Heinrich von Kleist

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is the most celebrated German writer of the Classical period, and some, perhaps most, would say he is the most eminent German writer of any period so far, the author of Faust, Werther, West-Oestlcher Divan and many other distinguished plays, novels and poems. But also a botanist, a geologist -- he published some work on optics notable today mostly for some glaring errors, perhaps to demonstrate that no-one is completely perfect, not even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But also the longtime minister of culture of the the German city-state of Weimar. When Napoleon passed through that part of Germany, he and Goethe had a good long chat, because of course. But also too many other things to list them all here. When Germany founded its official international cultural center in 1951, they named it the Goethe-Institut, because of course they did. 

The second-most eminent German writer of the Classical era is Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, friend of Goethe, perhaps best-known for his "Ode to Joy," which Beethoven put to music in his 9th Symphony.

And then there's the third-most celebrated German writer of the Classical era, one you may not have heard of if you're not from Germany and have taken no courses in German literature: the spooky one, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). 

 

"Spooky" feels like a very inadequate adjective to describe Kleist's works. The German word "unheimlich" is much better. I don't think there is a single English word which translates unheimlich adequately. Unheimlich means frightening, eerie, ominous, unsettling -- come to think of it, when English-speaking people mis-translate the German noun "Angst" -- and they do, utterly, every time -- they tend to come up with something close to that which is described by the German adjective "unheimlich."

Kleist was born into a Prussian military family, in Frankfurt on the Oder, about an hour's drive from downtown Berlin today according to Google Maps, not to be confused with the much bigger and more well-known Frankfurt on the Main in western Germany, Germany's financial center and home of its highest skyscrapers, and also where Goethe was born. Kleist wrote plays, fiction and poems, and other things, including a fascinating essay on the marionette-theater. 

One of his plays, Der zerbrochene Krug, is among the best loved German comedies. The rest are quite dark, and one, Der Herrmannschlacht, which tells the story of the crushing defeat of several Roman legions by a coalition of Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD, is seldom performed, because it is considered, quite rightly, to be really about Kleist's hatred for Napoleon's army, for France in general and for non-German things in general. More about that later. 

If you saw a photo from a production of Kleist's Prinz von Hombuurg, you might well assume that what you were seeing was from a weird modern or post-modern staging of the play. But actually, scenes from the play as Kleist wrote it, and as it was performed in his lifetime, look like that, because very weird things happen in the play. Unheimlich. 

And then there are Kleist's stories. The longest and scariest of them, Michael Kohlhaas, has given a figure of speech to modern German: "to play Kohlhaas" means to be extraordinarily stubborn. 

The story was inspired by a report of a 16th-century episode in which a man from the merchant class reacted violently to mistreatment by a nobleman. In Kleist's re-telling of the story, Kohlhaas is a horse-dealer whose horses and servant are mistreated by a drunken lout of a junker. Kohlhaas demands restitution, and doesn't get it, because, you may not be shocked to learn, in 16th-century Prussia, noblemen could sometimes get away with mistreating commoners. But turns out Koohlhaas was the wrong commoner to mess with: long story short, he and his friends declare war on the Junker after his legal efforts fail, burn down the countryside, and although Kohlhaas is eventually caught and executed, he also manages to prove that he was right. 

This story is unheimlich right from the start. From the opening scene, where, now that the drunken lout of a junker has succeed his father, there is a toll charged to cross a bridge which Kohlhaas used for many years to bring his horses to market with no toll, there is the sense that what is portrayed is this fiction is both eerily real and and quite unpleasant -- that Kleist is thrusting under our noses the wrong things about the world from which we ordinarily choose to look away. 

The world is not as it should be. And Kleist describes this with devastating skill.

It also ought not to be that a poet as talented as Kleist was infected with such common and ugly nationalism, but his play Der Herrmannschlacht, with its heroic ancient Germanic tribes standing in for the Germans of Kleist's own time and the ancient Romans standing in for France, leaves little doubt about that, and of you still doubt it, his political writings and letters from the time of Napoleon's occupation clear it up. You see, Kleist was very disturbed by the way in which French soldiers and German women were behaving with one another. 

Not with the behavior generally of occupying soldiers of any nation, and of the predicaments of women of the nations they occupied. Not with horrors of war generally. Those could have been topics of reasonable discussion. But, no, Kleist was very specifically and exclusively disturbed about French soldiers and what they were doing with German women. There's no putting a positive spin on it.

And the final, very disturbing  fact about Kleist is his death; a young, terminally-ill woman, Henriette Vogel, convinced him to kill her and then himself. In 1811, Kleist, 34 years old, his success and reputation growing rapidly, shot her dead, and then fired a bullet through his own brain. 

The world is not as it should be.

Colorful Little Icons on Golf Balls

I've been in 46 of these 50 United States -- all but Hawaii, Washington, Idaho and Maine. And so I've seen a lot of messed-up stuff. 

But I honestly do not know whether I've seen a city with more mobile homes per capita than Anchorage, Alaska. Lots and lots of huge, luxurious houses, and lots and lots of huge trailer parks. I haven't seen Anchorage in 16 years, so it might look completely different now, who knows. Not me, is who. 

Anyway. In the middle of the night about 20 years ago, I was walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage. Why was I walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage in the middle of  the night? Well, to tell you the truth, i was doing my job. It was a messed-up job. I don't want to talk about that job right now. Maybe after the election. Please vote the straight Democratic ticket. Thank you.

So, I was waking through this big empty lot in the middle of the night, but not in the dark, because it was around the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and in that time of the year in Anchorage the sun does set, but it doesn't stay down for very long and the sky doesn't get completely dark. And I was thinking to myself, Well, I wonder if this is where they're going to put the next big trailer park. And that was when I found a golf ball. 

It's a Wilson TC2 Tour golf ball -- I still have it, I'm looking at it right now -- standard white golf ball, except that on one -- what do you call a corner of a sphere? -- except that in the middle of one ordinarily empty white space, it has a colorful little icon bearing the name of a local golf course, on a little outdoors-y picture suggestive of golf. 

What was it doing there? Well, just now, 20 years later, it has occurred to me that they could have been planning to put up a golf course there, and not a trailer park. According to Google, an 18-hole golf course typically covers 120-200 acres, and can be as small as 30 acres if all of the holes are par 3. That lot was at least 30 acres. Trust me. I grew up in rural northern Indiana, in relatively flat land sectioned into 1-mile, 640-acre squares. I'm autistic. I can calculate acreage.

So for 20 years I've been picturing various ways the golf ball could have gotten there. Maybe there was a golf course just over a stand of trees next to the lot, and maybe somebody hit a bad slice. Or maybe someone got mad and deliberately hit a ball out of the course. Google says that the all-time longest drive is over 550 yards and that lots of players can hit a ball over 300 yards. Making it actually rather easily explainable how golf balls can get all sorts of places. I have no idea where that empty lot was. For all I know it could have been right next to a golf course.

Or maybe, I've been thinking to myself over the decades, some big shot was flying over Anchorage in a helicopter, and tried to hit a mobile home resident with a thrown ball. Or maybe he just accidentally dropped a ball out of the helicopter.

But maybe, I'm thinking to myself now, it got there because they were about to put a golf course there.  

Years later, I had moved to a Midwestern city, and I found a golf ball on or near the sidewalk within a few blocks of my home. It's a Nike Mojo 4 Star. And it too has a colorful little icon in a place the manufacturer had left blank, in this case the icon of a local of a utility workers' union. 

And in this case the nearest golf course is more than a mile away, so this little ball has more splainin to do than the first one.

But wait -- let me search for driving ranges on Google Maps... Aha! More easily splainable now! But wait some more... Seems most or all of these driving ranges are indoor. I don't know anything about golf, almost.

These 2 balls, until several days ago, had been about the extent of my 21st-century experience of golf. Are Wilson TC2's and Nike Mojo 4-Star's good golf balls? I don't even know enough about golf for the Google results about these golf balls to tell me whether they're good or bad or expensive or cheap. I have no frame of reference. I have learned, just now, that Nike stopped making golf balls years ago.

Since these were the only 2 golf balls I had seen up close in the 21st century, I assumed that this meant that these days, golf balls all have fascinating colorful little icons put onto them by someone other than the manufacturer. Also, I had done searches for used golf balls on Amazon and seen still more fascinating colorful little icons. 

And so -- the other day I went into the local used -sporting-goods store and bought a plastic box of a dozen used golf balls. 

Why? you ask. Do you always know know why you do everything you do? If so, you and I are very, very different. But yeah, it was partly because I was looking forward to a fascinating little rainbow of those colorful icons. 

I shoulda dug through the bin of individual balls next to the packaged ones. On most of the 12 balls I got, 11 Titleist Pro V1 and Titleist V1X, the big empty white space is left empty. A couple of them have what looks like magic marker stripes in one quadrant -- maybe because "Oh look we both brought Titlesists marked 4" ? -- and 2 of them have decidedly drab, uncolorful little corporate logos, so drab and uncolorful that  you could miss them on your first look. No way you could miss the logo for the golf course or the one for the utilities workers' union on the golf balls I've had for years.

So which is the rule, and which is the aberration -- the 2 golf balls I've had for years, each with a colorful logo, or the 12 I just bought, very much less colorful?

How many times must I tell you that  I DON' KNOW NUTHIN BOUT NO GOLF?! You tell me which is the aberration.

Fundamentalist Marxism

Obviously, whenever you read a text which is thousands, or hundreds of years old -- or maybe even decades old when it comes to economics, or even years or months -- even if you rate the text very highly, you will also discard a lot. Because people -- some people, at least -- learn as time goes by.

Then there are fundamentalists: people who regard certain texts as perfect. Most well-known are religious fundamentalists, who are generally unbearable even to the other people in the same religion.

But Marxists are also accused of fundamentalism. I don't know whether it's true of most Marxists, but, Jesus, Lord from above -- so to speak -- it's true of a lot of them. There are a lot of dull-witted Marxists who spend what seems to be their entire lives denouncing anyone who claims to see any contradictions between what Marx wrote, and reality. 

And I don't think that Marx himself can be excused from blame for this. He uses terms like "inevitable" and "immutable" a lot.

It seems that people noticed this similarity to religious fundamentalism in Marx pretty early. In 1847 -- a year before the Communist Manifesto -- Marx published a "Communist Catechism," a satire of the questions and answers which children memorize in order to become members of the Catholic Church, but for Communists instead of Catholics. Ha-ha-ha, not as funny as you thought, Karl!

There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in what Marx wrote. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the Bible. There's also a certain amount of nonsense in both the Bible and in Marx. That in itself is unremarkable. Nobody's perfect. Compare the Bible and Marx to other writing done around the same times, and they're really not all that bad.

What is bad, and very unusual, in the case of the Bible and in the case of Marx, are the huge numbers of sheer idiots who cling fiercely, blindly, stupidly, to the worst parts.

Diva

Yesterday my brother referred to Sabrina Carpenter as a diva. I had no idea what he meant. It could have been one of several distinct things.

So I decided it was time to talk about the word "diva."

I first became aware of the term sometime around 1975. Maybe more like 1973. In any case, as far as I was aware, a diva was a star female opera singer. I didn't know much about opera -- I still don't -- but I heard Beverly Sills and Maria Callas referred to as divas.

Going back a bit further in time, the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary defines a diva as "a distinguished female singer." Etymological sources are given such as Italian meaning "goddess" or "lady-love" and Latin meaning "goddess," feminine of divius, "god."  

The 1933 also mentions the synonym "prima donna," which is Italian for "leading lady," "primary female singer," etc. Opera again. The earliest English usage cited is from Harper's in 1883. In the late 19th century in the English-speaking parts of the world, opera was considered to be something primarily Italian -- correctly? I don't know. I don't know much about opera.

When I first came across the term "diva," in connection with opera, I had heard the term "prima donna," but not in any sense which had to do with opera. A prima donna, as far as I knew, was a spoiled, difficult, unpleasantly egotistical person, gender not specified.

Eventually I learned that the two terms were synonymous, in opera, and in the wider world. Except that "diva," like "punk," was re-claimed by people at who the term was hurled. A diva became something positive, a proud, strong woman who didn't care if you found her difficult. The first non-operatic usage I noticed was it being applied to female pop music stars, like Diana Ross or Patti LaBelle. 

Simultaneously, I noticed that the usage of the term "diva" in opera could be positive or negative. It could denote that a star soprano was a great singer, or that she was an aggravating person. Then I noticed that in the case of Maria Callas, different people applied the term "diva" to her non-singing, offstage life, some positively, some negatively, although they were all referring to the same behavior. What struck some people as difficult and disgraceful, struck others as proud and glorious. 

Or perhaps it was more a case of some regarding a woman as proud and disgraceful, while others saw her as proud and glorious. Reclaiming the intended insult as a compliment. Saying that if you had a problem with this particular goddess, it was strictly your problem. 

I was already somewhat disturbed by people applying the term "diva" to non-operatic singers, when I became aware that it was being applied to people who didn't sing at all. Drag queens, for example. In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, the regional-award-winning drag queens refer to themselves as "fierce, ruling divas."

Thinking that over, while getting ready to write this essay, I began to wonder whether the operatic connection might be all in my head, and whether ladies who refer to themselves as divas might not be going back directly to the Latin, skipping opera altogether. As in: opera? What opera? Honey, I'm talking about goddesses! 

Then I remembered that, in To Wong Foo, the book DV by Diana Vreeland is recommended to a young lady as the last word in getting a MAY-un, and of course, Diana Vreeland, whatever else she was or was not, and that's several more essays at least, was utterly incapable of going for an entire book without saying quite a bit about Maria Callas. Of course I've read DV. What, you haven't?! *faints*

So anyway, my point was that I'm going to have to ask my brother just exactly what he meant when he called Sabrina Carpenter a diva.

EV Public Charging

One evening over 20 years ago, I happened to surf onto "Nightly Business Report." Not the sort of thing which ordinarily held my interest for more than a few seconds, but this time I ended up watching an entire guest commentary or editorial by a columnist from Forbes, a crusty, white bearded curmudgeon who asked, "When are one of you billionaire geniuses going to design a computer I can turn on and off like a TV?"

A darn good question! And all these years later, it still is. The commentator went on to say that computer guys made computers for computer guys, and not for the public. Computers are inconvenient and difficult to use for the general public, because computer guys don't care.

I was reminded of this just a couple of days ago, reading a social media conversation about public EV charging. Someone had started a thread because they were new at using public chargers, and having some difficulty. 

Something lots and lots of people can relate to. And thankfully, they were getting lots of advice, and hopefully, enough of it helped and they can use public chargers now.

But one participant was not helpful, was not friendly. They called the original poster stupid, and had harsh words for people who were "too lazy to learn" how to operate public chargers. 

Personal computers all over again: tech guys know how to do things like public charging, and, basically, screw you if you don't.

I know there are reasons for everything. I know tech guys got wedgies growing up and it made them angry at the whole world.

But there's a difference this time around: computers have never had to compete with any older, more familiar technology. They were new and unique, and they remain unique. EV's are competing with ICE vehicles, and public charging is competing with gas stations. 

And so, many of you may be very relieved to learn, the days when you can just go up to a public charger and swipe a credit card as if you were at a gas station -- no apps -- are already here in parts of Europe and California, which means they will be everywhere soon.

Competition between merchants, between old and new ways of doing things, leading to innovation which directly benefits the consumer. I hate to say it, but maybe Adam Smith wasn't completely wrong about everything.

Dream Log: Selena Gomez

 

I know what some of you are thinking: another movie star?! Steve, you're delusional! To which I say, Not guilty. I know these are just dreams. I know, for example, that Ms Gomez and I have never met. 

On the other hand, I am rather gorgeous, and I have actually, in real life, dated a couple of movie stars. There's nothing weird about that: I was a professional actor for a brief period of time -- "professional" in the sense of actually being paid to act. Not in the sense of having been paid enough to live on -- and actors and actresses do tend to date each other, just the same way people in other professions tend to see each other socially, and a couple of the actresses I dated were, or became since, movie stars. Names? Haha, Nope!

If all the women I ever snuggled with were somehow together in one place and you could see the whole group of them, you'd have a heart attack and die, that's how literally drop-dread gorgeous they have been. And some of them were also actresses.

So. Anyway. Selena. 

In the dream I was near Wakarusa, Indiana, the small town in cornfield-Indiana where I grew up. I didn't think of it as "cornfield-Indiana" when I lived there. I just thought it was weird when I went somewhere else and there were no cornfields, at all. Or only a few, here and there. I've been dreaming a lot about Wakarusa lately. 

In the dream, Selena Gomez and I actually didn't get to the first date: she asked me out, we made arrangements to meet at 8 that evening, and the rest of the dream was mostly me walking and driving between several small houses among the cornfields and looking forward to the date. It was winter, everything was covered with snow. In one front yard were the stumps of several trees which had been recently felled; in another, as if a series were being continued, several trees had been felled, and then the remaining stumps had been carved into the shapes of angels, not elaborate carving, but not what I would call crude either, rather nice. Rather abstract and merely suggestive of the shapes of angels

Then I was inside one of those houses, and there was a land-line phone with an answering machine next to it, and I was doing something involving a message to or from Selena. A small and nerdy-looking man observed what I was doing, shook his head and said I should just grab her already, or she was going to think I was a nerd and dump me. Actually, he worded it even a little bit more crudely than that. I wondered who he was and why he was giving me advice. Did he actually know Selena, or was his advice based on celebrity-gossip TV, or what? What did he care what went on between her and me?

Presumably, Selena was there filming something on location, but I didn't know exactly what. She showed up around 8, and now that I'm awake I realize that it was still daylight, whereas in reality at 8 in the evening in the winter in Wakarusa it would be night-time (you see? I'm able to discern differences between reality and dreams).

I mentioned to Selena that I had grown up in Wakarusa, and she said, "Oh yeah, that little town next to the county line," and I replied that it had been so long since I had been there that I couldn't remember where the county line was. Then I woke up and looked it up, and sure enough, the county line is just a little to the west of Wakarusa.

A Modest Proposal Concerning Manuscripts Shown in Historical Documentaries

I like some documentaries about archaeology. And I'm very, very much interested in ancient and Medieval texts. And so, when in a well-made film on an archaeological topic, the host takes a break from the digs to go to a library's special collection and show us some old manuscripts, I tend to like it very much indeed.

But still, I think it could be done better. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite archaeological series, In Search of the Dark Ages, written and hosted (or presented, as they say in British English) by Michael Wood and first broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This series, for the most part, covers the Anglo-Saxon period in England and the adjoining Celtic part of Britain. One episode goes earlier, having to to do with the first-century revolt of the British queen Boudica against the Romans. 

Woods walks around historic sites, talking to archaeologists who are supervising digs, or led digs a a while ago, or want to get permission to begin digs, and asks them intelligent questions. Or he walks around historic sites by himself and speaks intelligently to the camera. Occasionally making allusions to current political events which sometimes make me wince with their conservative flavor, but no-one, not even Michael Wood, is perfect. He often quotes from Anglo-Saxon or Latin accounts of Medieval events -- he's a specialist in Anglo-Saxon -- and translates into modern English for the viewer. He seems quite fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It's all quite wonderful.

Where I see room for improvement -- and not just in Michael Wood's shows, but in every show I can recall in the archaeological genre -- is in the way in which old manuscripts are presented to the viewer. The scene will shift from a dig to a library, while Wood says in voice over something like, "To find out more about, we must turn to a manuscript in" -- in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or in the British Library, as the case may be, or somewhere else. 

Wood will walk into special-collections rooms and proceed to read from Latin or Anglo-Saxon precious rare manuscripts. Which is awesome, but -- it leaves out the scholars who are currently working with those manuscripts.

Why not talk to those textual scholars just as he's been talking to the archaeologists? Or at the very least, mention some of them? He reads, in the episode "In Search of Arthur," from the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, one of the earliest written mentions of King Arthur. He reads the passage about Arthur right from the Bodlian Library's manuscript of the annals, the best existing manuscript.

The thing is, most of us don't have as much access to special collections as Michael Wood does. We can't just drop in and consult the best manuscripts whenever we want to. Luckily for us, in 1860, the Rev John Williams, also well known by his Welsh bardic name Ab Ithel, published an edition of the Annales Canbriae based on the very same manuscript Woods reads from in the show, and two others. 

I would like it if Wood, and other hosts of similar shows, would mention the printed editions that you and I can read. I don't know whether a new edition was being prepared while Wood was filming the show about Arthur. If so, Wood could have interviewed the new editor just as easily as he interviewed all those archaeologists. His interviews with the archaeologists have been wonderful. I see no reason to doubt that his interviews with textual editors would have been just as wonderful. If no new edition was underway at the time, Wood still could have interviewed a scholar and authority on the manuscript. 

In the episode on Boudica he reads from a manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, the primary written source for Boudica's rebellion. Why not also at least hold up to the camera CD Fisher's 1906 Oxford Classical Texts edition of Tacitus' Annals and mention that the viewer could easily get the original Latin text for themself if they so desired? Or, even better, he could have interviewed Heubner or Wellesley, who were working on new editions at the time. 

Being Michael Wood, I'm sure he could've come with far more intelligent questions for the new editors of Tacitus than I ever could, just as he came up with all of those great questions for the archaeologists. 

Let the viewers know, let them see and hear, that textual criticism is a living, ongoing, exciting thing, just like archaeology. It just needs the right host, the right presenter, to put it across. Michael Wood could definitely do it. Show the viewers that they can take part in the text in more ways than just seeing the host go into the library and look at a manuscript. Which is great! I don't want any of the producers to stop showing the manuscripts. I just want them to give the viewers a more solid connection to the manuscripts. And if it's not a famous text like the Welsh Annals or Tacitus, if it's actually still unpublished, then talk about how it isn't even published yet, and about the need for more students of Anglo-Saxon or Medieval Latin or what have you.