Now that I am preparing to leave this city, Chicago has begun to feel like home. Predictions of nostalgia? For the past four years I'd felt as though I had no city to call home; none, at last, that I visited frequently or lived in.

I am a worse than apathetic photographer, but that has changed. Sunshine, I suppose. Tulips. A new Yashika to replace the camera that died nine years ago, at the same age I was then. I've been happily photographing the city. (The Peace Corp advised, bring pictures so you can how people where you're from.) It's a beautiful city. I'm still glad to see that brick buildings aren't just brick, but have patterns set in them and cornices of stone and poured concrete molded into spiral columns. Even some of the apartments seen from the green line, north from Hyde Park, feature them. Near the Art Institute is a building marked by the engraved stone as a 'haberdashery.' No longer, but always. I stare at the buildings more, as I pass them on the street and on the el. I don't want to forget those glorious times at the start of spring when happiness descends on the city after winter is past, giving me just enough distance that I can look back on those times too without the pessimism of someone who's still wearing her winter jacket in March.

* * *

But when I finally convinced myself to go inside, it was worth it: I went in for the Field Museum's exhibit of the art of the last dynasty of China's last great emperor: Splendors of China's Forbidden City, about the Emperor Qianlong. The treasures on show are on loan from the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City, Beijing. They will be in Chicago until September, then to the Dallas Museum of Art, and then home. In Beijing, many of these objects are arranged inside the palace, but visitors are not allowed inside. Instead, they must peer in through the windows. Other pieces, including Qianlong's funeral throne, are on public display for the first time ever. There are beautiful paintings of Qianlong and court life by the Italian Guiseppe Castiglione -- he was a Jesuit missionary, but the emperor, a devout practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and Manchu shamanism, was uninterested in his Christianity, so the priest was given a new job. The silk embroidery is amazing -- intricate wave patterns at the bottoms of the robes, and the apparent texture of dyed fabric, not thread, in a wall hanging of a Buddha. And a great new phrase came from the decorations on some tables and desks -- it's a design motif called the "fungus of immortality" (here, on the desk in the top left). And the docents (special plug to a friend) are wonderfully knowledgeable. It's a truly impressive exhibit.

* * *

The Julius Meinl Cafe, at Southport and Addison, seves the same brand of beans as the coffee houses in Vienna. It's a comfortable place for a lazy afternoon, the coffee is served on a silver tray, and the small signs next to the sidewalk tables read both "no smoking" and "rauchen verboten."

* * *

Northwestern's miscellaneous language and theater departments hosted a performance of the Chilean playwright Juan Radrigan's Hechos Consumados, or Finished from the Start. It was the first English performance (mostly: a few digressions into Spanish). The play is set on the banks of an unnamed river, during the time of a totalitarian government -- the boss -- that has given a few people unpleasant jobs, sent many people poor and packing without direction, and caused a few to become the disappeared. Or, Chile under the Pinochet regime, as seen by a leftist author. Hechos Consumados's first performance was in Chile, two decades ago. At the post-show discussion, Radrigan said that people then were afraid to be seen coming to this play, but they came anyway. The theater was less touched by censorship than other forms, like folk songs and journalism. It was as though the theater was not seen as being as effective or as popular as those other forms, and so letting the playwrights speak out was relatively less dangerous.

Perhaps everyone just fell asleep at the beginning, which felt like Waiting for Godot all over again, and inferiorly done. There was a woman who said she'd fallen into the canal (she'd been thrown) and the man who fished her out, talking in that style. Once the main character of the disappeared came on stage to deliver his monologue, though, it began to get interesting. He spoke, recorded, in a projected TV screen. It was mainly a monologue, but sometimes the other two interrupted him and and responded to him (NWU had a CIRA grant that required them to include multimedia in the performance. That, the director confessed, was why he chose to include video projections.) It was hard to take my eyes off him as he spoke, both because his face was so large and because he on TV (I felt conditioned). Even later in the play, when what was projected was less integral to the scene being performed, it was hard not to look only at that.

Representing the people currently anchored in the present was the security guard, who'd come to kick the man and woman off river bank, for it was private property: I'm just doing my job; I'm a textile worker too by day; I know some say the pay is too low for the job but no one's forcing anyone to work in the factory, they can leave if they want to. And I felt a Chicago School guilt. Pinochet had called on some of those boys for his economic planning; I've hung around the atmosphere of this place. Somehow the two are comparable. Yes, textiles are imported because they're cheaper than the ones made in the country, and yes, some workers lose their jobs because of it. But the preachers here say the numbers come out on the side of globalization. And so as this debate unfolds on stage -- "I didn't ask to be born poor" -- I feel my sympathies are with the wrong side. No, it wouldn't really hurt anyone if these two homeless were allowed to stay on the river bank, on the textile owner's private property. But there's the principle that they don't really have the legal right to stay there, though they may very well have a moral right... aie, life was simpler when I was a pre-college, uneducated liberal.

* * *

The reading begun on the el home this morning was Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story.

I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next. And that morning I certainly had something to think about. Another man might have resorted to talk about life and death, but such weighty words do not come easily to my lips, even when there is no one else there, as was then the case.

I had waked up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead, but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead, or vice versa, I could not ascertain."

And now back to that. I had thought I would finish it today, but that was before I went to what was called a brunch at noon. Eight and three-quarters of an hour later... well, I can't think of any way I would have rather spent the day.

As in Will's quotation of the Stoppard (below),

The Ferry edition renders the line:
"quo pius Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus"

Whereas the edition on Perseus renders:
"quo pius Aeneas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus"

Both makes sense in the first Archilocean meter (i.e., functionally -- dactylic hexameter for this line), however, it's interesting that dives (wealthy) doesn't appear in Housman's translation at all. Interesting as to what Horace could have written here in the first place (should Housman be correct in Stoppard's play). Horace, the poet laureate of Rome's Golden age would have been in support of Augustus -- would this have meant being for or against the era of the kingdoms?

My guess -- saevus, in description for Tullus, whose full "nick" name was Tullus Hostilius, and was known for his cruelty as a king. Saevus would also have transfered to the "Ancus," whose full "nick" name was Ancus Martius -- known for his military conquests. This would also explain why people might have modified this in literary history -- in Horace's catalogue of great Roman heros, why would he have mentioned the cruel Ancus and Tullus? Thus, dives might have been used to round out some very uncomfortable edges. Although, to my knowledge, there's really no record of these early kings of Rome being exceptionally wealthy...

...although admittedly, I don't know what other alternatives have been presented, nor their defenses -- A question (perhaps for Will, but the general public as well) does Stoppard's Housman actually tell what he was thinking, or is there any record of what Housman may have been thinking?

A quick note in response to the beautiful Housman poem-- titled Diffugere Nives-- Sudeep posted below.

[From The Invention of Love:]

Housman: [Scholarship] is where we’re nearest to our own humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about the poetry. I do. "Diffugere Nives" goes through me like a spear. Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead – dust and shadow, and no good deeds, no eloquence, will bring you back. I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was, but in verse 15 Horace never wrote ‘dives’ which is in all the texts, and I’m pretty I’m sure I know what he did write. Anyone who says ‘so what?’ got let behind five hundred years ago when we became modern.

Thought this ode seems strangely appropriate for myself and all those who are madly writing theses indoors today in Northeast Illinois. (Rendered from the Latin -- as it will not again be done for quite some time -- by AE Housman.)

Q. Horatius Flaccus, Carm. IV.vii:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
     And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
     And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
     And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
     Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
     Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
     Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
     Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
     And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
     The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
     The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
     The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
     No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
     Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
     The love of comrades cannot take away.

Michael Van Winkle responds to my post below, saying that even if blogs aren't producing a new kind of content, at least they're making it much cheaper for someone to enter the market and get their content to a wide audience -- where, of course, it'll sink or swim in the same way that the old media forms do. I think he's right. I absolutely think that the power of blogs is that do enable content to potentially reach wide audiences virtually costlessly, and that there is real potential for the best of them to translate into real career-making ventures. What sparked my skepticism about the BloggerCon session was how much the notion that only the very best of them will succeed was being ignored, in favor of the idea that blogs simply by virtue of being blogs can be money-making enterprises, and forgetting that the key is having content people want to read and that is really providing value. Yeah, so Van Winkle is right; read his post. :)