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.
No comments:
Post a Comment