Monday, February 10, 2014

Crying Won't Help You




I woke up twice this morning laughing.  These are my kind of dreams. I’ve as much stress as the next person and there are no dearth of things I could kvetch about all night, and perhaps I do.  But the salient memories this morning were on two occasions; in two totally different contexts uttering something that elicited a gut-laugh from me at the person I was parading through the dream with.  I won’t bother to try to retell them.  One was an inappropriate word play in a corporate setting, and another an emphatic Dionysian euphemism, yelled with an old friend as we trotted down a strange, familiar street.  But both times I woke up laughing aloud.  That’s my kind of morning.  Good morning Mr. Blues, now get out, as I: 付之一笑[1]

Last night I finally finished the first volume of a book I mentioned on my first blog post, I believe, a real DustyBrine inspiration tomb:  Fernand Braudel’s “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.”  I always have some history text I plug away at.  For the last year or two it had been the Cambridge History of China series through which I’ve made my way up to the Qing Dynasty.  I’d seen these two bricks sitting there on my stepdad’s shelf for years and last summer asked to borrow them.  I can recall a friend in undergrad had discussed the book, the Annals History approach, which I learned about in Medieval History through Marc Bloch, and the famous ironic ending, and it always beckoned. 



Too much information, perhaps, but I’ve simply kept Volume I sitting on a stool in the upstairs bathroom and chipped away at it over the last few months.  And though Philip is in the title, nearly seven hundred pages in we haven’t really met him yet.  The sea, rather, Le Mer, ‘the Sea, the Sea’, is the real protagonist.  Mountains abut, currents flow in and out, carrying this nation or that city, this religion or that faith, on this vessel or that swifter one.  But the remarkable water body lapping from Iberian Peninsula to the Levant is the main protagonist in this tale.  And it would be difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to tell the same sort of tale about, say, the Bohai Sea, which was peripheral, rather than central during so much of China’s civilizational thrust.  The Mediterranean is and its particular competitive fecundity is surely sui generis.

But I did feel bad for Philip, the fella.  And though it may not be quite the style in “Social History” to go on about “great men”, I do hope he makes a bit of an appearance in the second volume.  I did a bit of “Intellectual History” poking about on line this morning.  Remarkable what I didn’t know.  The empire upon which the ‘sun never sets’, was first coined for Philip II’s empire, not Britannia.  The Philippines was actually named after, drum-roll please, his august self.  He had a smile that could cut like a sword and a protruding lip and generally refined manners and his imperial swath helps to explain quite a bit of seventeenth century legacy matters that I hadn’t always understood correctly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain

Cold sun, blue skies and a fair covering of snow still on the ground.  A fitting sort of day for February 11th. In the northern hemisphere.  



Revisiting some Joe Albany, the bee bop pianist I’d written about earlier, just now.  This morning I was doing so much laughing I got up late, and I faced a choice as to do the gym or the still-sitting first.  Gym won, and I was pretty sure I’d hold off on the calisthenics till later, when I returned.  But a tune came on the mix that simply summoned me maintain the physical push.  “When the Levee Breaks” was originally written by blues gal, Memphis Minnie, but John Bonham sure does bang the hell out of the skins and thump that bass drum till it just about tears on the Led Zeppelin version.  That was one band I sure did hate for most of formative years, when every other person you knew adored them.   But me and Bonham, we were tight this morning, me on push-ups, him just hitting it.  ‘Crying won’t help you.’  Here’s to more laughter.





[1] fùzhīyīxiào:  to dismiss sth with a laugh (idiom) / to laugh it off

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