{"id":5119,"date":"2007-01-08T07:05:54","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T07:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5119"},"modified":"2007-01-08T07:05:54","modified_gmt":"2007-01-08T07:05:54","slug":"five-things-about-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5119","title":{"rendered":"five things about me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russell Arben Fox has tagged me in a game that is going around the blogosphere<\/a>. I’m supposed to write “five things you don’t know about me.” Here goes:<\/p>\n

1. I used to live with Marcel. Marcel was once a beloved baby elephant at the Paris Zoo. During the Prussian siege of 1870-1871, the famished Parisians were forced, much to their sorrow, to eat Marcel. They retained his skin, which was stuffed with a beer barrel and straw. After some years of posthumous service in a Paris bar (beer came out of his trunk), Marcel was moved to London. He belonged to the owners of an apartment near Victoria Station that my family rented in 1979-81.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2. My 7-year-old daughter and I have constructed what we call our “mosque.” It is about 14 inches high. It isn’t really a mosque, because it lacks a mihrab (to orient people for prayer) or a minbar (the Islamic equivalent of a pulpit). That’s probably just as well; it might seem disrespectful for two unbelievers to build a mosque for play. Our motives were the opposite of disrespectful. We (or at least I<\/em>) love Islamic architecture and wanted to figure out how to construct a public building–which could be a bath, a school, or a library–in the 16th-century Ottoman style.<\/p>\n

3. In the 1990s, I used to play the clavichord. It is one of the two quietest instruments I know, the other one being the lute. If an air-conditioner is running in the same room with our clavichord, you can’t hear a note from more than three feet away. Its low volume was an attraction for me, because we live in a small apartment. So was the fact that J.S. Bach would have used a clavichord in his home. Tuning it, however, is so time-consuming that I have mostly given it up. (I did receive a didgeridoo for Christmas last year, but that’s mostly for looking at.)<\/p>\n

4. I basically identify as a Jewish American, a grandchild of immigrants. But it turns out that my oldest American ancestor, by way of my mother, was one Isaac Learnard, who died in Chelmsford, Mass. anno domini <\/em>1657.<\/p>\n

5. I am color-blind and can hardly sing a note. (Or, even worse, I can only sing one<\/i> note.) Yet I love music and painting. Would I enjoy these arts less if I could actually perceive them?<\/p>\n

I tap phronesisaical<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russell Arben Fox has tagged me in a game that is going around the blogosphere. I’m supposed to write “five things you don’t know about me.” Here goes: 1. I used to live with Marcel. Marcel was once a beloved baby elephant at the Paris Zoo. During the Prussian siege of 1870-1871, the famished Parisians […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}