a lady working as a courtesan, who wore a red camelia when she was menstruating and a white when not. It sounds ingenious and I wonder whether it might solve my problem with restaurant visits at the local pensioners’centre. The food is good and cheap but people might talk to me, when I want to put the world on hold. So perhaps if I wore a red camelia, I could be alone, except that red camelias are a symbol for passion that you give to your beloved. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps if I wrote an explanatory leaflet about myself or maybe it’s just easier to cook in my kitchen’s bookish calm.

From camelias to chameleons, which is (I think) the same in French. Wrestling with whether “Les dames aux chameleons” works in French, planning the day pushes Dumas rather abruptly off stage.

But before I get very far Molly Coddle hoves into view, I know not why but she triggers my etymological alarm response. It means pamper, which is a synonym for coddle. Otherwise, the word is innocent enough with its aura of blankets, hot chocolate and brows caressed by beloveds. But it had a chequered history in its early nineteenth century youth with unpleasant homophobic overtones associating it with effeminate gay men, moll having drifted from a working lady at the other end of the social scale from La Dames aux Camelias to a homophobic term for gay men. Fortunately, the word rapidly lost its youthful louche.

But then began the wild dance of the internet, saviour of the thinking being when the ceiling of the world lowers and starts to crush. A source about the history of moll leads me to Dr Jacob Serenius, who produced a Swedish-English dictionary (among others) in 1762. Born in Färentuna, he was a priest at the Swedish church in London for a number of years and took an active part in eighteenth century intellectual life. I’m not sure I would have approved of his take on religion but interrogation about that can wait.

Hunting for the dictionary on Libris, I seem to have arrived at a bad time as the website is rushing around in the throes of renewal but things are hushly calm at Carolina Rediviva; I learnt that Serenius is far from unknown in the Swedish lexicographical world with a half recent Gothenburg University PhD.

Returning to Sweden, he became a bishop active in Strängnäs where he died.  There is a picture of him at All Saints (Alla Helgons) church in Nyköping, which I have to visit (after I’ve checked that it´s actually on the wall and not languishing in some ecclesiastical basement together with sentimental nineteenth century alabaster statues of the saviour with his feet chopped off).

With no urgent translation work, it feels like a good day for a library visit to Carolina Rediviva. I have an article about the Faroes that I’ve wanted to read for some time and I’d like to learn about how to access digital articles as so many publications are now only available that way.

But I have an hour of Bengali to fit in, an hour of French, an hour of current affairs, an hour of German, a body longing for a walk and a shingles vaccination, and a flat that needs attention if it is not to scream from every dusty corner that an old man lives here. Lucky that KVT has a flexibility worthy of Harry Potter and doesn’t plod along with the austere inevitability of CET.

It’s now 6.45 CET, more or less the same in KVT with 2 hours and fifteen minutes to get through my Japanese tea ceremony-like shift from night mode to day mode before 09.00. So resisting the temptation to relax on my lotus leaf in my dressing gown and drift around on the Internet ocean, I am going to leap up and put all these pesky items pressing in on me in their place.