9 posts tagged “berlin”
Ten things that make me preposterously, giddily happy (no books— too many to pick from):
- A certain dirty, fuzzy, supersaturated superloud guitar tone
- The saxophone equivalent—usually at least two at once
- Climbing the pine-studded hills of the American West
- Good espresso (@ Ritual, Bittersweet Rockridge, & a few other spots)
- Jays being jays
- The seashore
- Fast bike rides in no traffic
- Gerhard Richter
- Berlin Berlin Berlin
- Being kissed by this fella
A post brought to you by Listening To The Auteurs Instead of Writing Papers!!!
First, here are two photographs I took in the
vicinity of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I'm not sure this
building is itself the library or part of it, but if it's not, it's
something reasonably congenial. The Humboldt Universität campus
on Unter den Linden has a similar set of rooftop statues. I'm
really taken with them: it's as though the buildings were much further
along in the generative process than the sort you see here, which can
only conjure up gargoyles or embedded human faces at best. Enough
thinking and rash, hubristic imagination has gone on in these buildings
that the fetal statues drink it all up, mature, grow feet, and walk to
the edge of the building to look down, with a mixture of haughtiness
and envy, on passersby. Oh highest hand-wrought register!
They wouldn't all fit in a frame; so, two pictures.
Now, now that I've been pronounced free of jet lag and
travel-instigated illness, of course, I can't sleep for anything and
I'm sniffly. Paul & I went out to Cha Am last night not
because there was nothing to eat at home but because the walk up to
Cedar and back would force us to stay awake. By the time I sat
down at Black Oak Books briefly to read, my head was swimming: I felt
utterly drunk. The state in which the idea of the action
precedes, and improves upon, the action itself; you see everything, but
somehow you're still blind. I made it back, crashed at 9:30, woke
up at 4:30. This is a new experience! New and rotten.
Side note on German vocabulary: the word Bürgerkrieg.
Every time I see it, I become briefly convinced that I'm reading some
insane, doctrinaire Marxist ravings about the bourgeois wars that will
usher in the proletarian revolution, and then I remember that it just
means "civil war." It can generate a lot of short-lived and
interesting alternate histories. Speaking of the Humboldt,
actually, the enormous sculpture on its campus of a stack of books
representing the German canon includes Marx and omits Nietzsche.
Paul got an earful of my apoplexy over this during the trip ("would the
best parts of this postwar society be conceivable without
Nietzsche?!"), but I'm calm enough now merely to note it in
passing. But hey, here's another memorial, from Charlottenburg:
On the other side of the square is a monument
to the victims of National Socialism. They are roughly
symmetrical. I was glad to see this one, though, even if the
story about East Germany that made the strongest impression on me is
humorous: a man who had his phone tapped by the Stasi spent hours at
night talking to his girlfriend in a different country. Finally,
towards the end of one conversation, he heard a series of clicks and a
weary voice broke in: "Hallo, this is the Stasi. We were
wondering if you could wrap this up, because we all would like to go to
sleep." It sounds apocryphal, but it's a cheery piece of
apocrypha and I like to retell it.
I've cheered myself up a bit writing all this, in fact, and the sun
has come out. Earlier, though, I was going to whine and carry on
about how little I want to apply to Ph.D. programs. (Much
earlier, while I was unable to sleep this morning, the personal
statement I was composing in my head began: "Dear Admissions Committee:
-- Actually, why are you admitting anyone to this
program? It really seems like a dead letter.") I understand
that universities need to screen applicants, and I can't quarrel too
bitterly with their methods, but sometimes I don't see how I can
possibly convince any good school to let me in on the basis of those
methods. But, unfortunately, the idea of "getting in" as a goal
just seems ridiculous. I just want to continue doing my
work. I don't know how to orient myself towards
admission-as-such. Honestly. I don't know. I've
mentioned this before, but the day of reckoning is inching closer, and
I just looked at the short list: eight schools that probably won't
accept me, two that might. Oh, and what about the U.K.?
Am I exaggerating? I don't know. I'm not
exaggerating my irritation with the bind I'm in, anyway. I guess
above and beyond everything else I need good guidance, and I don't know
how exactly to look for that. It seems like the sort of thing --
like nearly all human relationships -- that either falls into your lap,
or does not.
Advice here is both impossible and welcome.
While I work on a review of Genres in Dialogue, you may read my notes from the last night in Berlin, which I have been encouraged by other members of the household to post.
I thought my life was beginning again (Zurückbleib' bitte)
It took the S25 20 minutes to arrive at Bahnhof Lankwitz. Do you
know how long 20 minutes is at Bahnhof Lankwitz? You do
not. People believe me, oh yes, but they don't know, except
Paul. Two southbound trains passed. Two inbound Deutsche
Bahn trains came flying up the parallel track in the meantime, as I
untangled a sentence-from-the-Hungarian in my last-purchased book.
The book I brought to Germany was Vergil's complete works in Latin --
Vergil and Dante, though I didn't read either. But standing on
the platform leaning over the tracks, listening for the approaching
whirr of the train, I thought of Ovid instead and briefly, honestly
wondered if my helpless and profound longing to stay in Europe would
transform me into one of those fast trains: constantly in motion, bound
to the earth. My first thought about this was that it would make
Paul terribly lonely. My second thought was something trainlike:
whirr.
Now I'm here on the train in the falling darkness: the halting creep of
darkness up here in the north, further north than anywhere in the
U.S. [except Alaska -ed.] I don't remember if the summer days in Cork were this long,
years ago. All my nerves feel exposed: every passing meter of
Berlin hits them, like pieces of baggage swung by insensate
passersby. Unter den Linden. Friedrichstrasse.
Someone lifts a mug to his lips, somewhere in quiet half-light,
half-heat, which I have only half-seen and half-intuited: buried, like
everything, by the passage of time, like the 20 minutes at the Lankwitz
station: I can't describe them.
Last night I lay awake thinking about God, thinking: the word "atheist"
really has no meaning for me, I mean individually for me, because I
haven't the faintest idea what God is, so I can't either affirm or deny
his or her or its existence. I used to put this more cryptically
and say that I didn't believe in God, revelation pending. This is
as strong a profession of faith as I've got. Fuck some sort of
propositional definition: do I believe in an all-powerful being who
created and controls the universe? Why would I believe in that,
out of some overwhelming epistemological need to believe in such a
thing? It has no sense for me. Faith is an individual
matter: well, this is mine.
Oh but who could make sense of that. I sound like I'm looking for
an argument, reluctantly. Maybe it will strike someone,
somewhere. Easier by far to claim atheism; often I do. But
it really is critically inaccurate, critically inaccurate in an almost
invisible place. Cf. Simone Weil, gravity --
This seems like the most serious thing I've ever done, leaving Berlin,
or maybe the second, after coming to Berlin. That is, if
seriousness is a feeling, which it may be. In terms of
consequences it's actually hard to see. I said my good-byes, and
left a few unsaid. I wrote a paper, seven whole pages, all in
German. My classmate who hadn't finished her work said she was
too busy translating the paper from English into German and I thought:
insanity. So you write two papers. I have to blunder
through in a single language (in Spanish equally so); I can't switch.
Translation is a thing I've actually lost faith in -- I think I'll find it again, but in the meantime
er, something bad has happened, actually. I checked out of the
dorm thinking I would find a hotel in der Nähe von Tegel in which I
could spend the night, or half the night, or however much of the night
remains, and from which I would have easy access to, say, the center of
town. Uh-huh. So. Es gibt ganz und gar nichts in der
Nähe von Tegel. Nothing. I took the X9 bus, got off,
walked, got on the 109, got off, walked, got back on the 109 and
realized that the buses don't run on Saturday morning until after I
land in England. I know that "normal people" take "taxis" and so
forth, and that normal people check to see if there's a hotel before
they plan to stay in one (please, don't even try to square this with my
firm theological logic), and that normal people don't think that
spending the night in the airport is a perfectly good outcome. On
that last point, admittedly, we agree. I'm really not sure what
to do now. Should I tell you my plans for sleeping over the next
few days?
Tonight: dodgy
Sat. night: one million hours
Sun. night: no sleep, bus from Ox to Lon
Mon.: 20 hours in transit
Folks, I am already shot.
And what kind of airport is not ringed by hotels? What kind of
MAJOR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT is not RINGED BY HOooooohhhhh. weh
mir. I really, really didn't want this to happen. Thank God
I don't take the grad school high stakes bets very often.
You answered "the same kind of airport that shuts down practically
every service other than the Schoko-Automat by 10 p.m."
Correct. One thing they don't shut down, as it turns out, is the
free access to airport websites, so I did end up finding a shockingly
expensive room for the night on a bus line where I slept in a
beautiful, uncannily luxurious bed for 5 hours, got up, took a shower
with several different beauty products, and took the bus to the
airport. I don't know if I would have held up at all the next day
if I hadn't found that bed.
The following important things have happened: my laptop has become 75% unusable, friends came into town, I began to have real homework, and the Prague trip traumatized me well beyond what I would have considered possible for a lovely Central European city. I should never underestimate American hegemony. For those of you who haven't heard the story, the American students who alienated me on the bus ride into Prague began screaming, when we were outside Dresden, for dinner at McDonald's, and continued howling at every McDonald's in Dresden until the bus stopped at McDonald's for dinner and I, who had foolishly given the howlers my only food to try to encourage silence, went hungry. The piece of dialogue that summed it up best for me went as follows:
Irrepressibly happy student, on the city bus back to the dorm: But look, everyone, we got to see Prague!
Second, more typical student: No, sorry. I am not ready to look on the bright side of this yet.
Much of this, I admit, I did to myself. I had a lot of angst over being unable to speak Czech and pushed the limits of my ability to walk around and take in a thousand different objects of interest per hour; I didn't make it to Jan Palach's grave, where I really would have left a flower or two if I could have found it; I skipped the Mozart opera after being disabused of the notion that it would be real art and, when friends invited me to see a chamber orchestra play Bach and Vivaldi, inexcusably passed on that too.
But it crystallized, better than anything I could invent in writing, the negative side of my experience here: I'm happy to be a grad student because I like the work I am doing and will do, and the connections I make with people on the basis of it; I don't, however, want to be an undergraduate again, not ever -- I am told that I behaved like a grad student even before I got my B.A. There is a certain, often American but also international, personality with which I share no important qualities: it seems to be common among "students," which is to say people who sign up for overseas academic programs, which is to say the 19-year-olds on the bus with me, and the disconnect didn't occur to me until I got here. This sounds sort of wretchedly whiny and unkind, and I mean no disrespect to anyone by stressing my own difference. If anything, all of this has made me more ambivalent about it.
Anyway. I also realized I want to study in Germany, and my options seem to be a) a 4.5-year master's program or b) a year on exchange in Baden-Wurttemberg, i.e. Tübingen or Heidelberg, not Berlin, not even Leipzig or Munich. There is this great stony cliff before me, rising higher and higher, and I am in the smallest of boats. At the Gemäldegallerie: Rembrandt, his late beatific portraits, Dürer (but not "Melancholie"! O Melancholie!), the mighty 15th century, a bite to eat with Vitaminensaft and still-staring artstruck eyes: every few hours here I see something I love and I don't know the name for it, but I don't know the words to alienate me from it either. I dreamt I spoke German as a child, that there were recordings of me at 5 speaking fluently, I only forgot it later. The house on the Ku'damm where Musil wrote his novel: there is a plaque. But I have not written anything here yet. What happens? What happens then?
"Sanddorn," apparently buckthorn, is a popular ingredient in health
foods here, and you can buy "Distelöl," which I think is thistle oil,
at the BioMarkt. I haven't tried the latter yet, but the Sanddorn
bars are acceptable.
Now, this is what people hate about personal websites, and it is
also something I hate about personal websites: what do I care about
buckthorn? What do I care about thistle oil when [current world
events]? Do you people sit down and think: how shall I speak to
my fellow-men? What shall I bring forth from my mind, from my
heart, what strange wonders, what piquant distortions of the
commonplace: as I am asked each day to account for myself and my place
on this earth, shall I speak of truth and justice and art or shall I
speak of thistle oil and blackbirds? And how shall I speak of
thistle oil and blackbirds: there is thistle oil, there are
blackbirds? Is that all?
Past the Sex-Kino, past the Gedächtniskirche, past a tiny unfledged
dead bird on the sidewalk with impossible dark convex disks for eyes,
shuddering under cloud cover, in search of the train, past
Fasanenstrasse and the art-and-architecture bookstore which sold me
Philippe Jaccottet's book on Giorgio Morandi, against all odds.
Up to the Zoo S-Bahn. To Friedrichstrasse. Up and down the
stairs, one after another. My train not there. The
possibility of my train, in the form of any assurances of its arrival
or departure or existence, also absent. Down the stairs to
U6. Off at Hallescher Tor: it is decided, I will go back to the
FU, no more vacillating, but first a snack and drink in the park.
Poetry on the sidewalk, like Addison Street, only polyglot: Slovene,
Czech, Greek, Latvian. For each of these languages a
corresponding restaurant, somewhere, with no vegetarian food; a
darkened doorway to a darkened hallway, a bright sky, an absent
train. Nothing adds up. Up to the U1 platform, over to the
U3, off at Thielplatz carrying my Sanddorn bar past the blackbird, the Amsel,
not an icterid (like U.S. blackbirds) but a thrush (like U.S. robins,
very like them, same alert bright eyes), which looks brightly and
alertly at me from behind a veil of leaves. I greet it in
English, but it most likely does not understand.
Flucht, Fluß, fluency, flurry, fluster, buckthorn thistle oil and
thrushes: kein Schlüssel; I seem to have found Anaximanderplatz at last.
The last shall be first, because I made a
mistake uploading the images: street scene near the Ku'damm, while I
sat drinking the tea pictured below.
I'd been delinquent in photographing the city for a day or so, until I
found the joke that never gets old: Kantstrasse. As you leave the
U-Bahn on the way to the Kantstrasse you can pass through the Kant
Center. I have digitally altered the photo so you can see the
"fitness" logo.
"Idee" turns out to be an art-supply shop. Could be worse.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the "Best Western" logo in the picture.
Yes, and yes.
Another entry in the register of philosophical beauty salons.
Now, "Kant" means "edge" in German, so I assume there's some silly
"cutting-edge" pun implied here.
I was in high spirits after all this, so I took this artsy picture of a building on the next block.
3.10 Euros for iced tea? After an amazingly complicated process,
this is what I got. That's an orange slice and a lemon slice in
the glass; the orange packet contains a chocolate-covered espresso
bean. I'm not sure this picture even captures the gestalt.
Must try their coffee, however.
In the English-language Berlin lifestyle magazine they stuck in my
bag with the university orientation materials (a map... to lose!,
etc.), there's an ad for a vegetarian restaurant. The caption is "Why
are those Berlin girls so shockin' healthy?" While I find this idiom
charming, it doesn't belong in any English I've ever heard spoken --
but I realize I am not the only speaker of English in the world, so
I'll defer to the rest of you. Kennen Sie "shockin'"?
Obwohl ich hier deutsch schreiben möchte, weiss ich doch dass 1) Sie
können überhaupt nichts davon lesen und 2) es soviele grammatische
Fehler geben würde, würden die paar deutschsprachige Leser schnell
weggehen. Trotzdem bin ich jetzt im Mensa, noch-nicht-so-früher
morgen, damit ich das WLAN benützen kann. Warum dann sind die
Berlinerinnen so gesundlich? Sie haben keine Luna-bars zum essen!
Wie ist es möglich? Vielleicht kommt der schockin' Gesund wegen des
Bionade, diese kaum verständlich Getränk mit seinen unheimlichen
Rohstoffen. Gleich in diesem Mensa, gestern oder früher, sah ich eine
Frau von fast mythischen Schönheit, obwohl wahrscheinlich sie kein
Bionade hatte. Ein Rätsel.
Dinner with D. last night in Mitte. Paris and London and New York
are all more charming than Berlin for him, but too expensive, so here
alone the standard of living he wants is possible. I considered this.
In theory I would pay any amount of money to live in the city I found
most congenial; in practice there is no "theory" of such things. It's
an economic system. The more time I spend here the more I love
Neubauten's hymn to Berlin, "Die Befindlichkeit des Landes," with its
mela mela melancholia -- it's a particularly sharp example of a global
problem, the sedimentation of life stories, values then-and-now, power
distribution through populations: the visibility of all of it meshes
well with my generally abstract cast of mind. Being a flâneuse is the
least self-conscious thing I do, and it gives rise to the consumption
of coffee but not a whole lot else -- much more interesting to watch
the mechanics of economics, or try to.
I also think the trouble with me and travel is that I can't stand short-term, superficial acquaintances with places. Wherever I go, if I like it at all, I want to live there for at least a few months. This is, obviously, the same compulsion that drove me to try to learn eight different languages rather than being content to read everything in translation and pay for the tour. But on the other hand I'm fucking impatient and so diverse in my interests that I can't just settle on one thing and do it well. It is far from certain that there's any way to make those two things work for me, but I'm still hopeful.
I just wanted to call this entry by this name; I don't have a clever joke for it. That will have to wait.
It feels strange to write in English here, suddenly, as though I
were writing in some sort of low-level assembly language -- English
gets a lot less done here than it did in the U.S. So far my
stammered German has not led me astray -- my appalling hubris with
matters of transit has caused catastrophe after catastrophe,
however. Also, um, it's hot here. It's so hot I can hardly
eat. I actually appear to be losing weight, which is probably
okay for now since I don't have to do any strenuous physical tasks, but
I should probably increase the Eiweiss intake. (That means, of
course "egg white," but also generally "protein." These Germans
are so literal.) Wo kann ich meine Eiweiss finden? Ich
brauche Luna-bars. Es gibt zuviel Schokolade und zu wenig
Luna-bars in dieser Stadt. But this heat, oh Lordy, I don't even
know if I could choke a Luna bar down.
So. I'm in Berlin. I like it here. I think I
should just stay at the Peter Szondi Institut für Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft and not go home.
I've taken a remarkable quantity of pictures so far, for me, so you
have that to look forward to. I have ready internet access about
two days a week, however, so you should bear that in mind.
all of vox is things! and friendliness. how
exhausting. well, okay. how do i put books up, i
wonder? i should upload my blurry photos of my bookshelf, from
the apartment i'm about to vacate. i was going to allow people to
guess titles from the spines and offer them prizes, but i am in a
bubble of incommunicability. it seems. the prizes might not
get past the walls of the bubble.
trouble.
in a week & a half i leave tegel airport in berlin to go to the
university via zoo station. zoon stationikon!
myself-at-twelve would be real proud. i remember bono discussing
the recording of "achtung, baby" in an interview in rolling stone
around that time: they ran into some nihilistic german girls before
they went into the studio. "you record too many love songs!" the
girls sneered. "it's awful!" (or something.) so they
listened to a lot of nitzer ebb and prodigy and produced "the fly" and
"acrobat." met the girls again, post-release. how'd they
like the new record? "it was shit!"
yep. world, you get another chance to live up to my youthful expectations.
