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.