French history

Goodness, I'm blogging queen for the day. Enjoy it while it lasts; you and I both know it won't for long...

I'm confused. Robespierre, the French revolutionary-turned-apparent-dictator who was guillotined when the people had had enough. You know what I'm talking about. Well, S. T. Coleridge, in the third act of his "The Fall of Robespierre," has Barrere making a speech. Here's part of that speech:

...When the tyrant
Hurl'd from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann'd for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart
Has sunk within me, when the various woes
Of my brave country crowded o'er my brain
In ghastly numbers---when assembled hordes,
Dragg'd from their hovels by despotic power,
Rush'd o'er her frontiers, plunder'd her fair hamlets,
And sack'd her populous towns, and drench'd with blood
The reeking fields of Flanders.---When within,
Upon her vitals prey'd the rankling tooth
Of treason; and oppression, giant form,
Trampling on freedom, left the alternative
Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day,
When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced
The doom of injured France, has faction reared
Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach'd
Of mercy---the uxorious dotard Roland,
The woman-govern'd Roland durst aspire
To govern France; and Petion talk'd of virtue,
And Vergniaud's eloquence, like the honeyed tongue
Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction.
We triumphed over these. On the same scaffold
Where the last Louis pour'd his guilty blood,
Fell Brissot's head, the womb of darksome treasons,
And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet,
And Hébert's atheist crew, whose maddening hand
Hurl'd down the altars of the living God,
With all the infidel's intolerance.

I can kind of see the reference... I think. Roland, in the Italian-connected cycle, is bewitched by a Pagan princess from China, and more or less travels the entire known world in search of her, madly in love. He's blinded by a woman, etc.

But was Robespierre? I can't find any information on him that would make the uxorious-dotard lines make sense. Nevermind that a French historical character making wholly disparaging reference to Roland is in itself more than a little strange. Help?

EDIT 23.47: Oh! It was Madame Roland. THAT explains it. From the Britannica:

(1754–93). The wife of a French politician during the French Revolution, Madame Roland greatly influenced the policies of the moderate Girondist faction of the revolutionaries. The Girondists professed moderate republican views and opposed the excesses of the more radical party.

Jeanne-Marie Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754, the daughter of an engraver. An avid reader, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière. He was a government official who afterward became a leader of the Girondist party.

When the French Revolution came, Madame Roland became the intellectual leader of a group of young enthusiasts who gathered in her salon. Her visitors included the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde. At first even Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, leaders of the opposing Jacobins, belonged to her circle.

So, this isn't my Roland at all.

From Cucina Pratica

Subtitle of the cookbook, translated: Recipes, ideas, advice for the modern woman. Subtitle notwithstanding, this cookbook (purchased in 1995 in Padova, on clearance for something like $10) is one of my favorites. Practical cuisine, indeed; tasty dishes of varying complexity. The following measures were eyeballed all to hell.

Take five medium-sized zucchini. Wash them, trim the ends and lovingly cut into thin (3-5mm) circles. Set aside. Mince a good handful of fresh parsley, and set that aside too.

Heat up a large frying pan; a wok would work too, but probably not quite as well. In 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1-2 tablespoons of butter (no less than 3 tbsp of fats), fry up 3-5 cloves of sliced – not mashed – garlic, and a round slice of a Mayer lemon cut up in eighths like a tiny pie. Fry that until the garlic and lemon are done, then fish them out of the oil-and-butter and set them aside.

Toss in the zucchini and coat in the sauce. Cover and steam-fry for a minute or two, just to get them sweating. Take off the cover and toss in some salt, freshly ground pepper and a little of the parsley. Toss well and keep stirring occasionally until the zucchini are done to your liking. Don't worry if they get mushy; keep frying them, and eventually they'll turn this amazing crusty brown.

While waiting for the veggies to fry, cut another piece off the lemon and squeeze its juice into the cooked garlic and lemon. At the end, toss in that mixture and the rest of the parsley, and fry on high heat just until the parsley is heated through.

Eat as a side dish with your burger, or with anything really. Then, when it's summer and parsley actually has a scent, cook this again and allow the green trance to overtake your kitchen.

arRSSgh

Every time I change the RSS template, LiveJournal reads them as new messages and thus reposts them to people's friends lists and flooding.

Sorry about that. I'll leave the template alone now.

In the name of

"This is clear evidence of God's existence," they say.

But if you believe in a god, why do you need evidence that this god exists? And why would you want to convince others of it?

RSSing it

Just downloaded NetNewsWire, which seems like a nice gadget for blog reading.

Oh, the tragedy! Fully half of the bloggers I want to read put only excerpts of their blogs into their RSS feeds. So I actually have to click on the link to the entry, if I want to read the whole entry.

I'd really rather not, in most cases. There are many people (including myself) who make the full entries, including images and/or comments (that last one I should really figure out), available through syndication. Is there a good reason not to do it?

Roland of Rolandseck

You may have heard (or read) my impression of the Roland legend's German incarnation. Pfaffe (Priest) Konrad, sometime in the 12th century I think, translated the French Song of Roland into German, at the request of a wealthy patron. He did not pass on the opportunity to pepper the text with, literally, pages of moralistic sermon: "Oliver asked Roland again to blow his horn, and again Roland refused, and WOE TO HIM THAT IS TOO PROUD TO CALL FOR HELP FOR GOD WILL" etc.* So, okay, I thought; the Germans more or less knew the legend as the French had conceived it, with few changes except to make a religious martyr bordering on fanatic out of Roland. Seemed to make sense: in the days of yore, specifically during Charlemagne's reign, both France and Germany were under his direct rule; and so the legend should be more or less the same, right?

Tutt'altro, as the Italians say. There's a whole 'nother thing.

A Google search reveals that the Roland-of-Rolandseck legend seems to exist in many versions. Here's one whose wording I like. The "this" refers to Rolandsbogen, or Roland's Bow, the stone window shown in the image. It stands on the Rhine, not very far from Bonn, in an area called Rolandseck (Roland's Corner).

   This is all that remains of the fortress that was built as a toll castle by the archbishops of Cologne in 1100. After the "Rolandsbogen" collapsed in 1840, its restoration was paid for by public donations.
   According to the legend Sir Roland, a knight, built the castle for his bride, Hildegund, the daughter of the Knight of Drachenfels. Roland went off into battle against the Saracens and Hildegrund learned of his supposed death. She went into retreat at the convent on the Rhine Island of Nonnenwerth, and when Roland came home, he was heartbroken. Every day he looked out of his bow window at the convent and when Hildegund died soon after, they found him dead as well - at his window.

So, to sum up: the German legend retains the bit about Roland dying at Rencesvalles, but disregards it as rumor that is in fact untrue. Instead, Roland dies of lovesickness, staring out the window at the convent across the water, in which his beloved is wasting away in the name of love and Jesus.

*That isn't an actual quote.

Now that's research.

Whlie doing some online reading about modafinil's possible interactions with alcohol (I'd like to know whether I can have a glass of wine every once in a while), I came across the following gem:

One healthy male volunteer developed ideas of reference, paranoid delusions, and auditory hallucinations in association with multiple daily 600 mg doses of Provigil and sleep deprivation. There was no evidence of psychosis 36 hours after drug discontinuation.

These people's conclusion? "Caution should be exercised when Provigil is given to patients with a history of psychosis."

One healthy male volunteer. One. Six hundred milligrams when the maximum recommended dose is four hundred, and sleep deprivation to boot. And they're making pronouncements as to what they think should and shouldn't be done with the drug? Aiie!

For whom the Roland tolls

I have got to go to Belgium.

In a bellfry, in Ghent, there is a bell called Roland. According to one work of fiction, the inscription on it reads: My name is Roland. When I tell, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders. Longfellow wrote a poem about it.

Here's a fun bit. Sometime just after World War II, Luigi Dallapiccola wrote a short opera – set in sixteenth-century Spain – titled Il Prigioniero (The Prisoner). (Click on the link for a plot summary.) An interesting addition to the Roland corpus, in its odd but unmistakeable parallel to the French Song of Roland. To wit: our knight is the champion of Christendom, whose heart's desire is to deliver every heathen from their wicked ways by word or steel. Well, okay, mostly steel. Obviously, he fails to do that for the Pagans that kill him. The same pagans whom Charlemagne had just previously besieged for seven years in the Spanish city of Saragossa, the last Pagan stronghold in Europe.

Centuries later, the prisoner finds himself in that same city, and Roland the Ghent bell fails to deliver him from a most evil expression of Christianity.

I did a double-take at that one, but it's there. I'm wary of trying to see connections where there ain't none, so this is probably where I'll stop with The Prisoner. Still, very cool.

cooking indian

"Okay, let's see what this recipe says."

   "Well, we're gonna need the cauliflower in florets, right? I'll do that. Hey, we don't have ghee. Oh, you're using butter."

"Right! And in the butter goes – guess."

   "Let's see. Cumin seeds!"

"Right! And?"

   "Uh. Turmeric!"

"Yes! Aaaand?"

   Ginger and chilis. How could I have forgotten.

...

   "It's fizzly."

"It says the rice and mung beans need seven cups of water, but I think it's on crack."

Discussion ensues as to whether the water should be cold or hot. Warm wins, and the rest is eyeballed. Rice and tiny yellow half-moon moong bean halves are cooked in more butter and spices, pre-browned cauliflower and some frozen peas thrown in and the heat cranked. The fragrant result, created between readings about an equine Roland (who also, as it turns out, dies), is tasty.

Blue Company now online!!

Well, darned if this isn't good news! Rob Wittig's erstwhile e-mailed novella Blue Company is now available online. Originally, you had to subscribe to it, and it got mailed to you every day for a month. Ingenious use of the medium, and it worked really well. While reading it on the Web might not be quite the same thing, it's still brilliant. I highly recommend it.

And while you're at it, do check out Scott Rettberg's sort-of sequel to Blue Company, called Kind of Blue.

Live and learn, under God

So, I didn't actually know that the words "Under God" weren't put into the U.S. pledge of allegiance until 1954, when America was fighting godless Commies. I find this as hilarious as the present blind enforcement of the phrase's repetition is idiotic.

Who are you to make me pledge allegiance to your god?!

In high school, at first I thought it was kind of cool to participate in recitations of this sort. After all, I'd just arrived fresh out of the USSR, where vocal pronouncements of solidarity and loyalty to the State weren't exactly a rarity. As I got older and started thinking for myself a little more, though, it seemed distasteful to have to say "under God." This is around 1992-3 we're talking about, Clinton was president, people were a lot more relaxed, and I'd just moved to southern California, where (especially compared to Queens, New York) nobody seemed to ever raise their voice above speaking level. My teachers gave us quite a bit of freedom on this one, saying we didn't have to recite the pledge at all, but could mouth it or just stand there with our hands over our hearts, facing the flag.

I had my problems with facing the flag as a daily exercise, too, but wasn't going to fight this particular battle.

Anyway, yes. "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance, and the forced daily recital of the pledge of allegiance, is stupid. It's not going to get you any thinking person's loyalty. It stinks of propaganda: "Look at us! We're good Christians! WE are not mindless ROBOTS who want to take away everyone's MONEY! Oh, and by the way, you should praise our god." Spare me, will you? You've already made me renounce my godless ways in favor of The Flag whose purpose and ideals of religious and other freedoms you are corrupting. You get my loyalty, and my taxes – for now, anyway; I'm not at all sure I want to while away the rest of my days in the U.S. You made my mother wait over a year longer than the rest of us to get her citizenship, because her line of work back in the old country required inscription to the Party ranks. Over a year. In 1998. Paranoid bunch of...

In other news, I notice that political ranting is becoming a favorite use for this blog. I wonder how many people I'm aggravating.

XML editors for semantic encoding

Ethan and I have been talking a lot about the kind of xml editing environment that is available out there for free, or cheaply (read: to academics). I'm becoming more and more convinced that there isn't yet a good editor for what I'd like to do. iBoggle at this! What I'd like to do is relatively simple, compared with the wild and crazy things people do with XML nowadays.

1. I'd like to edit documents without a DTD. While I'm encoding a file semantically, which constitutes research, I can't have a DTD in place by definition, until I've encoded the document (possibly several times). Thus, I don't care if myfile.xml validates against a pre-set DTD. I only care whether it's well-formed.
2. I'd like to be able to highlight text, and with a keyboard or mouse shortcut call up a menu of all the elements I could possibly use at this point in the document, based on the elements I've used thus far. Once an element is inserted, it would also be grand to get a menu of the attributes used in it up until now. In both cases, there should be an option to add a new element or attribute.
3. I'd like to be able to view the thing in different modes – a full-on text mode, with all of the source right there, and perhaps a more wysiwyg mode, in which the cursor's position would trigger a display of what element(s) I'm in at the moment, somewhere on the side.
4. I'd like for the editor to then be able to extrapolate a DTD from my code, if I ask it to do so. Or tell me exactly why it can't.

This is the wish list so far. Of all the editors I've seen, only XMetaL and <oXygen/> have half-way decent interfaces. The former is only available for Windows. The latter is excruciatingly uncustomizeable, or else the Windows version is different from that made for the Mac, or else-else, the trial version does not include all the features of the full version. While that last option seems more probable the more I play with oXygen, documentation didn't bother to mention it, and I spent so much time beating my head against it, that frankly, I'm not inspired to pay the $48 for an academic license. Moreover, the feature I want most – being able to quickly surround text in tags based on the tags I've used so far in the document – is wildly unreliable. If I create a new element, the program will not see it until I close and re-open the document; and even then, at any given point I get a seemingly arbitrary list of available elements.

Enough bitching, I just wanted to formulate all of this in writing while I'm in the middle of it. If anyone knows of an already-existing program that does what I want to do, let me know!

modafinil

I would've been posting, but early last week suddenly found myself unable to log into my MovableType install. The lessons I learned from this are two: one, that it is always better to have one geek in the house than a whole support forum full of them on the Interweb; and two, that at any point your sysadmin might upgrade a database and not tell you. To be fair, the sysadmin didn't know I needed to be told; hence the advantages of having a geek in the house.

They're easy to feed, too. Unless you add too much chili powder and asafetida to your soup; then you just get to blush and feel remorseful.

The sleep study (sorry this is so late, Johanna) revealed that I do not, in fact, have narcolepsy in any form. On one hand, this is reassuring; because, hey, no narcolepsy – or any other sleep disorder they could see, for that matter. On the other hand, I'm still sleepier than I should be. Granted, my schedule is highly variable; but the doctor was realistic and did not even suggest changing my schedule (this would be entirely impractical, for me). Instead, she prescribed modafinil (Provigil), a non-amphetamine stimulant, relatively new on the market.

I'm still experimenting. I don't know how well this'll work. For the moment, it's interesting: modafinil seems to be more or less a wonder drug, though that will probably change when there's more research data on it. For the moment, it's said to not be addictive, and there are no grave side effects commonly associated with it. It may or may not be affecting my mood, but the jury is still out on that one.

I'm no biochem specialist, but from what I've read, instead of supplying the body with a lot of stimulant hormone, modafinil seems to inhibit the brain trigger that tells us we're tired. It does not make me jittery or "speedy," and is thus far considered to not be habit forming. Its effects last 8-12 hours, and it does not make it difficult to fall asleep – unless, of course, you take a significant dose of it too late into the evening. Based on others' reports, it does not seem to be effective in perking you up when you're already tired.

Having started to take this stuff last Tuesday, here are some positives so far. I get to regulate my dose; they have you start at a quarter of the maximum, and find what works for you. (I'm at the minimum right now, and don't intend to go much higher.) I've felt not only more alert, but more easily able to concentrate. However, there is a noticeable drop in energy level as the drug wears off, and it's not so much the tiredness itself as the abrupt transition that gives me pause.

Since Tuesday, I've had maybe two cups of coffee, a few cups of caffeinated tea and less than a can of caffeinated soda. This is big, for me: I get habituated to caffeine easily, so it's difficult to balance using it as a stimulant with absolutely loving a good cup of coffee. Separating the two would be grand.

There is a warning on its documentation that modafinil may interfere with the effectiveness of orally administered hormonal birth control, by making you process the hormones more quickly. This has been tested by one study, which used just over thirty subjects; only sixteen of them were given modafinil and not a placebo. They were all on the pill; so things like the Nuva Ring haven't been tested. Also, these women were given 200 to 400mg of modafinil – the highest dose – for a month. This is all the information available about the interaction so far; the rest, for the moment, is up to individuals and their doctors.

Get your religion out of my government!

Bush slams gay marriage at Evangelical convention.

Bush vows to protect traditional marriage from courts.

Listen to the NPR report. Note the Evangelicals gloating that Bush is picking up the torch that was dropped, leading a country founded on Christian principles.

Yes, well, this country is also founded on blood, on near-genocide. And on freedom of religion. Including freedom from religion. Oh god, am I furious.

In about an hour

they're going to hook up electrodes.

to my BRAIN.

!!*

* this is meant to indicate excitement, not worry. I've done this before. Tomorrow morning, I'll get to see my brain's electricity while it was sleeping! How good is that?!

Nightmare?!

I never have nightmares! What the heck? Perhaps this one was prompted by the sleep study questionnaire I filled out last night, which asked whether I ever had nightmares. Hm.

I was in Italy somewhere, I think it was supposed to be Rome, but parts of the city looked uncannily like Kishinev. In the place where I was staying (some friend's?), Satan (a rather handsome chap in a black-and-red suit, sans horns) brutally killed and mutilated some truckers. One of the other girls in the apartment (women were the only live beings in it at that point) discovered them, and my best friend (who was there and immediately took charge) said we all had to clean it up. I felt terrible, but said I couldn't look, because I'd have nightmares for a month or more. I was a coward even in a dream.

(That bit came from extensive perusal of our Netflix queue last night, in which I mentally noted some horror flicks, and also made a note to myself to not watch them. Because I'd have nightmares for a month. What is it with the month?)

Anyway, I left. Feeling bad, not to mention frightened, I had to get out of the city: there'd been another murder proximate to me, and I'd had enough. I get on a bus and get off a random stop, hoping to not run into anyone I know. And run straight into M*. Who looks uncannily like Bruce Campbell.

The alarm clock beeped (at 5am, and I was actually grateful for the early wake-up time), and I lay in bed rather unsettled for a while.

Now I go have breakfast with a woman whose name is the closest to mine, ever.

--
*M is a person I've never met, whom I know through scholarly veins, and with whom I've had very strange interaction.

Happy women's day!

It's International Women's Day. Happy 8th of March!

Despite the lack of updates, it's been an eventful month. I gave a talk at a brown-bag seminar at, well, Brown; and it went remarkably well. Ethan moved here from Seattle, which consumed us logistically for a week or two but, oh, is worth it. Both my work and my personal well-being are much improved.

Entirely selfishly, I am giddy to have access to both a ricemaker and a breadmaker now. Oh, and a wok. These implements of culinary creation, coupled with finding a couple of excellent Southeast Asian markets around Providence, have rather shaken up my daily diet in the best of ways. Incidentally, as long as you stay away from Thai Kitchen brand anything, I cannot recommend mamster's Thai curry highly enough. Actually, here: take a look at his other food writings. They are as amusing as they're informative.

E. and I have successfully ("victory!!") collaborated on writing a paper abstract, which was submitted too late to be considered for a conference session, but we'll find a venue for it. We continue to talk about the logistics of Roland^HT and I am hopeful for the project, if a little frustrated by not dedicating quite enough time to it. This last one should improve now that the exciting double-appointment, Italian-and-Comp-Lit faculty search is over. Amongst the applicants are a couple of really excellent women, and I fervently hope that one of them will join us.

I have begun to teach Italian to RISD students. They're a trip, complete sweethearts, and that priceless combination of razor-sharp and willing to throw themselves into conversation in a language they barely know. It's a really fun gig, and although it's technically a distraction from what I should be doing (*cough* dissertation *cough*), it's actually great for my own morale.

Tomorrow evening, I go in for a sleep study. That's exciting! Perhaps we'll find out why I become sleepy, regardless of how rested I am, if I sit in one place for too long. Becomes a bit of a problem when spending long hours at a computer, or, say, driving to Boston...

The weather had been improving until the weekend. Saturday it rained and rained; Sunday it was sunny and gorgeous; and today, it is snowing again. But the days, they are getting longer; and my mood is definitively on an upswing. We're full of activity over here. I keep noticing little things and mentally filing them in the "to blog" category, and... well, you know.

Earlier this morning, right around 6:30, a skunk waddled across our neighbors' backyard. It was light already, so either it spaced on the whole hide-in-daylight thing, or it was rabid. Cute.