Kirmizi_ada

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