Peeking into the rock

Tonight I discovered, thanks to Languagehat, Franz Kafka's wee fiction "Odradek." I also discovered the amazingly over-labored interpretations that exist -- many times more words than the story itself.

The story is a tiny vignette, a meditation on an ungainly object called "Odradek," which looks like an elaborated but delapidated spool, and is apparently capable of speech but has no discernible purpose or desires of its own.  Apparently "Odradek" bothers Kafka scholars a lot: they are sure it must mean something very deep, and they are willing to go to any ends to discover and defend its meaning. I don't think so. The word odradek itself is a word made up for the story, with a West Slavic feel but no real meaning. I think the story is the same kind of thing. It is a writing exercise: the reason it was ever published was that Kafka came to like it andf it helped to fill out a collection.

One a related front, I'm studying Czech again. I'm using Byki espress as a study tool, but I have no patience for the proprietary word lists which are too basic and don't advance me at all. There are quite a few relevant user-made lists, though at least half of the users who make lists seem to have missed the point, because they've made lists that are a hundred or more words long. This is not a useful study set. The lists I like the best right now are connecting phrases, and there are five or so of them, each with seven to twelve or so phrases. Things like "and besides that," or "oh, I almost forgot," or "now it occurs to me that."

I'm having to use the thing very loosely because I can't figure out how it decides that I have learned a phrase. Eventually I may use the phrasebook inside my dictionary to make some phraselists of my own. It's a wee bit strange, that phrasebook, as it seems to be aimed at Czech IT guys who are preparing to go to the US or the UK.

On another front -- a head thing front, I guess -- it is within the normal range of human behavior to spend almost an entire day in bed after every day socializing, right?

I read The Alchemist's Door by Lisa Goldstein last night. It's not terribly new- twelve years old -- but it's new to me. It showed up when I was searching books about Prague in the library and I said, sure, why not read someone else's Prague-inspired fantasy?

It has a decidedly weird relationship to history. On purpose. It's not a book where you can say "She got it wrong" (except for a little movie geography, which I'll nitpick in a bit: but it's not important) because what she's done is completely sideways on purpose. I will say this: she hasn't violated the space-time continuum with the characters' movements around Europe.

The premise is this: "What if John Dee was totally sincere and of course there's real magic, and he teamed up with Rabbi Loew to fight against Edward Kelley, and also King Rudolf and Elizabeth Bathory and also demons?" The sticking point is "John Dee as a sympathetic hero," but as stuff you have to grant an author to get along with the story, that's not too bad.

Some things I liked: the everyday life parts, the constant worry about money, the personalities of some of the characters. When I set aside the fact that the protagonist was John Dee and forgot about his historical ickiness, I liked him a lot. I liked his wife. I liked Izak the bastard. I was usually annoyed with Rabbi Loew, but I think that was about right. I liked that his status as an oppressed Jew didn't make him into a saint. I like that the fact that he had a bit of magic and was an oppressed minority didn't make him into a Magical One-Dimensional Prop Character. I adored the character of Magdelena, the street-dwelling apparent old lady who wants to learn magic. I liked that when she wrote John Dee as sympathetic and also a product of his times, she didn't feel she had to defend his prejudices. I've always said that if your protagonist has bad ideas or ideology and the reader feels as if the writer is promoting them, it is a failure of craft. So no failure of craft on that front here. No preachy-preachy either. Just clarity.

I am of two minds about the setting. Maybe I'm prejudiced because of my own romantic attachment to Prague. Maybe I'm territorial. I hope not. The movie geography wasn't usually actually important. Though I was thrown right out when there's an emphatic two paragraphs describing the very impressively long walk from Stare Mesto to Faustuv Dum (Faust House, where Kelley was living). I've done that walk, and it's like six blocks. Maybe eight, if you go the long way round. Maybe when Goldstein went there she was tired, or maybe she got lost on the way. It's easy to get temporarily lost in the center of Prague, though if you are patient you will get unlost eventually.

Another set of tiny details that threw me out of the story -- again, this is not really fair because it's a little thing -- was the description of how the spoken languages sounded to John Dee. They didn't read right. They read like descriptions of what the written language looks like, not what the spoken languages sound like. The thing about Czech not having any vowels -- it doesn't sound like that when spoken. The vowels are quite prominent and fluid, the consonant clusters don't stomp all over them at all. And Hungarian dolesn't sound hissy and sibilant, either. It looks sibilant, but it doesn't sound like that.

People call time to tell John Dee stuff about history and geography a lot. Of course they do that in real life. But it reads a little clunky. I actually think it would be a non-problem altogether if it were cut by only a little bit.

I was hoping for a different resolution to the golem part of the story (what, you thought that there could possibly be a story about Rabbi Loew that did not include the golem?), that would involve greater emotional and moral growth for Rabbi Loew, but the resolution here doesn't violate the source material (by the way, I just did a quick check on the dates for these guys, and as I thought, she has them right).

So anyway, if you like alchemist stories and stories with demons and Mad King Rudolf and the Golem, you might enjoy this. I'm going to look for other books by Lisa Goldstein, though I might hope they are set somewhere else so I don't get sidetracked with nitpicks.

My favorite musicians this morning: Sebő Ferenc.

My favorite site this morning: The Czech page of Visegrad Literature.

Do I have time for this?

No.

I entered into a discussion about breastfeeding at James Nicoll's lj, and now I've exited it (without flouncing: I don't want to be that person). There's only so many responses a person can make without becoming an asshole. So here's my private musings about the fallout from the dscussion. I've not friendslocked this because why bother? But I'm not going out of my way to invite people to continue the discussion over here because, again, why bother? I think I'm doing this because I am annoyed, want to express my annoyance, and I don't want to keep arguing, but even more so because I want to be really clear in my mind about what I'm thinking and saying and doing, and this is an opportunity to work on that clarity.

One tremendously useful thing has come out of this. I've figured out why the phrase "agree to disagree" always makes me want to be violently rude. It's because "agree to disagree" actually means "agree that the less-privileged position will shut up and the more-privileged person will continue to say whatever they feel like, without challenge."

And the privileged position in this case is: "you can recommend breastfeeding, but you must put my very specific and unusual difficulties front and center to make sure you don't offend me."

One person (who says they're not intending to have children, so I don't know why they took this so hard: I never said everybody who raises babies has to breastfeed, them much less that everybody in the whole world has to breastfeed babies whether they have any babies or not) said that it was "deeply antifeminist" of me to suggest that breastfeeding is nearly free. Because see, this person makes 35 dollars an hour and so therefore they shouldn't be throwing that time away on baby care. I did point out that it takes more time to bottle feed a baby than to breastfeed them, and somebody else said -- oh, I forget, and I am too weary to go heck, but it was something to the order that you can have somebody else do all that icky baby feeding if you're not using the breast.

Several other people objected to my saying that breastfeeding becomes enjoyable after a while, because they knew somebody who didn't ever enjoy it but did it for two years or something anyway out of duty (I don't get that. Six months, yeah, but two years? For why? So you can throw it in the kid's face later when they aren't sufficiently grateful?).

Then there was "What if you're taking medications that babies shouldn't have in their breastmilk? What if your working hours are long and terrible?"

Honestly, there's individual exceptions to every epidemiological recommendation I can think of except perhaps for "don't smoke cigarettes" and "don't inhale carbon monoxide" amd "stop making candy and wallpaper colored with Paris green." Everybody should eat a nice amount of protein foods every day -- except if they have phenylketonuira. Everybody should eat foods rich in fiber -- except if they have certain malformations of the digestive tract. Children with chronic diarrhea should eat lots of rice, bananas, applesauce and toast and not much else till it resolves -- unless they have the apple allergy that causes diarrhea, skin rash, and potentially anaphylactic shock. With a bit of research I could go on.

It's a typically libertarian tack taken by typically privileged people. They find the rare exception and insist that it disproves the common (and scientifically demonstrated)situation. They debunk epidemiology. Reflexively, as far as I can tell, because also, as far as I can tell, none of these people actually want to tell people not to breastfeed -- they just don't want me to tell people to breastfeed. At least not in sincere, comprehensible language.

For a moment here and there I thought maybe they were confusing what I was saying with the weird narcissistic homeschool-novaccination-everything-has-to-be-done-in-the-most-difficult-and-intensive-manner people, but I don't think it was possible for a person to actually think that and be honest, given what I actually did say.

Apparently the reason James invited this shitstorm on his journal is that Michelle Obama has suggested that people should breastfeed their babies to cut down on the incidence of obesity. Apparently this is offensive to people. Of course this is a controversial subject on a lot of fronts. The science of obesity is not well developed. There's a lot of claimas about obesity that are dumb. The causal direction of the diseases of obesity are not clearly established, though since it looks like moderate weight loss improves health and longevity for a lot of obese people, there's something to the idea that it's better to be less obese than more. And there are studies that show greater incidence of obesity in people who were bottle-fed for their whole infancy. Trying to get a nice roundup of the studies led me to stuff I wasn't looking for, including abstracts of two studies about obese mothers and breastfeeding, one seeming to show that obese mothers were less likely to continue past 6 weeks than overweight ones, and another finding different prolactin levels in obese mothers and other mothers. I don't lknow anything about the quality of the studies, but that's interesting.

Apparently the Tea Party types are offended that Michelle Obama should be taking this on. Because, um, why? Because Michelle Bachmann has to oppose anything from Michelle Obama? There can be only one Michelle?

So, anyway, James asked whether it was a good thing to promote breastfeeding or whether we could just all agree to disagree, and I said I wouldn't agree to disagree, and gave a few of the arguments in favor of breastfeeding, and then I was told I was deeply antifeminist.

I swear, there are some really strange people hanging out at James's journal. A while back I said I thought it was selfish and wrong for post-menopausal women to enlist a big chunk of expensive medical care to reactivate their wombs to bear their "own" babies rather than spend those resources, for example, improving the lives of existing children, and one of the commenters suggested that I might possibly therefore be anti-abortion.

Originally I was going to go into a contrast between the kind of breastfeeding promotion I do, and the kind that these folks seem to think I should do, and the kind that hey seem to think I actually do. But it's taken me this long to say what I have said so far, and I do need to go to bed eventually. So I think I'll stop here.

On another front, I am in lesson 4 of "Chcete Mluvit Česky?" ("Do you want to speak Czech?") and I have found out why it is so hard to tell Czech verbs apart. It is because they tend to be made of base verbs plus prefixes that change their meaning in specific ways, for example, they make them into perfective or imperfective verbs, which are described as being verbs that finish and verbs that don't, though I can already tell that is an insufficient description. Other prefixes have functions more like what we're used to (those little bits of usually Latin detritus that indicate direction or whatever, except when they don't, like and obverse and converse and diverse and perverse and universe and subversive and like that there. But the thing is, Czech prefixes are not mostly from Latin, they are mostly from Old Slavonian or whatever that is, and they have a different logic that I have not grokked yet.

Also, the adverbs and preopisitions and conjunctions and quasi-pronouns and not-really-articles and occasional nouns and adjectives tend to sound a lot alike, much like words of those categories in English (these this that those there then thing thus: which who what why when where whither whence). Notice that these kinds of words in English don't come from Latin, they come from Old English. Anyway, I've learned some of these -- kdo kdy kde and I'm struggling with others -- ten tenhle tam tady taky ted' to ta which overlap because some of the same forms which are gender and case forms of one word are different gender and case forms of other words, and I just have to memorize the whole lot of them because there's no more logic to it than there is to English (probably no less as well, but I don't have a lifetime of experience with it).

Frank says there is no excuse for Czech, it is just a horrible language. But I don't know. Certainly it is a lot harder than Spanish, but I imagine that ninety percent of the world's languages are harder than Spanish.

On a further front, we had almost every possible kind of weather you can have in February in Santa Cruz in the last two days, with the exception of lightning and snow that sticks. And both of those are rare.

This time I thought I had backed up my files up to last week in the (Frank-titled) "master ninj" drive automatically: that's where I thought I was saving things to. It's somewhat protected, because it doesn't have an operating system on it.

Instead, I was saving things to the drive that formatted itself for no reason. The file I tried to format, by the way, is untouched.

So, instead, I'm set back maybe two productive weeks: most of a chapter and half of another chapter. That is, I do have the version I mailed to myself, which is lacking in those things and some continuity work which I will have to reconstruct.

Everything that was on the C drive was lost. Everything. Fortunately, that means very little of my writing, since I did back all that up. It also doesn't mean the photos, as they are backed up. It does mean every single program and piece of hardware has to be reinstalled. It doesn't mean any of my recent email stuff, because that's all webmail. And I never looked at the very old email stuff anymore anyway. And the guy that worked on the computer this time had no theory. My theory? Microsoft's last security update, or else dust on the fans.

How do you clean the fans? Canned air doesn't do it. I can't seem to open the places where the fans are to wipe them off. There's a trick to opening them, right?

---

On a more cheerful front, the triumphant young doctor-to-be is homeish (actually at the moment over the hill being bought a laptop by a doting aunt and uncle). He has a long convoluted story of Kafkaesque experiences in Prague (appropriately enough). In order to expedite his student visa, he was first recommended to go to the US Embassy. The US Embassy was closed on Thursday (his first free day after the examination), but would be open Friday. He arrived at 11:30 on Friday to discover that the Embassy had already closed. But he could come back Monday, except that he couldn't, because his flight was on Sunday. The next recommendation was that he should go to the Foreign Police. This is supposedly much less scary than it sounds. The first place he was told to go to was not the Foreign Police, but the domestic police, who told him that he had to go across town to the Foreign Police. He got to the office that was named, but it was only the Foreign Police dealing with matters in several languages not including English. He had to go to a different office for the Foreign Police who could deal with English speakers. At one of these offices he was told he would have to go underground which was alarming until he realized he was being told to take the subway. Anyway, this next office turned out not to be the Foreign Police: it was the domestic police again, only the multilingual office. He still had to go to the correct office of the Foreign Police. He was given the address. But he couldn't find it on his map. The officer looked at Frank's map. "Oh, that's because I gave you the wrong address," he said, and went to look up the correct address. Which he found, along with the information that the office Frank needed was not open on Fridays.

None of this matters one bit.

It has been explained to Frank that if his student visa does not arrive by the end of the ninety visa-free days he gets as a USian visitor, he merely has to visit Austria and get his passport stamped there to reset the ninety days. Presumably he could do this indefinitely. But the student visa is supposed to take seventy to a hundred days, so he should be all right anyway.

More about the examination: most of it was easier than the USian MCAT medical school test, with odd bits of unexpected lore here and there. The part that allowed Frank to really shine, though, was the oral part. Here they gave him a stack of cards from which to pull a discussion prompt. He could hardly have pulled better prompts: one was about end of life care, and the other was about "alternative medicine." The first he was completely prepared for, because of his grandfather's death the year before. They liked what he said about that, and the other too.

He came home dressed in orange. He brought funny chocolates and a Czech fairytale book. And Cuban rum (of course).

Supposedly Czech is one of the hardest languages to learn. Nouns have four genders and six cases. Verbs may have a transgressive form, which unfortunately does not mean what it sounds like. Wikipedia apparently has four articles referring to Czech pronunciation and spelling alone.

I want to learn Czech.