You all know, I'm sure, that tired old conversational gambit - if you could have dinner with five people, living or dead, who would they be?

I have a list, but I wouldn't want all of them at once - I'd want them separately, so I could focus on each by turns.

- Colette.

I'd love to have met her, and talked to her, and, without doubt, would have fallen in love with her instantly. Sure, she died nearly fifty years ago, but I'm half in love with her as it is.

- Moving from the would-fall-in-love end of the scale to the would-not-like-but-want-to-meet-anyway end, Adolf Hitler, circa the late thirties, perhaps - before he went mad. Yeah, yeah, I know, all those jokes about me being a fascist aside, I would have liked to talk to him, if only to get a sense of who he really was, beyond the demagoguery, and the propaganda - and at this point, it's still very, very hard to distinguish fact from propaganda about Hitler. I know he was a Bad Man (tm), and I don't really subscribe to the contemporary German Great Men theory of history, but Hitler... Well, I just would have liked to talk to him.

- Winston Churchill. Whom I probably also wouldn't have liked, but would have respected, and definitely, definitely would have enjoyed listening to, because the Great Men theory of history being a crock aside, Churchill was a Great Man nonetheless, and brilliant with it.

- Aspasia, the great hetaera of Athens, companion to (and almost certainly advisor to) Pericles. I think a lot of Pericles, but I would have rather talked with Aspasia - perhaps partly about him, but I think Aspasia would be amazing. Her, too, I would probably fall in love with, at least somewhat.

Idle note: I think it says a lot about Pericles that he had the respect, almost the awe, of Thucydides, despite his heavy involvement in the democracy that Thucydides so despised. Of course, I'd also point out that Pericles was as much a demagogue as Hitler, and probably could have been a fascist, except that he wasn't in a nation that was weak, didn't see a need for rebirth or authoritarianism; Athens was in her prime. They were in the golden age and they knew it.

Possibly he'd be the fifth one on my list, I think.

A game: Marbles. Very simple, yet weirdly addictive.

I find myself thinking in terms of blood strangely often. Blood metaphors, blood imagery, sometimes just the word intruding randomly into my thought. I'm a very textually-oriented person, so word is association for me. I think it's why I love German so - German words can hold so much more meaning than English can.

Take something we've been discussing in my fascism unit, the concept of the Volk and volkisch ideology. It's something some historians pay a lot of attention to in the Second Reich, but in Imperial German politics the volkisch thinkers were fringe players, radical loonies if you will.

But most texts translate Volk as "people", and not all of them even take the trouble to point out how incredibly impoverished a translation that is. There's layers and meanings and power to the word in German, all about cultural identity and heritage and soul. English can't translate that - it's a weakness, and also a strength, because English is a less emotionally manipulative language, some ways.

See, it occurred to me that German is a demagogue's dream, because it has these words that mean so much that doesn't even translate, but which, in the right emotional and political climate especially, can yank hard on a person and carry them along. Hitler was charismatic as all hell, to begin with, and he knew how to work a crowd - if you watch one of his speeches, even if you don't understand the language, you can see the way he builds, from calm to an impassioned fervour that swept his audiences up by the thousand. And he played on things like the idea of the Volk.

I really need to write up my notes from Rob's last lecture, because it rocked, and was also greatly inspiring.

I think that's probably why I'm hating my Medieval unit so - I'm struggling just to get any kind of handle on it besides rote learning of a few crappy narrative facts, while in fascism we're looking at understanding and historiography and the interplay of social and political and historical forces and I get what's going on, and can move on to understanding and making conceptual leaps to the ideas that lie beyond narrative history, and I love it, and I'm so fucking good at it you wouldn't even credit it, and in Medieval I'm having to work at mediocrity, and my ego Does Not Like That, and it makes me write run-on sentences that go on forever and ever and if this was spoken I'd have run out of breath halfway through, so it's time for a full stop now.

I can't express how very much I love modern history - the visceral thrill it is to look at this stuff and understand what's going on, the delight of dissecting fact from propaganda and influence and so on. The joy of active loathing of bad historians (some day I hope to meet Roger Griffith at a symposium or something, and kick his shins), and the delight of realisation of some little point that you didn't understand. Even just the fun of picking apart some theories, like the ones that buy into war propaganda and Hitler's own ideas about the German soul in trying to claim that Nazism and the Holocaust are just built into Germans because they're German, which I hardly need explain is a total, total crock.

I love it.

Testing, testing.

I've been using my LiveJournal because it has the nifty update client, and my blog doesn't.

Well, didn't. Elizabeth pointed me to w.bloggar, a nifty update client for blogger, which means that the blog is again all good and I may yet be updating them both again.

W00t.

Eliane's diary (excerpts)

Today we trained for combat. The plan worked more or less perfectly, but that Valmar boy ignored the objective to go play.

...

We arrived in Meore today. I borrowed horses and a wagon from Dumont. I told him that we'd bring them back in a month or so. He said I was just as likely to get killed, and he'd bill my father for the wagon and horses. I told him fine.

That self-indulgent pig Valmar was in charge of finding rooms - the others don't speak Algandarve, which should tell me something, I suppose. It would have been cheaper to find rooms at the ducal palace.

Our valiant captain is a fool. She seems incapable of making decisions, and didn't even seem to realise how ridiculous Valmar's actions were. Even planning how to get to our destination was beyond her - must I do all the work in this group?

...

We are riding into the bridge city. Most of the group are wounded. We came across an impassable road block - thugs who wished more money than we had. Valmar was translating. Kalika came along, but was useless. I lost my temper and tried to kill the guard - unfortunately, as so often happens when one loses one's cool blood, my blade went astray. Our courageous captain immediately set about fleeing; I thought the others would ride with us, and boarded the cart, but they stood and fought. The battle was over before I had managed to stop the horses after the captain was wounded.

We must find a physician, for Aldo is gravely hurt, and shows little improvement. I shall leave as little of the negotiations to Valmar as possible.