(Look it up if you don't get it, "Trump's losses")
Sep 29, 2020
Sep 1, 2020
Portugal (24) -- Quinta do campo
Brother, or sister, if you care: we've finished the house hunt, and are targeting a place atop a hill in Alcobaça, which is 6 km from the sea as the crow flies. Today, however, we talk about a different place, located in Valado dos Frades, a few kilometers from Alcobaça, and it's called Quinta do Campo.
"Quinta" means farm, and this particular one started 900 years ago as the forage point of the Frades (friars) of the monastery in Alcobaça.
The monastery is enormous, and possibly twice as large as the medieval downtown of Alcobaça, which, as we learned today, must have been a Moorish settlement initially, due to the prefix "al".
As John, who runs the place together with two siblings, explained to us, the Quinta provided everything material for the monks, like food, drink (wine), and other substances of material interest; only metaphysical needs required recourse to other sources.
Which---come to think of it---testifies to the power, and importance, of pre-modern religious orders.
But then, the order ran afoul of the same forces of darkness which Donald Trump faces in his re-election campaign...
...like liberalism, atheism, and all these terrible creeds that deny the legitimacy of irrational power, and so, a Portuguese king around 1830 decreed the put-down of the monkish orders. The friars were bereft of their Quinta, which was sold to John's great-great...grandfather, a very rich man who had made his fortune in Galicia (northern Spain), and married into the Portuguese aristocracy. Said ancestor erected the manor in the first picture. He also bought kilometers and kilometers (miles and miles) of land around the place at bottom market prices, sired nine children, and lived a happy long life with his spouse.
Yours truly has--in his scandalous political incorrectness--always dreamed of the life of the landed gentry, but he has never seen, despite his visit to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and other places, a home as purely gentrified in its 19th century emanation as this one:
It's a pity Agatha Christie never visited this place.
We'll be back. Hold on. We rented an apartment on the Quinta for a few days; this was our entrance:
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| The main building of the Quinta do Campo |
"Quinta" means farm, and this particular one started 900 years ago as the forage point of the Frades (friars) of the monastery in Alcobaça.
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| Partial view of the monastery. (The place we are interested in is to the right/south of this picture, up the hill for 600 m or so, make a left, and there you are.) |
The monastery is enormous, and possibly twice as large as the medieval downtown of Alcobaça, which, as we learned today, must have been a Moorish settlement initially, due to the prefix "al".
 |
| A partial view of the service buildings of the Quinta |
Which---come to think of it---testifies to the power, and importance, of pre-modern religious orders.
But then, the order ran afoul of the same forces of darkness which Donald Trump faces in his re-election campaign...
...like liberalism, atheism, and all these terrible creeds that deny the legitimacy of irrational power, and so, a Portuguese king around 1830 decreed the put-down of the monkish orders. The friars were bereft of their Quinta, which was sold to John's great-great...grandfather, a very rich man who had made his fortune in Galicia (northern Spain), and married into the Portuguese aristocracy. Said ancestor erected the manor in the first picture. He also bought kilometers and kilometers (miles and miles) of land around the place at bottom market prices, sired nine children, and lived a happy long life with his spouse.
Yours truly has--in his scandalous political incorrectness--always dreamed of the life of the landed gentry, but he has never seen, despite his visit to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and other places, a home as purely gentrified in its 19th century emanation as this one:
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| The library (1), |
 |
| the library (2), |
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| the library (3), |
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| the drawing room. |
It's a pity Agatha Christie never visited this place.
We'll be back. Hold on. We rented an apartment on the Quinta for a few days; this was our entrance:
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| Apartment F. |
(You can book them here)
Aug 23, 2020
Les temps modernes -- Modern times
"Les temps modernes" --named after Charlie Chaplin's film -- was a magazine founded by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in 1945; it folded in 2019.
Here's a modern version of the modern times, expressed in the words of our favorite NYT columnist, Ross Douthat. We've been trying to say this since forever, but Douthat says it better, and it doesn't only apply to Republican voters in the US:
"For Republican voters who want more — well, for them you can just make up some triumphs, whether banal (a new social-media executive order!) or exotic (a secret purge of pedophiles!), and trumpet them as victories worthy of Reagan, Lincoln or F.D.R.
In which case Trump could be a special kind of pioneer, and the party he shaped a digital-age novelty: the first political party to exist entirely as a simulation."
"Agathon!", "Alcibiades!" -- Alcibiades crashes Plato's "Symposium"
We've been at it for quite a while, Plato's "Symposium." But now we've hooked up with David Cantero, the famous comic strip artist, and voilà, Alcibiades crashes the Symposium again:
The text is in German since we are targeting the German market.
Remember the original, Anselm v. Feuerbach's painting of 1874? We've put it up in 2015. Here it is again (click for a larger image):
The text is in German since we are targeting the German market.
Remember the original, Anselm v. Feuerbach's painting of 1874? We've put it up in 2015. Here it is again (click for a larger image):
Portugal (23) -- Praia do Norte
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| Photo by Chang, taken yesterday (22-8-20) |
We've been so slovenly and sloppy and not posting for reasons we don't even dare to explain. Anyhow, we left the beautiful Swiss Valais and hurried to Nazaré, Portugal, where we are house-hunting again.
Last time, in January, the quarry was a bit disappointing, but this time we've already viewed five houses that make the short list. Several of them are situated in the neighborhood of Sitio, a district of Nazaré, very close to the Praia do Norte, as pictured.
What's so special about the Praia do Norte? Well, the waves. Occasionally, they reach record heights of 30 meters, and the place holds the Guiness Book of Records for the highest surfable waves on the planet:
Haha!
Haha!
Jul 21, 2020
Bürchen again -- Switzerland
We're posting this for our Australian friend, Alex Hogan, the famous editor of Gay Flash Fiction -- as usual, we spend the summer here, and we're concerned she'll get the wrong impression if we don't post enough.
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| Bürchen, the "Chalet Zone", where we are staying |
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| The farmers get together during the summer and have their cows grazing on the communal ground of the village. |
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| In the background: the Dom, the third-highest mountain of the Alps |
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| Sunset, picture taken from the house of a neighbor nearby |
(All pictures taken during the last 14 days by Chang)
Jul 11, 2020
Death on the Beach
Jul 8, 2020
Back in Switzerland
House is rented, we're back in Switzerland. Picture taken by Chang yesterday afternoon:
Jun 26, 2020
Jun 25, 2020
Jun 8, 2020
German for beginners -- Lederhosen
Our friend Sacha (depicted as Jack Horn in our literary oeuvre) and we have been back and forth today about receiving pictures from friends concerning a country that both of us left 40 or 45 years years ago. So...along those lines, here are pictures concerning things which are still happening today in those parts:
Why do you do this, you'll ask, putting up these pictures? Well, we want to sell our books, and here's a fragment from our first novel, Green Eyes, a finalist of the Lambda Literary Awards...and which--TADAA--came out out in a German translation last month.
The fragment involves Maurice Dymond, a recent acquaintance of our narrator John Lee, who's telling about Godehart Wagner, a fictional fifth generation member of the Richard Wagner clan:
"[Godehart] tells me his life story. He’s from this minor branch of the Wagner family, but somehow he still holds some rights to the Wagner name. Not for the music, of course, that belongs to the public domain, but in some way Wagner’s name is still protected under German law, some special provisions enacted by the Nazis, and he makes his money with Wagner mugs, and Wagner busts, and this themed stuff that you find in tourists shops. And he sells leather shorts, Bavarian leather shorts, emblazoned with the Wagner motif. You know—-these garments that they wear with Tyrolean hats when appearing on the telly where they dance to the tune of Bavarian square dances, jodlers, if you will, and slap their thighs to the rhythm of the music. You are aware of that folly if you ever watched German television. It’s of no importance when you switch to a German channel, there shall always be men in Bavarian shorts and Tyrolean hats, slapping their thighs.”
“Impossible.” [John]
“Mind you, they don’t dance to Wagner music, just a jodler.”
“But the Wagner theme, how do you combine this with leather shorts?” [John asking]
“Good question, no idea.”
“Do you know whether Wagner was gay, too?” [John]
“Actually I asked Godehart. Wagner wasn’t officially gay, but he had an affair with the young king of Bavaria, Ludwig the Second, Godehart told me. Ludwig furthered Wagner’s career, in fact, he underwrote his productions and built opera houses for him. Wagner would not have succeeded without Ludwig. So perhaps Wagner wasn’t gay, perhaps it was just the casting-couch behavior of an ambitious composer. But we can’t be so sure. Wagner and Ludwig exchanged quite a few letters, quite explicit, passionate ones, the jury is out on that one.”
“How do you know?” [John asking]
“Well, Godehart told me, I asked pointed questions.”
“Nobody asks pointed questions anymore.” [John]
“I do,” he says.
Buy the book, here:
Why do you do this, you'll ask, putting up these pictures? Well, we want to sell our books, and here's a fragment from our first novel, Green Eyes, a finalist of the Lambda Literary Awards...and which--TADAA--came out out in a German translation last month.
The fragment involves Maurice Dymond, a recent acquaintance of our narrator John Lee, who's telling about Godehart Wagner, a fictional fifth generation member of the Richard Wagner clan:
"[Godehart] tells me his life story. He’s from this minor branch of the Wagner family, but somehow he still holds some rights to the Wagner name. Not for the music, of course, that belongs to the public domain, but in some way Wagner’s name is still protected under German law, some special provisions enacted by the Nazis, and he makes his money with Wagner mugs, and Wagner busts, and this themed stuff that you find in tourists shops. And he sells leather shorts, Bavarian leather shorts, emblazoned with the Wagner motif. You know—-these garments that they wear with Tyrolean hats when appearing on the telly where they dance to the tune of Bavarian square dances, jodlers, if you will, and slap their thighs to the rhythm of the music. You are aware of that folly if you ever watched German television. It’s of no importance when you switch to a German channel, there shall always be men in Bavarian shorts and Tyrolean hats, slapping their thighs.”
“Impossible.” [John]
“Mind you, they don’t dance to Wagner music, just a jodler.”
“But the Wagner theme, how do you combine this with leather shorts?” [John asking]
“Good question, no idea.”
“Do you know whether Wagner was gay, too?” [John]
“Actually I asked Godehart. Wagner wasn’t officially gay, but he had an affair with the young king of Bavaria, Ludwig the Second, Godehart told me. Ludwig furthered Wagner’s career, in fact, he underwrote his productions and built opera houses for him. Wagner would not have succeeded without Ludwig. So perhaps Wagner wasn’t gay, perhaps it was just the casting-couch behavior of an ambitious composer. But we can’t be so sure. Wagner and Ludwig exchanged quite a few letters, quite explicit, passionate ones, the jury is out on that one.”
“How do you know?” [John asking]
“Well, Godehart told me, I asked pointed questions.”
“Nobody asks pointed questions anymore.” [John]
“I do,” he says.
Buy the book, here:
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| "Click" |
Jun 1, 2020
Afternoon picnic
...just back from an afternoon picnic in the park, the "forêt domaniale de l'Estérel":
May 17, 2020
May 14, 2020
Michael was born 4 years later and still remembers the ruins
(Our friend Glenn sent this:)
Fragment, fragment...yes, here, cool, from Michael's essay, My Childhood Ruined, which tells about his youth in the suburb of Berlin-Grunewald:
Halfway
experiences are also fairly common, I believe, and it took me some time to get
over the shitty first sex of my teens, like when Amy, another classmate, him
from Armenia, living alone with his father in one of the villas not bombed out,
took me to the plot opposite his home which had been cleared of the rubble and grown into an orchard of sour apples with an undergrowth of stinging
nettle—-and then suggested that we’d play doctor. We had barely started when
Evelyn, whom I hated, and who was officially my friend, turned up and sent us scampering
into the stinging nettle.
Fruit
trees and cleared plots weren’t typical, however. Roughly half the splendid
villas of the Grunewald, by reputation Berlin’s most residential area, had
gotten hit by air raids during the war and burned down to black skeletons of eternal
stone and reinforced concrete, with rusty steel rods sticking out and begging
for accidents to happen like when you were chasing an Indian under fully-feathered
headdress up to the fourth floor of the rubble and trip and fall to your death.
Yes, fourth floor, or fifth even, since these structures had been built by the nouveau
riche in the ’70 and ‘80’s of the nineteenth century when Berlin became the
capital of the Second Reich. Falls from ruins never happened, though, or
were never reported in the West-Berlin of the ‘50s, an insular place so devoid
of news that nothing ever happened—-save for a world-shaking crisis when Nikita
Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist World, threatened to take us by
force and unclench WW3—-so the press had to play along and beg any visiting
celebrity to confirm with his/her own eyes that—-yes—-Berlin was still the Hauptstadt,
even though the government resided in Bonn and anything of consequence had decamped to Munich in Bavaria, including Siemens, the founder of local
Siemensstadt (don’t ask).
How
about the fruit trees, then? Well, if you’d trip while aiming your pistol at this
Indian, you wouldn’t land on an apple tree, but on an Acacia. Nobody ever
remarked on it, or explained it, but newly grown Acacias dominated the ruined plots,
whole forests of them, until Khrushchev’s ultimatum was forgotten, investors
regained confidence, and reconstruction got under way.
May 11, 2020
Plato's Symposium
Here's little Michael, done by David Cantero, posing--yes, that's the word--posing as Phaedrus, son of Pythocles, the first speaker in Plato's Symposium (each guest is supposed to give an encomium on EROS, the eponymous God of Love).
Just so that you know. I believe I should rather play one of the slaves, but anyhow.
Fragment, fragment. Here, from our script:
PHAEDRUS (begins): Eros is a great and wonderful god…
--
PH: for he is one of the oldest gods. Hesiod says that Chaos came first---followed by Gaia, and Eros.
CAPTION: (Hesiod goes on) “…Eros, who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods. He is the dissolver of care who overpowers the mind and the thoughtful council of gods and humans alike.”
--
PH: Eros is also the source of the greatest benefits. I know of no greater blessing for a young man than to have a good lover, and for any lover, to have a proper beloved.
--
PH: The principle that must guide men who strive to live a noble life—-the principle of honor—-is best fostered by love, not by birth, money, or other means. Without this sense of honor, neither states nor individuals can ever do great work.
--
PH: And, I say that a lover who is detected doing anything dishonorable, he will be more pained at being found out by his beloved than, say, by his father, or his companions. And the beloved, when he is found in a disgraceful situation, will feel likewise.
--
[IMAGE: Sacred Band of Thebes]
PH: If there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, it is beyond imagination how well they could do, refraining from anything base, contending with each other in the pursuit of immortality, and exhibiting such valor in battle that—-even as a mere handful—-they could overcome the world.
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| Sacred Band of Thebes, random picture from the web |
In this spirit, n'est-ce pas?
May 9, 2020
German for beginners: Grüne Augen by Michael Ampersant
Finally, folks, the GREEN EYES are out in a German translation with the DeadSoftPress. Have a look:
May 5, 2020
Symposium
We'll explain later, but we are working on Plato's Symposium again, and here we have a scene from Aristophanes' speech, the Council of the Gods pondering what to do with the uppity primordial humans:
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| Rafael: Council of the gods, cropped |
Apr 22, 2020
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