Italy: Political turmoil | Al Ja...

Oh it's gone!

That blue and yellow flag again!
An unsure sign
Of something in the wind . . .




It was Al Jazeera's report on the unelected 'rabbit out of the hat': an  unelected ex-IMF director being dropped into the Italian Prime Minister's chair.

What kind of trick is this?! 

Will he last longer than a flute of Prosecco at a garden party?

I wouldn't bank on it.

Doctored? Mum's the word.

A good many years ago a doctor told my mother that her cholesterol level was too high.

Mum said: It's only too high because you people have changed the numbers.

It was clear to mum that the numbers had been doctored.

What mum knew was that her cholesterol had been in the 'normal' range before the lower levels were 'invented'.

Mum refused the doctor's advice and tablets.

Next week she will be 98.


One time I went to a doctor who measured my heartbeat.

He said: It's too low.

I said: What do you mean by too low?

He said: It seems to be less than 40 beats per minute.

I said: What should it be?

He said: For your age, about 70 beats per minute would be good.

I don't really know why but I immediately said: Miguel Indurain's resting pulse is 28 bpm.

I'd read it in a cycling magazine once. Perhaps that was the reason.

Doc said: Uh?

I could see the Doc was puzzled so I said: A friend of mine has a higher pulse rate. It's 34. But he's he's only a runner. He doesn't cycle up the Pyrenees.

Doc then showed me another machine. It looked a like a vacuum cleaner. In fact it was just like the drawing of the vacuum cleaner-WMD in Graham Greene's 'Our Man in Havana'.

Doc said: Blow into the mouthpiece. I'll measure your lung capacity.

When I'd finished blowing he said: You have the highest reading we've ever measured.

I said: Is there anything else?

He said: No. You can go now.

That was 30 years ago.  Shortly after mum's cholesterol 'problem'.


Since that time I can only recall my heartbeat being measured once.

My friend Jon, a believer in gadgets,  once put a heart monitor on my chest and said: Run up and down that hill over there.

When I got back five minutes later he showed me the result.

The screen on his device said:  00 bpm

Jon said: I don't understand it.

I said: I must be dead.

Jon laughed.


As for my pulse, I no longer measure it.

When I want my pulse to go faster I drink coffee.

If I want it to go slower I drink beer.


That's all there is to it.





*Note: If you're feeling unwell consult a doctor.  The above story is for amusement only.

Green grows the Irish garden

A small contribution to Northsider Dave's appeal for garden pictures.

My green corners.

Dave is a poly-tunnel expert, a writer of humorous anecdotes, and something of a rambler.  He grows his own vegetables somewhere in Ireland.

I don't have a poly-tunnel (yet!) but I know whom to consult should the need arise.

On the bare patch of earth there were sword lilies but I removed them after they'd finished flowering and planted a green bushy thing which I was told the name of but neglected to memorize. It ought to flower, I'm told. It seems to be thriving and has doubled in size in the space of 3 weeks or so.

Forecasting the weather for the gardeners needn't be a hit and miss affair. In the garden we have a green frog who sometimes carries a red and white umbrella.

The cat in a garden is a sign of fine weather.  It's 28 C at the moment.  There is thunder in the east but it shouldn't arrive here before nightfall, if it arrives at all.

That's Life

80 years ago, on 1st June 1938 a man was walking through Paris when a branch fell from a tree and killed him. The man, Odin Von Horvath, was a Hungarian and the author of the play Tales from the Vienna Woods. He had emigrated to Paris from Vienna to escape the Nazi occupation of Austria. He was 37.

In this life you never know what is waiting for you around the next corner.

Glass Bead Poems and Lives

The Glass Bead Game (post below) continues to fascinate.

There is no reason why the reader cannot follow the progress of the hero Knecht as he works his way through his task.

The poems he writes during his early studies, all 13 of them, are to be found in the tail end of the book, as also are the 3 stories - which he writes later - under the heading The Lives.

The poem titles are fascinating in themselves: A Dream, The Last Glass Bead Game Player, The Glass Bead Game, A Toccata by Bach, and Stages . . .

The Lives are previous lives the student imagines he may have lived. These are The Rainmaker, The Father Confessor, and The Indian Life.

A meditation to be taken slowly.  A dedication to the journeyers to the east.

German speakers tell me they have tried and failed with this book. Others veer away from it.

No such problems with the English version.

You can believe that!

Other innovative novels by the same author include:

Demian

Steppenwolf

Siddhartha

Narcissus and Goldmund


The back cover blurb of my copy of Glass Bead Game, the book shown in the post below,  reads thus:

In the remote Kingdom of Castalia, the scholars of the twenty-third century play the Glass Bead Game. The elaborately coded game is a fusion of all human knowledge - of maths, music, philosophy, science and art. Intrigued as a school boy, Joseph Knecht becomes consumed with mastering the game as an adult. As Knecht fulfills his life-long quest he must contend with unexpected dilemmas and a longing for a life beyond the ivory tower.


'Sublime'   - Thomas Mann

I think that's the right word.

The book I've bought (in a bookshop!) for my summer reading

The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse (translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston) Vintage Classics.  ISBN 978-0-099-28362-1.  Fiction.

"One of the truly important books of the century, in any language." - The Times.

Hermann Karl Hesse was born in Calw, Württemberg, Germany in 1877.

As a protest against German militarism in the First World War he moved to Switzerland and lived there in self-imposed exile until his death in Montagnola, near Lugano, in 1962.

Hesse was influenced by his interest in music, the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, and Eastern thought.

The novel was first published in Switzerland in 1943.

Hesse was on the German regime's  list of banned authors and the book was not available in Germany until after the Second World War in 1946.

In the same year Hermann Hesse received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Arnie's back in town

The R20 World Summit is in Vienna and the undoubted star of the show is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres, Jane Goodall of chimpanzee fame, and the prime ministers of Austria, Norway and Denmark are also in attendance.

Joschka Fischer, a previous foreign minister and Green Party member for Germany, is a so-called 'surprise guest'.

Clean Air, Clean Water and a Healthy Environment

There are huge obstacles: Lack of EU action is one.
  Think  Dieselgate!

Industry calling the shots.

Trucks, cars, road and building construction.

Dust everywhere.

Car parks where corn used to grow.

Cement, gravel and water

insatiable demand

holes go deeper

than a lobbyist's pockets


mountainsides

and forests

disappear almost overnight



One simple matter

- smoking in the workplace -

is permanently

on the back burner,

if it

is

even there.


The political will

is not to be seen.


Unwanted

cars will soon head south

like birds in winter

fair exchange

 for unwanted

meat.

Robert Musil's Flypaper begins . . . .

The flypaper Tangle Foot is about thirty-six centimeters long and twenty-one centimeters wide. It is coated with a poisonous yellow glue and comes from Canada. If a fly were to land on it - not particularly from curiosity, but more from convention because so many others were there - the outer extremities of her bent legs would be the first of her parts to be held fast. A very light and strange sensation, as if you were to walk in the dark and step on something with your naked soles, that was nothing more than a soft, warm, unclear resistance; but then you realized with a gradual and terrible human realization, that something you'd imagine as a hand somehow lay there, and had with five growing evermore distinct fingers held you fast . . .

This above is not a literal translation from the German but merely an exercise I have done because I cannot find what I consider a flowing translation of this first paragraph of Das Fliegenpapier. Translations are new works, as Thomas Bernhard said, and therefore a translator while keeping closely to the original text must be prepared to bring the same poetic quality to bear as he finds in the original, particularly with a great writer like Musil. It's not enough to merely translate. Yesterday, Saturday, I ordered an English copy of Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel, and I'm hoping for the best. I think it's by Vintage Classics so it should be a good translation. It'll be waiting for me in my local bookshop on Tuesday afternoon.


ps: There's more than one way to buy a book. Please support your local bookshops. If you don't you'll sooner or later be stuck with one way.

Choice is important.

The daily news from the Republic . . .

 Another corner
and The Crown 
       an evening paper
thrust my way


Austrian justice system threatened with financial collapse.
Moscow military power parade commemorates victory against nazi Germany.
Iran nuclear deal. What will Trump do next?
World record at David Rockefeller auction. Private art collection sold for €545 million.
Five Austrian friends share €45 million lottery jackpot.
Germany: 800 police raid illegal immigrant network of fake security officers.
Zero tolerance for bogus asylum seekers following brutal murder.
Viennese spend €129 on average on Mother's Day presents.
France: 71st international film festival report.
Sport: Dominic Thiem on masters tournament in Madrid (tennis)
           Austrian Cup Final tonight 8:30pm.  Salzburg v. Graz  (football)
Television: Cesar Sampson "an Austrian Lewis Hamilton" reaches Eurovision final.

That's it. That's basically all you really need to know.

See how it's going?

It's all downhill from here.

Sorry I can't be more optimistic when it comes to reflecting on the mainstream daily news. That's why I have several alternative news links in the sidebar.

So it is, as Kurt Vonnegut would say if he was here in this Viennese cafe with me.






         

A Reason to watch tonight's Eurovision Song Contest; Ieva Zasimauskaitė - When We're Old - Lithuania

Cannot believe I watched the first semi-final of the Eurovision musical jamboree complete with strobe and garish effect flimmering  the whole way through. But sadly I did.

For something to occupy my distraction I made some notes, now thankfully deleted, as it went along.

The end result was that I woke this morning with the anti-war hit  'Neunundneunzig Luftballons', a song from Nena (1983) and known as 'Ninety-nine Red Balloons' in  the English-speaking world,  floating gently through my mind.

So what does it all mean?

  This thing is past its sell by date or I am?

  Let's face it.  It was always so.

  One grows old.

  Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.



  Thank you Ieva Zasimausekaite.

  And congratulations on reaching the final.

Not the Nobel Prize

In a week that the Nobel Prize was making the headlines for the wrong reasons I was pleased to be be in the audience at several venues and also at the final evening of an Amateur International Choir Competition and Festival held in Austria.

The judging panel comprised three judges. It struck me as odd that one of the three judges whose task was to award points was a Swede, since Sweden had a choir participating in the competition.

I dismissed this early thought as mild paranoia. You've seen too many controversial Olympic and World gymnastic and ice-dancing championships on TV,  and even the Eurovision Song Contest is not without its controversial results, I told myself.

Russians. Shouldn't they look more like dangerous spies?

Indonesians. How unwarlike they are. 

Here are the friendly Croatians.  

And here some delightful Czechs

Japanese ladies had their fans.

Norwegian ladies were well conducted.

And the winner of the €2,000 first prize is . . .
Sweden. 

I don't pretend to know the intricacies of the judging process and I am very pleased for the winners.

But

for some 

there will always be a tiny  but  

hanging like a shadow 

over the result.

But, as I said, it's not the Nobel Prize.

The Merry Month of May

 without a maypole?

Unthinkable!

The maypole arrives . . . 

. . . in traditional manner.

It's erection by 20 men is a slow and careful process . . . 

. . . using only ropes and poles.

Finally above the surrounding trees . . .

. . . the maypole stands proud. 

Every Austrian town and village worth its salt will now have one.  And why not?

After all, we are now in the Merry Month of May.

I believe we owe it to future generations to preserve our ancient and charming traditions.

Here are a pair of couples making merry:

Do you have a maypole tradition where you are?