Hello

So as not to be alone Otto decided to call his friend Martin, the one who is always wearing the dark blue shirt. Not feeling much like talking, however, he decided to send him a text message instead. "Dear Martin," Otto wrote. Dissatisfied, he deleted "Dear" and deleted "Martin" in the process. He wrote, "Hello," and then stared at the blinking line where the next letter was to appear. Otto thought, blink - blink - blink. Blink - blink - blink - blink - blink. He began to worry that the screen would go blank from prolonged inactivity, like the great yawn of a visitor signaling it was time to leave. To avoid despair, Otto just sent the message as it was and lay down to wonder whether he would receive a response.

out on the street

So as not to be alone, Otto went out onto the street where there were many people all the time. Sure enough, the street was full of people now as well. Otto didn't know any of them, at least of the ones he saw. Certainly there were some he didn't see but knew. But they just as well could not have been there at all. In fact, they weren't. Somewhere there were always people unseen but known. That seemed just then to be less troubling than the fact that those he could see he didn't know. The distance separating Otto from those he knew was certainly greater than that separating him from those all around him but didn't know. And maybe it was precisely this relative proximity that led Otto to believe he would be less lonely less alone. Who knows.

Hunger

When I asked her whether she was hungry yet, she said because she had just eaten something sweet. When I asked her what it was, she said it was something with something sweet in it. I looked at her, and she said it was like a bread with something sweet inside that was a kind of bean. She said because her English is not so good, I knew that. When I asked her when she would be hungry again, she said why are you always asking me about food. I said I'm not asking her about food, I'm asking about eating. She said what's the difference. I said one is a noun the other is a verb, one is a thing the other is an action. She looked at me as if my face became funny but in a way one could not laugh about. Actually, I said, I was asking about hunger, which is more different than food than eating is. She looked at me again. I said in Africa people are hungry but have no food and cannot eat. She said we're not in Africa. I said that was just an example. She said where she came from eating and food and hunger were all the same, they were all related. Everything is related but not the same, I said. Are you the same as your sister, I asked. No! That's different, she said. See, I said, it's different. She shook her head and went back to her work. It was then that my hunger began to frighten me.

tabula rasa

The best things that happened to Otto were the ones that he had never expected because he had not imagined them. Whether he could have imagined them he wasn't sure. On the one hand, it seemed he indeed could have, since after they happened, he imagined them. On the other hand, just because things are imagined after they happen doesn't mean they were imaginable beforehand.

It was not coincidence. It was Otto. As soon as something entered into his imagination, he picked at it obsessively like an itchy scab until it became a dull scar consisting of layers upon layers of imagining. When the thing he imagined ultimately happened, it touched not him but the scar, and he could hardly feel it.

The only defense mechanism Otto had was to imagine as little as possible what might happen. Thus, except for what was absolutely necessary, he made no plans, followed no schedule, committed himself to nothing. Often he loved waking up with the day before him as a tabula rasa. Sometimes he despaired.

Otto

Otto Malik came to me the other day, as I was sitting at my desk by the window pretending to be working but actually looking out at the windows across the street, or the trees across the field, depending on whether I was at the apartment in the city or the home in the countryside, and said, you know it doesn't really matter where you are, what matters is that I'm here telling you, telling you that it looks as if it's about to rain. Annoyed that he was interrupting me as I was working just to tell me it was about to rain, and not feeling that I had enough patience just then to find out why that would be important, to either him or me, I didn't even look up. I paid him no attention. I paid him too much attention, but I didn't show him that I was paying any attention at all. Of course he knew, though, that I had heard, and even listened, and probably that I was in wonder. Oh to do all that with the most trivialist of statements. But I persisted, and so did he. Finally, I said, are you going anywhere, and he left. That's not what I had meant, but maybe it's not what he had meant either.

Every day is a new day

minimalism

"At its essence, minimalism is about repetition." But an example of extreme minimalism in music would be a single tone, where there is no repetition, and in art a canvas of a single color, where there is no repetition either. Indeed repetition is precisely not minimalistic in that it is almost by nature superfluous, although precisely in nature it is not superfluous; in nature nothing is really superfluous. Repetition may serve as a means of bringing out a work's fundamental features, but that does not make it one of minimalism's fundamental features. Indeed, to the extent that a piece must employ abundant repetition to express its fundamental features, it is not necessarily any less complex than a piece that coats its fundamental features in a rich narrative. In this sense, Steve Reich's music is no more "minimalistic" than Mahler's; it only sounds that way. A better example of minimalism is the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose aesthetic quality is contained and revealed in the skeletal structure itself, i.e., the work's fundamental features. Perfect unity of aesthetics and structure is found only and everywhere in nature, which is full of patterns making up a thing's structure and also consisting of its beauty. It is not repetition that is the essence of minimalism but patterns, which is essential to any structure. The paintings of Agnes Martin, for example, are repetitive only if we start with a single rectangle, but seen as a whole they rather present a pattern. Interestingly, the beauty there is not in the pattern itself or its repetitiveness but in the tonal gradations the pattern reveals, or indeed create. I guess we humans, too, when seen as parts of human kind also simply make up a pattern whose beauty is in the gradations only the pattern itself reveals.

Solidarität

Last night I went to a "soli" party at a squatted housing complex. "Soli" is short for "Solidarität" and means that the proceeds from the party go to some political cause. "Solidarity" means "unity (as of a group or class) that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards." Indeed, the party was like a herd of sheep, except that one couldn't just piss wherever. While manouvering myself toward the bathroom, or anywere else, I was pushed and shoved the same way I used to be while getting on a crowded bus in Russia, except there the point wasn't to have fun and solidarity was not a cause but a mandatory fact of life. In both places, however, each little push and shove contained the potential to blow up the basis of civilization, I felt. After about an hour, I asked myself, "why am I here," and left. Solidarity is a nice concept but uncomfortable in the flesh.

trains

Yesterday I went to take a train to the woods in the west of the city, but for some reason there were no trains. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read in the book I had taken with me to read on the train about a woman on a train who said that she would like to look longer at the small, abandoned train stations but the train stopped there for only one or at most two minutes. Actually, there were trains, but not to where I wanted to go and despite the schedule as well as the fact that I had taken these trains many times before at the same time. The passage in the book following the one about the woman on the train was about sheep, but I was too distressed about the missing trains to pay attention. In the end, I ended up taking a train back home, wondering if the cellist would be playing at the station near me. He wasn't.

Ich habe schon

A man came into the Vietnamese restaurant on Adalbertstrasse the other evening and went from table to table asking for money. When he got to the table next to mine, the young German man sitting there said, "Ich habe heute schon gespendent" ("I already donated today").

Sing me a song

I recently reread Franny from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. The first time I read it must have been at least a decade ago. I remember being surprisingly moved by it, but now I'm mostly surprised by how little I actually remembered of it. For example, I didn't remember that Franny went to visit her boyfriend at his college; I thought they were both in New York. I didn't remember that they were eating at a restaurant fancy enough to serve snails and frog legs; I thought they were at a diner. I didn't remember that the occasion for the date was "the Yale game." I didn't remember Franny's love letter, and certainly not the spelling mistakes in them, or that she fainted, or that, as she was lying in the backroom of the restaurant, recovering, the boyfriend basically said to her, "I hope we can still have sex later, it's been so long."

What I do remember was Franny's despair at the smallness and meaninglessness of everything and everyone including, most immediately, the boyfriend she was talking to and the false modesty with which he was telling her about his paper on Flaubert. I also remember being reminded by this scene of my relationship with one of my best friends from boarding school. Unfortunately, the boyfriend reminded me of myself. I had never thought that I could be so male.

Yesterday I wondered where all the people who made Salinger so famous by so closely relating to Franny and Zooey and The Catcher In the Rye were. Then it occurred to me that they're everywhere but closeted. Some part of everyone believes, like Franny or Zooey or Holden Caulfield, that everything is small and meaningless and that everyone is "phony," but it's covered, layer by layer, with the thickening resignation to being phony in order to cope with the mounting evidence that smallness and meaninglessness are inevitable. Those who refuse to cope are either gone from this world or hiding in some dim, dusty corner of it. Even if they found each other, what would there be to communicate but bitter howls and screeches? Better to stay in the world and sing. At least it sounds nice.

"I have nothing to say."

Once, my grandparents visited me at boarding school during "grandparents' weekend." My grandparents only just happened to be visiting from Japan, and at a reception the headmaster, an unshakably cheerful Quaker who always told us students to get "high ON LIFE," noted that there were grandparents visiting "from as far away as Japan!" The grandparents were given a thorough tour of the campus, pictured above, and then gathered at a reception at the headmaster's home. When we were greeted by the headmaster at his front door, my grandfather took his hand and said, slowly and carefully, "I have nothing to say."

It goes on.

I used to admire Wittgenstein's famous quote, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." But now I'm beginning to believe just the opposite. What's important is not content or style but constancy. What's so fascinating about the writing of Genazino, for example, is how, without a story, the narrative must dance with the problem of what to say when, in the end, there is really nothing to say at all. At least this has always been a problem for me. One lonely winter in St. Petersburg, I fantasized about lying on the floor next to a friend lying in bed in a tiny room a few hours before dawn, talking. It was dark except for a little moonlight coming in from the tall window at our heads. We were exhausted but in no hurry to sleep. Over the years, I've had that fantasy several times, but it never developed so far as to contain any conversation beyond "Anna?" "Yes?" What we said didn't matter. My fantasy was saying and listening to what's said precisely when there is nothing to say. It seems to me only then there's real communication, the essence of which is that, like life, it goes on.

I'm sorry for my German.

Two winters ago, I read an article about Haruki Murakami's routine of sitting down to write every morning for several hours, even if he had nothing to write and indeed wrote nothing at all. I was inspired to do the same and started a story called "I'm sorry for my German," which began with the mistaken reading of a sign on the other side of the river I used to run along that said "Anlegestelle." For weeks I had thought it said, "Angelnstelle," which I thought to mean a place for fishing, and wondered why I never saw anyone fishing there. Somehow the story developed into Otto wandering aimlessly in Vienna and then abruptly ended when, being driven nearly mad by the noise from the neighbors above me, I fled to New York to stay at my grandmother's empty house, where I discovered the terrifying loudness of solitude.

I don't remember what I meant by the title, "I'm sorry for my German," but I liked the sound of it, and that's approximately how I felt at the time, or maybe more accurately sorry about my German, and sorry about many other things as well.

But now I remember. I thought that my writing would inevitably contain some German words and phrases for which I couldn't find appropriate English translations and, knowing that this might be annoying and even come off as pretentious, I wanted to apologize from the get go. At the same time, it is true that here in Germany I often did feel sorry for those who had to endure my imperfect German and wanted sometimes to tell them, "I'm sorry for my German."

Today, while walking home from the U-Bahn station where I had sat for a while listening to the cellist, I thought that the inclusion of German words and phrases in my posts could be a theme for my blog. Thinking of the cellist, whom I gave 10 Euros, I thought of writing that maybe "das war ein bißchen übertrieben," although I actually don't think so at all. This time he didn't play any Bach, but what I once paid $10 for at The Stone, I thought, wasn't at all necessarily better.

Look he said. Why don't you go and get some for me. That's the thing. He didn't say we wouldn't. He went himself that day and got it himself that day. So what. We didn't care we asked. He said why we should be so underwhelming. Since that's under my own stance. I don't know. Just be sure. We didn't ask for it he said it himself why. Why. You look always anyway. So that you know. He told me we weren't going. How am I supposed to know.

Just like that

Otto wasn't sure he wanted to do anything at all that day or today or any day to come for that matter except he still said he would. But of course he did it anyway as he always did because what was the alternative. Why not read a sonnet and reread it and reread only one or two lines or each of all the lines. Outside was cold and windy like fall. The leaves in the trees were hissing. Yes they were hissing that's exactly what they were doing. Maybe it wasn't so bad. He always thought it was when it couldn't have been or didn't have to be and then everything changed all of a sudden just like that. Just like the time he was sitting on a bench in the park and everything looked clear all the spaces between the leaves and the branches the light flatly beaming through them. The squirrels were terrible nibbling and nibbling whiskers quivering greedily cowardly and utterly uncivilized. The couples were terrible sitting sprawled fat on the bench clouded in the thick oily black newspaper. Today this happened and he said no. Yesterday that went this way. The day before and the day after and the day ever after was stupendous. Stupendous stupendous stupendous. Once a Japanese man stuck a knife in his belly. It wasn't a knife it was a sword. It wasn't his belly it was his side just at the edge slipped under a muscle and twisted and dug. Maybe he felt like it was good. The baseball players they were cracking. The children were screeching. Their yells were yelps of joy and of angst. I hate this all of this so much it's so. The wind was frosty and smelled like coffee. The wind smelled like craving coffee. What if the wind never went away dug and twisted into the bone. What get up and go. Where. Get up and go. Anywhere. You'll see.

A Trip to the Bookstore

Ever since finishing the Janet Malcolm book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas a few days ago, I'd thought about going to the English language bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg to find something new to read. I decided to go on Tuesday, when the weather was nice, but only made it to Friedrichshain, where I had a quarter liter of red wine which caused a drowsiness that couldn't imagine being anywhere but home in bed. After waking up, I dragged myself to the chair from where I managed to pick up from the coffee table Buddenbrooks, open it, and put it back down again, just as Janet Malcolm had written she repeatedly picked up Making of Americans, opened it, and put it back down again, until she finally went to the kitchen and chopped it up with a knife into six or seven managable pieces, which I had done incidentally with my case books in order to carry to and from law school everyday. After putting down Buddenbrooks, I realized that it wasn't so much that I wanted just to read but that I wanted to read in English and something that was well-written. Reading good writing effects in me a special calm that I associate with the Logos which was in the beginning and was with God and which was God.

Online I googled "Janet Malcolm" and found an article she had written on J.D. Salinger which made me want to reread Franny and Zooey, a copy of which I found at the bookstore yesterday, as well as Nine Stories, high on a shelf that I had to climb a ladder to reach. Up on the ladder I unexpectedly experienced vertigo and then, holding the two books in my right hand and onto the side of the ladder with my left, suddenly had to sneeze. Afraid that a sneeze would propel me off the ladder, I confidently tried to sniff it away, but it came and with even more gusto than usual, as if in rebellion. My great-grandmother once supposedly said, hearing me sneeze as a small toddler, that I would be a great person one day.

Fortunately, the woman tending the bookstore was being distracted by an energetic customer who was not only asking about certain books but expressing her disbelief that they were not more readily accessible and then went so far as to describe her dissertation. She had an accent I originally thought was Slavic but then realized was only just Italian, and she was no longer young. The woman tending the bookstore responded to each of the Italian woman's statements with an "AH ha," which expressed professionally insincere interest but resulted in encouraging further details anyway. The Italian woman reminded me of a Russian language instructor at college who was brilliant and enchanting but whose large restless eyes made me wonder whether she was actually a witch. Her long black hair always looked as if she had just come in from a long walk on the windy Irish coast.

By the time I was back on the ground, an English woman walked in. The woman tending the bookstore asked, "how are you," and the English woman said "unemployed." She had the kind of solid core and legs that allowed her to walk briskly but with unfortunately short steps. Thus she walked back and forth along the length of the small front room of the bookstore, picking up books, glancing at them, and putting them down again, like a stout Chinese mother of five shopping for vegetables at the local market. All the while, she was chatting with the woman tending the bookstore, making short, quick pronouncements that were not obviously bitter but undeniably damp. I imagined being in conversation with her and having every single remark deflated with a sharp retort. J.D. Salinger, I imagined her saying, what else would you expect from an American. Then I imagined myself thinking, with Janet Malcolm standing behind me, small but steady, that she was ignorant. My irritation slipped into a denouncement of the entire English people, and the complicity of the woman tending the bookstore made me increasingly suspicious of her as well. Eventually, however, by the time I noticed a copy of Malcolm's Two Lives, the book whose wake rocked me toward the store in the first place, I was ok. The English woman was sitting outside in the sun reading.

Home

After three weeks in New York, I returned to Berlin today. Because I had spent the entire flight reading Janet Malcolm's book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, I was tired and slept through most of the sunny, warm afternoon. When I got up, I had a coffee and decided to go have a soup at Kottbusser Tor.

In the entrance to the U-Bahn station at Schlesisches Tor, a young man dressed like a squatter, in thick grey cargo pants and a canvas military cap, was playing the prelude of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. He was not bad, and the sound filling the entrance way, usually full of people who are drunk or scalping used Fahrscheine (U-Bahn tickets), was full and sweet, as if he were rehearsing in an old, stone chapel in the French countryside. I wanted to put money in the open cello case in front of him but the smallest denomination I had was a 5 euro bill which seemed too much although really it isn't.

While waiting for the train on the platform upstairs, I noticed a young, blond German man talking with a young, fat man with dark hair. The blond man was neatly dressed and carrying a full backpack. The fat man was wearing thin, white cotton pants and a red t-shirt, both of which were too large even for him. What I first noticed about them was that the fat man was speaking heavy slang, but the blond man was answering him in crisp and clear Hochdeutsch, in a very friendly even interested way. I wondered whether they knew each other.

When the train arrived, the fat man and I got in the same car and, as he sat down on the bench across from me, I realized he was inebriated. His right pant leg was ripped on the inside from the crotch to his knee. Underneath, he was wearing black tights. He was carrying a bottle of Moskovskaya vodka, and the man next to him, drinking beer, remarked with a smile, with what I think was a Russian accent, vodka. The fat man said, no, not Vodka, and then read the label, Mos, Mos-kov, Mos-kov-ska, Mos-kov-ska-ya. He put a heavy arm around the Russian and suggested they drink together. He opened the bottle and took a swig, appearing to gather all the strength he had to swallow. There was not yet enough alcohol in the Russian to have purged him of suspicion, and the fat man said, what, it's a new bottle, I just opened it, there isn't any poison in it. The Russian took a sip of his beer. They compromised by knocking the bottom of their bottles against each other. The fat man turned to me and said what sounded like Shingling and something I couldn't understand. I looked at him and looked away. The man spoke to me more, apparently offended that I did not respond, and all I could understand was Shingling. I looked at him again as if to signal fearlessness, thinking to myself, I'm from New York, he doesn't know that, he thinks I would feel unsettled by such a situation, although he almost certainly wasn't thinking anything at all. He turned to the Russian and said, what, his name is Shingling isn't it, don't you know? Getting no response, he turned to the woman on his left, whose face was red and creased. I wasn't sure whether her frown expressed a less jolly shade of inebriation or the despair of intermitten sobriety or that she was just utterly downtrodden. She ignored him, too. I'm not sure she could have done anything else. At Kottbusser Tor, the fat man got off and so did I.

I had planned to walk home after my soup, but because I had to pee, Bierhimmel was too empty for me to inconspicuously use their restroom, and the train was approaching Goerlitzer Bahnhof just as I was, I ran to catch it and rode it home. When I got off at Schlesisches Tor and walked down the stairs, I heard the cellist still playing Bach's cello suites. This time I had a 2 Euro coin and some change. I took it out and held it in my hand even before reaching the bottom of the stairs. As I was approaching the open cello case, I saw a woman standing in front of me with short, silver hair, wearing a black, trench coat and carrying a black bag which she was rummaging through presumably for her wallet. As I walked by, I dropped the 2 euro coin and change in the cello case. I noticed that it was about 10 times as full as before. I imagined that the woman, surprised to hear Bach at that U-Bahn station, of all places, played by such a young man, of all people, would give maybe as much as 5 euros. I wondered then whether the cellist had considered that the few people there who would appreciate Bach would give money out of sheer surprise which would be lacking in more affluent neighborhoods. And yet, there are enough people here in my neighborhood who do appreciate Bach for it to be worth the cellist's while. As I walked toward my apartment, I thought that I was home.

The Dordogne

After a long run in the park today, I went down to 35th street to eat a korean rice-cake and dumpling soup. The waiter, who resembles my uncle and who I recognized on the street the other day dressed fashionably in black, asked, before I even sat down, if I wanted number 50. I said, no, and he asked again, and I said, no, again. As soon as I sat down, I looked in the menu and saw that number 50 was something I had never ordered before.

At the table next to me were a white man who seemed to be in his fifties and a black man who seemed to be still in graduate school enthusiastically engaged in conversation. Over the course of about half an hour, they covered topics including chartered buses (which the black man was was getting his license to drive, although he had gone to Carnegie Mellon, which the white man mentioned was "one of the best schools in the country"), the funeral of Ronald Reagan, who the white man called a pig, the cuisine in Bologna, Bill Clinton giving a talk to a group of elderly black ladies who, the white man said, he had "eating out of his hand," and traveling. The white man was explaining that his brother, who had gotten his MFA at RISD and eventually became the art director of Time magazine, where he was making lots of money, one day dropped everything and went off to Egypt, and said that Egypt was "a place that exceeded your expectations." Then he asked the black man where he had been that exceeded his expectations, and I thought, the Dordogne.

I went to the Dordogne, in France, when I was 16, as part of an art program run by Parsons that entailed two weeks in the Dordogne followed by two weeks in Paris. We were in the Dordogne primarily to see the cave paintings, which were about 15,000 to 20,000 years old. I had seen images of some of these paintings in history books in elementary school and wasn't very excited to see them in real life. They seemed like the typical scratches one would expect cave people to produce, and I wasn't sure about the purpose for young art students of seeing something so primitive. But when I saw them, I saw that they were as expressive, aesthetically interesting, and technically sophisticated as anything that had ever been produced since. It was then that I thought, despite all our scientific developments, the spirit of human beings has, since their beginning, remained the same.

Apart from the cave paintings, many other things in the Dordogne exceeded my expectations; the landscape and people were more beautiful, the bread and croissants more delicious, the people friendlier, the air softer and milder. In comparison, Paris was disappointing.

Phantastic Gogol

Last week I went to Brown, in Providence, RI, to talk to students about my experiences in the "real world" after studying Russian Language and Literature as an undergraduate. On my way to the train station, to travel back to New York, I stopped by the List Art Building where almost everyday for a semester I walked up six flights of stairs to the painting studio. The walls in the staircase were covered with images. They're different now, of course, but the smell is the same. It was a Proustian moment.

A professor who had taught me Pushkin 16 years ago gave me a hug when she saw me. After my talk, in which I had mentioned the impact on my life of the works of N.V. Gogol, the professor said, "I guess we all have our Gogolian moments," and added that she wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. Only later, walking aimlessly around campus at dusk, did I think, it's not that we have Gogolian moments, but that there is a little bit of Gogol in each of us, which is, like certain bodily odors, repulsive yet irresistible.

The newest member of the faculty is a Gogol scholar who has just had a book published on Gogol and Gombrowicz. I searched for the book on the website of an academic bookstore with the keywords "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" and improbably found it. At the bookstore today, however, the woman at the information desk couldn't find it. I had told her I wasn't sure what the exact title was, that it was something like "Phantasmic Matter," but that it certainly had the words "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" in it. I spelled out Gombrowicz, "G-O-M-B-R-O-W-I-C-Z." She typed something in the computer and looked at the screen, typed something again and looked again, typed again and looked again. I wondered whether I should have spelled out Gogol. I said, "I saw on your website that you have it," to which she replied, "but you don't know the title," and I said, "no, but it's something like Phantasmic Matter." She typed and looked, and typed and looked. I started to want to make a scene.

Earlier, as I was browsing, I had heard the woman tell a colleague some insolent news about the government's recent bailout plan for companies like AIG. There was something about her tone I didn't like. She seemed to want to appear smart in order to conceal deficiencies. When she finally said she couldn't find it, I said, "I found it on the website just by typing 'Gogol' and 'Gombrowicz.'" Indeed, I had said that I was sure only that those two words were in the title. She typed again and found it. Then she said, "Phantasms of Matter," emphasizing the "of," to correct me. It occurs to me only now that she might not have known how to spell "Gogol." Maybe all that time she was typing, "Gogle," "Gogel," or even "Google."

Apart from Phantasms OF Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) by Michal Oklot, I bought, Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz himself, My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen, 54 by Wu Ming, The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels, and Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Of these, only the Derrida and the Oklot were not discounted.

Genazino, again.

While waiting for my eye exam on 78th street, I looked at books at Barnes & Noble on 82nd. I stuck my nose in several different "recently arrived" books and became sick with the impression that everything not only sounded the same but seemed to be singing the same whining song with the piercing chorus, "yes, of course we know there's no point, but what else is there to do?" No one seemed to be presenting things anymore as unbearingly grey, flat and numb as everything actually is most of the time.

Then I remembered reading Genazino's Die Ausschweifung on the plane to New York. As I was crossing Broadway toward the bookstore, I had imagined describing Genazino to someone who had never heard of him, that is pretty much everyone I know, as being so plainly convincing that it's irresistible on the one hand and devastatingly tedious on the other. After 30 or so pages of being entrenched in his off-white, muted world, I sigh deeply, close the book with a finger keeping the page, and wonder what it's all about anyway.

Having seen nothing by Genazino in the quite vast fiction section on the second floor, riding the escalator down to the ground floor, I imagined translating him and thereby introducing him in the United States as, perhaps, the next sensation. Then I considered that there might already be American versions of Genazino, in, say, someone like Richard Ford, whose writing repulses me, maybe only because I actually know people like his characters and don't think they're worth devoting any story at all to. Maybe, I wondered, part of Genazino's appeal is that his characters are too foreign to trigger any prejudices in me. And yet, underneath the level of consciousness infected with prejudices, he describes lives that I can relate to poignantly enough to even learn from.

By the time I reached the ground floor, I decided that the project of translating even a single novel of Genazino would be beyond my competence and, therefore, an utter waste of time. With that settled, I went toward the cash register to pay for a pocket Moleskine music notebook, in which I wanted to transcribe old English songs to play on my clarinet. Standing in line, I noticed that one of the cashiers was occupied with a woman who had already completed her purchase but lingered to talk. She kept talking and talking, and I finally said under my breath, "Sie steht da und quatscht ohne Ende! Es ist ja nicht zu fassen, eh!" Of course, I noticed that I dared utter the criticism aloud only in German, a language I doubt anyone in earshot could understand, and wondered at my cowardice. Now I wonder whether German is simply the more appropriate language for that kind of criticism, directed at noone in particular and lacking any practical effect. In any case, I can't imagine saying something like that in English - "She's standing there and talking endlessly! It's unbelievable!" It sounds translated, like something from a Kundera novel. I think in English, or at least in New York, we would say, "What the fuck is she doing?"
I can imagine something like that being said in German, but only from an alcoholic impatient to pay for his beer.

Something With Happiness

On my way home from the bookstore, I saw across the street the beautiful Turkish butcher standing in the doorway to his family store, leaning against the side, wearing his thin, white, cotton "lab" coat. That image seemed to represent to me just then all of life itself, or maybe just of spring. It's about 10 degrees celsius in Berlin, warm enough to run in shorts. It almost makes me want to cry, though at the same time it's too bad, I thought approaching home, I missed the snowstorm in New York a few days ago. As always, I want everything, or maybe just both what I have and what I don't have, but not necessarily everything else.

I had gone to the bookstore to pick up the latest novel by Wilhelm Genazino I had ordered a week ago. Both last week when I ordered it and today when I picked it up, I couldn't remember the title, but knew only that it had the word "Glück" (happiness) in it, and I referred both times to the title as having "something with happiness" in it, "irgendwas mit Glück." While looking for the book on the shelf, the woman at the store today said, "Genazido," "Glück." "Genazino," I corrected her. Then she found it and read the title aloud: "Das Glück in Glücksfernen Zeiten." "Glücksfern" is the kind of word made possible only by the lego-like quality in German of constructing words by putting words together. I can't translate it. But the title means, roughly, "Happiness in Times When Happiness Is Far Away." That seems to me just now to represent all of life itself, or at least of my life right now.

Dreams of George H. W. Bush

I dreamt of George H. W. Bush again the other night. We were planning to meet for dinner, which turned out to be a coffee, although I don't remember having anything at all to drink, or to eat for that matter, in the end. Earlier that day, I met Putin. I told him what an honor it was for me to meet him and then started to try to explain why, realizing rather quickly that this was a dangerous path to travel. Putin smiled, then nicked his head a little, as if to say, "well, I don't think so," but instead he said, "You know what? I don't believe you," which prompted the security guard standing next to me put a gun to my head. Somehow I managed to convince him (Putin, not the security guard) that, despite my lack of eloquence, I was being sincere, and he spared me. At one point I tried to bribe him for my life by inviting him to join me meet Bush later. Actually, I don't think Bush would have been particularly delighted to see that I had brought Putin along, but even in my dream I figured that my life was worth a little social embarassment. Either before or after meeting Putin, I met the Russian president who happened to be Sarah Palin or someone who looked very much like her. She didn't try to kill me, but apart from that our meeting was unremarkable.

I guess Putin wasn't very interested in meeting Bush, because he didn't show up. I sat at a round table across from two old ladies and an old man who looked like members of the only Episcopalian church in a predominantly working class Midwestern town. They sat very stiffly and unsmiling. Everything was in bright starched white and pastels. The room appeared to be the convention space in a Holiday Inn. As Bush introduced the first old lady to me, she stretched out her pinky as stiff and erect as a pencil and pointed it towards me. I felt very uncomfortable not knowing whether I should grab and wag it or bring it to my lips for a kiss. The next lady did the same, and finally the man. I think I decided to wag it after all, which I realized to be a wise decision when it was the man's turn. Then I woke up.

In my first dream of George H. W. Bush, we were on our way to the wedding of Condoleezza Rice, who had been my Russian teacher at boarding school. I was in the car with George, who was driving, and younger relatives, including some small children. Suddenly I realized that I wasn't wearing any pants and told George that I had to get some. He said we had no time. I insisted that he stop the car, but he refused. With my growing realization that I couldn't appear at the wedding of the U.S. Secretary of State pantless, I started to panic, and George finally let me out. Then I found myself in a street somewhere in India where all I saw were souvenir shops. I don't remember anymore whether I had found pants, but I never made it to the wedding anyway.

killing time softly

Lately Otto has been waking up with insomnia. The other night he woke up at 4 and lay in bed sleepless until almost 8. Waking up with insomnia is not as bad as going to bed with it. Thoughts tailing dreams float, but chasing sleep they rush breathlessly, repeatedly tripping on jagged stones of panic. Insomnia is a disease of the lustfull.

When Otto awoke with insomnia this morning, he was relieved to see that it was already 7:30, when normal people were already up, he thought. He knew that if he got up then he would be tired all day, but with luck it would be dazeful and pleasant, like the empty stare of a fat old woman sitting on her front step following the whole world shuffle by.

By 10 he had finished all the work he had wanted to do for the day and then wondered if it was too early to go have his hair cut. Remembering that he still had to shower and dress offered unusual relief, even though Otto always overestimated the time that would take. In Otto's mind, radical transitions gulped down time much more ravenously than, for instance, stupor. And what worse sequence of transitions did one suffer everyday than going from being clothed to naked, dry to wet to dry again, and then clothed again? Otto never knew whether in the end he would be, like after his afternoon coffee, invigorated or exhausted.

As Otto was going down the stairs in his building, he wondered whether the barbers would still be too sleepy to concentrate on his hair. Ever since hearing once that later in the day barbers become sloppy from fatigue, he's never had his hair cut after 2:30 in the afternoon. But in Berlin everyone was still just waking up at lunch time, and it was precisely in the very late afternoon that people started to get in the swing of things. He remembered mornings where his hands were too heavy to heave up over the keyboard. In the courtyard unlocking his bike, Otto told himself he was too tired now to think about things like that.

Once done with the haircut, Otto looked at his watch and was disappointed. The small Vietnamese place nearby where he wanted to have a hot noodle soup was still closed for another fifty minutes. He remembered that on the way was a photo automat, somewhere in the intersecting tunnels of an U-Bahn station, where he needed to have his photo taken. Suddenly, however, Otto felt tired and cold, and the idea of navigating through the commuting crowds rushing in different directions at all angles seemed impossible. On the other hand, he told himself, he would have to go for the photos sometime within the next two days in any case, he would literally be passing over the automat, and he had time to kill.

When Otto got to the automat, he was surprised to see that someone was already in it. Not wanting to pressure her to hurry, he walked away, first toward nothing in particular, then, feeling as if he were attracting the attention of the drug addicts and alcoholics, to a large map of the city. The map of the city was much more interesting than the U-bahn plan, but Otto wondered what kind of person would look at it so purposefully, and he stared in the direction of the U-bahn map instead. The woman was still in the photo automat, and Otto started to think she was incompetent. Finally, she got out and took her photos. Otto waited a moment and went to the automat, not as quickly as to seem he was waiting, but quickly enough to get there before someone else.

Ruhm. Ein Roman in neun Geschichten

On the way home from the bank the other afternoon, I decided, after some hesitation, to stop by the small bookstore specializing in books on post-modern culture and usually full of cigarette smoke. (It was there that I found a book of personal narratives from South Koreans who went to Germany in the 1960s and 70s to work as nurses, and stayed. The book was called "Zu Hause" ("At Home")). I had hesitated because their literature section, which consisted of only about 5 shelves about a meter and a half wide, was usually uninteresting. But, after about two and a half steps in a divergent direction, I remembered being told that all the workers there aren't paid and decided to go after all. Besides, I had about forty-five minutes to kill. I also considered that, because the peron working there sits partially hidden at a desk on a mezzanine behind a wall, one doesn't feel obliged to say hello upon entering, or even goodbye upon leaving, which suits my New Yorker's fundamental preference for anonymity. As I was glancing at the books on the display table in the middle of the small room on the ground floor, however, one of the workers came down and said hello, giving me a smile. Then he went back upstairs, and I turned around toward the literature section where I saw a new novel by Daniel Kehlmann and thought, "my God, he's written another one already," or actually, "Mann! Der hat schon wieder eins geschrieben." All five hardcover copies were wrapped in plastic. After looking at the cover and reading the title, Ruhm, ein Roman in neun Geshichten (or more exactly, "ruhm ein roman in neun geschichten"), I turned it over to see the price. It was more than I'm usually willing to spend for a book, but then I remembered being told by a running friend of mine for whom I'd been thinking of getting a late birthday present that he thought another book by the same author was good. The fact that it was to be a gift seemed to justify an exception to my general reluctance to buy hardcovers. I also remembered once reading that authors earn money only from the sales of hardcovers, although now I wonder how this could be true. Somehow the relatively quick but nonetheless reasoned decision to buy the book made the decision to buy another for myself self-evident. When I went upstairs to pay for the books with the lady sitting at the desk, the man who had come down to say hello asked if I wanted to have a look inside the books, and I said no, I wanted to buy them. He took the books from me and went behind the desk, commenting that the books were quickly becoming their new bestsellers. He said just that week one or two had been bought, and now two at once. I explained that one was for me and one was to be a gift. Then, after wondering whether I should say anything at all, I said, "It's amazing how much he's written," or, more exactly, "Es ist erstaunlich, was er alles geschrieben hat." The woman said something like, some people just have it in them. Then the man said that his father was certainly some professor and his mother something-or-other which I didn't understand. The woman then said that her mother was also a something-or-other, and the man said, "No! Really?" Having nothing to say myself, I looked at the books on the shelf to the left of me. They were the kind of books about post-modern theory that, like some exquisitely beautiful but utterly useless object found in the gift shop of a conteporary art museum, I have to make an effort to resist purchasing. After the man returned my bank card to me, he gave me back the books with a smile, I thanked him with a smile, he asked me if I needed a small bag, I said no, "es geht so," said goodbye, and left. On the way home, I thought of Daniel Kehlmann, as well as the man at the bookstore.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Once, I had to have the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, I wanted to read an article on Mozart’s Zaide, which had appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and since I could get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, as I had thought, only in Salzburg, which is eighty kilometers away from here, I drove to Salzburg, to the so called world famous festival town, with the car of a friend and with the friend and with Paul, all for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. But in Salzburg I couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Then I had the idea of getting the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Bad Reichenhall and we drove to Bad Reichenhall, to the world famous resort town. But in Bad Reichenhall I couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung either and so we all three of us drove more or less disappointed back to Nathal. But just as we were approaching Nathal, Paul suddenly thought we should drive to Bad Hall, to the world famous resort town, because there we would surely get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the article about Zaide, and as a matter of fact we drove the eighty kilometers from Nathal to Bad Hall. But in Bad Hall we couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung either. Since it was only a skip and a jump from Bad Hall to Steyr, twenty kilometers, we drove to Steyr too, but in Steyr we couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung either. Then we tried our luck in Wels, but in Wels we couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung either. We had driven altogether three hundred fifty kilometers only for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and in the end we had no luck. So then we went into a restaurant in Wels completely exhausted, obviously, to get something to eat and to rest, as the hunt for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung had brought us to the edge of our physical abilities. With much hindsight, I think now, when I recall this story with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Paul and I are pretty much the same. If we had not been completely exhausted we definitely would have gone to Linz and Passsau, perhaps even to Regensburg and Münich as well, and actually we would not have minded just buying the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Zürich, since in Zürich, I think, we would have gotten it for sure. Because we couldn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in any of these towns that we had driven to and where we had searched, since even in the summer it isn’t there, I know that all these towns we had driven to are miserable filthy towns, which deserve their undistinguished names. If not filthier. And even then it became clear to me that a thinking person cannot exist in a place where one can’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. To think, I can get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung even in Spain and in Portugal and in Morocco anytime of year in the smallest towns with only the loneliest hotels. Not where we are! And because of the fact that we didn’t get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in all these presumably important towns, not even in Salzburg, all our rage blistered against this backward, narrow-minded, hick, and simultaneously repulsively megalomaniacal country. We should live only where we could get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, I said, and Paul agreed absolutely. But then in Austria there’s only really just Vienna, he said, since in all the other towns where it would seem one would get the Neue Zürcher Zeitung one as a matter of fact cannot get it at all. At least not every day and just when one would want it, when one absolutely needs it. It occurs to me that even now I haven’t gotten to the article on Zaide yet. I’ve long since forgotten the article and I’ve naturally also survived without this article. But at the time I had thought I had to have it. And Paul supported me in this absolute demand, and, what’s more, as a matter of fact he led me through half of Austria for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Thomas Bernhard
(translated from the German by Robert Kim)

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Almost as soon I got out onto the street this afternoon I started whistling "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," but at the time I thought the chorus was "que sá, que sá, que sá," which is probably meaningless. When I had crossed Skalitzer Strasse and was walking in front of McDonalds, still whistling, I found myself behind a blond young man carrying a package in one arm and a folder in another. Imagining that he was listening to my whistling, I became conscious of the tune and wondered why I was whistling it at all. Up until then whistling it had been as gratifying and irresistable as patiently scratching the itchy end of a thickly calloused toe. Then I remembered that just before leaving the apartment I happened to glance at the cover of a CD of Bach Cello Suites performed by a relatively unknown French musician whose name my flatmate had asked me earlier that day to correctly pronounce. I had always found French difficult to pronounce, and especially when I'm mostly speaking German, so I paused, sounded it out in my head first, and said, slowly: Queyras.

Later, I searched for the song on the internet but couldn't find it because I didn't know what it was called or that it was sung by Nat King Cole, and instead of googling "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" I googled, first, "que sa, que sa, que sa," then "que çà, que çà, que çà," then "qui ca, qui ca, qui ca," and finally "qui sa, qui sa, qui sa." I quickly ran through the song in my head searching for whatever text I could remember but found nothing. I vaguely remembered that it was in a film by Wong Kar Wai, but I couldn't remember which, and I wasn't even really sure that it was. The idea of googling "Wong Kar Wai soundtrack" exhausted me. My last desperate thought was to sing into the computer with google's homepage open.

Eventually my flatmate came into my room to chat and, after about 20 minutes of talking about different things, I suddenly realized that I could hum the tune to him, and I did. When I got to the part that went "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," I was relieved to see a spark of recognition in his face. I continued humming, even with a little swing, and he said he didn't know what it was called but that it was on the soundtrack of Wong Kar Wai's film "In the Mood for Love." He had the CD and brought it to me. Had I not figured out the title of the song, I'm not sure how I could have written this post.

getting to know you....

While walking home through Görlitzer Park the other afternoon, I thought, "there are so many things I still haven't figured out about Otto." Then I realized that there will always be things I can't figure out about Otto, despite the fact that he's only a creation of my imagination. I was pleased but I'm not sure whether by the idea that Otto was in his ultimate inscrutability as human as a real person or by being reminded of the ultimate inscrutability of humans.

"Alma" Means Apple

One story of Otto began in the kitchen of a groundfloor apartment in the Kazakh city, Almaty, formerly called Alma-Ata. During a previous trip to Almaty I learned that in Kazakh "alma" means "apple." Years later, standing in the kitchen of a house in Hungary, I noticed the word "alma" on a box of apple juice and remarked that in Kazakh "alma" means apple. Someone responded it means apple in Hungarian, too. My first impression, the one that preceeds an actual thought, was wonder at the coincidence. When I eventually realized that the word must have traveled, or spread like bands of wild horses, I broke into a long, satisfying smile. The story that began in that kitchen was called "My Hungarian Brother." Otto was then the Hungarian. As far as I remember, I stopped working on the story the moment it dawned on me, like a bone-chilling mist, that actually I was my Hungarian brother. But I was not Otto.

Otto Malik

Otto Malik is the name of a character I've been thinking about for roughly a decade. In the beginning, his name was Otto Oderberger, after my then-favorite street in Berlin, then Otto Ödemann, because Otto was öde. Since then, he's probably had a few other names as well, but I don't remember now. Malik I got from the Russian word for boy, "malchik," which is what strangers called me on the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1992, 1993 and 1996-97, when I was 18, 19, and 22, respectively. "Mal" being the root meaning "small," the diminutive "malchik" means "little small." Malchik became Malik to sound less Slavic, like it came from a part of the world where names shift as readily as the political borders, somewhere between Hungary and Slovakia, for example. It was partly the ambiguity of the name that inspired the rumor that Otto's father, having been sent as an Austrian soldier during WWII to the Russian front, stayed in search of his roots, leaving Otto fatherless. Fatherless is how I first imagined Otto. Little did I know that "Malik" is actually an Arabic word meaning King, who almost by definition is fatherless.