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