Cuise to Mexico

Hello Joan!  Yes, I took the cruise with my two children (without Carolyn, who had to work that week) to Puerto Vallerta and Cabo San Lucas.  I had never been to Mexico and fell in love with it.  The warmth and genuineness that one feels with Latinos here in the US is palpable in Mexico, quite overwhelming.  Puerto Vallerta is an old town with a beautiful center and an old cathedral -- just lovely.  A marvelous beach fronts the old town, full of cafes, umbrellas, and vendors trolling the tourists.  My children were dying to "jetski," a kind of motorcycle on the water, and a very nice vendor let them although the legal age was 15.  Rules don't seem to matter much in Mexico, especially traffic ones!  The cruise was wonderful, although culturally a little foreign to me.  There were no string quartets like the last cruise, or even classical music on the sound system, so I suffered a little.  The closest was Italian popular sounds, which are delightful.  On the other hand, the food was exceptional.  The buffet had several different lines, the French, Italian, burrito, Chinese, Indian, burger, pizza, etc.  Or there was the choice of the sitdown meal with full service.  I loved the frogs' legs -- the first time I had a chance to really feast on them (the kids didn't want theirs, so I ate their portions too).  There were many comedy acts on the ship, which the children particularly liked.  The best time on a cruise is when one returns tired out from exploring a challenging environment like Mexico and sits down to a luxurious dinner with waiters who know you (you have the same every dinner).  One doesn't choose an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert, but rather orders all the appetizers, main courses, and desserts that strike one's fancy.  I normally eat a very little limited range of healthy food (oatmeal, salad, frozen yogurt, fruit), so my eyes were popping out with the abundance and deliciousness.  I love desserts with lots of cream, like Tiramisu, and there were always several different kinds of them available.  Surprisingly, I didn't gain any weight on the cruise, probably due to the effort of watching the children and keeping up with them.

Clowns

Hello Joan!  Sounds like a great trip, and what an airfare!  That's amazing!  Thank you for your description of Capetown; it seems very beautiful.  There seems to be hope for the country's future.
I don't think the taste for deformity was restricted to women Tsars; it grew naturally out of the traditional place that jesters and clowns, with grotesque demeanour and appearance, had in the Russian court for a long time.  Peter had lots of clowns in his pay.  Being Tsar, or even a noble, precluded having human sympathy for the less fortunate, since inequality was the foundation and principle of the regime.  Poor people were looked at as less than human, and their suffering held to be of no account.  Laughing at the misfortunes of others was indispensable training for a Tsar.  The building of St. Petersburg, which cost thousands of lives, makes no sense otherwise.
Tschaikovsky seems a sensible, deeply feeling, and very conservative man.  He was a firm Tsarist, and I believe his self-identification with the Tsarist regime caused him to internalize its condemnation of homosexuality, giving him unbearable feelings of self-contempt.  He spoke of suicide at various times during his life.  He seems a wonderfully sweet, innocent, honest man.  When he does go deeper in his music, it usually opens layers of profound sadness that he felt so strongly.  So much of art seems to be the attempt to bring nobility to unbearable suffering.  I'm reading Troyat's life of Gogol, and that certainly seems to apply to him.  Take care, Sidney

Baroness Von Meck

Hello Joan!  I finished Troyat's lives of all the Tsars from Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II.  There was an interesting story about Tsarina Anna in the 1720s.  She loved dwarves and disfigured oddities, and collected them for her court.  She thought it would be a great joke on the recently widowed nobleman Golitsyn to make him marry the ugliest dwarf in the court, and even funnier if the wedding took place in the great square in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and was consummated inside a huge palace made of ice on a bed made of ice, transparent to the whole city.  She stationed guards outside the ice palace to make sure the newlyweds spent the entire February night there, while she slept comfortably in her warm room. My Russian friends know of this event, but I had never heard of it.
Having run out of Tsars, I picked up another book by Troyat called "La Baronne Von Meck et le Musicien," about the relationship between Tschaikovsky and his patroness.  She loved music, played the piano well, and when her husband died her greatest pleasure was listening to Tschaikovsky's music.  Her husband had built the Moscow-Ryazan railway, and hearing of T's severe money problems gave him a pension, on condition that the two never meet.  She was afraid that meeting him in person might spoil the perfection of the music for her.  They corresponded often and had a platonic love affair; the correspondence exists and is fascinating.  Over time she wished for a more satisfying contact, according to Troyat, but realized that for a grandmother like herself acorporeal music was the best form of love to indulge in -- an idea I thought illumined for me my ever growing love for music.  Finally the rumors about T's homosexuality and his insistence on writing operas, a form she thought vulgar, led her to break off with him.  His suicide by drinking cholera-tainted water was in part a reaction to these vicious rumors (probably well founded) and her rejection, although he no longer needed the money.  (The Tsar was about to commence a formal inquiry into his private life.)  It was fun reading Troyat in French -- his language is just lovely, although many words are so recherche I can't find them in any dictionary.
Passengers on the cruise we're going to be taking were robbed outside of Puerto Vallerta, so we're definitely staying inside the city -- I hope that's safe!  We had a pretty good earthquake here yesterday.  Take care, Sidney

Epicurus

Hello Claire!  We came back home with lots of samples in our bags, of course, and something interesting happened yesterday.  The food that just seemed so-so, average at the Fair was absolutely delicious the next day!  I think there was just too much at the Fair, so it all blurred together, whereas at home we try each one by itself and it was outstanding.  I think this is interesting information about our brains and our physical system -- we reach satiety fairly quickly and can't appreciate what we're having.  The simplest food when we're hungry (like my oatmeal in the morning) is more delicious than the most elegant meal when we've already had enough.  That probably applies to many things.  The ancient Epicureans (followers of Epicurus) believed that pleasure was the goal of life, and were paradoxically known for their abstemiousness.  They were thin, ate the simplest food and learned to appreciate the simplest things like air and exercise.  It will take a while to get through all the samples we have!  Take care, Sidney

Fancy Food Fair

Hello Claire! It was very fun, but boy did I feel sick at the end. I enjoyed talking with the business people about their products. I had always wondered why the cinnamon I use says "Saigon Cinnamon," and a purveyor of spices explained that this was the most aromatic, most expensive of cinnamons, grown in Vietnam. We wondered why Costco sells it so cheaply, and couldn't find an explanation. For me the best thing I tasted was Double Rainbow's Coffee Blast ice cream, which is available at of all places, the Trader Joes where I shop every day! That's a good thing, and I often pick it up and turn it around to look at the calories, then wistfully put it back. Maybe I should buy it and treat myself to a spoonful a day.
There were some interesting flavors of ice cream, like avocado and scambled egg with bacon. I had heard of these in restaurant reviews in the New York Times, and it was fun to check them out for myself. They really are good!
There were a surprising number of men wearing kipot in the fair -- I would have thought that the laws of kashrut would prevent orthodox Jews from making the food business their occupation, but apparently quite a few do.
Judging from my recollections ice cream, or frozen foods in general, are my favorite. That's a good thing to realize about myself.
What were your discoveries? Thanks for the tickets, and see you soon.

We had the most unbelievably wonderful day yesterday.   Rivka had a sleepover at her friend Lyla's house, and Noah, Carolyn and I made a fine bike ride down to the Zoo and our favorite cafe, Java Beach.  I had gotten up around 4 a.m. and read 30 pages of my current book, Moya Stol Dlinnaya Doroga by Henri Troyat.  (In the evening I read another 20 to finish with a highly respectable 50 pages for the day.)
Then Lyla's family joined us for a short hike to Kirby cove, an amazing beach that looks out on the Golden Gate Bridge and the city.  We saw jellyfish, sea anemones, mussels, barnacles, and several large rock crabs that people were fishing for.  There was very fun rope swing on the beach that the children and I enjoyed very much.  The air had an amazing clarity -- it seemed one could see every detail of the houses in the city.  It was warm too -- we all took off our jackets.  Afterwards we went for the first time to Gaspare's Pizza, an old S.F. favorite out on the avenues that Lyla's family enjoys.  An active, beautiful day -- to breath the air was like drinking wine.  Carolyn had never been to Kirby Cove, and I'm sure we'll return to it.

Hello Joan!  I like that about Napoleon renewing Europe, restoring youth and energy -- it seems true.  He definitely inspired so many young men, even those who also felt disappointed in him like Beethoven and Pushkin.  Coulaincourt says Napoleon shocked him once.  After a battle he was walking over the field strewn with bodies.  He says Napoleon's entire staff, hardened soldiers all, felt sickened and ashamed by the slaughter around them.  Napoleon looked at them with amusement, and quoted the Roman saying, "There is no more beautiful sight than that of one's dead enemies."  Coulaincourt realized that Napoleon was cut of a different cloth than most of humanity.  Throughout the Russian expedition, in the midst of all the suffering, Napoleon showed no sign of compassion for the soldiers, just worry about the deteriorating situation.  I don't suppose lovingkindness is a proper quality in a military commander.
Newt reminds me of Napoleon a little -- a belief in his own destiny, fascination with himself and his own brilliance, willingness to shift whenever the winds of change require it.  It makes for an attractive personality, full of energy and surprises, even amusement, while remaining somewhat strange for people outside the immediate charm of his presence.
Does the Takacz measure up to the Guarneri?
My lovely atheistic and revolutionary Tsar, Alexander I, has fallen under the influence of a Christian mystic and now renounces his entire past, a prey to the superstition that upended the dynasty in Nicholas II.  Too bad; I imagine the strain of his reign, which began with patricide and went on to many years of war, was too much.  I hadn't realized how difficult the final defeat of Napoleon was after the Russian expedition -- Napoleon still raised several hundred troops, and only Alexander's firm resolve to defeat him and strategic gifts made it possible.  After the last battle, when Napoleon defeated a cavalry detachment but found it was not the advance guard of the main army but a diversion that opened the road to Paris to the Coalition, he said, "I would not have thought such a trick possible for their generals."  It was Alexander's idea.  Take care, Sidney