staatsbesuch oder order of precedence

When the Queen and her consort come on a state-visit to Germany next week, they’ll be thronged by some adoring fans and followers. I wonder what sort of gifts will be exchanged. These two powerful women have everything but surely it will be something a little more dear and thoughtful than a bundle of DVDs her Majesty got that one time.
In the history of diplomacy, a lot of treasure, tribute and artefacts have been presented on state receptions, pandas, china, but probably the most priceless present was given by a scholar and magistrate of Constantinople called Gemistus Plethon during a council (summit) in the city state of Florence in 1430 to Cosimo d’Medici in the form of the complete works of Plato. These dialogues had been lost to Western academics for over a thousand years, since the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe and theological, scientific and philosophic thought had been governed by the teachings of Aristotle, Plato’s student. Medici, patron of the arts and scholarship, however, recognised the value of this trove of forgotten knowledge and commissioned priest Marsilio Ficino to translate the whole parnassus and provide commentary. The undertaking took decades (during which time it is also rumoured that Ficino may have tweaked the notion of a Platonic-relationship in order to excuse his own proclivities, and by the way, probably invented tarot card divination out of an interest for numerology he discovered in these new dialogues) but was probably the singular gift-exchange that sparked and sustained the Renaissance by shifting one’s perception of classical thought first in Italy and then beyond. This might be a tough one to top but I bet the Chancellor will present something meaningful.

5x5

archidirectors: cinematic visionaries imagined as architecture

needful things: revisiting the online emporium of haunted, cursed antiques

flying toasters: Dangerous Minds’ Dangerous Finds discovers that androids really do dream of dream of electronic sheep

de domús communis cura: condensed version and highlights of papal encyclical on environmental stewardship

b-moll: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier performed by a twisting gallery of neon lights

mauvaise foi

If not for coming across an indirect quotation, I would have gone on believing that the saying “Hell is other people” was a lyric from a rock-song (I’m confusing “Hell is for children” I think) and a rather throw-away sentiment and not a line, in translation, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act play No Exit. Just as words might serve us better if the title of the play Huis Clos weren’t rendered as Closed Door—or rather in chambers in the legal sense of private counsel that the phrase carries in French, it would have been truer to the original if Hell was understood as the Other.

I have grown a bit fond of learning about quotes misattributed, misremembered and miseducated lately, and if one knows anything about the French existentialist, it is those words he never said. On stage three bourgeois souls are condemned to a dreary waiting-room—not as an anteroom for something yet to come since over the course of eternity we’d adapt and resign ourselves to torture and not so much when it comes to unending anticipation. Sartre’s intent behind the line, which was the subject of curiosity and consternation, was that our judgments that we project and deflect became torturous because they parroted outside influences. What would the neighbours think? This is the damning mechanism—a relation to self and others that’s insufficient and apt to mislead but not unavoidable. I think that there was certainly a miss connection between Sartre and one essayist and theatre-critic who wrote a hundred years prior by the name of William Hazlitt. Hazlitt held that man’s chief mistake was in the delusion that one’s future self was in any way different than any other present interaction with another person. One’s future self was non-existent, emergent and determined by any number of intervening contemporary, non-aspirational encounters and to act counter, in accordance with selfishness and insecurity, is what leads people becoming inauthentic. Hazlitt was a staunch materialist, which is to say that he had no truck with immaterially things like the soul or the Forms, problematically but such an approach that could have really proved to be a saving-grace for Sartre’s inmates.

5x5

straβenverkkehrsordnung: a unique roadway configuration and the technicalities of traffic regulations means that one stop light has been red for three decades in Dresden

over the rainbow: MOMA acquires the pride flag and interviews the seamstress

four thousand holes in blackburn, lancashire: internet giant is checking computer reading-comprehension with conservative, sensational tabloids

electric babysitter: artist captures images of her children in listless, powerful moments of watching TV

raptor squat: honest-to-goodness zookeepers re-enacting pose from new Jurassic World

von und zu oder king under the mountain

A nobiliary particle (Adelsprädikat) is such a brilliantly useful term that I feel I ought to have known existed already—being one of those things within the necessary periodicity of language that’s completed with jargon and technical talk—but didn’t have the word for. As the name implies, it is a catch-all for all those ennobling, aristocratic elements of a family that denote some sense of present or former elevation, like de, o’ (of), von, zu, af, van and others. In many cases in English the particle, which is the same as the adpositional word that form spatial relations—to, from, above, under—has become embedded in the name or just reverts to the name of the estate but clues are still given about ownership and heritage.

currently reading: hocus pocus, or what’s the hurry, son?

in which Kurt Vonnegut, JR appears as a benignly unreliable narrator, the namesake of reformer and labour rights champion Eugene Debs, to blithely contemplate the End Times in the early twenty-first century—having written the book in the final decade of the twentieth, knowing that God is not big into numerology. The phrase hocus pocus, according to some sources, is a parody of the priest’s seeming magic trick of transubstantiation during mass. Hoc est corpus meum. The first English language work to address sleight of hand and prestidigitation, incidentally, was an anonymous publication in the early seventeenth century titled Hocus Pocus Junior—which might have been the stage-name of the author.

5x5

rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces

ossuary: sojourn around the world to reveal how the dead are kept among the living

blue harvest (dead link): Chinese theatres screen Star Wars saga for the first time nearly four decades after its release

consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports

nictotine

During the Golden Age of Exploration, French ambassador to the kingdom of Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain, undertook a voyage to the Portuguese new world colony of Brazil in 1560, bringing back with him a specimen of a tobacco plant, which he presented to the French king. The plant was studied and classified in Paris and incorporated the ambassador’s name into the scientific nomenclature—hence the chemical compound called nicotine.  Tobacco-use was promoted a defence against the plague and grew popular very quickly.  This tobacco substance was moreover as widely used as a pesticide as it was smoked, up until the 1980s when alternatives deemed less harmful to humans could be produced cheaply.