Sybilla Oritur

Right now my oven isn’t working. On the long list of things i continue to avoid, high up there is telling my landlord about the broken convection oven and the doorknob that keeps falling off. I feel stupid making a special trip to list things wrong with the apartment. However, i was given my Nana’s old slow-cooker over Christmas break for mine is MIA and am making yummy food - without an oven. This was this week’s foray into the world of cooking (you’ll note that almost nothing was from scratch - i am easing into it).

Ingredients
1 can cream of potato soup
1 can cream of chicken soup
2 cans chunk chicken (if you have leftovers that would obviously be better, but i did not)
1.5 cups frozen kernel corn (a can would work too i imagine)
1 cup chicken broth
1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
1 can chopped mild green chile (this makes it mildly spicy and interesting as a dish - don’t skip - can be found in the mexican food aisle of even the crappiest grocery store)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dried leaf thyme
1 cup milk

Preparation
Combine all ingredients except milk in slow cooker. Cover and cook on LOW for 4 to 5 hours. Add milk and cook for about 30 minutes longer (until hot). Makes 4 generous servings.

When i come up with a better formulation than Felix Gilbert’s on page 274 of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, I’ll let you know:

But if in its formal aspects the History of Italy corresponds to humanist prescriptions, these are not the features which the reader considers as determining the character of the book. Rather it is a work which bears the imprint of the author’s personality and mind, as as such it is a reflection of the Florentine political tradition and of the political experiences of the age.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if Robert Downey Jr. is in a movie i am going to end up watching it for he never seems to get himself cast into crap. It’s nice. Perhaps it’s just dumb luck, but i would like to think there are, out there, movie stars and starlets who actually vet the scripts they are offered and not just the salaries.

That said, i was a little disappointed with Sherlock Holmes. I’m not a huge fan of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books (yes, feel free to roll your eyes), so it had not so much to do with meddling with the original text and more to do with a general lack of sleuthing. There was more Iron Man (which i loved, incidentally) than Holmes. Although at the end there is a beautiful scene in which Holmes demonstrates that he HAS, in fact, been sleuthing the entire time, it would have been nice if a little of that work was peppered through out the film rather than concentrated at the end. There were, however, some beautiful shots of London, particularly in the shipyards, as well as an interesting love interest. Nevertheless, i was in love with neither Holmes nor Watson to the extent that i wanted to be. I like leaving action movies all starry-eyed and sure to have pleasant dreams of brawny men later on. That didn’t happen. But, honestly, what was i expecting?

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i think, perhaps, reading Guicciardini, Rucellai and Machiavelli may be better for my mental health than a truckload of pills or hours on a therapist’s couch. Also less expensive. I am so much more willing to stomach platitudes when they are artfully composed by a mind greater than i.

“In all human decisions and actions there is always a reason for doing the opposite of what we do, for nothing is so perfect that it does not contain a defect. Nothing is so evil that is does not contain some good, just as nothing is so good that it does not contain some evil. This causes many men to remain inactive, because every tiny flaw disturbs them. They are the overconscientious, awed by every minute detail. That is no way to be. Rather, having weighed the disadvantages of each side, we should decide for the one that weighs less, remembering that no choice is clear and perfect in every respect” — Guicciardini in Ricordi

Last night, when i finally open up my email acct (and i get WAY too much REAL email during the day), i discovered that the organizer of my panel for the NeMLA conference in April has dropped out. They are looking for someone to replace him, or a random NeMLA representative will step up. I had been asking for details about the length of my submission for a while now. Unfortunately, i now have to condense a thirty-page paper into a fifteen-page paper. I am hoping to be able to outsource this project as effectively as i outsourced the transcription portion of my translation.

I have been invited to present a paper on Rucellai (the current translation task) at the AAIS conference in Ann Arbor the week after the NeMLA. I was seriously considering it as, well, since i need a draft by March 1st, if i can’t talk coherently about the paper by the end of April i will be in much deeper water - but i found out yesterday when speaking to Prof. Terpstra that the RSA is in Montreal in 2011! I don’t foresee writing anything worth of presenting at such a prestigious conference before applications next fall, so i am considering perhaps holding off on presenting the Rucellai paper. Ah, thank the good lord for awesome advisors who i am sure will have brilliant suggestions to soothe my troubled mind.

Yes, I understand your son is only nine and that you are from South Africa, but if he’s going to ask when he’s going to get to see an eskimo on the train going to Toronto and you’re not going to correct him – I am NOT a bad person for letting you know that that is a racial slur here. And if you DID happen to know and just couldn’t be bothered to correct him… your stance that “he’s only a little boy” IS going to be put into a context of your native country’s overall record with respect to, well, respecting non-white people.

That was the train from Baltimore to Toronto. Got on at 3:55am. Arrived here at 9pm (here being Veronica’s apartment). I am a trooper.

Ok. That’s it. I am tired of finding references to Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in just about every article I read – in works ostensibly about the French Revolution, literary theory and even early modern witchcraft theory. It was going to be on the summer reading list – but it has just become a priority for the winter break on par with actually completing the other 92 pages of translation I need to do and the historiography paper on the Napoleon in Italy. Did I just call that a break? Really? But, then again, how can I complain? Paid to read things I would want to read anyways isn’t exactly worthy of bemoaning.

Is it a coincidence that people first started REALLY arguing about whether it was appropriate to compose speeches for historical characters even though they were manifestly not what was said but rather a rhetorical composition by the history-writer around the time of the printing press? The extent to which such creative writing was tolerated appears to be inversely proportion to the availability of the person’s composed words, in written form.

If the likes of twitter continue over people’s lifetimes, it will be possible to read the narrative of just about any person’s life, in their own words. How do the relationships forged with the people’s tweets we follow and status updates we read affect our conceptions of selfhood?

I was first introduced to the concepts of colonial imperialism directed towards the peoples of Europe itself when talking a course on the Irish Famine in my freshman year. The exposure did not really legitimate the hardline separatist account of the Quebecois experience in Canada as a case of “imperialism” which should be likened to such cases as India, South Africa or Sri Lanka (this is a genre thing in literature more than anything else). I have been reading Broer’s The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796-1814 and it is changing how i am conceiving of imperialism. In a nutshell, Broer appears to be arguing that French institutions were fundamentally incapable of coping with transhumance as a main social pattern and that this, among other factors, caused Italian elites, usually complicit in processes of integration and amalgame to turn away and provide the French with only assimilation, ever unsuccessful, as a model.

There was only one thing worse than the propensity of the peripheral elites to turn against — or simply away — from the French, that was their seemingly bottomless hatred of each other. The elites were not drawn in volatile, lascivious popular culture, there were its “trend setters”. In the Ligurian mountain communes of Vezzano and Arcola, the local notables appointed as tax collectors by the French proved not only corrupt - some people were made to pay their taxes several times in 1809 - but were driven by lust and sexual jealousy to the public violence that first brought them to the notice of the police. Gian-Battista Bertaldi, the chief tax collector, attacked his brother-in-law’s dometic servant with a sword in the main square and threatened to kill her because he had had an affair with her, and believed she was now having one with his brother-in-law (229-330).

I’ve found myself defending my respect for the faith of men like Descartes, Pascal, Newton and - most importantly - St. Francis of Assisi. The rosary i picked up from Assisi along with the Assisi rock i use as a paperweight out of reverence for someone who believed in something, something good, so strongly he psychosomatically gave himself the stigmata. Atheism undermines any such conviction really.

Linda Cooley in Britons: forging the nation, 1707-1837 (Pimlico, 2003) outlines the development of a distinctly British identity during the course of the early modern period and discusses the extent to which French Catholicism and Anglican Protestantism were defined in apposition to each other. I’ve been having difficulty explain the appeal of monarchy to my republican (little “r”!) friends. They see the inheritance and issue and i point out what the British do when they don’t think the monarch represents them properly:

In 1688, and again in 1714, the strict rules of dynastic succession were ostentatiously broken so that the evil-which was how most Britons regarded it-of a Roman Catholic monarch could be avoided. In the first case, the openly Catholic James II and his male heir were coerced by force of arms into fleeing to France, so that the crown could pass to his elder, Protestant daughter, Mary, and in reality to her Dutch, Calvinist husband, William of Orange. And when Anne, Mary’s sister and successor as queen, failed to keep any of her huge and sickly brood of children alive, a Parliament dominated by Tory country gentlemen passed the Act of Settlement in 1701 confirming that anyone who was Catholic or married to a Catholic was ‘forever uncapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the crown and government of this realm’, a law that still stands. To make sure of obtaining a Protestant successor, Parliament had to sweep away considerations of hereditary right not just once but many times over. It passed over more than fifty individuals who were closer as blood relations to Queen Anne but ineligible because of their Catholic faith, in order to arrive at the man who eventually became king in 1714, George Lewis of Hanover, a German with only a smattering of the English language, a plain, middle-aged, uncharismatic man, with no great appeal except the essential one. He was Lutheran, not Catholic” (46).