humdrum

Maria Popova from Brain-Pickings has crafted another brilliant and consciousness-expanding on the formative and soulful importance of boredom. This is simple boredom being addressed here, restlessness and not ennui, world-weariness, which Oscar Wilde quipped as the one unforgivable sin.
The essay examines the nature of being bored through the lens of various writers and disciplines, showing how it is disdained as childish thing, something to be beaten back post-haste with one’s full quiver of distractions and shiny-objects and something that one ought to out-grow as soon as possible. Not a disheveling feeling that necessarily matures into quiet meditation or offers more than a vague sense of irritation of not knowing precisely what one wants, expects or can look forward to, boredom is nonetheless developmentally critical and something that ought to be cultivated—and not repelled, especially in children though that irritability that comes of unsure footing can quickly escalate. Boredom is essentially attention untethered, and when indulged, it allows care and courtesy to bob along until it can leash itself to something new and novel—in new and novel ways. The full article is an inspired and rewarding read, and makes one pause to think about how quickly one reaches for any number of pacifiers when made to queue-up.

ad confluentes

We had the chance recently to visit the city of Koblenz, where the Moselle joins the Rhein, and survey the colossal monument to Prussian Emperor Wilhelm I, designed by the architect Bruno Schmitz who collaborated with other artists to build other gigantic monuments in the area, from high above on the cliff-top campus of Festung Ehrenbreitstein (Fort Honoured-Broad-Stone). This ruler wanted more than cooperation, strategic partnerships and petty tyrants but unity among the peoples of Germany.
Wilhelm never realised this goal during his reign and more democratic institutions were responsible for that, as for the Weimar Republic that followed soon afterwards, but the monument was erected originally to commemorate the decisive Battle of Sedan. Successive governments then used the monument as a call for unity.
It was the figure that is evoked in the patriotic song Die Wacht am Rhein and during the 1980s, an image of the sculpture was used in West Germany as a rallying point for unity, with the iconic symbol of the Deutsches Eck being the standard sign-off signal for television stations at the end of the broadcasting day (before the advent of 24 hour, continuous programming) shown, from this vantage point with the national anthem. Herman Melville, along with other contemporary writers, makes mention of the fortress above in Moby Dick, “this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein,” and the massive installation is a venue for exhibits on art and history.
Though the fort was never taken in battle, the statue below was heavily damaged in 1945, less than fifty years after its dedication, by an American bomb-run and the French administration of the Trizone forwarded a proposal to demolish the giant completely and put a peace memorial in its place. Those plans were never realised and the decision to restore and rededicate the monumental statue at the head-waters was announced in 1990, just after Reunification.

manifest-destiny or the pineapple speaks

At the risk of being accused of crying sour-grapes—and despite being very glad that I tried to refresh my knowledge of US history and civics, reviewing world capitals, major treaties, colonialism, recent wars and trying to memorize the amendments to the US constitution and presidential line-of-succession—I found myself really at a loss as how to rate my experience essaying the diplomatic corps' written exam. The anticipation and being escorted through the cavernous consulate compound and speaking to the other hopefuls, who were mostly young, recent international relations students with interesting backgrounds, was really exciting and memorable. The test itself, however, struck me as a bit of a disappointment—not implying that I aced it or completely bulloxed it up, since it was one of those standarised exams where it is difficult to differentiate between the best or the right answer and the test's author's intent. A few questions seemed so poorly constructed, I could only guess at the question, and I got several verbatim repeats, plus technical difficulties at the start did not exactly instill confidence when it came to the custody of the proctors. Next, there was a whole battery of biographical questions, some of which required a narrative though many did not, that was mostly just a self-assessment of ones leadership ability.
Those questions that did call for some contextual justification were limited to two-hundred characters—barely more than a tweet, and generally fell far short, in my opinion, of soliciting any sort of complete or insightful answer. Though this exam was only the first step of many in the selection-process, it did seem like an unnecessary and expensive obstacle, not really any sort of value-added or scientific sieve for potential candidates. It all seemed a little naïve, like realising that the motives that run economies into the ground are really, really basic and nothing more than greed and corruption and one expects such a grand failure to have a better rationale. Noticing that the practise drills were more rigorous and old-school (peppered with questions that some might consider trivia, whereas the only question that could not be answered without basic literacy or elimination had to do with the Thirteenth Amendment), I come to find out that this was one of the first iterations of the exam to be given by an educational corporation recently awarded the government contract to administer and grade this entry test for the US Department of State. This concern is infamous for its mismanagement of standardised testing in public schools, for requiring teachers to teach to the test and the expense of genuine education and for introducing such confounding concepts as fuzzy maths, known as Common Core. I am no educator or social-engineer, but I do strongly suspect that it is more indemnifying for pupils to struggle with straightforward logical operators, for instance, before inventing their own short-cuts to cope with basic arithmetic. Though students, teachers and parents in America alike are pretty helpless against such tyrants, the question that really tested everyone's patience was a strange fable (the company later admitted to plagiarising from a real American story-teller, Daniel Pinkwater) involving a sessile pineapple that challenged a rabbit to a race. Suspecting that the pineapple had some trick (or sophistry) to ensure its win, the other animals of the forest bet against the rabbit. When the rabbit actually won in the end, however, the animals ceremoniously devoured the pineapple. The test then asks grade school students to divine the thoughts of the characters of this poorly re-told story and imagine, under the category of reading-comprehension, what would have happened the pineapple not challenged the rabbit. Maybe that is an apt parable for the commercialization of teaching and learning. Education and experience are not in themselves limited and have to wonder, cringing loping up to fear, what it means to put bounds (or to take them away wholesale) on what is supposed to be a meaningful assessment.

michigan j. frog

I had often heard the phrase Wetterfrosch (Weather Frog) used as a segue to the weather forecast—I, however, assumed it was a gimmick, mascot or inside-joke and never imagined that term referred, at least figuratively, to an actual prognosticating frog.

Similar to the principle that the rise in temperature can be heard in the tempo of the chirping of crickets and locusts (though there is some scientific truth to this method), the frog was not the actual barometer, but it was the key part of a closed-environment, kept in a terrarium of a weather-station with a branch or ladder to scale and a supply of flies. People constructed these little biospheres in the belief that the flies responded in a predicable manner to up-coming changes in temperature and conditions waxing fair to rainy by either hovering higher or lower, and the resident frog would position itself accordingly to catch its prey. There is also a folk-belief that certain birds are also pretty good forecasters—for the keen-observer—by flying lower to the ground when the air pressure falls. The idea of harnessing the predictive powers of the Wetterfrosch (and all of Nature, by extension) may certainly have something to it but it does remind me of the Warner Brothers' cartoon character: the singing frog that can belt out rag-time numbers, but who proves quite taxing for the individual and his visions of fame who discovered this amazing creature, since the frog will only perform in front of him, alone. Ehi, Figaro! Son qua.

zwerg is the word

Apparently, in a generational strife that has been taken up by by the up-and-comers with a similar sort of twisted and mean sense of house-proud that is the domain of so-called home-owners' associations in the States that would treat pink flamingos and old jalopies on cinder-blocks with the same jurisprudence, younger people in Germany are beginning to vocally regard the de facto and traditional eye-sores with less and less tolerance.
Some creative outlets are made endearing by their distance—even if that's all in the neighbourhood, the convention of populating ones garden with gnomes (Gartenzwerge, but promulgated the world around) goes back a long way with the history of kitsch and camp modeled off Renaissance ensembles that included endless Puti and Gobbi (as does the controversy) and clever ceramic manufacturers that plied their seconds for reasons of fostering an imaginative and creative environment for children—the claims backed by eminent pedagogues. Fortunately, nothing can be leveled by the renters and the mortgaged on how people choose to decorate their lawns on private and established properties and resistance is staunch.

potentiation or college-try

Human memory and learning, as opposed to artificial means of storage and retrieval, are usually dependent—only brought to mind—on association. Though single and isolated impressions can seem, especially under sharp focus and scrutiny and when one wonders how one got there, to be thinking about that subject over another (the same with a fleeting phrase that seemed forgotten only to be recalled later and one wonders where it was hiding when first beckoned), to be quite independent entities, self-sufficient, and not part of a long chain of events (and equally as non sequitur, defying belonging or following), there is a whole entourage of attendant thoughts and recollections.

Though no measure of the content of one’s mind or character, drills in recall and rote (something quantitative) are effective ways to study how these connections weave, unravel and hang together. Cues are not exclusively semantic (mental symbols and what they denote) and drawn from experience itself, but also based on the state one was in during the cementing of the memory. I have noticed that I don’t remember my dreams very well—except when I am buoyed between sleep and waking, just emerged from another dream. It seems in those moments, the whole Parnassus returns—though not to linger for long. Research shows—and of course there is more than one way to conduct this sort of thought experiment, that those cramming for exam perform better on the actual test, if proctoring can be held in the same physical and chemical state, be that groggy, drowsy or over-stimulated with caffeine. Alcohol and designer psychotropic drugs take advantage of this phenomenon, as well. I am myself trying to study with a furor right now, and I wonder what it means that one can imagine one’s memories as a filing-cabinet, as something episodic rather than relational. I suspect that it is always richer (infinitely so, and that is where imagination, which is not just a addictive response either, and consciousness comes from, since infinite is always infinitely bigger than the speed records of brute force) to be able to triangulate into and out of context and would forego precision, always (or settling for one uniformly hazy ambiance) in order to be properly schooled.