Kirmizi_ada

I was supposed to start writing my dissertation, oh, 16 months ago. Instead I rode my bike, ate burritos with my boyfriend, taught German, listened to NPR, went to beautiful weddings, babysat, and checked my email. To earn my 12 credits of dissertation writing per semester, I took a ream of paper, three-hole punched it, stuck it in a binder and wrote “My Dissertation” on the front. I made a sheet with 250 little check-boxes, one for each page. I made grandiose ergonomic plans to prevent my upper back and neck from fusing into a gargoyle mold.

As soon as I arrived in Berlin on the TXL bus, I bid farewell to good weather. That first day was wet and sad, and it seems to have become steadily more beautiful from there. And today, today was a high-fall day with self-assembling leaf piles and wind that shook the spice jars. I woke at 7, cooked coffee, and listened to a little Buffalo Springfield. It was still dark enough on my way out that I almost tripped over the pregnant white cat on the third-story landing. (Whose cat is that?) I walked a few blocks up to Viktoria Park, wrapped up in the butterscotch corduroy coat, and did a few Garurasana poses between slugs of coffee.

Back in at my desk, I had lots of things to fix. Bad writing, for one. What a lumpy mess I’d made last night! I’ve started to lean hard on the idea that preventing confusion ought to be high atop the list of writerly objectives. Even if you’re a poet, even if you’re John Prine. Hanging chads in your writing are just never worth the risk. The modest idea that selecting a gerund over another nominalized verb form might save a reader an irritating stumble gives me newfound pleasure. I think there is something deeply servile in trying to be a good writer. Like Mr. Stevens in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, your ethics are perfect invisibility. I remember the papers I wrote for American Lit at Middlebury and wonder: why didn’t someone slidetackle me, or at least repossess my Powerbook? I think I once even used the word “asseverate.”

So the diss is a new friend of mine. We just met. If I am lucky, it might partner me into a way of thinking via language that receives the wild world like a monstrance, instead of throwing a tarp over it.

The chapter I’m working on right now is about Orhan Pamuk, the guy who just got the Nobel Prize for Literature and was arrested for “insulting Turkishness.” If anyone has a favorite sentence in English, please send it over; I could use the inspiration at the moment. Maybe I’ll just model the whole thing after that one Eudora Welty story. How did that sentence go? It was something about a cow…

NEXT: Das Kolloquium in der Sophienstraße

Sehr verehrte Fluggäste: Wenn ich mir heute Abend was wünschen dürfte, wär es lediglich dass meine homosexuelle sowie nichthomosexuelle Freundinnen und Freunde sich eiligst zum nächsten Kino aufmachen, in dem der Film "Shortbus" von John Cameron Mitchell gezeigt wird. Viel Fun und Sex steckt drin, sowie gewichtige Persönlichkeiten aus der neuesten Geschichte des Tuntentums. Nicht zu versäumen! Diese Meinung teilt jedoch nicht jeder clevere Kinogänger. Laut der Zeit sei der Film eben bloß eine ratlose Kombination von Kessheit und Spät-Hipness. Siehe http://www.zeit.de/2006/43/Short-Bus

[This is a special entry for my nephew Fin.]

Hey Fin! I wanted to write you a letter to tell you what I am doing here in Germany. I heard that your soccer team is named Germany. What are the names of the other teams?

Like the United States, Germany has a capital city, which is called Berlin. That’s where I’m living now. Many cities in Europe used to be castles, or at least they were surrounded by a big wall, and the king and queen got to decide who could come in and go out. Germany hasn’t had a king or queen for almost a hundred years now. Instead, it has a Chancellor, whose name is Angela. Sometimes she meets with other leaders to talk about the world’s problems. Anyway, Berlin is an old, old city, but definitely not the oldest city in Germany. There used to be many different gates to the city of Berlin, and everyone used to have to stop at the gate and pay a special toll to get in. The old gates are still here, but no one has to pay to come in and out of the city anymore. Imagine if Rumford had gates? Where would they put them?

There are lots and lots of kids your age in Berlin. Their families come from all over the world. Actually, half of the kids in Berlin speak more than one language, because their parents and friends speak Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, or Farsi. And a lot of them like playing soccer too.

People also like to dance in Berlin, just like your mom and dad. A few days ago, I started learning a dance called the Foxtrot. Isn’t that a funny name? For the Foxtrot, you take two big steps forward and then two little steps sideways. So it goes: slow, slow, quick, quick. Slow, slow, quick, quick. Just like a fox. It’s so fun! At the dance hall in my neighborhood on Sunday, there were hundreds of dancing couples flying around the dancefloor like butterflies. Tall girls were dancing with short boys, short girls were dancing with tall girls, tall boys were dancing with short boys. We were all dancing so fast that sometimes we got dizzy and had to sit down. It’s hard to learn new things—like dancing, or writing cursive, or multiplication, or how to eat an artichoke—but I guess that’s what being alive is for.

The German language is also fun to speak, I think. There are super-long words like Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme and Bundesverfassungsgericht and Aufenthaltsbefügnis. Can you think of any English words that are that long? I can’t.

I’m excited to see you at Christmas! Is there anything you want me to bring you from Germany? Will you please give your mom, dad, and sister a big hug for me? Or maybe a high-five. Are you still going to be a hunter for Halloween? I’d love it if you wanted to send me a letter. My address is:

David Gr.
Monumentenstraße 9
10829-Berlin
Deutschland

Okay, well I’ll see you soon!
Love,
Uncle David

COMING SOON: The Diss: Friend or Foe?

Es ist ein BURGER aus Marzipan gewesen. Architektonisch unergründlich, mit einer mittelalterlichen Schwerkraft ihr in die Hand gelandet. Wie es immer beim Triagieren sein muss, übernahm sie rasch die unerwartete Haftung, nahm sie die schweigsamen Aufträge dieses Marzipan-Zwergplanets wie einen dringenden Appell entgegen. Keine polizeiliche Anmeldebestätigung erforderlich, kein Vorstellungsgespräch erwünscht, keine weitere amtliche Vorsichtsmaßnahmen weit hinten in jenem italienischen Eckcafe: bloß das gewichtig und aufs Eiligste geschehende Prozedur des Kauens, des verstohlenen Liebkosens. Dann, nach dem trägen Zusammenreißen, ging sie—geschniegelt, gebügelt, und gewissenlos—die Bergmannstraße weiter voran.

It’s Ramadan, but the director of the high school where I am teaching English puts out plates of jelly donuts in all the classrooms anyway. I eat one, and immediately feel like a composite mug-shot of the Bavarian Interior Minister and Agustus Gloop. A fourteen year-old girl in my class tells me not to stress out about it; she doesn’t mind. She says fasting is not that bad this year anyway: "It’s chill. This one time, Ramadan was in the summer, and you had to wait till 9pm to eat. That was killer."

I ask my class how many years now they’ve fasted, and whether it gets easier every year. The consensus is that the first three days are always hard, and then you spend the rest of the time getting stoked for Şeker Bayramı, the big holiday at Ramadan’s end, when you put on all the new clothes you bought and eat everything in a ten-block radius. Until then, Playstation, shopping, and re-watching White Chicks will have to suffice for staving off the hunger.

—What do you do when you get really really hungry?
—Chat on the Internet.

—Is there anything you like a lot about fasting?
—Yes, God WANTS us to do it, so that’s cool,

says a fifteen year-old who is planning to be a stewardess and nurtures an uncommon fondness for Apollo Creed in Rocky IV. At a totally boring point in my lesson, she pulls a blue scarf out of her purse and wraps it around her head.

With a universally teenage tone of stoic self-protection, one kid talks about how, if he passes his English exam in November, he gets to go to university; if he fails it, he’ll be stuck in vocational school:

—Do you want to stay in Berlin after you finish school?
—No, there’s nothing for me here. Maybe in Turkey, or New Jersey.

He wants Wlad, the only kid in the class who isn’t fasting, to travel around the world with him after they get out of school. But Wlad says he doesn’t want to leave Berlin’s Wedding district—ever. He jokes about how he goes over to all of his Muslim friends’ houses before sundown and picks at all the food while their moms and sisters are cooking. The future stewardess slugs him in the chest.

It is almost unanimous that the homework tonight should be to make a vocabulary list based on a Fifty Cent song, so now I’m off to iTunes. On second thought, I should probably try playing Jill Scott’s “Family Reunion” for them instead.

And maybe no jelly donut tomorrow, but I’m not going to stress out about it.

DEMNÄCHST: Slow, slow, quick, quick…

Did medieval mistress travelers always get to see that crocus-covered fountain, that empty chapel, that warm clearing—or did they just know these to be inevitably near at hand?

On the way back from Pittsburgh to Berlin, I got to see my lovely mom and dad—and my brother, sister, niece, nephew, and grandma—who, at 96, is living at the same assisted-living place as my dad, running the table at all-over bingo.

The picture here is from our walk out on a pier at Fort Tabor, one of those modest peninsulas that make up the Massachusetts South Coast between Martha’s Vineyard and Newport Island. On the way back through New Bedford, Mom and I sang songs like “Michael, row your boat ashore” and “This land is your land” in her powder-yellow VW convertible.

Back in Schöneberg now, I tune in to Cape and Islands Radio for my morning (there), evening (here) news. I hear weather reports from Block Island, soccer match results from Dennis-Yarmouth High School, controversies about the over-achieving town-clock in North Truro.

Is this a heresy: to settle back into the loved contours of a place—with all the will of your body—when you’re several thousand miles away from it?

COMING SOON: I teach Fifty Cent.

Here (to the right) is tonight’s westward view out my kitchen window. October’s rainy first week has put Berlin on notice that it had better invest in hoodies and blazers, legwarmers and cars. What will become of midnight walks?

I am looking forward to learning how to layer again, after seven years in temperate winter climates. West of my Red Island is Polish Hill—far west, over the Atlantic and up along the Allegheny River. I went there this past weekend on an irresistibly taciturn tip from a local: “Go to Gooski’s Bar!”

To get to Gooski’s you walk up through Pittsburgh’s decrepit Amtrak station and take a right over the tracks on a trestle overpass that looks like it abruptly disappears into a giant arborvitae. That bridge-swallowing arborvitae is in fact Polish Hill, and on top of it is Gooski’s, a bar whose hard-core clientele is spending the fall months suiting up for a general strike against the smoking ban, which is due into Pittsburgh on January 1st. It was here that I overheard a phrase of such enviable succinctness that I was ashamed I hadn’t yet noticed it in all my years bearing witness to the creative genius of homophobia: “He drank himself gay.”

Walking back down from Gooski’s, I felt it was sad that Kafka never got to visit the Tri-River Area. Overall I experienced the human landscape of Pittsburgh and its suburban surrounds as a kind of public contact-improv based on extravagantly co-dependent behaviors between complete strangers, a mutual feedback loop of depersonalized punishment and forgiveness that leaves each participant with the consolingly dull sensation of carrying a heavy, empty box. Still, I was heartened to be informed—by a bulletin board in the basement of the Andy Warhol Museum—that today’s Pittsburgh is as edgy and emergent as Lower Manhattan was in the early 1980s. Maybe if I hadn’t been wearing a laminated name-tag from the Hilton, this likeness would have revealed itself to me more vividly.

This weekend, Pittsburgh was host to the annual conference of the German Studies Association. It was at this very conference, at a panel with the inconspicuous title “Thinking Modern Terrorism: The German Case,” that I stumbled onto a new school of “thought” among a cabal of literary scholars, which I will call The New Asskicking. New Asskickers, a very sexy and elegant set of baby-Ivy professors, believe that the “Left,” whoever that is, has abandoned the victims of 9/11 in favor of the confused martyrdom of Tel Aviv suicide bombers, that liberal humanities scholars have acquiesced to terror and would rather act as its unwitting apologists than its unequivocal opponents. In their spoken discourse, the New Asskickers prize consequentiality, gravitas, and force over what they seem to view as the 1990s’ fetish for self-critical circumspection; they, along with so many others in this still-unnameable decade, love words like “wrong,” “childish,” and “delusional,” and use them freewheelingly in reference to political thinkers like Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek. I am afraid of the New Asskickers, their glamorous and inconsolable public demeanor, their willingness to invest in the unitary idea of “terror” as a psychical affliction. Not a word from the NAs about the socio-economic [read: food and water] situation in Gaza, Kabul, or Baghdad, just the Creon-like adrenaline-injected speech that neo-McCarthyism offers. I wonder if I will ever see another such spectacle of scornful self-renunciation as the New Asskickers baked up for this year’s GSA. It took a whole Saturday evening of Iron Chef America to calm me down.

But I was delighted to read what director Hans Neuenfels said when he found out that his Idomeneo was canceled. Back home in Austria, he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper “Die Menschen, die den islamischen Glauben leben, machen mir keine Angst. Mir machen vielmehr die Menschen Angst, die uns vor dem Glauben dieser Menschen Angst einjagen.” [“I have no fear of people who live an Islamic faith. The people I fear are those who are spreading fear of these peoples’ faith among us.”]

COMING UP: Everybody Likes New Beige a Little Bit