I
Early in the morning I finally hit the sack after pushing my way through season five in all its glory.
Seven hours later I was awakened by the ring of the phone as Andrew called, nominally to wish me a happy “New Year” but probably more so he would have someone to whom to relate “stories” from the New Year’s Eve party he attended. The voice on the phone barely concealed traces of hangover or at least uninhibited consumption, whereas the words claimed no effect from the evening’s beverages. The stories were nothing out of the ordinary and they will fade — there was nothing adventurous, scandalous, or hilarious to report.
Similarly no such stories in my neck of the woods.
It is Anne’s birthday — to have your first birthday be your golden birthday — and tomorrow is Phoebe’s, and Wednesday is my host father’s, I think, unless that is the sixth. I am confused by a few early January birthdays. My grandmother’s was the 9th, I believe, though I always wish to say it was the 3rd, because she was born in 1903. I won’t have any other birthdays to worry about until February, when it’s time for Leena’s mother, my brother, and a step-brother, all mid-month. The other clump of birthdays I try to remember all come in July (Nate, Nathaniel, Kaity, Merryl … I even want to put Heather’s in there because they are all the 21st-23rd, but hers in in June, I think).
II
“Ein Wort”
Ein Wort, ein Satz–: aus Chiffren steigen
erkanntes Leben, jäher Sinn,
die Sonne steht, die Sphrären schweigen
und alles ballt sich zu ihm hin.Ein Wort–ein Glanz, ein Flug, ein Feuer,
ein Flammenwurf, ein Sternenstrich–
und wieder Dunkel, ungeheuer,
im leeren Raum um Welt und Ich.— Gottfried Benn
My connection to Gottfriend Benn (1886-1956) is tenuous; he’s just one of those people who studied in Marburg. Later in life he, or rather his art, became ideologically problematic, for Benn at one point supported the Nazis until they basically rejected him, and after the war he was banned from publishing.
He was a bit more of a formalist (one might say control freak) than other Expressionists, as one notes in “A Word.”
The first m-dash(followed by the colon) functions to indicate a definition, whereas in the second stanza the two m-dashes serve to mark the boundaries of an appositive. In the first stanza we notice verb after verb; the second is nouns (and a pronoun as noun).
“A Word”
A word, a phrase–from ciphers rise
Life recognized, a sudden sense,
The sun stands still, mute are the skies,
And all compacts it, stark and dense.A word–a gleam, a flight, a spark,
A thrust of flames, a stellar trace–
And then again–immense–the dark
Round world and I in empty space.–Translated by Richard Exner
III
I started season 6 and have watched through “Tabula Rasa” (episode 8, one after the musical, “Once More, With Feeling”) — and the 1st of January is an artificial tabula rasa, though as in the episode there is no blank or clean slate, no starting fresh or from scratch. This year it does, however, work particularly well, the first of the year being a Monday, to many the first day of the week. Since the normal number of days per year is 365 = (52*7) + 1, the relationship between numbers and days of the week cycle by one each year, except on leap years, when they cycle by two. The joys of simple modular arithmetic.
I regained my love of algebra and last night took one of the better, concise textbooks off the shelf — Hernstein, I.N., Abstract Algebra. 2nd Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1990 — and flipped through a few pages, coming to cyclotomic polynomials on page 272.
Along the way I found an old piece of notebook paper folded in four hidden between a few pages, and discovered that it is an old Hungarian homework assignment. I cannot say exactly what the assignment was, though it seems I was to write a number of Hungarian sentences, some commands and some prohibitions, providing the English translations as well.
I really fucked up the “accents” on the vowels.
One of my sentences was supposed to be “Eat only langos” I believe. A “t” suffix is used as a direct object marker in Hungarian.
Egyél sok lángost.
