Category: work

Goodness, I’m blogging queen for the day. Enjoy it while it lasts; you and I both know it won’t for long…

I’m confused. Robespierre, the French revolutionary-turned-apparent-dictator who was guillotined when the people had had enough. You know what I’m talking about. Well, S. T. Coleridge, in the third act of his “The Fall of Robespierre,” has Barrere making a speech. Here’s part of that speech:

…When the tyrant
Hurl’d from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann’d for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart
Has sunk within me, when the various woes
Of my brave country crowded o’er my brain
In ghastly numbers—when assembled hordes,
Dragg’d from their hovels by despotic power,
Rush’d o’er her frontiers, plunder’d her fair hamlets,
And sack’d her populous towns, and drench’d with blood
The reeking fields of Flanders.—When within,
Upon her vitals prey’d the rankling tooth
Of treason; and oppression, giant form,
Trampling on freedom, left the alternative
Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day,
When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced
The doom of injured France, has faction reared
Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach’d
Of mercy—the uxorious dotard Roland,
The woman-govern’d Roland durst aspire
To govern France; and Petion talk’d of virtue,
And Vergniaud’s eloquence, like the honeyed tongue
Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction.
We triumphed over these. On the same scaffold
Where the last Louis pour’d his guilty blood,
Fell Brissot’s head, the womb of darksome treasons,
And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet,
And Hébert’s atheist crew, whose maddening hand
Hurl’d down the altars of the living God,
With all the infidel’s intolerance.

I can kind of see the reference… I think. Roland, in the Italian-connected cycle, is bewitched by a Pagan princess from China, and more or less travels the entire known world in search of her, madly in love. He’s blinded by a woman, etc.

But was Robespierre? I can’t find any information on him that would make the uxorious-dotard lines make sense. Nevermind that a French historical character making wholly disparaging reference to Roland is in itself more than a little strange. Help?

EDIT 23.47: Oh! It was Madame Roland. THAT explains it. From the Britannica:

(1754�93). The wife of a French politician during the French Revolution, Madame Roland greatly influenced the policies of the moderate Girondist faction of the revolutionaries. The Girondists professed moderate republican views and opposed the excesses of the more radical party.

Jeanne-Marie Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754, the daughter of an engraver. An avid reader, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Jean-Marie Roland de La Plati�re. He was a government official who afterward became a leader of the Girondist party.

When the French Revolution came, Madame Roland became the intellectual leader of a group of young enthusiasts who gathered in her salon. Her visitors included the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde. At first even Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, leaders of the opposing Jacobins, belonged to her circle.

So, this isn’t my Roland at all.

You may have heard (or read) my impression of the Roland legend’s German incarnation. Pfaffe (Priest) Konrad, sometime in the 12th century I think, translated the French Song of Roland into German, at the request of a wealthy patron. He did not pass on the opportunity to pepper the text with, literally, pages of moralistic sermon: “Oliver asked Roland again to blow his horn, and again Roland refused, and WOE TO HIM THAT IS TOO PROUD TO CALL FOR HELP FOR GOD WILL” etc.* So, okay, I thought; the Germans more or less knew the legend as the French had conceived it, with few changes except to make a religious martyr bordering on fanatic out of Roland. Seemed to make sense: in the days of yore, specifically during Charlemagne’s reign, both France and Germany were under his direct rule; and so the legend should be more or less the same, right?

Tutt’altro, as the Italians say. There’s a whole ‘nother thing.

A Google search reveals that the Roland-of-Rolandseck legend seems to exist in many versions. Here’s one whose wording I like. The “this” refers to Rolandsbogen, or Roland’s Bow, the stone window shown in the image. It stands on the Rhine, not very far from Bonn, in an area called Rolandseck (Roland’s Corner).

   This is all that remains of the fortress that was built as a toll castle by the archbishops of Cologne in 1100. After the “Rolandsbogen” collapsed in 1840, its restoration was paid for by public donations.
   According to the legend Sir Roland, a knight, built the castle for his bride, Hildegund, the daughter of the Knight of Drachenfels. Roland went off into battle against the Saracens and Hildegrund learned of his supposed death. She went into retreat at the convent on the Rhine Island of Nonnenwerth, and when Roland came home, he was heartbroken. Every day he looked out of his bow window at the convent and when Hildegund died soon after, they found him dead as well – at his window.

So, to sum up: the German legend retains the bit about Roland dying at Rencesvalles, but disregards it as rumor that is in fact untrue. Instead, Roland dies of lovesickness, staring out the window at the convent across the water, in which his beloved is wasting away in the name of love and Jesus.

*That isn’t an actual quote.

I have got to go to Belgium.

In a bellfry, in Ghent, there is a bell called Roland. According to one work of fiction, the inscription on it reads: My name is Roland. When I tell, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders. Longfellow wrote a poem about it.

Here’s a fun bit. Sometime just after World War II, Luigi Dallapiccola wrote a short opera – set in sixteenth-century Spain – titled Il Prigioniero (The Prisoner). (Click on the link for a plot summary.) An interesting addition to the Roland corpus, in its odd but unmistakeable parallel to the French Song of Roland. To wit: our knight is the champion of Christendom, whose heart’s desire is to deliver every heathen from their wicked ways by word or steel. Well, okay, mostly steel. Obviously, he fails to do that for the Pagans that kill him. The same pagans whom Charlemagne had just previously besieged for seven years in the Spanish city of Saragossa, the last Pagan stronghold in Europe.

Centuries later, the prisoner finds himself in that same city, and Roland the Ghent bell fails to deliver him from a most evil expression of Christianity.

I did a double-take at that one, but it’s there. I’m wary of trying to see connections where there ain’t none, so this is probably where I’ll stop with The Prisoner. Still, very cool.

Ethan and I have been talking a lot about the kind of xml editing environment that is available out there for free, or cheaply (read: to academics). I’m becoming more and more convinced that there isn’t yet a good editor for what I’d like to do. iBoggle at this! What I’d like to do is relatively simple, compared with the wild and crazy things people do with XML nowadays.

1. I’d like to edit documents without a DTD. While I’m encoding a file semantically, which constitutes research, I can’t have a DTD in place by definition, until I’ve encoded the document (possibly several times). Thus, I don’t care if myfile.xml validates against a pre-set DTD. I only care whether it’s well-formed.
2. I’d like to be able to highlight text, and with a keyboard or mouse shortcut call up a menu of all the elements I could possibly use at this point in the document, based on the elements I’ve used thus far. Once an element is inserted, it would also be grand to get a menu of the attributes used in it up until now. In both cases, there should be an option to add a new element or attribute.
3. I’d like to be able to view the thing in different modes – a full-on text mode, with all of the source right there, and perhaps a more wysiwyg mode, in which the cursor’s position would trigger a display of what element(s) I’m in at the moment, somewhere on the side.
4. I’d like for the editor to then be able to extrapolate a DTD from my code, if I ask it to do so. Or tell me exactly why it can’t.

This is the wish list so far. Of all the editors I’ve seen, only XMetaL and <oXygen/> have half-way decent interfaces. The former is only available for Windows. The latter is excruciatingly uncustomizeable, or else the Windows version is different from that made for the Mac, or else-else, the trial version does not include all the features of the full version. While that last option seems more probable the more I play with oXygen, documentation didn’t bother to mention it, and I spent so much time beating my head against it, that frankly, I’m not inspired to pay the $48 for an academic license. Moreover, the feature I want most – being able to quickly surround text in tags based on the tags I’ve used so far in the document – is wildly unreliable. If I create a new element, the program will not see it until I close and re-open the document; and even then, at any given point I get a seemingly arbitrary list of available elements.

Enough bitching, I just wanted to formulate all of this in writing while I’m in the middle of it. If anyone knows of an already-existing program that does what I want to do, let me know!

Does anyone happen to have book 5 of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla? I’m checking them out for work, believe it or not. If you’ve got a copy and are not afraid to loan it to me, you will have my undying gratitude. The loan would have to be for at least a month, optimally until May or June.

Showed the Genette post to Nick, and was once again reminded how useful it is to get ideas out of your head and into the conversational space between you and another person. He put what I was trying to get at in simple, sharply focused terms: “…distinguish a set (bunch of texts) from a property or set of properties defining that set.”

Well, precisely. It’s important to be aware of whether a text (loosely defined) is a piece of writing or a sculpture or a piece of music. If it’s a piece of writing, there will also be circumstances in which it’s useful to know that it’s rhymed verse, or a novel, or a theatrical script.

But the very fact of this separation, this compartmentalization of artistic works is the problem. We have literature departments, and art history departments, and music departments, and we study one of these to the exclusion of the others, and of course we haven’t seen the Roland corpus as a corpus. Scholars have alluded to it, discussing for example Roland’s reception in Italy or in Spain, but what they’ve concentrated on is literary production, or word-based anyway (oral performance included). The marvelous tradition of chivalric puppet shows in southern Italy and Sicily has never really been brought into the discussion in depth, except by theatre specialists.

Anyway, the important point is: Before being included in the Roland corpus, a work of art must be checked against an eligibility list; but this list has only two criteria. It must be a text produced by humans (or human-produced machines; we’ll get to sentient animals and aliens when we get to them); and it must feature Roland as a character, major or minor. That is all. Its medium of production, form, genre and anything else about it is unimportant with regard to its inclusion (or not) in the corpus. We will not fully see the larger set of texts and the interplay of borrowing and re-imagining among them unless we discard, just for the time being, the notion of homogeneity of form.

(And is specific recording N of musical composition X a different text from the notation of said composition on paper? Depends on what your purpose is; I do not make a distinction here. Multiple recordings and/or editions of the same work are the same text unit. But a 19th-century opera treating the same subject matter as the 11th-century epic poem is a distinct text from that poem.)