Saturday, May 9, 2009

Halfway Through

I am halfway through the exam period, and I will be glad when it is over.

Andrew has not been helpful.

He has been force-feeding me all sorts of weird Norwegian eel dishes, playing Schoenberg’s “Moses And Aaron” at full volume 24 hours a day, and continuously reading aloud from “Santa Anna’s Mexican Army 1821-1848”.

I think I am going to scream.
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8 comments:

  1. Danen RubbraMay 11, 2009 at 2:32 PM

    Josh,

    Norwegian eels contain a protein that has been shown to significantly increase the myelin in the prefrontal cortex, while sprechstimme is noted to boost dopamine reception throughout the lobus frontalis. Increased concentration and memory are the certain benefits, young man.

    As alternatives, however, you could ask Andrew to switch the CD to “Pierrot Lunaire” and to acquire a few portions of “pflaqkwaag” to replace the unsavory eels. “Pflaqkwaag,” you see, contains the very same protein in even more abundance; and I understand that this delicacy tastes just like chicken (or panda placenta, depending upon one’s taste).

    Ask Andrew to hurry, however: “Pflagkwaag” is extracted from the fascia surrounding the ligamentum arteriosum, which joins the aorta to the pulminary artery of the sperm whale. Owing to the poor global market for “pflagkwaag” right now, I suspect that logistic difficulties may prohibit Andrew from procuring it under the current time constraints.

    Can Andrew wield a harpoon well?

    Dane

    ReplyDelete
  2. Josh83May 11, 2009 at 7:32 PM

    Dane, Andrew doesn’t have a harpoon. Maybe I’ll buy him one and tell him to start practicing—however, I don’t think the authorities allow whaling off the Massachusetts coast.

    Actually, I’ve never had eel in my life, and don’t plan to start anytime soon. And we don’t even have a copy of “Moses And Aaron” in Boston (not that I’m complaining).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Danen RubbraMay 12, 2009 at 6:12 AM

    Josh,

    That's okay, I had never heard of "pflaqkwaag," either, until this "word" was presented to me as a "word verification" when I signed into Blogger yesterday. It sounds like something the Aflac duck would say.

    I wish you continued success as you wrap up your first year. I'm sure you will ace these finals, without any help from Schoenberg.

    Dane

    ReplyDelete
  4. Josh83May 12, 2009 at 6:27 PM

    Thank you, Dane. Things are going well, and Andrew has been through law school recently and he was a big help. He accurately predicted three essay questions I have encountered thus far, all based upon shifting areas of the law.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Danen RubbraMay 14, 2009 at 7:11 AM

    In dedication to young Joshua, avid history scholar, and now a third of the way along his journey toward the bar - for his and for his faithful friend’s amusement, from the May issue of the “Amphisbaena Whisperer,” enjoy.
    _____________________ Colonnadenkloeke

    Colonnaden remains one of the most exclusive addresses in Hamburg. Its street-lined row of arcaded columns is a source of pleasure for many sightseers strolling down this elegant, pedestrian throughfare. Few of these visitors, however, would ever know that Colonnaden is also the exclusive address of thirty-one famous “gentlemen” – architectural telamones, completed by French-Austrian sculptor Heinrich Sully-Prudhomme (no relation to the Nobel Laureate) between 1866 and 1875, a full year before this cobblestoned avenue in “Hammonia” was ever laid down.

    The reason so few visitors to Colonnaden are aware of these peculiar creations is due to the fact that the statues themselves are located scarcely three meters below street level, lining at regular paces the interior of a major branch of the city’s sophisticated subterranean storm drain system, which runs parallel to, but just short of the entire length of, Colonnaden.

    The Sully-Prudhomme figures are life-sized, “loin-clothed,” representations of the Greek god Telamon. They stand with arms raised, “supporting,” Atlas-like, the more popular (and more populated) street that lies above their heads. They are “Telamones,” however, only in corporeal form. Sully-Prudhomme grew up in Perigord Pourpre, near the Dordogne River in France, and all his life he had been an aficionado of Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. It was after this French dramatist that Sully-Prudhomme fashioned the likeness of each of the faces of his Telamones. Despite the oddity of their appearance, these statues are more known throughout the world to contemporary artists and students of anthropology (as well as to lovers of rodents). It was Sully-Prudhomme’s cued suite that had inspired British sculptor Antony Gormley in 2007, for example, to create the 31 nudes for his “Event Horizon,” along the Thames in London.

    Considering the age of Sully-Prudhomme’s work, every one of these splendidly detailed figures remains today absolutely free of any perceivable corrosion, a fact made all the more remarkable when one appreciates the extreme dampness of the tube, called “the Cloaca” by irreverent British existentialist Malcolm Muggeribs. The elevated humidity is caused primarily by the never-ending flow of Colonnadenkloekebach (or, during the rainy season, Colonnadenkloekefluss), which makes it necessary for all visitors to the “Cloaca” to supply themselves with knee-high rubber boots and a spray-bottle of antiseptic.

    The sculptor formed his Telamones out of calcite-free and chloride-free, white silica materials, ensuring that his art would remain durably resistant to any kind of foreseeable deterioration. Not surprisingly, however, the disparate surface areas of the suite, which express such exquisite line and flawless proportion, including those sixty-two, finger-friendly pits, so beautifully framed and contoured, have become over time discolored and speckled to varying degrees. Moreover, the surfaces have been unappealingly violated by multiple waterline stains, visible to the least observant onlooker, from “waist” to “ankle” – the legacy left behind by the Colonnadenkloekefluss.

    Such gradual alterations to Sully-Prudhomme’s original vision are the only notable results of natural causes. What has made these 31 statues more curious to Gormley – or to anyone else who has seen them, for that matter – is the UNnatural (and irreparable) disfigurement inflicted upon the suite, circa 1907, by a trio of teenage miscreants.

    One of them would be the future Chancellor of Germany.

    We have one surviving letter of Sully-Prudhomme’s. It provides one salient glimpse into this mysterious artist’s character apart from his infatuation with de Bergerac. Stemming from some serious grievance of his acquired during the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, Sully-Prudhomme passionately hated the North German Confederation. Writing in his native Dordogne French dialect, Sully-Prudhomme’s words crackle with “misoprussian” brio as he instructs the Italian sitter of his prized Shepherd, “Recht,” closing the letter with unintentional irony:

    “All German dogs are liars!”

    And so it makes little sense to anyone why on God’s good earth Sully-Prudhomme would posit his Telamones so far away from either homeland and in the heart of a kingdom that he loathed to the bone. On top of that, nothing is known that explains why the artist decided to hide his work so far away from general public’s eye, within the no-man’s bowel of Hamburg.

    Much IS known, by contrast, about the three vandals who defaced – literally – these Telamones more than thirty years after the artist created them.

    According to letters written in 1918 by Austrian expatriate Dame Prevera Cater, to her lover, Max Soddenstein, chief cavern tour guide in Marianna, Florida, the history of this crime begins in 1906 with the German writer Eugen Diesel – youngest son of Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the revolutionary engine – who was at the time enrolled at his father’s alma mater, the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic Munich. When Rudolph Diesel discovered in the spring of that year that his son had become engaged to the daughter of a sparking plug manufacturer, the senior Diesel, on Eugen’s seventeenth birthday no less, withdrew all financial support, forcing the young man to flee to Graz, Austria, the home of his deaf fiancé, whom he was soon to abandon.

    It was in Graz, at the Austrian premier of Richard Strauss’s opera, “Salome,” that this maverick music lover met August Kubizek and his playmate Adolf Hitler, who quickly became fascinated with Diesel’s recent invention: a new kind of inviolate “super glue.”

    August had read in the February 8 issue of the Viennese monthly, “Die Nasa,” an article devoted to French mathematician Blaise Pascal’s overly-quoted “Pensee” concerning the theory of causality in connection with the morphology of Cleopatra’s nose. One particular fact from this feature made an especial impact upon all three bohemians: The article reported that more than half the Renaissance statues in the city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia), then under Austria-Hungarian rule, were missing their noses, the result of some long-past, barbaric act of Ottoman vandalism designed to make the city’s folk heroes unrecognizable to the public.

    Inspired by this revelation, Adolf had hatched a Gogolian prank to perpetrate the same thing against the Sully-Prudhomme Telamones in Hamburg. Incredulous, Diesel asked, reasonably, why?

    Adolf then blurted out indiscreetly that his own father, Alois Hitler, had served as Sully-Prudhomme’s model for all 31 Telamones; that his father had in fact sat for the sculptor in 1865, soon after coming to Linz. But Hitler furiously averred that Sully-Prudhomme had outrageously “demonized” his father, turning him into a “Jew” and then even multiplying the insult thirty-one times.

    But venturing into the Hamburg Hauptkloeke to slice off all those noses in order to make Alois’s faces unrecognizable to everyone had seemed just too easy to Adolf: Until his meeting on May 16th of Eugen Diesel, a magical thirteen days younger than he, Adolf had been nonplussed as to how he, an aspiring (and very much mischievous, spitball-throwing) artist, could leave his signature mark on such an irresistible caper; and besides that, what kind of long-lasting art could he have created anyway with all those elongated proboscises, once removed?

    Just as Antony Gormely’s (temporary) exhibit, “Event Horizon,” failed to illicit very much gawking from South Bank passersby in 2007, these days the Sully-Prudhomme Telamones are barely noticed by any visitor to Colonnadenkloeke. Since 1975 at least the chief attraction of Colonnadenkloeke has been the Brahman Anthropologic Museum, which occupies the opposite “bank” of Colonnadenkloekebach and extends along the entire expanse of the tube. Donated to Hamburg by New Delhi University professor, Hiranya Garbha, the Museum is unique in its focus upon the only known tribe of cannibalistic Eskimos in the world today.

    More tourists visit the Brahman Anthropologic Museum through the mittecolonnaden manhole # 1 than annually pass through the nondescript door of the Johannes-Brahms-Museum on Peterstrasse. Interestingly enough, as it turns out, the proprietors of the Johannes-Brahms-Museum have even suggested to the city management that Hiranya Garbha’s fascinating exhibit – along with its thirty-one, symmetrically positioned, sculptured depictions of the “hunted down and captured” St. Florian composer, Anton Bruckner, shown in progressive stages of “devouredness” through the mouth of one icy, “anacondaesque” Eskimo called “Hanslick” (Professor Garbha is a Calvinist animal lover) – be relocated into the immaculate little spaces which currently harbor Johannes Brahms’s memorabilia. This would certainly draw more visitors to the place. The composer’s items could then be transferred to Vienna. Logically, the name of the Museum would then have to be changed to “Johannes-Brahms-Brahman-Museum,” or something along those lines. A fresh write-up in Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” would certainly boost the Museum’s public relations.

    Despite any perceived compatibility of such a proposed merger of these two institutions, the likelihood of moving the Brahman Anthropologic Museum to Peterstrasse any time soon, however, is rather slim. Recent reports inform us that Dr. Garbha, having resigned his position as a “Turtle,” and now fully retired, from teaching as well as from freezing his sweet ass off on arctic expeditions, and who currently resides in Singapore, where he recently took over the management of the international woodwind quintet, “The Beasties,” headquartered in Singapore, has staunchly, even vociferously stood his ground in opposition to any notion of transferring his Museum out of Colonnadenkloeke.

    ________________________

    Dane

    ReplyDelete
  6. Danen RubbraMay 15, 2009 at 4:11 PM

    Josh, my tribute to you was published yesterday by accident before I had actually finished it. I originally wanted to post it this afternoon, after you had completed ALL your finals. You might think that I should have just been done with the matter, but I figured that since you have poured yourself out with your best effort over the last academic year, you certainly deserve MY best effort, for all its worth.

    And so,in dedication to young Joshua, avid history scholar, and now a third of the way along his journey to becoming an attorney, for his and his faithful friend’s amusement, from the May issue of the “Amphisbaena Whisperer,” enjoy.
    __________________________________



    Colonnadenkloeke

    Colonnaden remains one of the most exclusive addresses in Hamburg. Its street-lined row of arcaded columns is a source of pleasure for many sightseers strolling down this elegant, pedestrian throughfare. Few of these visitors, however, would ever know that Colonnaden is also the exclusive address of thirty-one famous “gentlemen” – architectural telamones, completed by French-Austrian sculptor Heinrich Sully-Prudhomme (no relation to the Nobel Laureate) between 1866 and 1875, one full year before this cobblestoned avenue in “Hammonia” was ever laid down.

    The reason so few visitors to Colonnaden are aware of these peculiar creations is due to the fact that the statues themselves are located scarcely three meters below street level, lining at regular paces the interior of a major branch of the city’s sophisticated subterranean storm drain system that runs parallel to, but just short of the entire length of, Colonnaden.

    The Sully-Prudhomme figures are life-sized, “loin-clothed,” representations of the Greek god Telamon. They stand with arms raised, “supporting,” Atlas-like, the more popular (and more populated) street that lies above their heads.

    They are “Telamones,” however, only in corporeal form. Sully-Prudhomme grew up in Perigord Pourpre, near the Dordogne River in France, and all his life he had been an aficionado of Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. It was after this French dramatist that Sully-Prudhomme fashioned the likeness of each of the faces of his Telamones. Despite the oddity of their appearance, these statues are more known throughout the world to contemporary artists and students of anthropology (as well as to lovers of rodents). It was Sully-Prudhomme’s cued suite that had inspired British sculptor Antony Gormley in 2007, for example, to create the 31 nudes for his “Event Horizon,” along the Thames in London.

    Considering the age of Sully-Prudhomme’s work, every one of these splendidly detailed figures remains today absolutely free of any perceivable corrosion, a fact made all the more remarkable when one appreciates the extreme dampness of the tube, called “the Cloaca” by irreverent British existentialist Malcolm Muggerribs. The elevated humidity is caused primarily by the never-ending flow of Colonnadenkloekebach (or, during the rainy season, Colonnadenkloekefluss), which makes it necessary for all visitors to “the Cloaca” to supply themselves with knee-high rubber boots and a spray-bottle of antiseptic.

    The sculptor formed his Telamones out of calcite-free and chloride-free, white silica materials, ensuring that his art would remain durably resistant to any kind of foreseeable deterioration. Not surprisingly, however, the disparate surface areas of the suite, which express such exquisite line and flawless proportion, including those sixty-two, finger-friendly pits, so beautifully framed and contoured, have become over time discolored and speckled to varying degrees. Moreover, the surfaces have been unappealingly violated by multiple waterline stains, visible to the least observant onlooker, from “waist” to “ankle,” the legacy of Colonnadenkloekefluss.

    These gradual alterations to Sully-Prudhomme’s original vision are the only notable results of natural causes. What has made these 31 statues more curious to Gormley – or to anyone else who has seen them, for that matter – is the unnatural (and irreparable) disfigurement inflicted upon the suite, circa 1907, by a trio of teenage miscreants.

    One of them would be the future Chancellor of Germany.

    We have one surviving letter of Sully-Prudhomme’s. It provides one salient glimpse into this mysterious artist’s character apart from his infatuation with de Bergerac. Stemming from some serious grievance of his acquired during the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, Sully-Prudhomme passionately hated the North German Confederation. Writing in his native Dordogne French dialect, Sully-Prudhomme’s words crackle with “misoprussian” brio as he instructs the Italian sitter of his prized Shepherd, “Recht,” closing the letter with unintentional irony:

    “All German dogs are liars!”

    And so, it makes little sense to anyone why on God’s good earth Sully-Prudhomme would posit his Telamones so far away from either homeland and in the heart of a kingdom that he loathed to the bone. On top of that, nothing is known that explains why the artist decided to hide his work so far away from general public’s eye, within the no-man’s bowel of Hamburg.

    Much IS known, by contrast, about the three vandals who defaced (in the purist sense) these Telamones more than thirty years after the artist created them.

    According to letters written in 1918 by Austrian expatriate Dame Prevera Cater, to her lover, Max Soddenstein, chief cavern tour guide in Marianna, Florida, the history of this crime begins in 1906 with the German writer Eugen Diesel – youngest son of Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the revolutionary engine – who was at the time enrolled at his father’s alma mater, the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic Munich. When Rudolph Diesel discovered in the spring of that year that his son had become engaged to the daughter of a sparking plug manufacturer, the senior Diesel, on Eugen’s seventeenth birthday no less, withdrew all financial support, forcing the young man to flee to Graz, Austria, the home of his deaf fiancé, whom he was soon to abandon.

    It was in Graz, at the Austrian premier of Richard Strauss’s opera, “Salome,” that this maverick music lover met August Kubizek and his playmate Adolf Hitler, who quickly became fascinated with Diesel’s recent invention: a new kind of inviolate “super glue.”

    August had read in the February 8 issue of the Viennese monthly, “Die Nasa,” an article devoted to French theologian Blaise Pascal’s overly-quoted “Pensee” concerning the theory of causality in connection with the morphology of Cleopatra’s nose. One particular fact from this feature made an especial impact upon all three bohemians: The article reported that more than half the Renaissance statues in the city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia), then under Austria-Hungarian rule, were missing their noses, the result of some long-past, barbaric act of Ottoman vandalism designed to make the city’s folk heroes unrecognizable to the public.

    Inspired by this revelation, Adolf had hatched a Gogolian prank to perpetrate the same thing against the Sully-Prudhomme Telamones in Hamburg. Incredulous, Diesel asked, reasonably, why?

    Adolf then blurted out indiscreetly that his own father, Alois Hitler, had served as Sully-Prudhomme’s model for all 31 Telamones; that his father had in fact sat for the sculptor in 1865, soon after coming to Linz. But Hitler furiously averred that Sully-Prudhomme had outrageously “demonized” his father, turning him into a “Jew” and then even multiplying that insult thirty-one times.

    But venturing into the Hamburg Hauptkloeke to slice off all those noses in order to make Alois’s faces unrecognizable to everyone had seemed just too easy to Adolf: Until his meeting on May 16th with Eugen Diesel, being a magical thirteen days younger than he and having been liberated from a tyrant for yet another magical thirteen days, Adolf had been nonplussed as to how he, an aspiring (and very much mischievous, spitball-throwing) artist, could leave his signature mark on such an irresistible caper. Even more to the point though: before meeting Eugen, what kind of long-lasting art could he have created anyway with all those elongated proboscises, once removed?

    Just as Antony Gormely’s (temporary) exhibit, “Event Horizon,” failed to elicit very much gawking from South Bank passersby in 2007, these days the Sully-Prudhomme Telamones are barely noticed by any visitor to Colonnadenkloeke. Since 1975 at least the chief attraction of Colonnadenkloeke has been the Brahman Anthropologic Museum, which occupies the opposite “bank” of Colonnadenkloekebach and extends along the entire expanse of the tube. Donated to Hamburg by New Delhi University professor, Hiranya Garbha, the Museum is unique in its focus upon the only known tribe of cannibalistic Eskimos in the world today.

    More tourists visit the Brahman Anthropologic Museum through the Mittecolonnaden manhole # 1 than annually pass through the nondescript door of the Johannes-Brahms-Museum on Peterstrasse. Interestingly enough, as it turns out, the proprietors of the Johannes-Brahms-Museum have suggested to the city management that Hiranya Garbha’s fascinating exhibit – along with its thirty-one, symmetrically positioned, sculptured depictions of the “hunted down and captured” St. Florian composer, Anton Bruckner, shown in progressive stages of “devouredness” through the mouth of one icy, “anacondaesque” Eskimo called “Hans Lich” (Professor Garbha is a Calvinist animal lover) – be relocated into the immaculate little spaces which currently harbor Johannes Brahms’s memorabilia. This would certainly draw more visitors to the place, wouldn’t it? The composer’s items would have to be transferred then to Vienna. Logically, the name of the Museum would then have to be changed to Johannes-Brahms-Brahman Museum.

    But then, considering the gustatory theme of the new establishment, perhaps it would be even better under such circumstances to change the name of Johannes-Brahms-Museum to “Der Rote Igel,” the name of Brahms’s favorite restaurant in Vienna.

    Despite any perceived compatibility of such a proposed merger of these two institutions with the facts surrounding the well-known feud between Brahms and Bruckner and especially with the image of the two composers staring mouth-wateringly at each other across the table in anticipation of smoked pork and dumpling, the likelihood of anyone moving the Brahman Anthropologic Museum to Peterstrasse any time soon is rather slim. Recent reports inform us that Dr. Garbha, having resigned his position as a “Turtle,” and now fully retired, from teaching as well as from freezing his sweet ass on arctic expeditions, and who currently resides in Singapore, where he recently took over the management of the international woodwind quintet, “The Beasties,” headquartered in Singapore, has staunchly, even vociferously stood his ground in opposition to any notion of transferring his Museum out of Colonnadenkloeke.
    _______________________________

    Dane

    ReplyDelete
  7. Josh83May 16, 2009 at 5:44 PM

    Dane, you have a great gift for satire. There are so many jokes here, I think I probably missed half of them.

    Isn't Dame Prevara Cater a direct ancestor of the current Speaker Of The House?

    Thank you for the humor.

    Josh

    ReplyDelete
  8. Danen RubbraMay 17, 2009 at 9:44 AM

    You are welcome, Josh.
    And congratulations for completing your first year.

    I don't think the Speaker of the House is related to Dame Prevera Cater. But rumor has it that Pelosi is an alumna of the Dame Prevera Cater School of Acting in Baltimore, having attended this summer school in 1958 before moving to Washington. The documented observation that she deserves an Academy Award for betraying no sign of shame adds credence to this rumor.

    Obama himself apparently attended the same School. After all, his Washington pals and media toadies swallowed hood-line-and-stinker his false explanation of the shameful King Abdullah situtation.

    Surely Pelosi said to herself, "Gee, if the garden-variety American moron can believe THAT, I certainly can do better. I wonder if anyone has noticed an elongation of Pelosi's nose lately.

    Who in Washington now feels comfortable to top Pelosi's antic?

    Seriously, I am almost ashamed to be an American right now, Josh. Honesty. A zoo of chimps would do a better job at running the government than any of those shameless, incompetent and self-serving liars. I'd like to write a letter to Gov. Perry and add my voice to the rising sentiment here that our state SHOULD exercise its right to secede from the Union.

    On a lighter note, when you and Andrew return to Minneapolis, perhaps you should measure Rex's nose. I don't think he was being completely honest, either, about the reasons for wanting to move to Singapore: It was also reported in the May issue of the "Amphisbaena Whisperer" that "Milktoast," the orangutan bassoonist for "The Beasties," was mauled by a pit bull last March, and that Garbha is looking for a replacement.

    Dane

    ReplyDelete