The absent-minded traveler

The Science Diaries 2: Some Science Haiku

2026-03-16T22:14:27Z

12/02/24
the blue line cuts through
the darkened room - mirror - point:
aligning laser

17/06/24
bone-white triangles
electron beam micrograph
a strange deposit

how deep does it reach
out into the crystalline
matrix? what pollutes?

substrate immixes
in our data, obscures
the unknown carbide(?)

16/01/25
the damn laser won’t
show itself; we dowse for it
rocking the casing

27/01/25
careful measure shows
that the motor’s positions
are drifting: unmoored,

in its back and forth,
the heavy load - spring-pushed - will
tend towards the switch

06/02/25
under fluorescent
yellow, we piece together
patchwork into stone

11/02/25
scraps of gold foil sink;
the sweet stench of propanol;
poisonous liftoff

07/04/25
spectral soothsaying:
this line is said to betray
plane dislocations

16/09/25
chalk stains on my pants:
I seem to have acquired
a new profession

27/10/25
a mechanical
failure luckily turned out
a loose screw only

28/10/25
a forest of rays
could this be 3+ charge state?
or stray fingerprints?

results could not be
reproduced: hope is ever
- ah! - fleeting and vain

28/11/25
chasing lens alignment:
circles of pale yellow light
behind my closed eyes

06/02/26
electrician’s smells:
heated metal, polished wood
sweet leaded solder

24/02/26
why oh why is the
cryostat temp descending
but to 30K?

teaching is tiring
science is confusing and
I cannot find my bug

comments

Book review: Jean-Loup Trassard, Neige sur la forge

2026-02-15T12:01:57Z

This is a novella-length nonfiction memoir about the life of a blacksmith of the writer’s acquaintance, living in rural northwestern France. The book is from 2015, but the conversations with the blacksmith must have been at an earlier time, since Trassard recounts that the blacksmith was born in 1902. I bought it almost ten years ago on the strength of the title, but ended up not reading it then, because at the time the colloquial French it is written in and the many provincialisms and agriculture-specific worlds were somewhat too challenging for me. I decided to take it with me now on a January train ride from the Netherlands to the south of France, and read most of the book while being borne at high speeds through various snowy landscapes.

So, I was expecting blacksmithing, but I confess to not having expected the horses: this rural blacksmith, while he also does other work, gets the bulk of his work from shoeing horses. He is referred to in the text both as forgeron, blacksmith, and as maréchal-ferrant, which I think in English is farrier. And through this lens we are given a surprisingly thorough and penetrating analysis of the functioning of the pre-motorization rural economy. Horses are essential not just for plowing the fields and other agricultural work, but also for transport: Trassard tells us that the horses of the post, which had to run on hard roads, needed to be re-shod the most often, up to once per week. Early in his career our blacksmith is maréchal-ferrant in the army for two years as his military service, where the stream of horses needing shoeing was so endless that the job of the farrier was separated from any other kinds of blacksmithing work. The quality of a farmer’s fields, and the wetness of the winter, influence how often his horses need to be re-shod. It is the motorization of agricultural work that means the end of blacksmithing as a ubiquitous profession.

Trassard holds a great affection for this traditional countryside and its technologies, professions, and social rhythms, but he does not in my opinion unduly romanticize it. He shows clearly the ways in which this agricultural life was hard for all involved, the reasons why modernization might be preferable both on small and large scales, and how the old ways of doing things were just plain incompatible with modern labor practices and labor laws, even as he shows us what was lost in these changes and why he regrets that. One of the striking things in the book is that electricity and motorization did not arrive in his region of France until after World War II, and how fast it came when it came. The strength of the book lies in the way he shows just how thoroughly this changed how the economy and rural society functioned.

The book also contains lots of little details about blacksmithing as a craft, which is what I was hoping for when I bought it. Our blacksmith recalls how, in his apprentice days, smiths placed small slivers of cork underneath their anvils, so that the sound would be clearer: “this did not change how well it worked, but a clear sound was a point of pride among us.” He describes the practice of ‘frapper devant’, which is when blacksmith and journeyman work together on a single piece of work, bringing their hammers down in alternation; and how the blacksmith would communicate what he wanted during this, either by turning the piece or by a signalling system of tapping the hammer directly on the top of the anvil. Trassard details different pieces of blacksmithing work: specialty orthopedic horseshoes that the blacksmith made himself, knives that our blacksmith made out of used hoof rasps, and the intense and complicated process of making or adjusting the metal bands around wooden wheels.

To me, Trassard is at his best when he is being factual rather than lyrical, letting his information telling the story for him. The structure of the book is meandering, non-chronological, drifting from topic to topic and coming back in greater detail to ones he already visited, imitating the type of conversation he had with the blacksmith who formed the basis of his story. This worked quite well for me right until the end: I found that the book ended very abruptly, without providing a resolution for various storylines about different episodes in our blacksmith’s life. It’s not like it entirely doesn’t work like this, and the format Trassard has chosen means that he can just leave things open if he wants, but I was really hoping to see how the different episodes were joined together. The way he leaves it gave me the impression that either he didn’t consider his structure as carefully as I thought he did, or that he just stopped writing and turned in what he had at the deadline and hoped that people wouldn’t notice. But in general I thought this book was very good and very interesting: it was both a good memoir about the specific details of a craft, and completely unexpectedly, a brilliant resource on the functioning of the pre-modern economy. It appears that Trassard has written a bunch more books about different aspects of rural life, and maybe at some point when I’m in the library I will check one out.

comments

Book review: François-Timoléon de Choisy, Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme

2025-12-29T22:04:11Z

François-Timoléon, abbé de Choisy (1644-1724) was the youngest child of a fairly high French government official and an ambitious and somewhat mercenary socialite mother. De Choisy was born in the first years of the reign of the then-child Louis XIV. Louis’ younger brother Philippe was encouraged to wear female dress as a child to make him less of a dynastic rival; and de Choisy’s mother raised her youngest child, biologically male, in female dress as well, as a playmate for Philippe.
For the rest of her life, François-Timoléon de Choisy preferred female dress and roles whenever it could be gotten away with, and at multiple moments more or less ran away in order to fully live as a woman: the current book (published posthumously) recounts some episodes of her life in which she was successful in doing so.

( In our contemporary terms... )

comments

Book review: Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

2025-08-18T16:04:09Z

I really liked this book, despite the fact that it didn’t quite come together as a whole to me. Instead, it appeared as a collection of individual set-pieces that didn’t necessarily have much to do with each other. The glue holding the setpieces together (including, alas, some of the characters, including our main viewpoint character) tended to remain rather slight, but then again the setpieces were very good indeed.

The very best set-piece, and also the heart of the book, is the story of the emotional and intellectual journey of physicist Ye Wenjie, from the destruction of her life and family in the Cultural Revolution, via an awareness of the ecological destruction caused by economic planning and mismanagement, to her semi-rehabilitated research position at a remote radio base, where she finds herself confronted with the existence of alien life. I liked not just the character of Ye herself, but also the descriptions of the desolate mountain landscape of the Red Coast Base where Ye’s story has its center, and the details of the scientific work and the awkward meshing of scientific practice and ideology-driven totalitarianism, which felt very convincing.

I also really liked the section of the computer game segments, with their creative refashioning of historical elements (most of which I encountered here for the first time) and their dream-like logic and atmosphere.

I am afraid the aliens did not entirely live up to their hype for me - once we get to see individuals, they didn’t feel truly foreign to me in terms of behaviour and motivations. In addition, uh, from what I understand of it that is not how higher dimensions work, in a book that otherwise rather shows its work in terms of the science underlying its fiction. The glue between the different book segments was also by moments irritatingly didactic. But overall I enjoyed the book a lot: it introduced me to a lot of things that felt new to me, from its use of recent science to its sidelights on Chinese history. ] I am looking forward to reading the sequel, which I think has a good chance of coming together more as a whole than the first book did.

comments

Word of the While IV

2025-06-03T14:57:01Z

The current word of the while is without question the French s'inféoder, which means to accept a feudal relationship to an overlord or other instance; the literal translation would be to enfeudalize one's self. Isn't that cool?

I came across this word in a book on the daily life in medieval monasteries, La Vie des Religieux au Moyen Age by Léo Moulin; I suspect the author of being slightly more literary than literal in his usage, in which s'inféoder refers to individual monasteries that are part of a larger monastic order. The style of the book is that flavor of French Literary that abounds with the kind of semi-figurative synonyms that Orwell would disapprove of: three of my indicator species for this style (jalonner, 'to mark out, as dots mark out a dotted line'; pavoiser, 'to bedeck'; s'épanouir, 'to spread out, like a gas or a fragrance') can be found on this very same page.

comments

Book review: Bellahsene

2025-05-01T20:10:27Z

Cueillette de plantes et fruits sauvages comestibles en Méditerranée - Zohra Bellahsene
[Gathering wild edible plants and fruit in the Mediterranean]
( Plants I have identified and tried based on this book: )

comments

Book review: Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires

2025-03-29T09:52:56Z

“…que toutes les choses du monde avaient deux faces (…) que, comme la prudence conseillait de vivre avec ses amis comme devant un jour être ses ennemis, pour ne leur confier rien de trop, qu’aussi l’amitié venant à se rompre et pouvant nuire, elle ordonnait d’user de ses ennemis comme pouvant être un jour amis.”
“That all things in the world have two faces (…) that, just like prudence advises to live with one’s friends like they might one day have to become enemies, and not tell them anything superfluous, it also, given that friendship can come to an end and can cause harm, orders to treat one’s enemies like they might one day be friends.”

“Et la tristesse, contraire à la joie qui emporte hors de nous les pensées de nos actions, réveille nôtre âme en soi-même, qui, rassemblant toutes ses forces pour rejeter le Mal et chercher le Bien, pense et repense sans cesse pour choisir ce souverain bien, auquel pour assurance elle puisse trouver quelque tranquilité.”
“And sadness, contrary to joy which carries the thoughts of our actions outside of us, wakens our soul to itself, which, collecting all its forces to reject Evil and search for Good, thinks and thinks unceasingly in order to choose this sovereign good, with which for reassurance it might find some tranquility.”

—

The memoirs of the wife of the king of France whose funeral I once attended, in a theatrical re-performance of the music written for that occasion.

Intelligent, proud, biased, defensive, spiteful, honest, not entirely honest, detailed, vivid, loving, hating: Marguerite is not a likable person in all respects, but she comes through in her writings extremely real, and I like her a great deal.
Marguerite’s life story is highly eventful even with its long periods of semi-imprisonment: she is born into the heart of the royal family of France during the sixteenth-century wars of religion, and to keep herself safe she has to contend with all that the affairs of the Court can throw at her. She is surrounded by her difficult mother, Catherine de’Medici, who holds tightly onto the reins of politics; her brother, king Charles IX, who cannot assert himself against their mother; her younger brother Francois, whom she favors; and her brother king Henry III who, proud, brillant, irascible, and slow to forget a grievance, is the one she most resembles.
The massacre of protestants surrounding her wedding went down in history as the Night of Saint-Barthélemy. Then: her husband Henry of Navarre, who would become Henry IV, who neglects her for his mistresses and from whom she is separated by their different religions; her political position between the Catholics and the Protestants, the nobles and the king, the opportunists and the zealots; and her own furious and often counterproductive efforts to be a player in the game and not merely a pawn.

For a good portion of her later life she was quasi-imprisoned in a castle in the central regions of France, and it is in this time that she wrote her Memoirs. The events described, however, belong to the earlier part of her life, and the story cuts off very abruptly - either she did not finish it, or the later parts have been lost. What she describes is thus with the benefit and agendas of hindsight, either to make interpretations fit with the shape politics and allegiances turned out to take, or just to relive events and adventures past with the distance and illuminations of memory.

This book was in some ways a very relaxing thing to read, because Marguerite would always have a worse day than I did, but not in a way that made me feel too bad for her or oppressed me with the horrors of the universe. Her mother is mad at her! For something she did not do! Her lover is cold and uncaring! People tried to attack and kill her lover, but luckily only succeeded in killing someone they mistook for him! She has to be in the South of France instead of in Paris! The king of France her brother is mad at her other brother for something that he absolutely did do, but she’s taking his side anyway! She had to escape from Flanders in a hurry and leave her golden carriage behind! She let her brother escape from her tower window and her maids are not managing to successfully burn the rope…

Marguerite’s world is in many ways still very medieval high courtly - there are tournaments, favors given by ladies to their favorites, codes of honor held to and broken - but it is also a time of change, of the increased propagation of new ways of thinking, and of the painful and bitterly felt tearing of Europe’s religious unity. These Memoirs are a cold but luminous window on a time period that in the end can only be regarded with the bitter clarity that Marguerite does, even though she has some very large blind spots regarding the value of lives outside of her noble circles. Her telling is rich with fury about injustices now past (in Marguerite’s case her personal ones, but we can think of others), but also with attention for the things that were beautiful and extraordinary - and most of all with the stamp of her own desires, opinions, and personality, so that you can read Marguerite tell you her own version of the story of her life with a directness not impeded by the passing of centuries.

comments

The Science Diaries, 1

2025-02-22T15:59:52Z

A daily life of science story from a couple months back, or, the one wherein one and a half scientists get stumped for an entire week by one diode. The one is my advisor, old and experienced; the half is me, brand new PhD student. The task is setting up the new infrared detector in its housing to make it ready for use.

The detector has connections for the biasing voltage, the measured current, the cooling element, and a ventilator to cool the cooling element. I had gotten started on this project by myself, and I’d done all the soldering connections of my own: and so when we had put the detector in place and did testing, and the ventilator didn’t work, it was a fairly reasonable thought that maybe my soldering was the problem.

So we cut the ventilator back out of the housing, and test it with a multimeter set to measure resistance (in which mode it will emit a loud beep if a continuous circuit is detected). The ventilator doesn’t seem to work - well, my advisor bought it for cheap on AliExpress, so the new hypothesis is faulty material.

Advisor brings in a new ventilator, we test it before soldering, it works.
We solder it in, we test it, it doesn’t work.
We remove it, test, it works.
We resolder it, test, it doesn’t work.
We remove it, test, it doesn’t work… we scratch our heads in confusion… I go to retest it with the multimeter, only now after all the headscratching I am holding the leads the other way around…

And it works.

We switch the wires in the housing, solder the ventilator back in, it works.

Conclusion: they put a diode in the ventilator which was a resistance in previous iterations of this same model ventilator (which is why my advisor wasn’t expecting it to have a preferred direction). Why? No reason, most probably.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that ‘tech being more complicated than it has to be’ happens at all levels of sophistication, even at that of a small 5V ventilator which… you would think… had only one job.

comments

Question meme

2025-02-11T21:20:46Z

Meme from sovay, who assigned me the letter K.

Thing I hate: Kinetic energy, specifically the amount of it not transferred between the stepper motor that is supposed to move the screw in the cryostat base plate, and the screw in the cryostat base plate.

Thing I love: Knowledge: in general, but right this moment I would be especially eager for knowledge of why the stepper motor keeps skipping steps.

Somewhere I have been: Köln (school trip; mostly I remember that it was really cold and dark, but I did buy a really good CD of Renaissance church music in the cathedral). Kootwijk (forest / heather-y region not too far from Amsterdam).

Somewhere I would like to go: this meme is harder than it looks. Kazakhstan? Kazakhstan seems like it would be interesting to visit.

Someone I know: my friend the Statistician’s name begins with a K.

Favorite movie: my movie knowledge is… somewhat deficient (child me thought movies were too visceral of an experience, and these days moving images are hard for migraine reasons). So I’m going to go with the PinK Panther, which I enjoyed when the Statistician showed it to me.

If anyone desires a letter, feel free to comment and I will give you one.

comments

A new acapellascience song

2024-12-29T21:18:58Z

About eels.

(For those unfamiliar, acapellascience does lovingly detailed and intricate a capella ‘parodies’ of popular songs, with lovingly detailed and intricate texts about scientific topics, and ditto visuals. Highly recommended - my favorites from his backlog are The Shape Of You and Evo Devo.)

comments

Translation: Bert Schierbeek

2024-12-28T19:44:11Z

we never took photos
because we thought
what we see
we see together
and will always be there
where are now those photos
that we saw?
what do you see?
what do I see?
those photos we
never took?

Bert Schierbeek, In- en Uitgang, 1974
The most decent link to the original I have been able to find.

Bert Schierbeek was associated with the post-WWII Vijftigers literary movement, which sought to break with traditional poetic forms and to address the paradigm-breaking reality of WWII in unvarnished language. This eventually heralded a transition to a dominant poetic mode that eschewed traditional forms and made very sober use of language, preferring the understated.

This poem was written after the death of Schierbeek’s wife.

Free verse turns out to be difficult to translate in a very different way than formal verse, because there is little excuse not to translate according to the sense, but all the same the flow of the line remains important…

comments

Translation: Roland Holst, Wanderer's Love

2024-12-01T19:57:22Z

Have a translation. Roland Holst was one of the poets in the Dutch Neoromantic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, of which some of the other notable names are Bloem and Slauerhoff. Characteristic of this movement is the combination of a masterfully controlled, almost precious usage of traditional poetic forms, and a Romantic yearning for the elsewhere and the unbound life.

Much of Holst's work uses a complicated and very personal code of symbolism, but the poem translated beneath is in a fairly direct style somewhat uncommon for him. It is among his better known.

I have slightly changed the sense in parts in order to keep the rhyme: most notably I have made ‘the wild wind’ out of ’the wind’. In Dutch, as in German, wind and child (kind) rhyme with each other, and these words and their rhyme repeat throughout the poem.

Link to the poem in Dutch.

Wanderer’s love

Let us be kind to one another, child -
For oh, the measurelessness that the wind
Blows over our travel-weary limbs
Under the stars of emptiness and wild.

Oh, let us be kind, and let us not
Pronounce the proud and mighty word of love,
For many hearts have had to break thereof
Under the wind with helpless grief distraught.

We are but as the leaves that in the wild
Wind rustle at the edge of the old wood,
And all things are uncertain, and how should
We know what but the wind knows, child -

And let us now because we are alone
Incline our heads towards each other, knowing
And share our silence while the wind is blowing
And within a last dream become one.

Much love has been lost when the wind blows wild
And what the wind wants we will never know;
And - before we forget one another - so,
Let us be kind to one another, child.

comments

Book reviews July - August

2024-10-28T19:53:37Z

( Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley )
( Taltos - Steve Brust )
( Records of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - Albrecht Dürer )

comments

Book acquisition May through July

2024-08-16T16:36:26Z

Books I am allowed to buy: -11.

These two were in the pick-up-for-free box of the small English-language library in my quartier.

The Land where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax
They were giving this away for free! It’s a mint-quality hardback! This is why one can never leave a free-books box unexamined. I am still half convinced someone made a mistake.

My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir
Good quality Penguin paperback, although it will probably start falling apart as soon as I start reading it. I’m interested in shifts in land use in the United States, it was there, it was free; I could probably have left this one in the box.

Three books that were gifts from my mother.

Cueillette de plantes et fruits sauvages comestibles en Méditerranée, Zohra Bellahsene
A handily small book, somewhat more discursive than precise. To identify something I am going to eat I am going to want more than a single photo, but I do have other books for that already. This provides an idea of what the edible species are and of what flora is characteristic for the region. Also contains recipes, in part from the author’s own childhood in Kabylia (in Algeria).

Les bases de la botanique du terrain, Rita Lüder
On the complete other end of the spectrum, identifying things by flipping through my flowers-by-color book has limits, and a recent outing I went on with the student botanical society showed me the existence of a more systematic way of identifying plants of which I am almost fully ignorant. This book proposes to teach exactly that. It’s translated from the German and insofar as it is region-specific at all it is so for Middle Europe, which is not where I am, but especially the more weed-like species do tend spread quite widely over the continent.

Guide Delachaux: Tous les Oiseaux de France, Frédéric Jiguet & Aurélien Audevard
This book has the nice poetic descriptions of the birds’ song and call which one desires to see in a bird guide. Now to find the species corresponding to my ornithologist former housemate’s description of “sounding like radio static”. That one is apparently pretty common on campus.

comments

Language of the something

2024-08-05T15:37:49Z

The word of the while is the German Glanzwinkel, which if I interpreted my source correctly means ‘angle of refraction’, literally shine-angle. (I had two years of German in secondary school and have thereafter vaguely tried to keep it up by reading, so while my grammar is decent my vocabulary is pretty much nonexistent, and I sail by on Dutch cognates. This means that I have these huh! moments much more often when reading German than with other languages.) In Dutch, ‘winkel’ means shop, not angle, but there is a word ‘winkelhaak’, which means the L-shaped tears you sometimes get in clothing when you catch it on something and it tears along the warp and weft of the fabric. The etymology of this thus turns out to be angle-hook: completely logical. I am now also wondering about wenken (to make a come-here gesture) and wentelen (to rotate, int. and trans.).

The other word of the while is the Pali dhamma-taṇha, which Rahula defines as “desire for, and attachment to, ideas and ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions, and beliefs.” I am very charmed that there is such a specific word for this, the desire for ideas.

The grammar of the while is the so-called ethical dative, which my French grammar book told me exists in Dutch as well as French. It applies to the presence of an indirect object in a sentence where the verb does not actually take an indirect object normally, and where it indicates a tangential relationship of the indirect object, which is usually the speaker, to the action. “Qu’on me jette ces papiers au feu!” = “For my part they can throw those papers on the fire!” In colloquial spoken Dutch this is often used just as an intensifier or to indicate surprise: “Daar viel-ie me zomaar van de trap.” = “All of a sudden he fell off the stairs (I was not expecting it).”

Kauderwelsch update: according to an article of the Instituut van de Nederlandse Taal, the ‘waals’/‘welsch’ part indeed is from the same root as Wallon, here in its original meaning of ‘any romance language’; the ‘koeter’/‘Kauder’ part comes from the Kauer region of Tirol (Austria), where a Romance dialect was spoken, and possibly received reinforcement from the German word kaudern, to talk unclearly.

comments

Some book reviews

2024-08-03T11:18:56Z

Books I am allowed to buy: -10

( Six to Sixteen )

( What the Buddha Taught )

comments

Book acquisition Paris April 2024

2024-07-20T09:52:27Z

…which is a while ago now. I plead thesis. Most of these notes were written shortly after buying the books, though.

Number of books I was allowed to buy before my trip to Paris: 2. (The rule is ~~supposed to be~~ that I am allowed to buy a new book for each book in my collection that I finish for the first time. This is to instate some measure of accountability for my book acquisition habits, as of recent years I acquire books much faster than I actually read them. Free e-books don’t count for this counter, e-books I paid for do, as do physical books I picked up for free.)
Number of books I am allowed to buy: -6. Does the opera program book for Médée count? I am afraid it does.

Am I Too Loud?, Gerald Moore
A memoir by the piano accompanist of many famous twentieth-century singers, including my personal canonical male Schubert singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I first heard of this book years ago, and have never been at risk of forgetting its title. Somewhat surprisingly, this is the book I’m finding myself reading first.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Spider Robinson
From what I’ve heard, this should be my kind of humor book. Looking forward to it.

Flight from Neveryon, Samuel Delany
#3 of a series of which I do not have #1 and #2, and I have not yet finished the Delany book that I already have, but rare author I’m pretty sure I like + cheap book = I bought it.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullough
I read this book in high school, in the high school library the book was also from, and loved it. Now I have my own copy. It’s a Southern Gothic-ish book, but mostly a story about a collection of lonely people, and their efforts of communication. I will save analysis of its central conceit for when I reread it.

Elizabeth’s German Garden, Elizabeth von Arnim
I’ve heard good things, and I like memoirs, and the early twentieth century, and I am trying to learn how to garden. The book is described as a novel on the back copy, but I’m still hoping for only homeopathic quantities of plot.

The Witches of Karres, James Schmitz
Considered not buying this, but the three passages I read at random already made me want to know how it came out. I should remember to take this one with me on my next train ride so that I actually read it, because it is the type of book I might otherwise forget about.

Taltos, Steve Brust
The next in the series. Teckla was not ideally cheerful reading, so we’ll see when I get to this.

The program book for Médée, the opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier I went to with J
I should at least scan this before I write up the opera. I hope it will answer some of my questions about both the original context and the choices made in the adaptation.

comments

Translation: Rather Cat than Lady

2024-07-03T21:07:40Z

Annie M. G. Schmidt, who wrote song lyrics, satire, and children's books, was also a longtime student of the porous boundary between cat and human. This is a translation of one of her efforts in this direction, Liever kat dan dame.

( Rather cat than lady )

comments

de_eekhoorn's Playlist for Finishing a Master's Thesis

2024-06-30T11:22:51Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF0XIvKFA1g William Shakespeare / Shaun Davey - The Wind and the Rain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4OzdyxbOuU Dolly Parton - 9 to 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuDJE-b-qJg The Manhattan Transfer - Joy Spring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg0NGif5jZc Pat Metheny - Minuano (Six-Eight)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWJE52G6mXo Vienna Teng - Never Look Away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh67x9iDCjg Crosby, Stills and Nash - Carry On
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOnbeapXujo Pat Metheny - Last Train Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fm10whccto Weather Report - Birdland

and for revisions…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yfNgsUVhA8 Ray Charles, Melanie - What Have They Done To My Song, Ma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egDjDDI5aLI Ray Anthony - Show Me the Way to Go Home

Done with the thing. Still have to do the defense, but that's comparatively a lot less bad.

comments

Books read ~April 2024

2024-06-07T18:34:31Z

( Joanna Russ )

( Curt Sachs )

( other )

comments

Word of the day

2024-06-02T16:34:50Z

The word of the day over here is the German Kauderwelsch, which the internet tells me means ‘an unintelligible mixture of various languages’, or, from there, any gibberish.

This word I had known only as its Dutch cognate koeterwaals, n., meaning 1. ununderstandable nonsense language, 2. a foreign language not understood by the speaker. This word is of course verbed, as koeterwaalsen, v., the act of speaking, imperfectly but enthusiastically, a language foreign to the speaker but not to the interlocutor, as e.g. to the owner of the campground while on summer vacation.
I had always expected this word to be a construction of the type ‘pig Latin’, with the ‘waals’ part referring to French, as in the Wallon region of Belgium. I had also expected it to be an only-in-Dutch word with no cognates in other languages.

But no, it also exists in German! Kauderwelsch! Further etymological researches will be needed.

[The same source has also already provided me with versteigen, v., the act of going in the wrong direction while climbing a mountain. Stay tuned.]

comments

Song translation: Zeur niet!, Annie M. G. Schmidt

2024-05-27T18:49:23Z

This is my singable translation of the song Zeur niet! (Don’t complain!) by Annie M. G. Schmidt, set to music by Harry Bannink.
Annie M. G. Schmidt (1911-1995) was a Dutch writer whose children’s books are still very well known. Her work for adults is a lot less known these days and often discounted, but at her best it’s brilliant, combining an undauntable sense of humor, a somewhat world-weary compassion, and absolutely scathing social commentary.
This song lists some things she’d prefer you do instead of complaining, and some of the reasons one might have for wanting to complain nevertheless. It is, I’m afraid, one of the things that give the best sense of who the Dutch are as a people: I’ve long wanted to be able to show it to non-Dutch speakers. The version linked is sung by Conny Stuart, one of the greats of Dutch song and a long-time interpreter of Schmidt.
The translation is, as per usual when I do these things, a compromise: it mostly rhymes, it mostly fits the tune, and it mostly makes sense. I hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

Connie sings for you

( Don't complain... )

comments

Introduction

2024-05-18T17:20:42Z

Hello, I am de_eekhoorn, originally from the Netherlands, currently in France. I’m interested in history, science fiction, languages, music, philosophy, and also solid state physics.
My name is taken from the protagonist of many of Toon Tellegen’s animal stories, the squirrel, a compulsive traveler incapable of ignoring any side road. The squirrel likes philosophizing with his friend the ant (preferably with snacks), exchanges letters with inanimate objects and nonexistent animals, falls out of trees with only slightly lower frequency than the elephant, and in general tries to deal with grace with the perils and rewards of living in an absurdist world.
This journal may contain notes on books, music history rambles, poetry both original and translation, and whatever else I decide to be worthy of note.

comments