Ceci n’est pas une blog update.

The blood was primed with a traditional Easter breakfast of peeps and coffee.

(I love peeps. Cutest way ever to celebrate the sick horror of crucifixion.)

Then it was off to a delightful brunch where Grandma terrified the children when she threatened to make hassenpfeffer out of the easter bunny if he ever came near her.

Dinner was filled with tales of getting baby ducklings and chicks for Easter in the past. They were raised as pets and then killed for food. We also talked about the Great Depression and the horrors of polio before the vaccine. “We could hear Jimmy Fisher screaming from three houses down…”

I remember enjoying myself, but now that I think of it, sugar and caffeine + crazy family + various horrors = the perfect storm for getting pretty drunk on a Sunday afternoon.

I identify with this comic way too much.

Do I get black emo clouds around me when I do that too?

Not so pretty.

From the blurb on the Paris Review’s interview with Robert Fagles:

INTERVIEWER: I would indulge in a Barbara Walters moment because I happen to know that you are a football fan.

FAGLES: Who’s a football fan?

INTERVIEWER: You are!

FAGLES: Can’t keep any secrets.

INTERVIEWER: It would be great to work a fantasy football team out of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

FAGLES: Out of the Iliad and the Odyssey? Good. I know who’d be thrown off the team as captain. Agamemnon. He’s a disaster as a leader! Achilles is the best broken-field runner. And the one I’d most like as a coach is Penelope. Good at tactics, better at building morale, emotional when it counts. I don’t mean to be gallant. I’m not half-kidding.”

Poor Agamemnon. Cursed House of Atreus! Conquer half of Greece and still can’t even make Robert Fagles’ Homeric fantasy football team.

Now I need to go to the library and read the rest of that interview since only that blurb is available online. I’m curious if it goes on.

I was kind of surprised to run across Robert Fagles at the Paris Review. If you aren’t familiar, Fagles is best known for his translations of ancient greek literature, specifically Homer.

At my nerd college, The Iliad was the first book every student read, and one of the first things we learned was that which translation you choose is, like, really important. There were two camps for Homer: Lattimore or Fagles.

Lattimore was a literal translation and proponents loved to endlessly repeat the phrase, “It’s true to the Greek,” but it was clunky and foreign-sounding and extremely dry; Fagles was poetic and captured the meaning of the words and idioms, replacing them with English counterparts, which made it enjoyable and allowed for emotional reactions, but you lost a good deal of the Ancient Greek flava. Each translator had a devoted following and we all pretended allegiance was philosophically significant; which was more important, the letter or the spirit of the work?

I started with Lattimore because we were also studying Ancient Greek and freshly aware of how much nuance was already lost in translation. Not that I even got close to translating any Homer; Homer is to Ancient Greek as Chaucer is to Modern English. That the literal translation of Homer is better was based on principle alone.

Furthermore, Ancient Greek itself is only theoretically fascinating. Like any foreign language, there are words and nuances of meaning that don’t exist in English, and can’t be captured by any translation, but it’s also horrendously complex, irregular, and punishingly difficult. You can’t get an ear for it because it’s unspoken. For all the work it requires, the small insights you gain seem cheap. In reality, unless this particular dead language is your thing, or some particular ancient Greek is your thing, or you are a hopeless masochist, there comes a point where you must declare Greek a bastard and move on with your life.

Back to Fagles: Somehow I ended up reading a chunk of the Odyssey in the Fagles translation later in the year. Fagles made Homer a gripping, emotional, page-turner. Full of humanity and courage and love and archetype. Unlike the Lattimore, you didn’t have to mentally translate the emotion from the Greek.

I defected firmly to the Fagles camp.

I felt pretty confident in my private choice, and that the whole issue was just too excessively nerdy to ever come up outside of school, but oh! I was wrong! I asked my parents for the Fagles translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for my birthday that year. Perhaps because I specified the translation, they felt the need to buy the books in a special bookstore on the UofC campus. When they went to select the books, some random guy literally blocks their path and starts telling them they DO NOT want to buy the Fagles, that the Lattimore is far superior, that the Fagles can’t even be called a translation. He went on and on, and proceeded to browbeat my bewildered parents until they bought something else entirely.

Who knew people felt so passionately? It’s like some secret, hot-button nerd argument along the lines of “Who was the best Star Trek Captain?”

I’m still a Fagles girl.

So who would I pick for my fantasy Homer team? I don’t know enough about football to choose positions, but I imagine you’d want big, aggressive, tough players. I think Fagles is on the right track (sorry again, Agamemnon.) I’d grab Hector and Ajax for brawn, and Clytemnestra for general bloodthirstyness. Can I pick the magical creatures? Giants, centaurs, witches, and sirens? How about the gods? This would be a very entertaining game! And those Greeks, they’d probably want to play naked.

I’d definitely watch football if it had more centaurs.

In December, I ran across this blogpost offering free Gmail stickers.

I was sending out a few holiday cards at the time, so I sent Gmail one with my sase tucked inside it.

Well, I got my stickers. Included:

1 Gmail keyboard shortcuts sheet
1 Sparkly M-velope logo sticker
1 Goofy Email Robot bookplate
+ bonus social rejection!

They sent my totally religion-neutral holiday card back! :( They took the card out of its original envelope, and stuck it back in the sase with the stickers!

You could have just thrown it out, Gmail. Now I know you hate me. No wonder my gchat goes all wonky all the time! It’s personal!

Ha. Ok, the stickers are notably adorable, I love the robot, and they were free. Likely they stuck some poor intern, who is normally at the top of his/her programming class, at a desk stuffing stickers in envelopes for 8 hours, wondering if this is the really the reward for all that overachieving.

But still, who returns a Christmas card? Who does that?

*Sigh* I’ll just rise above.

Even if you hate me, Gmail, I still like you. You do good work. You make good stickers. I’m a fan of Bus Stop theme especially. You come from a good family, and I have faith you’ll grow up to be a very well-mannered little web application.

Just remember, don’t return people’s Christmas cards. It’s not polite. If Emily Post, the Google of etiquette gurus, was alive, she’d say, “Being polite is cool!”

Ok, we’re good then? Good. Thank you for the stickers! I love them.

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them…”

–Barack Obama

So it happened. The shifting of ground. The great breaking of cynicism. The….hopequake? Here we go.

Whee?

I don’t really know what to say about the inauguration and the past week. I felt the tremendous relief of release from the agonizing waiting, and the images of the crowd were suitably awe-inspiring. On the other hand, I watched less than 5 minutes of the parties and balls, and only to check out Michelle’s dress (pretty.)

After that, there was the requisite explosion of opinion. Response all seemed to fall into two general camps: 1.) claiming the massive crowds and enthusiastic fans are brainless, worshiping a hero, and will be disappointed. And 2.) that Obama’s call for cooperation between the parties is empty, naive, or dangerous.

(And well, there was also commentary on the youth and fashion and dance moves. And Aretha’s hat, of course, which currently has 32,500 search hits.)

The first response is getting less and less convincing. Cynicism is not realism. I think cynicism is defensive at best, defeatist at worst. But I’ll take ‘cautiously optimistic’, fine. We’re all wounded animals after the last eight years; hesitation is understandable.

Still, it’s disturbing that people are so quick to insist all the excitement is brainless celebrity. The most enthusiastic Obama supporters that I know were once very cynical and/or disinterested in politics and had to be persuaded to take an interest, let alone support one man. It didn’t come easy. Obama’s books and speeches are so inspiring because they are honest and articulate feelings we already share, and also because they impart wisdom. People respond to that. Even disillusioned people. Thousands of volunteers actively canvassed, and continue to remain involved; that isn’t mere image.

It’s not stargazing, it’s hope. I agree there is blindness in unquestioning belief, and danger in hero-worship, but I disagree that having hope is equal to unquestioning belief.

On the contrary, hope is an essential part of critical thought. You must have hope to believe that change is possible, that solutions are possible. You must have it to take an active interest in solving problems. Without that belief, we flounder.

So: Hope. It’s such a plain word. In my own resistance to slogans and cliches, I have struggled to not grow irritated at “HOPE” and “CHANGE”, and remember they really do mean something. Something large and important.

So, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got my hope face on. It looks like this:

The second general response the the inauguration was more interesting. We’ve heard the unification speech before, and it usually passes as meaningless political drivel. Most of the time no one even notices it, let alone responds with full essays on the topic. This is the first time in my lifetime that I’ve actually believed that a politician meant it, and has the ability to work strategically to accomplish real democratic pluralism.

I find, I don’t really understand how that works, but I’m working to understand. Before I’m willing to believe that listening to the opposition party is ‘coddling’ them and will be taken advantage of, or conversely, before I believe that it’s possible to find a compromise on policy decisions where the two parties have deep and opposing ideological differences, I want to learn more. I’m starting by examining the Federalist Papers #10, and some essays on pluralism. I welcome suggestions for further reading.

Sadly, I do not have a pluralism face yet.

**”Hopequake” is a word 100% smithed by wordsmith Dave, frequently appearing at the adorable Sugar Snap Chronicle.**

I wanna be sedated
Nothin’ to do and no where to go-o-oh
I wanna be sedated
Just get me to the airport put me on a plane

I can’t control my fingers I can’t control my brain
Oh no no no no no

I’m a little excited. This song has been running through my head all day and I’m bopping around like little bunny foo-foo. It’s less than 24 hours now.

The funny thing is, I’m about 0% interested in the Inaugural festivities, save for casual interest in Michelle Obama’s inaugural dress (ok, it’s more like fascination with these fashion sketches– they’re apolitical catnip for my foolish girl heart.)

I certainly don’t expect anything to be instantly different after a ceremony, either. What I’m excited about is the end of this excruciating limbo period between Nov. 4th and now.

I got to be there, in Grant Park, on Election Night. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Hundreds of thousands of happy people, pouring through the streets. A well-behaved mob. And afterwards, the city sparkled with excitement for weeks. With the transition team here, even traffic jams were tolerated patiently as long as they were caused by the Obama security motorcade.

But it’s been a long, long few months. I’m done celebrating and ready to get a move on.

Obama Banner on The Hideout, by Kristiecat

And I do have hope. You have be either not really paying attention, or extremely, extremely cynical to think this whole movement is a marketing trick, or that ‘inspiration’ is empty. If you aren’t paying attention, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised to find real intellect and deep understanding of policy, emotional sophistication that comes from real ethical precepts, and bonus dry humor behind the slogans.

If you are extremely cynical then admit to yourself that cynicism is a lazy excuse not to participate. It’s status quo to be cynical about politics, and that sort of blanket reaction is much more naive than hope ever was.

Is it naive to speak in big, general principles? Or is it kind of nice to be reminded of those general principles? To use equality, liberty, justice and opportunity for all as real goals that we develop policy to attain? That it’s not Government vs. The Individual, but both. E Pluribus Unum.

It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that out free market system is the result neither of natural law nor of Divine Providence. Rather it emerged through a painful process of trial and error, a series of difficult choices between efficiency and fairness, stability and change. And although the benefits of our free market system are mostly derived from the individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision of happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transistion we depended on government action t open up opportunity, encourage competition, and make the market work better…and we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well, or at all, individually or privately.”

–Barack Obama

“THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.”

–Inscription on the Gates of Hell, Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Just kidding. It’s not the Gates of the Hell, it’s the gates of the United Center– the Michael Jordan statue on a snowy night.

Though I’m sure some tormented Bulls fans, whose devotion began with the relatively divine authority of MJ himself, find that quote perfectly appropriate these days.

“…Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries were echoing across the starless air….strange utterances, horrible pronouncments, accents of anger, words of suffering, and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands…”

Hey, it’s 2009! And past the halfway point in January. I suppose it’s time to take down my bloggy Christmas decorations.

I haven’t been posting lately because the past few weeks have been comically mundane. So far, 2009 has been intellectually dull, eventless, and bitterly, freezing cold, and if I could show you a conceptual animation of what that has done to my brain it would look a lot like those Chemistry 101 videos where the spazzy gas molecules cool into the motionless crystalline structure of a solid.

I’ve mostly been sleeping.

For example, my favorite Christmas present this year was a free promotional planner from a surety bonds company.

I get the exact same, black, DiDomenico Court Bonds daily planner every year; only the year printed on the cover changes. To be fair, it’s always one of my favorite things. It’s the first thing I look at everyday, and you cannot buy a more perfectly organized planner.

But…do you believe me when I say things have been slow? What has thrilled me most in life lately is my annual appointment planner. It’s not even shiny.

I’ve never been the type to start the year off with a bang. I rarely make resolutions I have any intention of even trying to keep, and I even take a break from the gym in January to avoid The Resolved. This year, however, seems especially blah. 2008 was a vortex of absurdity. I’m happy to see it go, and as much as I normally don’t run my personal life by national politics, this presidential transition has extended it’s foggy liminality right into my psyche.

I’m just tired of the old ways, and they’re over, but they haven’t changed yet. In the meantime, there is nothing. I don’t care at all about anything Bush or any of the administration does or anything the pundits or news sources or bloggers has to say about it. I can’t even muster negative feelings. I don’t care. Just go away already.

But things are starting to heat up, and my brain molecules are finally starting to jiggle. Tonight is the season opener of the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica, in all their powerful, long-awaited nerd glory. I am unashamed of my love of BSG. It is the best show on television. Possibly the best show ever.

And that kicks off Inauguration Weekend, culminating in the swearing in of a new day. Finally. It’s finally here. Finally, 2009 feels like a fresh start.

Btw, before I frakked with it, the orginal graphic above came from this very timely tshirt at skreened.com.

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. … It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

“It requires self-esteem to receive–not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.”

Are you good at receiving gifts? I’m not, the gift exchange always makes me slightly uncomfortable. But it’s so easy to criticize the unseemliness of the manic and stressful forced shopping season. It’s harder to praise those who do it right.

Some people are very good receivers, reacting with grace and happy gratitude, and they make the gift exchange joyful, the way it’s no doubt supposed to be. I admire them for it. Receiving well, whether gifts or advice or thoughts, is a wonderful, higher ordered skill.

Happy Holidays, Everyone! Give and Receive well!