December 31st;
Robin,
Constantine & I modestly welcome in the
New Year with a
glass of
unicum
and a television documentary about
Canaris.
December 30th;
Pretty quiet
out here.
December 29th;
Constantine & I walk to the
village shop,
frosty air filled with mixed
woodsmoke aromas.
December 28th;
Robin
still in bed. I teach Letty how to play
Klondike patience, though
using two packs, not one.
December 27th;
Robin ill, stays in bed. Letty & Zsuzsa play
chinese checkers
with me.
December 26th;
Boxing Day. I make
mince pies.
December 25th;
Christmas Day. Robin's copy of
'Astro-archeology' by
John Michell is a
refreshingly short and clear illustrated account of various
pioneers investigating whether neolithic stone circles were intended
to track sun, moon & stars to mark the celestial calendar. Michell
records how three centuries of archeologists repeatedly dismissed
claims by outsiders from
William Stukely
through Norman Lockyer up
to Alexander Thom that sites
like Stonehenge,
Silbury Hill,
Castle Rigg and
Le Menec were
Druid
observatories built to mark solstices and equinoxes. Neolithic
astronomy is now right in the standard picture.
December 24th;
Well, at least some people are courteous enough to reply to me.
Robin,
Constantine & I end up celebrating the eve of
the nativity
by watching
'Zabriskie
Point'
on telly, and reflecting on
innocence, love & materialism. Clearer than ever that
Antonioni
was thrilled & inspired by the fresh 60s mood, yet not taken in.
Fine camera shots, perfectly caught sense of space & hope,
good score - wooden acting, middling dialogue, bit slow.
December 23rd;
Out gathering firewood by the
river.
As night falls, with rich
colours along the horizon, Robin & I secure a sapling against
quite bitter wind.
December 22nd;
Indoor day. Lovely
Persian-tutorial
site.
December 21st;
After delays, Constantine,
Robin
& I make it out of town to the country by car with
Letty
& Zsuzsa.
December 20th;
A complex afternoon culminating with a visit to a
Mucsarnok
opening, then a sort of trial-by-dead-language
with Zeno & Krisztina in Muvesz coffee house. Zeno excitedly extols the virtues
of wine, makes me promise to relearn my
Latin,
the true European language, questions my position on God, and
urgently challenges me to debate any century in the
history of philosophy
with him. We draw a bit of a blank when I nervously suggest
Anselm. Krisztina sweetly pays for our drinks.
December 19th;
I bobble around a bookshop &
WestEndCity shopping centre,
& meet no-one.
December 18th;
Japanese artists at the
Ludwig.
Robin, Constantine, Istvan,
Wayne,
Goran & I go on to the
Knoll Gallery, to see
Emese's light
sculptures.
Judit joins us at a Kertesz-utca restaurant
{'M'} with arrogantly small portions, and
shows us the scar across her throat.
December 17th;
I wake up somehow healed. My waking thought is that each day has a
'push hour',
when you try to get the day's crucial things done. And today works.
December 16th;
Sudden crushing darkness hits me in the evening. Aching, bitter
self-pity.
December 15th;
Read 'Babel orokeben' by Istvan Totfalusi, an old general-interest book introducing
linguistics in a basic, cheerful way for schools. Lovely early-70s period piece
(so feels more like an early-60s book from Britain) with black-and-white photographs
of schoolboys in Wokingham struggling with an early school computer, lots of spools
of Joe-90-style
magnetic ribbon, stern-looking linguists' portraits from earlier
centuries, chunky grids of type in other scripts, and touchingly crude cartoons of
vowel-wielding cavemen. For a Hungarian book, an understandable, but not excessive
amount of space given to the
Finno-Ugric languages
in the middle sections.
Ends with a rousing vision of a future, centuries ahead, where
giant, humming translation machines occupy whole floors of
Corbusier-type glass towers,
the world has settled on one language, and
Esperanto
had an honoured place in bringing
the new age to fruition. Though the intermediary chapters move over topics like a
logically perfect language with a light touch, the great coming age still has a World
Language supposedly better at expressing emotion, abstract argument, and everything in
between than any language hitherto.
Plus... Chatting with a
statistical surrealist.
December 14th;
A Sunday so low-key it almost wasn't there. Esther & I do some
drawing in the
kitchen. I turned the heating up when I found her sitting in her overcoat.
December 13th;
So you can get a hangover from
pezsgo. Rob & I meet in
the Goethe
Institut for coffee.
December 12th;
At last a printer
Robin
& I can work with? In the evening, the cast party for the
Seress
film. Mici says she'll send me her
Sapir-Whorf essay,
Rita & I fail to get
into Capella,
Zita weighs up options, and
David tells me
he is working with an inspirational speaker.
December 11th;
Esther takes me out to a small village by train to meet our now-reclusive young witch
friend,
Edit,
and her adorable three-year-old daughter, Emoke.
After a fine chicken
soup and an hour trying to configure the
Apple,
Edit says my green 'heart'
aura
is about three inches thick with my yellow 'strength' aura another inch on top
of that. Esther has more of both, though. On the train back, Esther gives me
some useful advice on how
Libra women such as herself think.
December 10th;
Cough starting to leave me. Why do shops here not have
floor wax?
December 9th;
Up late translating stuff about
Istvan Szabo (who was Mr Choi's
all-time favourite film director, of course) for Gyorgyi's film-theory journal.
December 8th;
After yesterday's big clean while Esther &
Wayne
cooked pasta & tuna, another dull,
middling Monday. Where did I put the book
'Cheese'
Nina sent me?
December 7th;
Some strangeness surrounding
Mikulas
this year. A traditionally Continental pre-Christmas
Father Christmas turned up on Friday while I was teaching Sara
to present us each with a miniature chocolate version of himself. Eerily, though,
the stumbling visitor had no face, his white fluffy beard covering the front of his
head from neck to forehead. At home I completely failed to notice Esther's
Saint Nicholas
gift to me for two days, hiding in the shoe section of the hallway. Meanwhile, at
the
Internet cafe round the corner,
a generous stocking of nuts and chocolates was
left for me by a
"girl with long brown hair"
said the genial proprietor, himself
dressed in red with white beard for that couple of days. The only women who know I
go there/here (or would think of including a sachet of cappuccino) all deny
responsibility. Hmmm.
All supposedly based on the colours of the mushroom the
Lapplanders used to
get high on (hence flying reindeer etc)? Makes me admire the stubborn Dutch, clinging
to their yellow-robed
Sinterklaas
who turns up on a steamship with an African boy
in jester's clothes to help him distribute oranges. Especially the steamship
detail.
December 6th;
I nip round the corner to
the
mysterious socks & underpants wholesaler on the next block with the
mirrored door, where you have to press a buzzer to be let in. A rather dishy blonde
sends me away, explaining that simply because OPEN is written in large letters on the
door doesn't actually mean they are really open. But I can come back tomorrow,
Sunday morning, from seven a.m. - so almost like a real shop then.
December 5th;
Sitting upright in bed (yes, in bed - that's how ill I am) so as not to keep
Esther awake next door with my coughing, I read the school's copy of
'Hidden
Histories of Science'.
The book is five essays about how science often
advances erratically with backward steps and social influences.
Stephen Jay Gould's
essay about misleadingly teleological
"ladders and cones" in pictures of plants and animals in earth's deep past and in
"march-of-progress" diagrams of evolution could illustrate the whole book's thesis.
In other words scientific advance is not so much inevitable and orderly as messy
and filled with squabbles and misunderstandings. Pictured backwards from where we
are it looks much neater and more heroic than it was.
Since the book repeatedly boasts about how lucid and readable it is, I don't feel
too wicked saying it was a bit dull in parts. It starts off with the slightly bossy
Jonathan Miller
talking about how a string of disputes held understanding of
"enabling unconscious" back for over a century, in favour of more mystical, such as
Freudian, views of what the unconscious mind might do. Nice essay in the middle about
the role of viruses in cancer. It closes with
Oliver Sacks
describing how he repeatedly found neurological conditions
(Tourette's syndrome,
geometric pattern illusions seen by migraine headache sufferers, phantom limbs - he
might have also mentioned
synaesthesia recently rehabilitated by
Simon Baron-Cohen) had
vanished from textbooks and academic journals for a century: noted and described by
Victorian doctors, dismissed and forgotten by 20th-century doctors. Sacks uses the
image of a
'scotoma',
a blind spot or an overlooked area, to describe the way some
topics disappear from the literature and become apparently invisible to medical
practitioners for decades or even centuries. Miller obviously does something similarly
mimetic with his history of unconsciousness. What struck me about Sacks' stories of
going back through hospital library books to look for references to some neurological
condition, and finding that no-one
had taken out a certain book since before World War I, is that Sacks was simply doing
what was his job. And so is almost unique. Indeed, it would seem that roughly one
person a century actually does the job they are paid to do in most fields. Not quite
the conclusion I expected a book like this to lead me to. The most subversive thing
about it is this truth that, in science too, conscientiousness earns you resentment and
opposition from others. Far from effort and honesty being rewarded, the conscientious
minority clearly need large reserves of stamina to soak up the punishment they get from
others for doing their jobs properly.
December 4th;
With Ryan to
Al Amir.
I burble on about
sentential logic,
sign-language and
a book on philosophy of regret, to reconcile
ethics &
time.
December 3rd;
Still coughing.
Richard back in touch.
December 2nd;
In the evening I visit the Turkish restaurant, and chance upon the
multi-talented
Sandor
tucking into a shish kebab with
tsaziki. Of course, he greets
me in Turkish.
December 1st;
After standing in for Georgina in an intriguing 8 a.m. meeting with the wary old fox
Tiszainoka
has for a village mayor, I cycle with
Robin
to the next village to meet
The Sexy Dentist. One bicycle has no gears,
the other has no brakes, so we swap over half-way. Finding the dentist out for the
day, we repair to
Tiszakurt's
pub where I watch a Bavarian soap opera on
the television and he manages to secure a surprisingly convincing lager-and-lime
shandy. Then we pop in on his upholsterer, and get drawn into a long and deep
discussion about stuffing materials and seam-stitching. Robin's short-cut on the way
back has us cycling through an extremely muddy field.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
back
up to top of page
