little golden book or mihi causas memora

Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, the founding story of the Roman Empire that began with a lieutenant’s escape from burning Troy, carrying his infant son, Ascanius, in his arms and his elderly father, Anchises on his back, as well as a bundle of household gods, wandering journey from Phrygia to Italy, battles with the Latins and eventual status as forbearer of the Roman people, presents a rich allegory, with some powerful, contemporary points of correspondence (for what it’s worth, as the latest tragedies are not, in the grander scheme of adventure and mythological, really all that legendary) with the current Greco-Roman marketplace.

It is remarkable how cultural tenants migrate and are adopted and re-imagined, like gods and heroes both transplanted and devised. The Church and State of the Romans is not just derivative of the culture and learning that the Greeks, nor it is a fair characterization that a Roman exodus realized the more perfect expression of Greek accomplishment. Art, artifice and traditions transmitted certainly do evolve and have become a frenzy of norms and nomos, but are more than just spillage, contagion and viral ideas. Money and trade tend to simplify and compartmentalize matters that have grown beyond all public bounds, yet are smaller and more personable as ever they were. Italy’s burgeoning crisis of confidence is not some impossible Hydra but rather nothing more than a relatively strong (third largest in Europe, compared to Greece, which has the industrial output of the German state of Hessen) economy called stagnant because growth (exports, consumer demand, investment sleight-of-hand) has failed to keep pace with borrowing’s legacy of interest payments. Endless regulation and stimulus (coaxing, invention—if honest) cannot do much for contentedness and thrift. That chimera, a new mythological foe, is something that a lot people the world are coming to face but it is no burden borne over the Aegean.

heresy or wash your mouth out with soap

Generally, I don’t ascribe to the latest fads or scares in health and hygiene, though I do tend to be skeptical about the utility over marketing and salesmanship of most products and I am usually captivated by the ideas that present reduction and disenchantment with conventional wisdom and the vaunted over-the-counter industries. Some time ago, H shared with me a tract circulating the internet, I’m sure, about tooth care, and I took the prescribed regiment rather seriously because the researcher (who I am sure could also share a lot of conspiracy theories about the fluorine in tap water—I could as well) was not trying to sell anything or get one to radically change his or her routine, like freeganism or the anti-soaps league.

I tried and stuck with it, not be too vain about my teeth and questioning if anything should be brilliantly and unnaturally white—I found the tobacco and coffee stains tolerable, but since I exchanged red wine for beer and tried to combat the discolouration with aggressive, daily flossing, I could tell that I was doing damage to my gums and enamel. The researcher maintains that the teeth can heal themselves (we tend to forget that one’s biology is mostly smarter than we are, despite our micro-managing of the affairs of our mouths and skin) and the biggest obstacle against repair is angry teeth-brushing with tooth-paste. The glycerin in all toothpaste, which makes it foam up, sort of suffocates one’s mouth because it does not rinse away. Instead, the researcher recommends that one use a bar of plain soap and take vitamin C and calcium supplements. That getting rid of a chemical coating might make all the difference struck me at first like the fallacy of moisturizers for one’s skin--nothing of the fancy ingredients and nutrients are absorbed into one’s skin, nor would we really want them to be. I must say that my gums were very sensitive at first and I had a few painful mouth ulcers at first, and I wasn’t seeing results after just two weeks, as promised, but six weeks later, my gums do look healthier with no latent pain and the stains have been bleached away to a large extend, even some of the swaths of decay look like they have sloughed off. Dental health is important and hopefully people won’t follow quackery, but as with most matters of taking care of oneself, there is no magic potion and a lot of what is being peddled does little more than mask underlying problems and perpetuates the business of health-care.

heisenberg or frisch gestrichen

The New York Times' technology blog has a post covering significant recent changes being released that redirect the traffic flow of the internet on the approach from the biggest and most ubiquitous internet search engine. After first changing its parameters a few months back so as to not so easily fall for website spam--pages that capitalize and snare hits with words popular searches but are hollow and without content, in addition to continual fine-tuning, parameters and rules in favour of freshness, timeliness, I suppose over other criteria like brute popularity or possibly definitiveness.

These structural changes, of course, which in turn molds and models the internet itself, being a repository also but immediately the sum of what seekers find and share, refer to something called an internet search algorithm. Knowing that an algorithm is not a formula or a mathematical proof but rather describes a set of rules, like a dogma (no one can hold all of the important tenants of belief or affiliation in his or her head all at once and at all times)--a rule of thumb that for all practical intents and purposes becomes something absolute and infallible (ex cathedra and within itself) given how many processes the computer-aided human mind can summon, brute and making the finite applicable for as far as one cares to extend infinity to. A lot of things taken as a rule are calculated with such heavy-handedness, and apparently one reason that the mainstream search engine are making the change is pressure from social networking platforms that have made freshness, instant and incessant updating customary. If search results are arbitrated truth, one wonders what tweaking is improvement and what is pandering over precision and bias.

flower drum song

A few weeks ago, our neighbour, sharing the plot of a crime-thriller that she was excited to plow through (auf englisch), asked if I had read any Günter Grass--and I think, enjoyed literature in general. She named off Die Blechtrommel, and I said that I had heard of that one, translating it "The Tin Drum Song," like Flower Drum Song, which is something, I think, completely different.

Since that exchange I had been a little obsessed about finding a copy and investigating it. Finding this vintage edition (1962) from our library, I remembered, vaguely, the cover illustration and think that there was a copy among my families books growing up. The story is intoxicating and is the perfect expression of the genre of magical-realism, which too is all about remembering and the supernatural talent of recalling what can't be recollected.

In translation, I am plowing through this saga as well. The cover image of the prodigious Oskar Matzerath also reminded me of another household artifact, though, this plate, I believe, was a much later acquisition. The novel promises to be a story that one incorporates, perhaps, anticipating the whole of it before the end, like a natural, musical progression or a consonant chord.