Lance Olsen

[[there.]]

acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and American Academy in Berlin for providing me time to work on this project; to Conjunctions, in which parts of this book first appeared in different forms; and to my graduate students at the University of Utah for helping me think about the shapes and means of being [[there.]]

[[there.]]

For Andi, & our seconds in Berlin.

To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

— W. G. Sebald

If you leave me, can I come too?

— Friedrich Kunath

:::: The day we pack the exactly three small UPS boxes my wife Andi and I allot ourselves for our five-month stay at the American Academy in Berlin, I happen upon this passage in Wayne Koestenbaum’s brainy meditation on the meaning of hotels:

Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be AT HOTEL.

:::: Then you are scudding above the Atlantic at 37,000 feet. It is afternoon. A few minutes later, it is past midnight.

A pair of celebratory scotches, dinner, and you try falling asleep, but at 600 miles per hour there is no rest, no comfortable position, and the lighting is all wrong: yellow, harsh, stubborn.

The air, too warm, oven dry, makes you conscious of your own breathing.

:::: The cabin torqueing and rattling around you in abrupt turbulence.

:::: The rough skin behind your eyelids feeling like what time passing feels like.

:::: Here is Derrida: The unrecognizable is the awakening. It is what awakens, the very experience of being awake.

:::: Here is Guy Debord: Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.

:::: London. New Year’s Eve. O. can barely stay conscious long enough to get down a pizza and salad at a damp cramped bistro just outside the South Kensington tube station, stroll through the rainy neighborhood back to his hotel, pop a pastel peach Xanax to begin rebooting.

:::: I’ve been practicing my German for three months — ever since I received the news — in an attempt to bring it back to a semblance of life after more than 30 years in the mnemonic deepfreeze.

The blond bearded graduate student with the wire-rimmed glasses who could read and speak sentences I can no longer even tangentially understand:

Who was that guy?

:::: And what does skin have to do with autobiography?

Leigh Gilmore wondered.

:::: The heavy black iron gates of the American Academy swing open. Your cab crawls through the icy drizzle past what once was the chauffeur’s Brothers Grimm cottage, where a couple of anthropology professors and their boy are now staying, the gardener’s, where an avant-garde musician sans children is now staying, up the driveway toward the austere vaguely Italianate villa whose backyard slopes down to a small marina on Lake Wannsee.

:::: A week before you leave, you decide to keep a trash diary: a constellation of sense, thought, memory, observation, fast fact scraps.

:::: E.g.: A recovery rate from jet lag of one day per time zone crossed can be expected.

:::: I’m allergic to cherries. No one is allergic to cherries. I am.

I’ve loved them forever.

Cherry pies. Cherry lollipops. Cherry Coke.

Except one day I ate half a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and started skidding into anaphylactic shock. The lump in the throat. The hives across the neck and back. The flushed face and crazy pulse.

:::: In the wake of Kim Jong-il’s death, e.g., grief was mandatory in North Korea. Some insincere mourners were sent to labor camps as punishment.

:::: David Foster Wallace, whom I bumped into at O’Hare (he was flying east; I was flying west; we had one of those affable five-minute catch-up conversations until I asked him what he was working on, at which point he mumbled something I couldn’t understand and began looking down at his sneakers a lot) the spring before he bound his wrists with duct tape, kicked over the lawn chair he was standing on, and hanged himself with a black belt nailed into a patio rafter in back of his home in Claremont, California: you have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

:::: I’d just capped off a rafting trip with Andi, my niece, and nephew on Idaho’s Salmon River. We celebrated with a carb-and-sugar-rich dinner in a cowboyoidal restaurant in Riggins (population 424) and were driving home when the symptoms budded.

Initially I thought I was coming down with a cold.

By the time we reached what passed for a hospital 45 miles up the road in Grangeville, I was in shaky shape.

To calm me as she administered the epinephrine shot, the nurse (the doctor on call was home fixing his lawnmower, would be by in 15 minutes, give or take, if the situation warranted, he conveyed over the phone) told me the recent story of the young man allergic to bees who was stung on the far end of town and died on the sidewalk leading up to the emergency-room doors through which I had just entered.

:::: On the way in from Tegel Airport, our driver, Peter (mid-fifties, thinning gray moptop, contagious easy-going amiability), explains how he had followed his girlfriend to Berlin from a small town in the countryside back in the seventies.

When the Wall fell things got harder, he said, not easier. The East Germans had a different culture, found it painful and frustrating adjusting to West German work standards, couldn’t get their heads around the concept of socio-political transparency, were wired for grim inflexibility. This vexed their interactions with West Germans in everything from government planning to uncomplicated exchanges at the grocery store.

Peter suspected it would take another 20 years — another generation’s extinction — for such perspectival baggage to go away altogether.

:::: So the first line you re-learn to say is: Ich bin allergisch gegen Kirschen. I’m allergic to cherries.

My pronunciation is terrible, though, and it keeps coming out: Ich bin allergisch gegen Kirchen. I’m allergic to churches.

Which, of course, is true as well.

:::: Yet the home key Peter returned to wasn’t about the great worsening. It was about how comfortable his life had become. He drove cabs, he said, but could afford a second house in the country. He drove cabs, but could rent a boat any time he wanted and take his family onto Lake Wannsee for a sail and a picnic.

When Andi offered him a tip, he dropped the bill on the floor in surprise.

He had been expecting a handshake instead.

:::: The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.

Referenced David Markson.

:::: Hans Bellmer: thank you.

:::: [[Because how does one write the contemporary?]]

:::: The villa lounges in a leafy neighborhood of mansions. It’s a seven-minute walk from the brick-and-stucco train station-cum-hotel-and-café. It used to be the home of the Jewish banker Hans Arnhold, his wife, and their two daughters.

During what the Germans refer to as the Golden Twenties, the family hosted a salon for Berlin artists, musicians, and intellectuals. This was the period in and around Berlin that begat the Bauhaus’s unadorned functional cubism; Döblin’s textual montage, Berlin Alexanderplatz; Lang’s Art-Deco-gone-darkly-crazy Metropolis; Grosz’s exquisitely demented caricatures; Brecht and Weill’s socialist revision of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera; Benjamin’s hyperactive cortex.

At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, the director’s name was Albert Einstein.

In 1938—the economic crash, the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, and the Anschluss faits accomplis—Arnhold sold his property for almost nothing to the Ministry of Finance and fled — first to Paris, then New York.

Four years later, the Minister of Finance of the Third Reich Walter Funk’s moving van rolled up.

:::: Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.

The epigraph to my last novel quoted Paul Thoreux as saying.

:::: What I love most about the Situationists is the party they throw in celebration of dérive—unplanned journeys through landscapes (in their minds urban, in mine catholic) whose contours lead drifters into new, unexpected experiences.

A technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences, Guy Debord called it.

Like wandering through an unfamiliar Berlin.

But also through an unfamiliar non-novel by Beckett. A video by Joseph Beuys. A crooked composition by Cage or Zappa.

:::: Readers are travelers, Michel de Certeau remarked. They move across lands belonging to someone else.

:::: I spotted him sitting at a crowded airport gate. I’d first met him a dozen years earlier at the University of Idaho, where I had been teaching, and where he visited for a reading and weeklong workshop a few months before Infinite Jest appeared and David Foster Wallace became David Foster Wallace.

He was reading Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers.

The novel was open to two pages that were frenzied with marginalia — arrows, circles, underlinings, question marks, notes — as if Wallace weren’t so much enjoying Stone’s story about the necrosis of the sixties as actively working it as a math problem.

:::: The animated fellows service coordinator, Christina, meets you in the lobby and shows you up to your apartment on the second floor.

Your door opens onto a narrow kitchenette on the left, a closet on the right. Beyond lies a spacious high-ceilinged living room, a spacious high-ceilinged bedroom, a tiled bathroom with a separate shower and tub. The place is a mishmash of styles, from the mahogany Viennese Art Deco bookshelf, all gold-trimmed and glassy, to the workaday four-seater wooden dining table and streamlined Northern European bureaus with silver hardware. The side tables are wicker. The couch is a paisley that sort of matches the dark putty-colored rug which is the same hue as the train station.

The entrance smells oniony because of the old cutting board you discover later tucked beneath the kitchen sink.

:::: Desynchronosis e.g.: the medical term for jet lag.

:::: There is an unnerving number of mirrors, a stark enlarged black-and-white photograph of Greek statues lining a mock Roman pantheon at the Altes Museum, two posters: a sepia-and-black Toulouse Lautrec in the living room, announcing a Parisian revue, and, in the bedroom, a Sebastiano Ricci Madonna-in-glory with assorted seraphim and billowing brown and blue robes, all busy and baroque.

A stereo. A flat screen TV. A printer.

A filing cabinet stocked with a pair of scissors, cube of Post-Its, Academy stationery and envelopes, sheaf of heavyweight paper, pens, four unused pencils, a pencil sharpener. Even a box of paper clips.

On the counter in the immaculate bathroom: two Lilliputian bars of soap marked Seife (Soap), two packets of shower gel marked Duschgel (Shower Gel), and a role of extra toilet paper, all neatly laid out.

The toaster in the kitchen is comprehensively crumb-free.

Andi turns it over, lifts, shakes gently.

Nothing, not a speck, falls out.

:::: Traveling, I want to say, is like clicking a link on a website: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation.

Only in three dimensions.

Over and over again.

:::: I came to consciousness in a jungle compound surrounded by twelve-foot-tall cyclone fencing in Venezuela.

My father had taken a two-year position as port captain at an oil refinery on Lake Maracaibo — not a lake at all, in fact, but an 8200-square-mile bay, the largest in South America, whose northern tip feeds into the Gulf of Venezuela.

We lived in a squat flat-roofed cement house that flooded during the rainy season. I remember watching our living-room rug suspended in two inches of brown water.

One morning a fat three-foot-long black snake thunked onto the floor out of a wad of sheets my mother had extracted from the washing machine. They were stained yellow where the snake had struck repeatedly as it drowned.

Once one of my sisters was treed by a wild boar.

:::: For days O. wakes at 4:00 a.m., ready to go. It makes no sense: back in Salt Lake City it’s 8:00 p.m. When his alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., Berlin time, he’s in the middle of a paralyzingly bottomless sleep. His mind can’t figure what’s happening to it. The effort of forcing himself from bed ignites a migraine. O. drifts from one latté to another in a throbby, filmy daze through the morning, the afternoon, can scarcely pilot the hours between 4:00 and 6:00, collapses into bed at 10:30, at which picosecond his mind starts racing like a cage full of mice with a cat plunked into it.

:::: A photograph exists behind my forehead: my mother bent in half on our porch in Venezuela, wielding a hoe, carefully chopping up another snake — this one thin and green and no more than two-feet long — into short segments that continue to writhe, mouth opening and closing, long after it’s been diced.

:::: Back in the States I biked through my bland foliaged suburb, wandered the hermetically sealed climate-controlled malls of northern New Jersey. My elementary-school teacher hosted show-and-tell on Friday afternoons. When I recounted my experiences near Maracaibo, she’d send me down to the principle’s office where I had to phone my mother to have her verify my memories.

It was that kind of childhood.

How could I become anything except a fiction writer?

:::: Jeff Eugenides: When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award. . It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?

:::: The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.

Suggested Czeslaw Milosz.

:::: The windows in our apartment are large and leaky. Cold spills in around the edges while I work at the desk in my bedroom, door shut, curtains pulled back so I don’t miss a second of what’s going on outside.

I suspect those in charge shut off the radiators at night to save energy.

:::: In your novel Girl Imagined by Chance, you write the following scene, pretending it’s fiction, although it isn’t — except to the extent that everything one writes is fiction because it has been composed, is language, has been edited, embellished, erased, misremembered, precisely in the sense it exists nowhere besides in the troubled territory between word and the other thing:

How once you strolled along the banks of the Bagmati in Kathmandu, watching cloth-wrapped bodies burn on the funeral pyres.

Families of the dead in prim circles, passing time.

Holy men spattering butter on the fires to help them burn faster.

You could hear steam building in the skulls as you strolled along.

Sadhus cooked bread by burying it among shards of smoking bones.

How guilt and happiness are not mutually exclusive emotions.

How a group of children stood knee-deep in the river, oblivious, in the black oily water that used to be strangers.

Throwing a red rubber ball through gusts of coppery haze.

:::: We land at Tegel on a Thursday and Sunday morning I sit down to begin polishing an interview about the illusions inherent in the terms historical and biographical fiction, continue working on a novel inspired by earthwork artist Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and write this, the book you’re holding in your hands as you read the phrase write this, the book you’re holding in your hands.

:::: My impression is that my two sisters recall Venezuela as an existential affliction. I recall it as strange elation.

My father, an intensely Lutheran man sans the religion (rigid, misanthropic, a captain at home as well as on his ship, yet acutely committed to the promise of family) went on to skipper supertankers. He would be away for three months, home for two, much to the confusion of our household rhythms. When he reappeared, it was always with stories from the front, Polaroid photographs of Istanbul, the Strait of Hormuz, waterspouts rising from a wide ocean desert.

One of his favorite overused sayings: Home is where I hang my hat.

That one, if none of the others, seems to have stuck.

:::: A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Reflected Rebecca Solnit.

:::: Through a pair of French doors off the living room perches a balcony that overlooks Lake Wannsee, today so foggy that the woody island on the far side edged by a narrow ribbon of villas seems constructed from a dream you had several months ago.

:::: When J.F.K. declared Ich bin ein Berliner on 26 June 1963 from a platform erected on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg in front of an audience of 450,000, almost exactly five months to the day before Lee Harvey Oswald lifted his Italian Carcano bolt-action rifle for the last time, something was gained in the translation.

He both announced he was from Berlin, as he had intended, thereby underscoring his support for West Germany 22 months after the Wall went up, and, apparently unintentionally, announced he was a type of jelly donut known in Berlin as a Pfannkuchen, but elsewhere as a Berliner.

Ich bin ein Berliner.

:::: In high school most of my friends aimed for classy northeastern colleges. Classy northeastern colleges never crossed my mind. Partly this was because my grades weren’t good enough, and partly this was because I knew almost nothing about classy northeastern colleges, and partly this was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

I knew one thing, though: there were possibility spaces on the far side of the parochial one in and around New York and I wanted to visit them.

:::: [[It always takes O. longer than he anticipates to acclimate to a place his body doesn’t believe it should be in.]]

:::: Because of the huge apartment windows, everything is spectacular light.

:::: Almost directly across the lake from Arnhold’s villa among that thin ribbon of others sits one that looks more like a modest palace than someone’s residence. Something called the Wannsee Conference took place there on 20 January 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler referred to admiringly as the man with the iron heart, presided.

The topic of the conference, which lasted 85 minutes, and was attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi regime, was the intellectual and ethical suicide for German culture called Die Endlösung, or The Final Solution.

:::: In the States everyone tells you most Germans know English. My experience files a dispatch concluding something less convincing. It may have been otherwise when this country was swarming with American soldiers, when it was divided between those who learned Russian as a second language and those who didn’t. Now most people you bump into outside the tourist and university districts in and around central Berlin answer Nur Deutsch when you shamefacedly ask Sprechen Sie Englisch?

Yet unlike, say, the cliché concerning the French, even those who do know a little English are more than happy to let you try out your German as long you both feel you’re making headway.

Only when you begin to fluster yourself, display the international facial expression broadcasting I’ve run out of language, do they politely switch over — often to almost creepily accentless, fluent American.

:::: At the refinery on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, there was the tapeworm room — a room filled with metal shelves filled with formaldehyde jars filled with tapeworms, some several feet long.

The American kids were brought there shortly after arriving to learn a straightforward lesson: if you don’t want such things to happen to your insides, wash your hands and food thoroughly and never, ever eat anything that touches the floor.

I’ve always been a good student: I got ringworm and tinea versicolor, a duet of fungus infections, instead.

:::: It still surprises me I didn’t read much, didn’t much enjoy reading, until eleventh grade, when I took my first of two English classes with Joyce Garvin, a woman barely five feet tall, skinny as a cocktail straw, all green tortoise-shell glasses and red hair, these days in her eighties and retired.

She was, no contest, the best teacher I ever had. I suspect this was because she was super smart, super well-read, and super sensitive, but it was also because she could wiretap her students’ minds, gauge what might interest each, and slip the right book and/or assignments into their hands.

She introduced me to Barth, Beckett, Kafka.

She introduced me to caring about close reading and big ideas.

I visit her and her husband, Aaron, at their split-level in Paramus, New Jersey, nearly every year, just to remind her how grateful I am.

:::: On 21 November 1811, Heinrich von Kleist, standing on the shore of Lake Wannsee, first killed his lover, Henriette Vogel, who was dying of cancer, and then turned his gun on himself.

He was 34, one year younger than Robert Smithson would be when the plane he was riding crashed near Amarillo, Texas, on 20 July 1970.

:::: Jet lag as a state-of-being: I usually finish writing for the day around one in the afternoon, power down my computer, walk out of the bedroom into the wider galaxy, and feel like I’ve just been hurtled through ten time zones.

It takes me another hour to adjust, re-tune to the channel everyone else seems to be watching.

:::: Méret Oppenheim: thank you.

:::: The aim of literature, wrote Donald Barthelme, is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

:::: I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden, scribbled Wittgenstein on one of the collage of notes that became On Certainty after his death. The philosopher says again and again I know that that’s a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

:::: One day Joyce Garvin asked us to open Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and read out loud. All the atoms in the room reorganized.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, goes that insanely good first line, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Or in German:

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

It wasn’t until decades later the reason for that atomic commotion hit me: in addition to the obvious, that perfect novella is an allegory about continuous change, which is to say an allegory about travel.

:::: When Andi and I arrive, Berlin’s light is cousin to that in Turku, Finland, where I taught on a Fulbright for six months in 2000.

We arrived in Helsinki on 21 December 1999. When the alarm went off the next morning at 8:30, it was still pitch black. The blurry pale yellow sunball didn’t come into being until past 10:00. It rubbed low across the horizon and exhausted itself by 2:00.

By 3:00 it felt like it was time to eat and crawl into bed for the night.

:::: Once upon a time, travel and travail were the same words.

The O.E.D.’s first definition of the former: to torment, distress; to suffer affliction; to labor, toil; to suffer the pains of childbirth.

:::: Ungeziefer is a word the Nazis employed when referring to the Jews.

:::: One of Wittgenstein’s schoolmates for a time in the Realschule he attended between 1903 and 1906 was a little Jewish-looking boy named Adolf Hitler.

They were born six days apart.

:::: Wittgenstein was and wasn’t Jewish. He was baptized Catholic, lost God as a teen, believed deeply in the act of confession throughout his life (arguably the essence of his entire philosophy), yet during his final years claimed his thoughts were 100 % Hebraic.

For me On Certainty is a much richer philosophical prose poem than Tractatus because of how much of the world the notes in it are committed to unlearning.

:::: The plan Heydrich unfurled at the conference went like this: deport all Jews in Europe and French North Africa to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe and use the fit ones for labor on road-building projects as long as they lasted. Survivors, Heydrich emphasized, according to the minutes taken by Adolf Eichmann (who would be hunted down in Argentina by Mossad and hanged in Israel on 31 May 1962), would have to be treated accordingly, because they would be the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.

:::: One morning as Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself in his bed transformed to an enormous swarms.

Is what you get if you feed the first line of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung into Babylon’s online German-to-English translator.

:::: Pastness in writing is never about pastness.

Rather, it is about the problematization of historical knowledge.

:::: Andi and I sleep with our windows open. The colder and fresher, the better. In what used to be Hans Arnhold’s villa, we slide under listening to waves lapping against boats down the sloping lawn in the marina.

:::: It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books, what other men do not say in whole books.

Aphorized Nietzsche.

:::: When traveling, you always feel like yourself, and not like yourself, and not not like yourself.

That’s the satisfaction exactly.

:::: The remarkable thing is how unremarkable Adolf Eichmann’s minutes sound — how flat, how matter-of-fact, how unremarkable the Wannsee Conference must have seemed to its participants.

For most, it was simply one meeting among many in a busy week.

Everybody knew the decision about Jews had already been made by Hitler in consultation with Göring and Himmler. The participants attended that day merely to hear the Führer’s emissary spell out what they understood was already a done deal.

:::: Fika: both a Swedish noun and verb (employing nineteenth century backslang: fika = kaffi, an early variant of the Swedish word kaffe) that means the nearly mandatory afternoon break over a cup of strong caffeine and a cookie, cake, or roll.

The idea is echt German as well. Between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. cafés, normally crowded venues, crowd even more, usually with svelte types who seem to have squat business partaking in such a gastronomically opulent social institution.

Once one knows the fika exists, how can one possibly deny its existential insistence?

:::: I remember my Swedish grandfather, in order to attain maximum sugar density, inserting during fikas three cubes between his lower lip and teeth and sucking his tar-black coffee through them.

:::: In her book on Eichmann, Hannah Arendt went to great pains underscoring how he was unconditionally, unquestionably nothing special: a high-school dropout, a follower who thought in platitudes, a guy who cared more about his family and building his career than, say, the mass extermination of a people.

Before the trial, six psychologists examined him. None found evidence of an abnormal personality — although one did note that the really unusual trait Eichmann exhibited was that he seemed more average than most people.

Miss that point, they say, and you’ve missed the war.

:::: Here is Vladimir Nabokov: I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

:::: We are all astronauts.

:::: When I translated Kafka’s gloriousness into my own novel, Anxious Pleasures, which in a sense wasn’t my own novel, retelling the narrative, not from Gregor Samsa’s point of view, but from the points of view of those around him, the gesture was meant as a thank-you note both to my high school teacher Joyce Garvin for helping me begin to become myself and to The Metamorphosis to show the text how much I cared.

This is why critics write criticism, why philosophers write philosophy, why theorists write theory: every critical monograph, theoretical essay, philosophical tome is ultimately no more and no less than an act of spiritual autobiography.

:::: Insect extermination: the Nazi euphemism for the annihilation of the Jews.

Which act was implemented in the gas chambers through the perhaps unconsciously ironic use of Zyklon B, the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide.

:::: O. never understood why we should stop at 14 punctuation marks in English.

:::: The first thing he does when arriving in a new city is get purposefully lost.

Berlin is especially conducive to the dérive because it doesn’t possess the orienting axes of Paris or New York. It is a gallimaufry space, a city that’s grown out of a bog (the word Berlin seems to be related to the Old West Slavic for swamp, berl, even though folk etymology connects it to Bär, German for bear, an image of which appears on the city’s coat of arms) like salt crystals on the rocks that comprise Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake near where O. usually lives and works from August through early May.

:::: On a single block in Berlin the gentrified nineteenth century dwells next to the crumbling eighteenth dwells next to the frayed East German dwells next to the clean Bauhaus dwells next to a McDonalds, a trendy café, an untrendy Indian or Vietnamese or Turkish bistro, a hip club, a currywurst stand, a bit of leftover Wall (now graffitied and encrusted with bubble gum), a five-story bunker built by Albert Speer that couldn’t be blown up after the war because it was so massive, and so was transformed (after an earlier iteration as the hottest site for techno raves and gay sadomasochistic festivities in Germany) into a gallery by the Polish advertising entrepreneur Christian Boros.

:::: Berlin feels disorienting because it is disoriented.

:::: Which is to say I am performing a verb: I am hoteling.

But it goes deeper than that: each of us occupies a perpetual condition of hoteling, although many of us prefer to act as if we occupied another altogether.

:::: In German, the noun gift means poison.

It shares the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English word gift — ghabh, meaning to receive—but German employs the original meaning as a dark gesture: Gib ihm das Gift. Give him the poison.

The verb for to poison in German used to be vergeben, a word that now means to forgive.

:::: Immense Allied bombing raids authored Berlin’s pastiche architecture.

On 3 February 1945, e.g., nearly a thousand B-17 bombers attacked the railway system in the city center. Although incendiary bombs weren’t used, monster fires erupted. Strong winds fanned the blazes, driving them east for four days. They burned out only when they had consumed everything combustible in their paths and reached a waterway, large thoroughfare, or park.

:::: From the French hôte, meaning host, referring to any building seeing frequent visitors, rather than a place offering accommodation.

:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing theses by previous Workshop graduates.

I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O’Connor’s writing, John Irving’s, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.

It’s the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.

Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides.

:::: We hotel when we’re in a state of physically not-being-at-home, but also when we read, think, become curious, start paying attention as we reach across the writing desk for our morning cup of coffee, focus more than a millisecond on a building or a bird, notice how the light outside the window has just now changed from Honda Accord gray to chalk smudged with blue.

:::: Jenny Holzer, Jed Rasula, Helen Vendler.

:::: Kafka’s three sisters were deported — Elli and Valli to the Łódź Ghetto, Ottla to Auschwitz.

None left their hotel rooms again.

:::: There should be special punctuation for not-being-at-home.

Maybe:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

:::: Because between 1919 and 1923 Germany experienced inflation of one trillion percent.

When a single bar of soap began costing a wheelbarrow full of banknotes, people often found money more valuable for other uses than paying bills — heating houses, say, stuffing leaky windows.

:::: Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, Henry Louis Gates: Guten Tag.

:::: The words hotel and hospital are related. Both stem from the Old French hostel, from the Late Latin hospitale: a guest-house, an inn.

When we hotel, we are concurrently guests in a shelter for the needy, patients in an institution for the ill, residents in an establishment for the lodging and entertainment of travelers.

:::: A few minutes later, it is February.

:::: The surface of the lake starting to freeze.

:::: We hotel when we feel things we don’t recollect feeling before, sense ourselves becoming interested, when we imagine, recollect, stare at the shimmering whiteness of our computer screen the second before we commence typing the next sentence—

:::: Maybe [[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

:::: As in: [[Once upon a time, we already knew these things.]]

:::: On 4 July 1945, less than a month after entering Berlin, U.S. Forces requisitioned Arnhold’s villa as an Officers’ Club.

Forty-nine years later, as the last American troops departed the city, German ambassador Richard Holbrooke proposed the establishment of a research and cultural institution designed to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and Germany.

He approached Hans Arnhold’s daughter Anna-Maria Kellen, former Federal Republic of Germany president Richard von Weizsäcker, and Henry Kissinger with the idea.

In 1998 the first class of fellows walked through the Academy’s doors.

Since then, more than 300 writers, artists, musicians, and academics in literature, humanities, politics, economics, law, and philosophy have worked here: a dozen each spring, a dozen each fall.

Look: there [[I]] am.

:::: My ambition is to say in ten sentences what each andre in a beech says — what every andre in a beech does not say.

Is what you get if you feed Nietzsche’s original line into Babylon’s online German-to-English translator.

:::: To walk is to lack a place, Michel de Certeau felt. It is the indefinite process of being absent.

:::: Alltäglichkeit: Heidegger’s term for that which in our lives is most familiar, and therefore invisible, furthest, unknown and constantly overlooked in its ontological meaning.

:::: A Russian saying: If anyone is born a German, God has sufficiently punished him already.

:::: The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein unwittingly agreed with Heidegger, a member in good standing with the Nazi party from 1933 until 1945.

:::: On the grounds around the villa stand several faux-classical statues put up by Walter Funk when he moved in in 1942. The form of such pieces, the Nazis believed, embodied an inner racial ideal uncontaminated by Jewish influences.

The Arnholds, however, preferred the antipodean: the very sort of modernist work Adolf Ziegler chose in Munich for the Degenerate Art show. Between 19 July and 30 November 1937, he displayed 650 paintings, sculptures, books, and prints in a deliberately haphazard mess throughout what had once been the Institute of Archeology, a site selected for its dark, narrow, unpleasant stairwells and rooms.

The exhibition featured works by Beckmann, Chagall, Dix, Ernst, Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Nolde, and Schwitters, among many others. That is, its visual argument went: depraved artists were Jewish whether they were Jewish or not.

:::: Contemporary Berlin has been hung like those pieces.

:::: A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war.

:::: Because when traveling you’re aware of maneuvering inside the spacesuit made of your own skin, which isn’t the same skin you wore 40 years ago, let alone 40 months ago, let alone 40 weeks, let alone, quite, 40 seconds.

:::: For me this is exactly what writing the contemporary feels like.

:::: As rector at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger prevented students from holding a book burning, from hanging an anti-Semitic poster at the institution’s entrance, yet simultaneously signaled his sympathies with the Nazi student leaders’ activism.

:::: Impressionism. Expressionism. Fauvism. Dada. Surrealism.

Too Jewish.

:::: But O. doesn’t want to play the stereotype game, the Jeopardy of fraudulent categories.

Here is all he can do: all he can do is write what he thinks he thinks he sees and hears, understanding that ignorance will invariably be the foregone conclusion, that not-knowing will be every narrative’s terminus.

:::: Theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from happening.

Advised Jean-Martin Charcot, teacher of both William James and Sigmund Freud, the latter of whom optimistically underestimated the Nazis and remained in Vienna for almost a month after the Anschluss in March 1938 before fleeing.

:::: On the opening day of the Degenerate Art show, Beckmann fled to Amsterdam.

A few months earlier, Alfred Flechtheim, a leading German art dealer, died penniless in London.

A year after the show closed, Kirchner shot himself through the heart — a gesture Debord would repeat in 1994 in a remote French village as his final act of defiance, his final off-stage anti-spectacle.

:::: Heinrich von Kleist shot his lover through the heart as well, as they stood on the shores of Lake Wannsee, but he chose to shoot himself in the head, careful to place the bullet so as not to disturb his elaborate hairdo.

:::: The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

Pointed out Francis Picabia.

:::: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Advised Beckett.

:::: Otto Dix fled to the countryside and began painting unpeopled landscapes that offended precisely no one.

:::: Some not-news that often feels like news if we don’t think about it too long or hard: We live in shards.

Why would we choose to write otherwise?

:::: Nolde, whom the Reichskulturkammer banned from buying art supplies, chose to carry on secretly with watercolors because they wouldn’t give him away through their telltale oil pong.

:::: Apfeltorte. Mandelhörnchen. Schwedische marzipan.

:::: Restless Berlin: its urban planning guide the one for the book you’re holding, the architecture its architecture.

:::: Because here is Beckett again, whose work seems empty of politics, and yet who functioned as a courier for the French Resistance after the 1940 German occupation, and yet who referred to those efforts as boy scout stuff, and yet who received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance from the government for them:

Habit is the great deadener.

:::: What I mean to say is this: culture makes believe it is all about remembering, when remembering is pretty much the last thing culture is ever about.

:::: Outside your window today, sparse snowflakes agitate gauzy air.

:::: More not-news, this time from Donna Haraway: Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

:::: Or Koestenbaum, redux: One way to be an I is to lose the I.

:::: J.F.K.’s assertion about being a jelly donut has been memed by media ever since: the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times. This novel. That monograph. It became a communal recollection of an adorable malapropism.

The problem is that Kennedy didn’t actually make a grammatical mistake. To a German ear, nothing sounds amiss. In fact, the gaff would have clanked had he said Ich bin Berliner, meaning I am a person from Berlin, as echt Berliners can and do.

By adding the indefinite article ein before the noun, however, Kennedy cast his sentence into the figurative: he was claiming he felt like a person living in Berlin rather than claiming residence. He was declaring solidarity with the German people in perfect German.

During the speech, he used the phrase twice. He had it carefully written out in English phonetics before him because he knew not a word of the language he was speaking:

Ish bin ein Bearleener.

:::: Here is Debord, back from the country of theory ghosts: The new towns of the technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest of indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded; their motto might well be:

On this spot nothing will ever happen — and nothing ever has.

:::: The fellow fellow living in the apartment above yours at the Academy enigmatically rearranges his or her furniture every night, beginning around 11:00 p.m. You can hear chairs and maybe a desk dragged back and forth. Maybe a small sofa.

:::: In Berlin everything can and has happened.

:::: Early each spring, I am told, Germans develop a fetish for white asparagus.

:::: Pockmarks on the facades, columns, walls throughout the city: the war still going on everywhere.

All you have to do is look.

:::: The American Academy provides a bus tour of the city. Unnervingly well-informed, our guide, a freelance art historian named Billie, tells us a version, I imagine, of what all guides here tell all tourists.

At the end, in private, I hear one of the fellows complain to another that Billie has done no more than perpetuate the clichéd Western narrative about the great triumph of democratic goodness over East Germany’s shabby authoritarianism.

Does the fellow mean to imply the East somehow wasn’t dingy and despotic?

The Stasi wasn’t known as the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agency in the world; didn’t boast half a million informers, 10,000 younger than 18; didn’t infiltrate all industrial plants, schools, universities, hospitals; didn’t drill holes through hotel-room and apartment walls to spy on its own citizens; didn’t employ psychological intimidation as well as physical torture (including the use of cold, damp, overcrowded, filthy, airless cells; sleep deprivation; standing upright until unconsciousness ensued; proto-waterboarding); didn’t thereby plant regiments of Foucault’s invisible police behind its people’s foreheads?

:::: According to the O.E.D., the word avant-garde initially referred to an army’s shock troops.

And was first used in English by Malory.

Sometime between 1470 and 1485.

:::: The gray lake freezes overnight and you find yourself standing at the window, thinking: All this seeing. All this taking in.

:::: One morning in a hotel in Mandalay I tried to check the news on a public computer. The sites for the BBC, CNN, The New York Times were blocked by the government. So I looked up a private proxy with an IP address in London and used that. By the time I was done skimming headlines, three boxy men in bromidic military uniforms and aviator sunglasses were standing behind me, asking, in Burmese, from what I could gather from their cheerlessness, what I thought I was doing.

:::: Etiolation: the process of causing a plant to grow pale by depriving it of light; hence the genesis of said white asparagus, in whose case dirt is kept mounded around the emerging stalks.

Likewise, naturally, innovative writing practices.

:::: Look up the first definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. and you will find carefulness, application of care and attention.

Both now obsolete.

:::: Not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Observed Donald Barthelme, winner of the 1972 National Book Award.

In the category of Children’s Books.

:::: Because all mobile phones are collected by customs agents upon your arrival at the Rangoon airport.

You can reclaim them upon your departure from the country.

:::: How a week into O.’s stay, a photographer appears to take portraits of each fellow. She seats O. in a leather chair in the lush library in front of a built-in bookcase, asks him to look into the camera, steps back a few feet to take the shot.

Except then she starts squinting into her viewfinder as if having difficulty making something out.

Puzzled, O. waits for instructions.

A minute, and the photographer lowers her camera, steps forward, reaches around him, removes a book from the shelf, lays it off to the side, out of range of the lens: George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points.

He isn’t a friend to the artist, the photographer says, backs up, raises her camera, and carries on.

:::: In German passport photos, the rule is never to show your teeth.

:::: Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.

Dared Ortega y Gasset.

:::: Teufelsberg means Devil’s Mountain, although it wasn’t made by the devil and isn’t a mountain. Rather, it’s a manmade hill rising about 260 feet above sea level in what used to be West Berlin.

It took 20 years to build out of war rubble.

About 75 million cubic yards of what once upon a time had been a place.

:::: Learning to travel is another way of saying learning to read.

:::: The second definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. — careful attention to detail, scrupulousness, exactness, accuracy—also obsolete.

:::: Watching a clip of Bush speaking on the German news, I notice the person creating the German subtitles is quietly correcting the President’s bad grammar and providing him with coherent thoughts.

:::: One of the fellows at the Academy notes in passing that, instead of washing his clothes, he has simply kept buying more t-shirts, underwear, and socks in order to hold off the inevitable.

:::: Learning to read is another way of saying learning to travel.

:::: Look up the third definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. — proficiency attained by careful application; skill, cleverness, ingenuity—and ditto.

:::: My first public reading in Berlin takes place in the little Las Vegas in Potsdamer Platz called the Sony Center. Before the war, this was the city’s iconic central hive, its Piccadilly Circus. Allied bombing destroyed most of it and, when the Wall went up, any structures left standing were razed to make room for the death strip’s barbed wire, electric fences, trenches, vehicle barriers, landmines, spring guns, and watchtowers.

Now Potsdamer Platz is all ecstatic economy again, Helmut Jahn’s energetic architectural hyperventilation: a revivalist confusion of industrial inside/outside, cinemas, restaurants, a conference center, hotel rooms, condos, malls, offices, a miniature Legoland, museums, a fountain, pink lights fading into blue and back again on the vast tent-like roof, and a huge television screen looping images of tropical fish drifting among rocks on the very white floor of some very blue, very distant ocean.

A nearby office building has bragging rights to Europe’s fastest elevator.

:::: Clever people master life; the wise create fresh difficulties.

Concluded Emil Nolde, who was an ardent supporter of the Nazi party for more than a decade — until 1052 of his works were removed from German museums, more than any other artist.

:::: What I mean to say is this: culture is an investment in an aesthetics of absentmindedness.

:::: Three yurts set up surreally by Potsdamer Platz’s fountain constitute the Wintersalon. One sells authors’ books. The other two host readings by 35 writers in half-hour segments over the course of four days. I’m the sole American on the roster.

Outside it’s shrilly cold, but duck through the decorated yurt door and it’s all crowded warmth and coziness. Two rows of cushioned benches along the perimeter. Colorful pillows piled in the center.

I take my seat behind a modest table outfitted with a boom mic. The host lowers the lights, and, just like that, it’s storytelling a thousand years ago: this magic expanse outside time.

What surprises me most is the raptness on the listeners’ faces, how I’ve never seen the same look back in the States — the one that tells you words still matter insanely, novels can still do things other art forms will never be capable of even trying to imagine, still celebrate language’s strangeness and human consciousness’s impossibilities for page after page after page.

:::: Otto and Elise Hampel were a working-class couple who during the war handwrote over 200 postcards denouncing Hitler and slipped them into strangers’ mailboxes in and around Wedding, their Berlin neighborhood.

They evaded the Gestapo for two years. Discovered, they were tried and beheaded in the Plötzensee Prison.

Along with 3000 others.

:::: In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

Remarked Nietzsche.

:::: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Werner Henze: Vielen Dank.

:::: For 10 days each year Berlin hosts Ultraschall, a festival of avant-garde music. At funky venues scattered throughout the city (a nineteenth-century waste-pumping station, an old train depot), you pay recklessly reasonable prices to gather with fewer than 200 aficionados to hear Schönberg, Luciano Berio, Emmanuel Nunes, Vito Zuraj.

On the second night, you begin to recognize faces in the audience, realize you accidentally stumbled upon a secret handshake.

:::: Serious travel — the kind that doesn’t involve air-conditioned buses, fanny packs, and American buffets in Cairo or Beirut Best Westerns — is accompanied by an element of play: the same sort that takes place in readers when discovering their ways through what Roland Barthes referred to as writerly texts — those which, by short-circuiting literary codes, fling the reader out of his or her subject position, put everything up for grabs, announce bliss’s entrance to the banquet.

:::: What if I turn right instead of left? What’s that over there? What does this taste like? Where will I stay? What’s that statue, this rash, that rotunda, this bazaar, that café?

When does the next train leave, the next bus arrive?

:::: If required, we can live without a heart, Joseph Beuys observed.

:::: Serious travel is also accompanied by an element of calamity that can run the gamut from mild discomfort to affliction, depending on who you are, when you are, where, with whom.

Why, I wonder, hasn’t more been written about reading as a mode of pain?

:::: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.

Felt Foucault.

:::: The fifth definition: desire to know or learn in a blamable sense; the disposition to inquire too minutely into anything; undue inquisitive desire to know or learn.

Videlicet: curiosity killed the traveler?

:::: Tell me how you interpret the adrenaline rush you’re experiencing, and I will tell you who you are.

Ortega y Gasset didn’t say, but could have.

:::: The steady rain unfreezing the lake minute by minute.

:::: Those all-you-can-eat buffets offering up the same blah food you can find at your local Chuck-A-Rama, Applebee’s, reminding you of those corporate novels offering up the same blah fiction you can find at your local John Grisham, Inc., Tom Clancy, Ltd.

:::: When André the Giant turned 12, e.g., he was already more than six feet tall and 240 pounds. He was so big, in fact, that he couldn’t fit on the local school bus, and his family couldn’t afford a car to transport him.

André’s father was a Bulgarian farmer named Boris Rousimoff. Boris worked on a farm about 40 miles northeast of Paris. In 1953, a skinny guy with an eagle’s smile showed up and bought some land next to his. Boris helped him build a cottage.

The guy’s name was Samuel Beckett.

:::: In the early sixties, there were more than 100 publishing houses thriving in New York. They were responsible for bringing out what we think of as innovative writers, including Barthelme, Coover, Delany, Gass, Le Guin, Pynchon. The recession brought on by the 1973 oil crisis changed that. Editors were laid off. Publishers went under or were absorbed by bigger publishers. Attention recalibrated from aesthetic risk to bottom line.

Being a brief history of the McDonaldization of U.S. publishing.

:::: Boris Rousimoff befriended his new next-door neighbor. Sometimes they played cards together. When Beckett learned the young André the Giant was having trouble getting to school, he offered to drive the boy in his own truck.

The only topic André could remember Beckett and him talking about on the way was cricket. That is, one of the conversations to which I would most love to have been privy in my life would have been utterly incomprehensible to me.

:::: [[I’m]] at a theatrical rethinking of Kafka’s The Castle.

Instead of speaking, the actors in the Novoflot opera company sing gorgeously rendered Schubert lieder against a sonic background generated by a dissonant ensemble featuring improvisation by a trombonist who, at one point, uses his instrument as a sledgehammer against a metal wall.

Ten minutes, and audience members are asked to rise and move from the primary theater to a connecting one. As soon as they take their seats, the stands they’re sitting in commence revolving. Tucked into a corner, an artist at a computer doodles stick figures, arrows, phrases that are projected onto the walls. The ceiling lowers, compressing space.

The production doesn’t retell Kafka’s text so much as actualize a series of moments that half-rhymes with it.

[[I]] end up feeling what [[I]] felt when [[I]] read The Castle, only more so: [[I]] negotiate a non-space more Kafkaesque than Kafka’s original, a production more like The Castle than The Castle is like itself.

Near the end, a dead child lowers by cord from the ceiling.

:::: The first postwar art gallery — Galerie Rosen — opened at 215 Kurfürstendamm three months after Hitler and Eva Braun changed tense beneath what is now the lawn of a residential housing project and kindergarten in the old East Berlin.

The gallery featured works that earlier in 1945 would have been denounced as degenerate and burned. Gerd Rosen, the founder, thereby flagged the reintroduction of a liberatory sphere for the arts in Berlin that championed an aesthetics of life over living death while standing in flagrant contrast to the head-slappingly dreary social-realist figurative one manufactured by the G.D.R. at the same time that attempts to share with us the beatitudes of farmish and factoryish monotony.

Being a brief history of the experimental and mainstream in U.S. publishing.

:::: Curiosity arrives in English from the Latin curiosus, meaning not only diligent, but also meddlesome, by way of the old French curios, which often denoted anxious, odd, strange.

In booksellers’ catalogues, the word curiosity means pornographic.

:::: Paul Bowles felt most inspired when inhabiting the interval between two places.

:::: Sit on your hands, the Stasi interrogator tells the accused in the opening scene of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, another rethinking of Kafka. They are in one of those confining tan interrogation rooms at the East Berlin detention center Andi and I visited earlier this week.

The interrogator’s flat tone and blank blue eyes announce: Pay attention to me. Anyone can happen next.

:::: The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, like Galerie Rosen, was located on Kurfürstendamm with its swank shops, hotels, restaurants, and Jaguar showroom. It was largely demolished in a 1943 bombing raid. The damaged spire remains as memorial.

Every few years scaffolding rises around the structure. A team of specialists sets out to maintain just the right ruined look — not too much destruction, not too little.

:::: This book: a waste aesthetics.

:::: Naturally O. isn’t suggesting New York doesn’t publish vibrant, surprising work: José Saramago, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Mark Danielewski, et alia.

O. is suggesting, however, New York brings out less of it—much less of it — than it once did. Nor does he want to submit that alternative presses don’t bring out some embarrassingly simple sloppy stuff. Still, those small presses constitute important sites of aesthetic, political, and philosophical anti-Oedipal resistance.

They remind us with each publication that our writing, and hence our lives, can be other than they are.

:::: No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke, David Foster Wallace advanced: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

:::: Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock.

Donald Barthelme once described his fiction as.

:::: When in the condition of traveling, you can by definition never take anything for granted.

:::: During the war, tankers my father sailed on were torpedoed and sunk two times. Once he was forced to jump overboard into a burning sea while a U-Boat circled, machine-gunning the survivors of the initial blasts.

By the time you hit the water, he told me, you have either chosen to believe in God or chosen never to believe in Him again.

My father got on the latter tram.

:::: [[Yesterday will invariably remain a rumor.]]

:::: When Linda Hutcheon talks about historiographic metafiction, she’s talking about writing practices aware of themselves as writing practices, aware that pastness occurs only in an incessant process of being un- and re-written.

:::: Wandering from room to room in the Wannsee Conference center, you wonder how Germans can carry such history on their backs from one day to the next.

A thought which leads you to wonder how Americans can do the same.

:::: Facts, Hutcheon continues, are discourse defined. Events are not.

To narrate, naturally, is to constellate facts.

To tell is by necessity to tell through the glitch of memory and fuddle of ideology.

:::: The genocide of Native Americans. Slavery. Vietnam. Und so weiter.

:::: I sit across a table from a French fellow at dinner. She lives in America, does German philosophy. Her father spent the butt ends of the war in Buchenwald, then Dachau, for working in the Resistance.

Her young communist self believed the G.D.R. was populated by utopian communes where girls in spotless white dresses played on lawns green as those now covering the remains of the Führerbunker — until she arrived in East Berlin to spend a righteous summer building housing for the comrades, only to find herself living in a hovel in a muddy field in one of the drabbest, meanest corners of earth.

That is, she explained, she’s had a profoundly complicated relationship with Germany all her life and yet, after spending many months on and off in Berlin since those strange early days, she caught herself last week strolling down a street in the city center loving the country without qualification.

Why?

The Germans, she explained, have more fully, more honestly confronted their heebee-jeebies yesterdays than any other culture she could name.

:::: The first definition of the word experimental is of a witness: having actual or personal experience of anything.

:::: Wandering Berlin’s streets, I find myself thinking about the morality of architecture: what you choose to reference, demolish, build, rebuild, reshape, augment, bury, unearth, partition, rename, retell, put a plaque on.

How. Why.

:::: Ampelmännchen: the dapper male figures wearing hats that comprise pedestrian-crossing signals here. When red, their arms are outstretched to block the way. When green, they appear in mid-stride to suggest it is safe to walk. Designed by a psychologist worried that about eight percent of any population is colorblind.

Born in East Germany in 1961, Ampelmännchen are one of the few communist symbols to survive the Wende — the Peaceful Revolution, the fall of the Wall, the transition to democracy in the East — and infect the West.

:::: Because the worst has already happened in the world of books. They have come to seem over the last four or five decades an increasingly conservative, market-driven form of communication. There exists a censorship in publishing based on an economic ecology. In addition to the current outlandish situation in Manhattan, even bestsellers now exist in a secondary position to the spectacles of film, television, the web, the Xbox, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.

Not 100 thriving houses, not 60 or sixteen or six, but three behemoth media corporations dominate commercial publishing.

They employ the print arms of their swollen conglomerates as tax write-offs.

:::: It’s always Stunde Null, Zero Hour, in Berlin and innovative writing practices.

:::: Which is to say the Khmer Rouge. Rwandan genocide. Israel’s freakish execution of its own Berlin Wall and ghettos for the unwanted.

Why. How.

:::: Our verb narrate comes to us from the Latin narrare, meaning to tell, relate, recount, explain, literally to make acquainted with, which comes to us from the Proto-Indo-European root gno, meaning to know.

To tell always resulting in a failed stab at understanding.

:::: Magnus Hirschfeld was an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the increasingly tolerant interzone of the Weimar Republic, he opened the Institute for Sexual Research a stone’s throw from the Reichstag in 1919. The Institute provided medical consultations and housed both a library with a vast collection on sexuality and the Museum of Sex, the latter of which was regularly visited by eager schoolchildren on fieldtrips.

:::: Fourteen years later, 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz to watch books go up in smoke.

Into a huge bonfire went 20,000 by those the Nazis deemed subversive: liberals, anarchists, communists, pacifists, socialists. Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Karl Marx. Helen Keller. Ernest Hemingway. H.G. Wells. Jack London. Sigmund Freud. Sinclair Lewis. Albert Einstein. Rainer Maria Rilke.

Joseph Goebbels honored the enthusiastic crowd with a speech. Scholarship had gradually isolated itself from real life, he said. He said the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism was over. Yes to decency and morality in the family and state, he said.

Sounding a lot like a commentator on Fox News.

The books you see the Nazis tossing into the flames in the famous newsreel footage supposedly belong to Magnus Hirschfeld’s library.

:::: Arriving at a new destination, you pay attention in a way you’re never able to do after having lived there for even a few weeks.

How the doorknobs are handles placed slightly higher than you’re used to. How some of the street-crossing signals sound like metronomes while others don’t. How non-fat milk, yogurt, and lattés are virtually unheard of outside Starbucks and the robot voice on all trains tells you politely a minute before you reach the next station which side to expect the platform on.

As it always is with leaving home, Anthony Doerr noticed, it is the details that displace us.

:::: At the Academy, they’re paying me to write. It’s extraordinary. They cook for me five days a week; clean the apartment and change towels every Monday; offer Andi and me private tours of galleries, free tickets for films and music, a chance to meet German artists and writers and musicians — and they provide me with a generous monthly stipend.

All I have to do is put down words on pages and attend lectures by fellow fellows.

The guilt and elation vie up and down my spine every morning as I take my seat before my computer, in the middle of every night when I shock awake in the luminous non-hours.

:::: Under ordinary circumstances we should like to recommend another publisher to whom the work might appeal; but we regret to say that we do not think it probable that you will find any publisher for work of this kind.

Wrote an editor when rejecting a manuscript submitted by Gertrude Stein.

:::: How the pillows for some reason smell medicinally bitter. How even I — five-foot-eight and slim, give or take, despite the weight my belly has already begun aggregating because of the amazing food — feel too large in the shower stall, my elbows knocking into the hardware, changing water pressure and temperature. How our apartment has a doorbell that sounds like something more urgent, electronic, and high-pitched than a doorbell, and so I often tune it out when writing, neglect to check who might be waiting on the other side.

How staying is a gradual process of forgetting how to see, hear, smell, touch, taste.

:::: Travel is what Marcos Novack calls liquid architecture — a digital mode without doors or hallways; visionary designs seeking out extreme regions that feel like spatialized music; continuously unfixed, flickering, mercurial constructions whose forms are contingent on the interests of the beholder; structures for what does not yet exist.

:::: The fifth definition of experimental: tentative.

:::: The difference between art and entertainment involves the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so we can re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so we don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all.

:::: Schlager: the word (literally meaning hit—in the musical sense — as well as wooden club) for the overly sweet ballads with catchy melodies and love lyrics that were especially popular in Germany during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and that saw a kitsch comeback in the 1990s and early 2000s. Schlager is the sonic lint Krautrock groups like Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh, and Tangerine Dream tried to sweep out the door.

Schlager isn’t political. That’s exactly what makes it so political.

:::: Inhabitants of towns near concentration camps reported tufts of human hair from the crematoria occasionally drifting down into the streets.

:::: When O. was in his twenties, one of the great pleasures of waking each morning was knowing he was about to share his dreams with A. over breakfast, A. about to share her dreams with him. Now he’s lucky if he can remember one drab flash rehearsing some tone-deaf scene.

Initially he attributed this impairment to the busyness of mid-life rhythms: the job, the responsibilities, the stuff of distraction. In Berlin, however, away from all that, it is the same thing, so he goes online to learn what’s happening between his ears. Apparently things are getting older. Humans sleep less and less as they age. Stage four sleep becomes distant gossip among most elderly people. Chronic aches and pains jab one awake in the middle of the night. One discovers oneself with an enlarged prostate, and/or depression, and/or anxiety, and/or restless leg syndrome, and/or breathing difficulties.

Evidence suggests your dream world gradually fades from color to black-and-white.

Your cranium turns into the history of film, only in reverse.

:::: Koestenbaum: A hotel room can never be mine, no matter how many nights in a row I stay there.

An assertion that is both true and false.

Give yourself a week, and you’ll become aware of your hotel room to the same extent you are already aware of any room in your house as you pass through it on your way to somewhere else, which is to say almost not at all.

:::: In Berlin, one enjoyed freedom, of both conscience and penis.

Affirmed Voltaire.

:::: Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term narrative fallacy to refer to the common intellectual blunder of forcing chaos into cosmos in an attempt to account for what eventuates around us.

We are natural story generators, pattern recognition machines, designed to narrate what the world has done to us, whether what the world has done makes sense or not. Give us an incident, no matter how enigmatic, indeterminate, or tenuous its causes, and we will tell in order to generate the impression of coherence. We strong-arm links, invent causal chains.

Hello conspiracy theorists, Greek mythologists, biographers, New-Age everything-occurs-for-a-reasoners, historians, cargo cultists, voodoo worshippers, doctors, chemists, Nabokov’s Austrian crank with his shabby umbrella.

Give us a bedlam of stars in the night sky and we will birth Andromeda, Draco, Virgo.

:::: Here is the difference between the arts in the United States and Europe. In the States, the worth of said arts is measured by their non-figurative value — by how much cash the cow can make. In Europe, governments subsidize music, writing, drama, dance because a different system of value is at work, one that evinces the deep-structure assumption that arts are the heart of any flourishing culture and thus must be maintained at any cost.

:::: To grasp the history of the arts in the U.S., ask yourself how much the Guggenheim Foundation, founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon in memory of their son, has donated to date, then ask yourself the same about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, regardless of the latter’s advertising campaign about thinking differently.

In America, innovation is the thing you do to maximize your profits.

:::: Another way of spelling this out: the current budget for military bands in the States is about $500,000,000. The current budget for the entire National Endowment for the Arts is $154,000,000.

:::: Libricide: literally the killing of books.

:::: If you cut through the main exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof’s Museum for the Present, cross into the sparsely populated hallways and rooms that once functioned maybe as storage facilities at the once train station, you will eventually arrive at a blacked-out glass door tucked into an easy-to-miss corner.

Step through, and you’re inside Bruce Nauman’s installation Room with My Soul Left Out—a hangar-sized gray expanse dimly lit by two rows of high filthy windows and a few yellow light panels. Before you lie three narrow dark corridors, two crossing horizontally, one vertically. On the shadowy black floor far beneath the grating covering the latter so that viewers can walk over: perhaps an origami bird and figure of a human with arms outstretched, each a couple inches in length. It is impossible to tell for sure.

The whole thing feels uncannily empty, black, bare, like descending that enormous spiral staircase in Danielewski’s House of Leaves and trying to reckon your way among the infinite featureless cubicles at the bottom, their walls the color of Borges and cinders.

:::: This is not for you, reads the epigraph of Danielewski’s novel about a blind man’s critical meditation on a documentary that can’t possibly exist about a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. Will Navidson, the impossible film’s protagonist, cautions: And if one day you find yourself passing by that house, don’t stop, don’t slow down, just keep going. There’s nothing there.

Nothing—not only in the sense of not anything, but also in the Nietzschean one: that big black void beating in the pith of being.

:::: Nauman’s is the only installation I can think of that consciously uses the air itself — here uncomfortably cold, oily, dark — as part of the material of the work, a construction that goes nowhere, teaches zip, embodies the purest form of Freud’s unheimlich: a term that contains within itself heim (home), unheim (not home), and heimlich (hidden, secret).

The unheimlich signifies what we know, yet has been made unfamiliar, a forever being-at-home that is also a never-being-at-home.

:::: Andi and I flew to Zürich, from Zürich to Cairo, and from Cairo to Kampala, where we hired a guide at the Sheraton to drive us eight hours southeast on increasingly narrow, rutted, red-dirt roads into the mountains of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

We stayed in a tented camp and at dawn our first morning were joined by four other trekkers (none American), two trackers, and a dozen soldiers carrying machineguns to dissuade the local rebels from taking potshots at the tourist economy. We rode in back of a rickety troop carrier to the edge of a pasture, hiked up a steep trail past thatched huts into brush so dense the trackers had to machete open paths grown over since the day before. Five sweaty hours, and we came across leaf beds marked with reeking humanoid scat. Twenty minutes after that we broke through into a clearing alive with gorillas. Mothers and babies. Young males playing among branches. A pot-bellied silverback reclining sprawl-legged against a tree trunk like an old drunk. It rose languidly, scratched itself, snorted, and bolted forward in a fake charge, halting fewer than 18 inches from my face. I averted my eyes and covered my teeth like the trackers had instructed.

Grunting, the gorilla inspected me meticulously.

Taking in silverback breath was the most stunning 30 seconds of my life. It smelled exactly like

:::: Wunderkammer literally translates as wonder chamber, or chamber of wonders, which comes over into English as cabinet of curiosities—the sort of exhibition that functions both as microcosm of the world and memory theater.

Berlin’s most well known belonged to Joachim II, Elector from 1535 to 1571. It was nearly destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, rebuilt by Friedrich Wilhelm. It ultimately found a home in Friedrich III’s City Palace — which exited the Second World War a burned-out shell and was leveled by the G.D.R. in 1964 to make way for the imaginatively bankrupt Palace of the Republic, which in turn was demolished between 2006 and 2008 to make way for a replica of Friedrich III’s City Palace that would serve as tourist flytrap.

The Ashmolean in Oxford began as a Wunderkammer, as did the British Museum. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. is a self-consciously anachronistic iteration of one. Five categories of objects are displayed in them: artificiala (artworks); naturalia (rare natural phenomena); scientifica (scientific instruments); exotica (pieces from strange worlds); and mirabilia (inexplicable items).

The Wunderkammer is designed to provoke astonishment as reward for keeping one’s eyes open.

:::: Innovate, the O.E.D. reminds us, means to change a thing into something new; to alter; to renew (rare after 1750).

:::: Travel removes one from clock time, from the capitalist insistence that minutes are money, our lives meant to be segmented, regulated, reified. Travel serves as compelled dislocation and temporal smear. When it is no longer that, it is no longer travel: you have arrived somewhere.

The same being the case with innovative writing practices.

:::: In another room on another floor in the Hamburger Bahnhof loops Joseph Beuys’s How One Explains Pictures to a Dead Rabbit, a video of a 1965 performance in Düsseldorf.

Beuys — who volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1941, was deployed as a rear-gunner in a dive-bomber, and shot down on the Crimean front in 1944—locked out the audience from the gallery before beginning. People had to peer in through the windows if they wanted to see what was going on. Because the video is shot in black-and-white, the honey and gold leaf Beuys has slathered over his head look mucosal, something out of H. R. Giger’s daydreams, transform Beuys into burn victim, a golem. He wanders from painting to painting, whispering to the rabbit carcass cradled in his arms. Sometimes he sets the carcass on the floor, hunches over it, marionettes its legs while holding its head up by nipping the tips of its long ears between his teeth. It is alive. It is dead. It is alive. It is

:::: When, three hours later, the audience was finally allowed into the gallery, it encountered Beuys sitting on a stool at the entrance, rabbit nursed in arms, artist’s back to his admirers.

His gestural exegesis of art’s significance, like Zampanò’s film in House of Leaves, is unimaginable because the idea of explanation remains an asemic act of separation, four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (which announces different systems of noise), a dispatch direct from the hurt locker broadcasting clarification’s nonappearance.

It’s right there in front of us, but only as what will never be right there in front of us.

:::: N.B.: My favorite line in the American Academy’s pamphlet on German Etiquette: An invitation for dinner at eight usually means [arriving] anytime between 7:59 and 8:00.

:::: Yesterday a tranquil snowy walk with Andi around the frozen Schlachtensee to a café on the far side for bratwurst, potato salad, lattés, and apfeltorte.

We sat among others at tables on a deck overlooking the winter lake. What appealed to me most were the red blankets draped over each chair. Patrons wrap themselves in them to stay warm, as if this were an obvious solution to a minor inconvenience, which it is.

:::: Travel is the condition of willed exile, being exposed, without protection from your government’s laws, sans firm friends and family.

In previous times (cf. Euripedes’ Medea) it was conceived as a fate worse than death.

:::: N.B.: to explain is from the Latin explanare: to make flat.

:::: Literary specimens of the Wunderkammer: Shelley Jackson’s hypertext My Body, David Markson’s Last Novel, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, Anne Carson’s Nox, Steve Tomasula’s Vas, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, Michael Mejia’s Forgetfulness.

This city. This book.

:::: Before I turn off my computer for the afternoon, I check the news as a way to begin to ease back into the world.

A 10-ton meteor entered earth’s atmosphere at 33,000 miles per hour in the skies over the Chelyabinsk region in Russia and exploded. The result was a shaking strong as an earthquake that blew in windows behind which people had quickly gathered to figure out what was going on. About 300 buildings suffered damage. Nearly 1000 people were injured.

:::: Reality is finally a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.

Observed Philip Roth.

In 1961.

:::: The original title of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire is Der Himmel über Berlin — The Sky Over Berlin, or, maybe better, The Heaven Over Berlin.

I fell in love with it again last night. Bruno Ganz at his most Ganzian. Peter Falk at his most understated and wise. I had no idea Peter Handke, whose Goalie Anxiety Before the Penalty Kick changed the way I thought about fiction, had a hand in its composition — generating much of the dialogue and lyrical fields.

When I first saw the film in the late eighties, I thought I was watching a movie about an angel who chooses to enter time in order to experience the hideous beauties associated with living inside that spacesuit called a body.

Last night I realized I was watching a visual poem.

There’s so many good things, Falk, himself once an angel, advises Damiel, the one who wants to degenerate into the likes of you and me.

:::: Davis Schneiderman posts a link to David Bowie’s new video on my Facebook page. Where Are We Now? was released on 8 January 2013, Bowie’s 66th birthday. It had been 10 years since we last heard new music from him. The video features experimental filmmaker Tony Oursler’s wife Jacqueline Humphries and Ziggy Stardust as conjoined homunculi perched atop a pommel horse in Oursler’s junk-filled New York studio. Behind them runs grainy black-and-white footage from pre-Wende Berlin. To the left sits the model of a large blue ear, to the right one of a large white eye. We are in another Wunderkammer.

This isn’t a rock’n’roll suicide or suffragette city, but it is all about changes. Listen, and you’ll hear a voice washed through with time — frailer, more spectral, yearning, candid than its earlier iterations. Listen, and you’ll hear Bowie hanging out with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the club Dschungel in the late seventies; throngs of East Germans passing across the Bösebrücke, the first border crossing that opened as the Wall fell on 9 November 1989—20,000 in the first hour, each unsure whether he or she was allowed to do what he or she was doing. You’ll hear Bowie’s heart attack back stage during a 2004 performance in Germany, his rush into emergency surgery for an acutely blocked artery.

What moves me most about the song, which has become our Berlin Days Anthem, is how shot through it is with that blue-eyed boy Mr. Death, how it could never have been written by a musician in his forties or thirties, let alone his twenties.

After fifty, your face becomes an accomplishment.

:::: The old poet in Wings of Desire is named, perhaps too noticeably, Homer. He walks beside an angel along the graffiti-covered Wall through the blast zone once thought of as Potsdamer Platz, now just vehicle tracks through a vast mud flat, water-filled potholes, tall weeds, a lone chimney, abandoned pieces of furniture, the black skeleton of an elevated bridge.

If mankind loses its storyteller, Homer reckons later in the film, then it will lose its childhood.

:::: Here is Lyotard: The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that the work and text have the character of an event.

:::: Innovative works are foreigners in the land of genres, exiles from the country of resemblance.

:::: The blue and white ferry on Lake Wannsee pressing through this string of days gray and cold as the windows in Nauman’s installation.

:::: At dinner one of my fellow fellows admits he’s homesick when I ask him how he likes Berlin.

I miss my reading chair, he says wistfully.

:::: A few minutes later, it is March.

:::: By way of anachronous Flash animation techniques, Young-Hae Chang and Heavy Industries’ text-film Traveling to Utopia: With a Brief History of Technology takes the form, not of a customary nonsequential hypertext, but rather of multiple black and green blocky words racing across the top, middle, and bottom of a bright white screen at a speed the reader/viewer cannot control. Because of the velocity, the reader/viewer often needs three, four, five or more encounters before beginning to assemble the information present.

:::: While painting Daniel Boone’s portrait, Chester Harding asked the frontiersman if he had ever been lost. No, I can’t say I was ever lost, Boone replied, but I was bewildered once for three days.

:::: In the Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station, the large sepia pre-War images of the area that serve as ongoing reminders of what Berlin could have been, of how one day the country decided to undo itself.

:::: I was bewildered once for more than a decade, the whole of my childhood in River Edge, New Jersey, because for some reason I always intuited the tri-state area had been grafted onto the real country. So I ended up going to Madison, Wisconsin, for college when the administration was still lobbing teargas at its students, and to Charlottesville, Virginia, for my doctoral work.

I took my first job at the University of Kentucky because I sensed I would get a better education teaching there than elsewhere.

:::: Traveling to Utopia. Across the top of the screen runs a narrative in Korean characters, indecipherable to most English speakers at any speed. Across the bottom runs one in English that recounts the Kafkaesque dream of a nameless (and ambiguously gendered) narrator stopped by three policemen at a subway station that may be in Seoul or Paris, questioned briefly, and allowed to go on her/his way. Across the middle of the screen runs what one takes to be the principle narrative, also in English, telling the story of a (probably) different nameless female narrator’s life with technology from her first run-in with a computer in her father’s office to her own first laptop while at university and beyond.

Walking through a metal detector at an airport one day, she sets off the alarm. A visit to the doctor reveals someone has implanted a chip used to track endangered species in her abdomen. Like Gregor Samsa, she abruptly becomes exiled from her own body. The story concludes with the narrator reporting she has taken to living in airports, which for her represent atemporal, non-spatial realms that make her feel safe, as if she is both everywhere and nowhere — the Ur-experience for all travelers.

All three narratives are interrupted briefly, once, by a screen-sized smiley face clock, while an upbeat jazz score at odds with the narratives’ content plays throughout.

:::: In Venezuela our maid decapitated live chickens on the way to our dinner table by forcing their squawking heads down the garbage disposal.

The grinding. The bloody feathers.

:::: Young-Hae Chang is a Korean artist with a Ph.D. in aesthetics from Université de Paris. Heavy Industries is one other person: Marc Voge.

We changed Marc into Heavy Industries, Chang explains in an interview, because Koreans love big companies and Marc doesn’t mind being objectified and capitalized on.

They hardly ever do interviews. When they do partake, they generate wide-eyed doubletalk.

Andy Warhol: hello.

Guten Tag, cosmopolitan interchange among the arts.

:::: Because people still read books on trains in Berlin. Fat books. O. can’t make out the titles, but the very fact makes him secretly happy.

Several nights ago the filmmaker Su Friedrich revealed to him over dinner this is no longer the case in New York. Everyone on the subway is thumbing his or her smart phone or iPad or iPod instead.

You don’t know what those around you are reading, she said. You no longer have any idea who forms the community in which you’re traveling. Fuck that.

:::: Our cultural retreat from narrative. Our cultural addiction to narrative.

:::: I am at war with myself.

Admitted Derrida.

:::: Sixty-two years after those people gathered in Opernplatz to watch books burn, Micha Ullman’s memorial commemorating the event was inaugurated. You have to hunt for it: a two-and-a-half-foot by two-and-a-half-foot piece of hazy Plexiglas set into the cobblestones of the square. Look through, and you will see a ghostly library below: a large white room filled with entirely empty white bookcases reminding you what was lost that couldn’t be lost.

:::: Next to the Plexiglas window, a brass plaque in German: This was only foreplay. Where they burn books, they will also burn people.

A quote by Heinrich Heine.

From 1821.

:::: Wandering through what had once been an orchard in Choeung Ek about 10 miles south of Phnom Penh, I start noticing shreds of material wisping out of the dried mud around my feet and realize we are walking on top of some of the 8,895 people murdered here by the Khmer Rouge.

To save bullets, they smashed babies’ and children’s heads against the surrounding trees.

:::: When the child was a child, the angel Damiel writes in his diary, it was the time of these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there?

:::: N. Katherine Hayles highlights the importance of Media Specific Analysis when approaching any text. We’ve been raised on hardcopy data delivery systems that have remained virtually unchanged in appearance for 500 years. As new paginal and surpaginal forms emerge, it is essential to employ a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.

How a text matters mattering.

:::: How can it be that I, who am I, wasn’t before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?

:::: During the autumn of our second year in Lexington, Andi came across the following in a local greensheet: FOR SALE: Remote cabin on 15 acres, Red River Gorge. Cliffs, caves, waterfalls. 1000 sq. ft., 2 BR, electricity. Great for relaxing, hiking, writing. Under $12,000. We drove out the next weekend to have a look. Remote was 70 miles to the east, in Meniffee county, first on a highway, then a series of winding and increasingly hilly, woody back roads through towns with names like Camargo and Grants Lick. Past fields of yellow-green tobacco and the Primitive Baptist Church, which was no larger than a sagging garage, and past the Lucky Stop Pentacostal Barn, which doubled as a used-car lot, and past block letters in white paint on the side of another gray barn that spelled SECULAR HUMANISM IS THE DEVIL’S WORK, then into and out of the last town, Frenchburg, which consisted of a Methodist church, a Piggily Wiggily Food Mart, a post office, and Mom’s Kuntry Kitchen.

:::: If I got bad marks or did something bad, my mother would say: It’s a pity that I got out of Auschwitz to experience that.

Related Yaakov Gilad, whose mother also survived Majdanek and Neustadt-Glewe.

:::: In the absence of metanarratives, Lyotard says, we must become alert to difference, the absolute incompatibility of our beliefs and desires with those of others. When we converse with someone else, we enter into a network of language games, aware of the innumerable systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation created. One might argue that such relativism gives the lie to the possibility of an ethics, but for Lyotard injustice simply means the imposition of one set of language games on another. Ethical behavior amounts to allowing multiple language games to be played simultaneously, to a commitment to keep playing.

Murder is unethical, not because it takes a life, but because it violently terminates the possibility of conversations that are and should be unresolvable.

:::: The first thing I saw as I stepped off the train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg was a cop hitting a man in the back of the legs with a billy club. The man would crumple to his knees, raise his hands in supplication. The cop would order him to his feet again, then hit him in the back of the legs. Down the man would go.

This skit lasted at least for the length of time it took Andi and me to walk from one end of the platform to the other. People curved around the couple so as not to disturb their dance, pretending nothing was out of the ordinary, which in a sense was the case.

:::: The dominant systems of education are based on three assumptions that are exactly opposite to how human lives are actually lived, educationist Ken Robinson maintains. First, they promote standardization and a narrow view of intelligence when human talents are diverse and personal. Second, they promote compliance when cultural progress and achievement depend on the cultivation of imagination and creativity. Third, they are linear and rigid when the course of each human life, including yours, is organic and largely unpredictable.

:::: When I was 15, Himmler’s great niece Katrin recounted, one of my classmates asked me in the history lesson whether I was in fact related to that Himmler. I said yes with a lump in my throat. It went so quiet in the classroom you could hear a pin drop.

But the teacher became nervous and carried on as if nothing had happened.

:::: Just as the actualization of Danielewski’s House of Leaves could not have been imagined without the ubiquity of hypertext after 1990, the Web after 1993, and the new layout software to which Danielewski had access as he constructed his novel on the page, so too Chang’s Traveling to Utopia could not have been imagined except as a reaction to and conversation with conventional linear narrativity and hypertextuality, the ubiquity of film, and the Flash technologies which enable it.

Chang’s film-text instantiates the book’s disembodiment while placing the reader/viewer in the same position as the narrator(s) with respect to technology: unable to control it even as it broadcasts from both inside and out.

:::: Remote was first running out of paved road and then out of graveled road and then finding your white Dodge Colt spattering through seven-inch-deep mud puddles and lurching through hip-high wild grass to the point you weren’t really sure you were on a road anymore or not. Remote was no running water, no indoor plumbing, no insulation, holes in the roof, and the glass in the front door shattered last winter by a hunter searching for some warmth who left a note of thanks tacked near the fireplace, the only source of heat.

We bought the place the next day.

:::: Pay attention, Susan Sontag advised. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

:::: Andi and I meet with Lis, our German tutor, two hours a week in the library, spend an hour a day in our apartment macheteing through the language thicket. Every time I open my mouth to speak German, I drop 40 I.Q. points and 53 years. I lose the ability to talk about concepts, articulate a basic sentence with anything like grammatical confidence, experience myself becoming semi-aphasic.

I have to concentrate as if playing Whack a Groundhog before sending a few words about the weather into the world. If someone responds to them in any but the most rudimentary way, it feels like a series of physical slaps arriving.

It’s an outrageously beautiful thing: this making the queerness of expression and thought queer again.

:::: Traveling to Utopia performs its thematics through a troubled interface with its reader/viewer, suggesting the new flesh (in this case the female abdomen, site of bio-reproduction) has become impregnated with media (the site of semiotic reproduction) that knows more about us than we do about [[ourselves]] — a realization that conjures the uncanny image of Max Renn’s head disappearing erotically into the TV set in Videodrome.

:::: I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

Claimed John Cage.

:::: What would it feel like, think like, to imagine without categories?

While possible to become conscious of feeling and thinking through ideology, it is impossible to feel and think beyond it.

:::: Camping at 14,000 feet in Bhutan. Temperature near zero. Our sleeping bags worn and dicey.

My body kept yanking me back from the brim of sleep with oxygen gasps — those massive reflexive inhalations your brain initiates when it no longer believes you’re serious about getting the air into your lungs you should be getting into them.

:::: The average American makes 36.07 % more money than the average German and consumes two times more oil.

He or she also uses 87.69 % more electricity, births 68.45 % more babies, risks a 55.44 % greater chance of dying in infancy, spends 93.91 % more money on health care, works 33.71 % extra hours each year, is 13.41 % more likely to be unemployed, perceives a 66.67 % larger class divide, and is six times more likely to have HIV/AIDS.

She or he will check out 1.17 years sooner.

:::: At the very moment the book is dematerializing, it is becoming more embodied than ever, the book celebrating the fetishization of the book’s bookishness: design, layout, texture, smell, borderlands.

:::: A wooden doll with a miniature novel inserted into a slot in its tummy.

:::: A text printed on a slice of bread tucked into a plastic baggie.

:::: The outhouse at our Kentucky cabin: redwood and tidy with the remains of an indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor and bucket of lime and plastic dove-colored cup in the corner.

I sat with the door open in summer for the breeze and in winter for the view of naked pines and cedars sloping down before me to fall away off a limestone cliff into thousands of acres of uninhabited forest.

It’s absurd to read a book in there, think of any politics save democracy, perched as you are above the most egalitarian system in the world.

:::: Heather Weston’s Borges and I.

The raised black text offset on black paper bringing forth a subtext, a reverse erasure, by deploying raised letters: the textural allusion to Braille, Borges’s creeping blindness.

You want to carry it with you everywhere you go.

:::: By 2007, five of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cell phone novels.

:::: Flurries falling upward outside the bedroom window.

:::: Think of it as a dance, someone advised me in regards to crossing the crazy streets of Hanoi, where there are few stop signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, lanes to speak of, and so crowds constantly swarm into the mess of cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses, taxis, bicycles, tuk-tuks.

The idea is not to meet the eyes of drivers or other pedestrians.

The idea is to keep moving forward.

An outrageous act of faith, all Easter bunnies and hope.

:::: Guy Debord: Human circulation considered as something to be consumed — tourism — is a by-product of the circulation of commodities; basically, tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite.

:::: I wanted to like this book very much. But I found it quite boring and odd. It is frustrating, repetitive, and does not offer much in the way of style and language.

Commented one Amazon reviewer about David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

:::: Fails to entertain, fails to enlighten, fails to engage. Time to move on to something more rewarding.

Wrote another.

:::: What book were they reading again?

:::: Jen Bervin’s The Desert, wherein she sews across 130 pages of John Van Dyke’s 1901 prose celebration of American wilderness, leaving a new poem in her wake.

:::: In a German restaurant, it turns out, you have to pay for the tap water.

:::: The runs strike me down in the Nairobi airport.

Everything is just fine, then an ominous gurgle leans into my awareness. Five minutes later, I’m trotting at the speed of angst into the men’s restroom.

Done, I realize there isn’t any toilet paper in the dispenser. That’s when a cute little boy — seven, eight — materializes in the doorless opening of my stall. Between his palms, a fresh roll. He’s all white teeth and faux innocence.

I reach into the lightweight trekking pants around my ankles and fish out a dollar, which I dutifully pay him. He tears off exactly one sheet and passes it to me. I look at him. He looks at me. His smile doesn’t flinch.

I fish out another dollar.

He tears off another sheet.

Und so weiter.

:::: One day O. sets out to write a fiction in the form of a Table of Contents.

His first line:

Introduction: Rapunzel: Her hair, her pain, the black hood over her head. . pg. xi

:::: Borges and I: a critifictional meditation on the pronoun as a hoax foisted upon us by the culture’s language. How the rules of grammar have been repeatedly misunderstood by philosophy and fiction as a metaphysics.

:::: You attend the House of World Cultures to see Ralf Hoyer’s Mid-Size Robo Soccer Music. The building was America’s contribution to the INTERBAU exhibition in Berlin in 1957. Hugh Stubbins, Gropius’s assistant at Harvard before the war, designed the place as a symbol of freedom. Its distinctive feature: a curved roof that connotes both a sculpture by Henry Moore and a bird’s spread wings.

The roof collapsed in 1980, killing one and injuring dozens.

The natives refer to it as The Pregnant Oyster.

Hoyer’s piece takes place on a small soccer field laid out on artificial grass around which people sit. The players are robots reminiscent of R2D2. When the human referee blows his whistle, they go for the ball. Sometimes they make impressive goals. Sometimes they lose track of what they’re doing and begin wandering the field aimlessly, little speakers atop their heads pointed at the sky.

:::: Hoyer has transformed those robots into musical instruments. They generate eerie sonar-like howlings defined by their movement, position, and distance.

They become a mobile sound installation, an exercise in swarm aesthetics.

:::: In a German restaurant, you don’t leave a tip on the table.

You never eat with your hands.

When finished, you lay your fork and knife side-by-side pointed to the center of the plate with the handles on the lower right rim in the five o’clock position.

:::: All art, Anthony Burgess noted, thrives on technical difficulties.

:::: How Hemingway turned himself into a character in one of his books and shot himself in the head. How Hunter Thompson turned himself into a character in one of his books and shot himself in the head. How Richard Brautigan turned himself into a character in one of his books and shot himself in the head. How Breece D’J Pancake turned himself into a character in his only book and shot himself in the head. How Yukio Mishima turned himself into a character in one of his books and committed seppuku. Publicly. In 1970.

:::: Mornings: writing. Afternoons: exercising in the Academy’s diminutive fitness center down near the lake, taking a long walk or German lessons, dropping into a café, visiting a gallery or museum. Evenings: a film, a concert, a play, dinner with friends or fellows, a reading by members of the small expat community of authors.

:::: Outside, people not cheering on Mishima, but heckling him, jeering as he disemboweled himself.

:::: We get together for a bite with Christian Hawkey and Uljana Wolf, their new baby, and a handful of friends at a bona fide German restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg named The Prater. I encounter my first Senfeier mit Quetschkartoffeln: hardboiled eggs on mashed potatoes covered with mustard sauce, once a staple for East German students. It’s heavy as eating a plateful of wet handkerchiefs. I fall in love immediately. From there we walk several blocks to St. George’s, founded in 2003 by twin brothers Paul and Daniel Gurner, and one of Berlin’s most beloved expat bookstores, for a launch party feting an anthology edited by Sarmila Cohen and Paul Legault made up of translations (in the widest sense of the word) of 154 Shakespeare sonnets.

The place is so packed, the crowd leaks out the door onto the rainy street. There’s nowhere for the readers to stand, so they crawl onto the counter where the cash register sits to perform.

One poem in the collection is a series of parentheses. One a collage of newspaper clippings. One constructed out of appropriated comics panels. In one the word space appears wherever there would have been a space between words in the original poem.

Sans, naturally, the poem.

:::: One morning O. sets out to write a fiction in the form of a Table of Contents:

Existing Conditions

1.1 Robert Smithson Brain Injury: New monuments cause us to un-remember the future. . pg. 1

1.2 Lilies. Apples. Salt Lake. Luff. . pg. 18

1.3 A person touches his face on average 16 times per hour. . pg. 30

1.3.1 (Perhaps to make sure it’s still there.). . pg. 55

1.3.2 The Derridean hound in the rain. . pg. 58

1.3.3 The Bataillean cat symphony. . pg. 60

1.4 Perhaps she wept in the evenings, alone. . pg. 67

:::: Grenzsituationen: Karl Jaspers’ term meaning Limit Situations—those moments accompanied by ratcheted-up anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms.

Moments, in other words, that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our boundedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness.

Death, for example.

:::: Literature is the question minus the answer.

Observed Roland Barthes, who was struck by a laundry van in Paris on 25 February 1980 while walking home from a lunch given by François Mitterrand, the future president.

:::: In Finland we learn about the competition whose goal is to determine who can perch longest on an anthill, naked, and then one day things in Berlin are familiar.

You’re walking down a street in Hackescher Markt when you realize you somehow know where the cafés are, where that Vietnamese restaurant Chén Chè is with the incredible pho, that curry stand on the way to the ME gallery (the one, by the way, housing a Wunderkammer), which staircase to climb in the Hof Kino to reach your favorite theatre, which train at the station to catch back to Wannsee. You recognize the clothes displayed in the hip shop windows, the dildos in the Fun Factory sexshop, the cobblestones comprising the square busy with bistros, the sense that there must be some kind of law around here that everyone must be younger than 30 to rent.

Which is to say you’re no longer traveling — not completely, not like the person that went by your name when you first arrived. You fetch up, hover on the sidewalk, letting this information seep in, people pouring around you, a little sadder than you were 12 seconds ago.

:::: Carry the notion of Grenzsituationen into the literary domain, and you think about books that, once you’ve taken them down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put back up again.

:::: By merely being in the world, Limit Texts ask us to conceptualize writing (and hence living) as a possibility space.

:::: For some reason it gladdens me to know I’m temporally out of sync with the U.S., respond to emails in the Berlin late morning, which is Salt Lake’s muddle of the night, which means those in Salt Lake respond to my emails after I’ve already shut down my computer for the day.

It feels like, try as we might, we just can’t catch each other.

:::: For every word of German I translate, Peter Filkins, poet and H.G. Adler’s translator, told me at dinner last night, I need to know twelve in English.

:::: It almost (but not quite) goes without saying that you can’t share travel stories with others when you’re away from the keyboard. You’ve tried. It doesn’t work. You’re dumb for having taken so long to figure this out. Anyone who shares travel stories with others comes off as a boaster, a windbag. Travel stories are a mode of telling that forces others into non-attention. They’re the slide show that never ends, the monotone lecture that stops the clock, the plump pat on narcissism’s back.

Enough about you, travel stories say. Now let’s get to something really interesting.

:::: One morning O. et cetera et cetera:

2.3.3 Addendum (2): Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your promise. . pg. 187

:::: O. first met Lidia Yuknavitch in San Diego in, O. wants to say, 2000, when they shared the stage for a reading. O. met Larry McCaffery there three or four years before.

Lidia was writing angry, visionary, post-Acker, post-Cixous prose, editing two girls review, making an alternative scene happen around her. She went on to found Chiasmus press, bring out two anthologies featuring innovative Northwest writers, serve for years on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two, coordinate several innovative writing conferences in Portland where she moved shortly after our paths crossed, and continue to publish raw animated books.

Larry was writing about the latest trends in contemporary fiction, interviewing experimental authors, editing important anthologies of innovative and cyberpunk work, co-editing Fiction International. Part post-hippy optimist, part narrative Marco Polo, he was the kind of guy who always had a deranged novel or film on the tip of his conversation when you bumped into him.

Lidia and Larry became two of O.’s essential literary guides, teaching him versions of the same lesson: writing is only one creative act among many that defines contemporary textual life.

:::: Like New York, Peter Wortsman wrote, I think of Berlin not as a proper noun, but rather as a proper, albeit transitive, verb.

:::: A disgusting city, this Berlin, a place where no one believes in anything.

The Italian occultist Alessandro Cagliostro pronounced.

In 1775.

:::: You are crazy, my child. You must go to Berlin.

The Austrian composer Franz von Suppe recommended.

In 1800.

:::: Andi is so taken with the light here, how it is never the same thing from one pulse to the next, that the day after we arrived she began snapping a couple photos from our balcony every morning between 7:40 and 7:50 to document the transformations of what she couldn’t believe she was seeing.

:::: Which is to say Larry McCaffery and Lidia Yuknavtich introduced me by the way they moved in the world to the idea of literary activism — the importance, not only of writing, but also of editing and bringing out fellow authors’ work, reading and reviewing that work, producing essays about it, teaching it, talking it up, urging others to launch journals and indie presses, running reading series, laboring in arts administration, coordinating conferences, launching local workshops, posting about texts you love on your blogs or via other social media, getting out the word any way you can, because innovative writing isn’t just innovative writing: it’s a cultural urgency.

:::: One of the fellows at the Academy explains to me she became so infuriated at the Catholic church for including her lapsed soul among its demographic reckonings that she requested to be un-baptized.

After much bureaucracy meant to wear her down, the Church refused.

:::: The first geese v-ing north against a desert of rainless clouds.

:::: How you jumped through the hole in the ice on one of the Åland islands after sitting in a sauna as long as your body could bear. You were visiting the chair of the English department at the Åbo Akademi in Turku at his vacation home. Although you only knew him professionally, you had both just stripped down to less than nothing.

He waited until you climbed up the ladder through that hole in the ice before telling you the story about the Fulbright fellow who had had a heart attack the year before while attempting the same maneuver and died on the spot.

:::: At the end of the stupendous cascade of The Unnamable’s nine-page-long final sentence, in many ways the epistemologically and ontologically indeterminate companion, the stuttering and pallid postmodern pal, of JoyceMolly’s confident modernist linguistic rush at the conclusion of Ulysses, we reach. . what?

:::: Curiosity — the act of determined noticing — connects innovative writing with travel: both ask you to accept the full adventure of not-being-at-home.

:::: We could contend those last Beckettian words signify a triumph over existential adversity, an assertion of the human spirit against umber odds, which apparently the Nobel committee did, and we would be wrong. We reach, rather, a moment of gray unknowability, an act of grammatical erasure. The antimatter of I can’t go on cancels out the matter of I’ll go on, and vice versa, so that we sense the real last line of Beckett’s un-novel isn’t composed of language at all, but instead of the white space washing down the remainder of the page, signifying the absence that both self and text have become.

:::: Lidia Yuknavitch and Larry McCaffery taught me to black out conceptual distinctions between the categories editor/writer, critic/poet, reviewer/novelist, academic/publisher, or blogger, or tweeter, or reading series coordinator, or volunteer at a journal or small press.

They taught me that the literary mandate for writers in our century should be: Ask not what publishing can do for you; ask what you can do for publishing.

:::: One of the fellows’ academic spouses at the Academy is working on a project to establish the provenance of four sixteenth century paintings that no longer exist except as references in various historical texts.

:::: Who is the you? The I? Molloy eons later? Some science fictional semi-being being dreamed by another? Certainly a disembodied subject position, uncertainly human, suspended between masculine and neuter, thereness and not-thereness, in the falter between penultimate clause and ultimate, immobile mind and its fantasy of a body that can move, self and other, speech and silence — an ellipse of uncertainty, a space of unfurling consciousness without steady temporality, geography, identity.

:::: Or the name of the color people deploy in their earrings, scarfs, shoes, glasses frames, sweaters beneath sports jackets, shirts beneath sweaters, knapsacks, purses, necklaces, socks, gloves to highlight their often dominantly dark clothes: Berlin geranium red?

:::: In what sense can it go on or not go on, its universe having already been unwritten around it?

In The Unnamable, Beckett remarked, there’s complete disintegration. No “I,” no “have,” no “being.” No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There is no way to go on.

You can’t remain the same person after having read that last sentence as you were before you began.

Can you?

:::: As Andi and I walked down a narrow street in Quito, Ecuador, just a few blocks off the Plaza de la Independencia, someone reached over the balcony above and dumped a glassful of diarrhea on us.

Thin, watery diarrhea that reeked of uncertainty and death.

Andi caught the worst of it on her wide-brimmed hat, shoulders, down her back. I caught a few pungent collateral splatters.

When we looked up, the balcony was already empty. A flinch later, and a crowd had gathered around us. A man emerged with a Kleenex in his fist. He began alternately dabbing at the shit on Andi’s blouse and apologizing for his country’s bad manners. Another man was already helping Andi with her camera, also beshitted.

Jabbering was general, and then, of course, Andi’s camera was gone.

She had managed to keep hold of her purse, but her camera was history. The whole thing had been a setup whose imagination you had to admire — though, personally, I would have preferred being robbed at gunpoint. In someone’s eyes, we were the rich, the bad guys. We were the marks.

I noticed a policeman floating at the edge of the crowd. When our eyes met, he shrugged, turned, and walked away.

:::: Hitler, e.g., was a vegetarian.

:::: It should be obvious, said Sukenick, that there is no intrinsic virtue in a quantity of readers.

:::: An invitation arrives from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, to visit for a month in the fall and help think their graduate creative writing program into innovation. The first thing I do after accepting is check which venomous snakes frequent the Eastern Cape Province. Black Mamba. Rinkhals. Puffadder. Cape Cobra. Boomslang.

Robert Berold, head of the program, emails me a photograph of the latter, its long, slender green body hanging from a branch outside his window, head buried in a black sunbird’s nest, feeding.

:::: The German language curses and cajoles, belches, farts, and philosophizes with boundless delight, then retreats suddenly, tightening its belt, squelching its own wild urges with the syntax of discipline and restraint.

Observes Peter Wortsman.

:::: How one day you start reading about skin aging as if it’s something you’ve always done: its propensity to receive less blood flow, become thinner, more easily damaged, less capable of healing, its decrease in volume, elasticity. Cortisol degradation of collagen. The body’s increasingly lower glandular activity. Sagginess, wrinkles, reddening, browning, yellowing, abnormal growths.

Go ahead: make a joke.

:::: Organ Recital: the term a friend uses to describe conversations among the progressively old about their bumps, twangs, bruises.

:::: Every parting gives a foretaste of death.

Reminded Schopenhauer.

:::: One morning et cetera et cetera:

3.2 Why, although Americans possess no identity, they do have wonderful teeth. . pg. 207

:::: Stan Brakhage used to tell his students at the Art Institute of Chicago you became an artist because, as a child, you lost someone or something profoundly important to you.

Art is the search for what has already left your life.

:::: Meat eating is a perversion in our human nature.

Opined Joseph Goebbels.

:::: O. wanders among mummies entombed below the Cappuccini Monastery in hilly Savoca in northeastern Sicily. They date from 1599, when local priests preserved a neighborhood monk so they could pray to him. Soon everybody in town wanted relatives remembered this way.

Now some lie in coffins. Some stoop in wall niches. They look like broken marionettes wearing the same nice clothes, now shredding, in which they were dressed for death. Among the children is two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo who died of pneumonia in 1920. The town nicknamed her Sleeping Beauty. Rosalia’s hair appears to be too yellow, her skin the tint of dirty talc.

Sleeping Beauty’s blood was replaced with a liquid made of formalin to kill bacteria, salicylic acid to kill fungi, alcohol to dry her out, glycerin to keep her from drying out too much, zinc salts to make her stiff.

When Rosalia’s epidermis began to taint, her coffin was placed into a hermetically sealed glass case filled with nitrogen.

Looking on, I can’t help thinking about Michael Jackson’s hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

:::: The lengths some people go to remain pretty, even after having assumed room temperature.

:::: Savoca, O. learns, is also where several scenes in The Godfather were shot. He didn’t know this before arriving. The Bar Vitelli, where Michael Corleone asked Apollonia’s father to meet his daughter, still serves cheap food and nostalgia for a time that never (quite) existed.

:::: Hitler loved to watch movies, but, if a scene involving cruelty to animals welled up on the screen, he would cover his eyes and look away until someone told him the coast was clear.

:::: You can’t get enough currywurst and french fries with that mayo dollop, the comfort-food staple of Berlin. Herta Heuwer came up with the idea in 1949. She obtained tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and curry powder from British soldiers and started hawking her snack, which quickly became popular with construction workers rebuilding the city, at a street stand in Charlottenburg.

The Currywurst Museum opened on 15 August 2009. It’s a five-minute walk from what used to be Checkpoint Charlie, where Soviet and American tanks faced each other during the 1961 Berlin Crisis.

:::: Or you could point to that defining moment in a once-new environment when you begin considering expeditions you initially undertook out of a sense of dynamic inquisitiveness as tourist snipe hunts and Facebook photo ops.

:::: Because the noisy jackdaws strutting through the sunny morning outside your bedroom window.

:::: The word for jackdaw in Czech is Kavka, a pun on Kafka, and hence the sign Franz’s father Hermann hung outside his fancy goods shop: the image of the black bird perching on an oak branch next to his name, the idea being to associate himself with a symbol of the German nation.

Later, he replaced it with a more abstract piece of foliage.

:::: Sisu is the Finnish word meaning strength of will, determination, perseverance, acting rationally in the face of adversity, deciding on a course of action and sticking to it in the face of repeated failures.

Integral to an understanding of Finnish culture, as in: the Finns fighting 42 wars with the Russians, and losing every one.

:::: Roy Batty, a replicant, virtually identical to humans in every way except that the memories he believes are his own are really someone else’s, except that he has a four-year lifespan, is more human than the other so-called humans around him.

Being a brief parable about how museums function.

:::: A ball will bounce, Richard Wilbur wrote, but less and less.

:::: Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

Bon-motted Baudrillard.

:::: On 17 August 1962, an 18-year-old bricklayer named Peter Fechter lost his bid for freedom in the West: he was shot in the pelvis by East German guards as he tried climbing over the Wall with a friend at Checkpoint Charlie. Bleeding profusely, screaming for help, Peter lay tangled in barbed-wire fencing at the base. Because he was inside the Soviet sector, American soldiers couldn’t rescue him.

His body was removed an hour later by the East German guards.

:::: One spring Walter Abish came to the University of Kentucky to give a fiction reading, and Andi and I drove him out to our cabin. Our neighbor Homer, whom we had hired to build our porch, was measuring and sawing wood out back when we pulled up. Walter was obviously flustered to meet an indigenous Kentuckian, yet recovered quickly and, eager to make pleasant conversation, put on his lovely European charm, picked up a board that was lying close by, and asked in his faintly Austrian accent: Is this what they call a two-by-four?

Homer carefully removed the board from Walter’s hands and asked: You work at the University?

:::: Is it possible I’m misremembering?

:::: It’s impossible I’m not.

:::: Linda Hutcheon: merci.

:::: We live our months at the Academy in a beautiful, tranquil, comfortable, rarified chamber like Sleeping Beauty’s in Savoca, like Michael Jackson’s in Neverland.

The staff takes immaculate care of us in what amounts to monastic epicureanism — good company, good-spirited support, dauntingly rich food prepared by über-chef Reinold Kegel served with a choice of red or white wine by Stefan Czoke, zero chores, freedom to do what we want when we want.

Andi and I cherish the knowledge sheepishly.

::::

3.6 The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. . pg. 265

3.6.1 (There are photographs somewhere. I remember seeing them as a child.). . pg. 270

:::: Here are Scott Black and Eric LeMay: There’s that moment in Google Maps when you dive through the map and suddenly get an image of the street-level places and activities abstractly modeled at the higher level. Maps are artifacts of a certain height (whether actual or metaphorical), at once registers of the surveyor’s movements and guides to your own. You need a map to navigate a new city, but once you’ve made a home in it the map is superfluous. Essays are maps. They’re registers of movements through books, or streets, or woods, which also remind their readers that a map suggests a route through a place you have to make your own. At that moment of use, you both realize the map and make it redundant.

:::: Essays, of course, are maps of other maps which are themselves essays of other maps.

It’s failed mapping all the way down.

:::: Because Germans produce nearly 50 million tons of garbage annually, fourth behind Japan (52.36 million tons), Russia (200 million tons), and, of course, the U.S. (254 million tons).

:::: Because our assholes are behind us, we’d hoped to leave our shit there too, and move like Manifest Destiny, always forward.

Pointed out Charles Potts.

:::: Baudrillard again: We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them.

:::: On our way to Tegel Airport and a long weekend in intricately exquisite, touristy Prague to celebrate Andi’s birthday, our taxi driver, raised in the East, reasons in jaggy English.

We have freedom now, he says. Even growing older belongs to us.

:::: The family of Roma — Romanians and Bulgarians trying to escape the wretched conditions and bleak prospects in their home countries — packing up their camp in the median strip as our taxi shoots by.

:::: Scott Black and Eric LeMay, redux: Zeno’s paradox says we can’t think motion, but it also seems we can’t think fragments. Brain scientists suggest we coordinate and blur perceptions, like film cells, into Zeno’s impossible motion. The illusions of time’s arrow and a stable, cohesive world are perhaps themselves temporary, jerry-rigged, ad hoc solutions. They may be ways we receive and transmit in momentary configurations the bits of information we thereby, essaying a world, call home.

:::: Ronald Sukenick: Theory is the delirium of intellect. It makes life more interesting.

:::: Here is Michael Martone’s prediction for the future of narrative:

Anonymous, viral, collaborative, ephemeral.

:::: The goal of all life is death.

Affirmed the guy Nabokov referred to as an elderly gentleman from Vienna who the author didn’t want inflicting his dreams upon him.

:::: In Yangon (which also simultaneously exists, inverted, as Rangoon, like the metropolis in China Miéville’s The City and the City) we hire a driver and guide. Whenever the former steps out of the dented white mini-van for a smoke, the latter turns around in her seat, drops her guard like a used hotel towel, and asks us about what’s happening in the outside world. She’s heard there’s a war in Iraq. Who’s fighting whom? Why?

We tell her what we know and ask about her life. She tells us she’s an American Studies major at Yangon University. I ask who her favorite author is. Mark Twain, she says. I try talking with her about Huck Finn until I realize we’re discussing two different books. The one she read was fewer than a 75 pages and edited into appropriateness by the State apparatus.

When the door opens and the driver slips back behind the wheel, our guide’s voice flattens and she turns around in her seat. The mini-van rolls forward. She picks up where she left off, pointing out this site, that, as we creep through the congested streets.

That’s her, she says quickly, under her breath, as we inch by the lane down which Aung San Suu Kyi is being held under house arrest.

:::: Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek’s thought of a self-reflective, always-in-process creating that moves the maker outside conventional grammars of aesthetics and commodification.

:::: Trying to reach the castle hovering on the hill above Prague through the city’s winding medieval lanes, you realize the great mistake is to fail to realize Kafka has always been a realist.

:::: David Shields and my weekly ritual while living in Iowa City: a salad and pepperoni pizza at the Brown Bottle followed by a short walk up to his dark bookish apartment to eat turbulent ice-cream sundaes and argue about literary everything — our favorite and our most loathed novels, emerging ideas about writing, toothy obsessions, under-conceived pedagogies.

Literary siblings, we made a sport of disagreeing with each other in a graduate program that on the QT bred uniformity of vision and something called [[craft.]] I learned more over those pizzas and sundaes than in all the workshops I dutifully if laconically attended every Tuesday afternoon.

David: gracias.

:::: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. What astonishes me about these nine words, makes them immovable in my memory, is how they announce, not only a murderous narrative about pedophilic obsession and hobbled love, an acidic satire about the bubblegum-chewing brashness called American consciousness, but also the Event of Language.

:::: How, to pass time once on the Paris metro between stops, I asked my sister, with whom I was riding, how old she wanted to live to be, and, instead of answering, she began to cry.

:::: Or Thoreau: How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?

:::: A few minutes later, it is April.

:::: And one day the sudden amazement of blue sky turning the lake into a shimmering Nordic fjord.

:::: Entropology: a neologism Robert Smithson borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss that holds within itself both the concepts entropy and anthropology.

Entropology, Lévi-Strauss asserts in A World on the Wane, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of the process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms. Smithson wanted to explore that notion, but not in a negative sense, not with a sense of sadness and loss. Rather, for him entropology embodied the astonishing beauty inherent in wearing down, wearing out, undoing, in continuous de-creation at the level, not only of geology and thermodynamics, but also of civilizations, and, ultimately, of the individuals within them.

::::

4.4 The Borges Ventilator. (Alembic Medulloblastoma.). . pg. 378

4.5. . . . . . pg. 538

4.5.1. . . . . . pg. 542

4.5.2 ( .). . . . . . pg. 566

4.5.3. . . . . . pg. 567

4.5.4. . . . . . pg. 570

4.5.5. . . . . . pg. 572

4.5.6. . . . . . pg. 575

4.5.7. . . . . . pg. 579

4.5.8 ( .). . . . . . pg. 585

4.5.9. . . . . . pg. 601

:::: Lolita. Closer to the phrasings of resonant lyric than the vapid transparencies of fictions that want to be films when they grow up, this luminous opening is Nabokov’s novel in miniature: a warped mind-in-motion — but equally, if not more so, the drama of alliteration, assonance, rhythm, self-reflexive verbal surprise, the pleasure of lovingly sculpted prose, the delight in density and detail, each phrase written on the back of an index card until it was just right by the distinguished, trilingual, virtually apolitical Anglophile who in mid-career had to win himself recognition once again in a new tongue and culture because he had had to flee both his homeland and two political harborages, first Berlin, then Paris, so that the reader can hear here in this initial linguistic fervor, if he or she listens attentively, the foreshadow of Humbert Humbert’s burning dyspepsia during the famous seduction scene at the Enchanted Hunters half a book away; St. Augustine’s brutally conflicted Confessions in the clash between the spiritual housed within the first metaphor and the sinfulness within the second; in the lee comprising the second syllable of the nymphet’s pseudonym (Humbert has stolen poor Dolores Haze’s name from her just as he will steal everything else) Poe’s poem Annabel Lee, and hence the Annabel Leigh who unreliable Humbert blames (by way of that quack Freud) for his, Humbert’s, fixation.

:::: A few minutes later it is April and Andi has embarked on a new project: a silent film about music, or, more to the point, a series of slo-mo black-and-white close-ups of musicians’ faces as they play.

That look in their eyes.

That way they have of paying rapt attention.

:::: You’ve come to recognize the bundled homeless men (you see almost no homeless women) waiting with their money cups, often next to a big brown beer bottle, on the train station steps at Savignyplatz and Hackescher Markt.

Every once in a while others in better shape board a train at one station, beg through as many cars as possible, debark at the next.

Nearly everyone looks through these people because no one knows what else to do.

:::: Ironically, we should remember, Smithson’s jetty, the site of such arresting entropologic processes, is itself wildly generative, a world-building appliance set into a no-man’s land.

:::: How you can replace people but not the memories you had with them.

Being a statement that sounds true, perhaps even profound, until you think about it for a trillionth of second.

:::: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

Non-jested Judith Butler.

:::: We step out of a café in Potsdam’s Old Market Square to witness a cop chasing a woman and what I take to be her little boy — eight or nine years old — down the block.

The cop shouts at her, breaks into a sprint. We hear his heavy boots clumping. A few more steps, and the woman gives up, stops in her tracks, waits for what’s coming. The cop points at her purse, says something I can’t understand from our vantage point across the street. I assume, though I have no way of knowing, we’re talking shoplifting.

The woman’s son, about 10 yards ahead, hovers on the sidewalk, figuring, figuring, then, whoosh, vanishes around the corner.

:::: The name of the 2012 anti-world’s fair in the former Tempelhof airport: The World Isn’t Fair.

:::: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall: the official G.D.R. term for the Wall, about a dozen feet high, about 66 miles long, lined with nearly 300 watchtowers and 20 bunkers. The term roughly translates as The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.

Implying that West Germany had never been fully de-Nazified.

Which, in several senses, is the case.

:::: At the Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, a retrospective of Polish tactical media provocateur Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Hiroshima Projection: the hands — just the gigantic hands (no faces, torsos, legs, arms) — of the blast’s survivors projected onto the river bank beneath the A-Bomb Dome, one of the few structures left more or less standing when the sun set on the city 6 August 1945. Disembodied voices recount the pain felt listening to official justifications for the attack, living their lives as invisible Korean slave laborers, experiencing the national prejudice depicting them as genetic threats to Japan’s general population.

All the emotion exposed in giant fingers finding each other.

All that fallout still sifting down.

:::: My books would never have been themselves without Pynchon’s and Kafka’s onto-epistemological sense of uncertainty, Raymond Federman’s exuberant challenge to what history had done to him and what the conventional page had tried to do, Donald Barthelme’s attempt to think contemporary art into language, Kathy Acker’s continuous performative advice to be more extreme, Robert Coover’s juiced-up sentences and re-configurative imagination, Steve Tomasula’s and Anne Carson’s reinvention of bookishness, Mark Danielewski’s avant-gothic architectonics, Bach’s crystalline geometric musical expressions, Duchamp’s inability to sit still, Ed Kienholz’s exhilaratingly claustrophobic alien installations.

:::: Which is to say: art’s always-already recursiveness.

:::: Kienholz bought the small town in northern Idaho called Hope. The next town up the road from Kienholz’s is named, perfectly, Beyond Hope.

:::: Or wandering among the 100,000 graves in the New Jewish Cemetery far from Prague’s old town one overcast morning.

Many of the headstones exhibit art nouveau motifs. All are overgrown with ivy, set among woods surrounded by a high wall in a nowhere zone. We’re searching for Dr. Kafka’s, number 137: a gray obelisk whose base is busy with red flowers, a single white one, a sandbox of small smooth rocks, a few soggy notes, a handful of burned-out votive candles, a plaque for Franz’s sisters.

I expected a litter of tourists, but in the end it’s just Andi and me standing side by side, recounting stories by and about him, how his vision has worked on us, paying our respects, and then Andi asks for my iPhone and snaps a shot of my hand, just my hand, touching his raised black name on the stone.

:::: Zeitlupe: the German word for slow motion—a conflation of time (Zeit) and magnifying glass (Lupe).

Not seconds lagged, but made visually hyperbolic.

:::: Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Conjectured William T. Vollmann.

:::: How long is now? asks the brobdingnagian mural on the side of the Kunsthaus Tacheles, once a department store in the Jewish quarter next to the New Synagogue, then a Nazi prison, then a squat and alternative culture center, now closed.

Below, left, the sculpture of a cockroach’s body bursting through the wall, and, below that, the words: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer, schickt der Staat die Wanzen.

Before the Wall, after the Wall, the state sends forth the bugs.

:::: A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Pointed out Wittgenstein, who believed a good and serious philosophical work could be composed entirely of jokes.

:::: Berlin is the testicle of the West, elucidated Nikita Khrushchev. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.

:::: How you fly back from Prague into a surprise snowstorm, the runway your plane lands on unplowed. Walking into your apartment at the Academy, you realize it feels like you’re returning home, which is to say you’re no longer moving, even though you’re moving.

You’re here. You’re there. At the same time.

:::: And next you are driving just north of Siem Reap on your way to Angkor Watt, and it strikes you you’ve already seen a thousand iterations of those stilted thatched huts sliding along the side of the potholed road, those packed reddish dirt yards, those mobs of green tropical foliage, that odd goat (or maybe it’s a chicken this time, or maybe a scrawny dog), have already watched this film, experienced its crushing humidity and heat, seen those cute kids mugging for the tourist cameras and spare change, those oblivious monks in red-orange robes bicycling beside your Jeep (or maybe it’s a Land Rover this time, or maybe a Pajero), and you feel a pang of shame for allowing yourself to entertain such a predictably jaded thought, except you entertain it anyway, except you don’t mean to, except you do.

:::: Et cetera et cetera:

The Oblique Derivative Predicament Conclusion

5.1 Nietzsche Throat: You are closest to a friend with your heart when you resist him. . pg. 702

:::: Guy Davenport, O.’s colleague for five years at the University of Kentucky, always struck O. as a courtly platypus. In an essay O. wrote about Da Vinci’s Bicycle, a collection that helped reconfigure his impression of the short story, he called Davenport the last modernist — a writer, painter, and scholar with a European sensibility and a bank of arcane knowledge who, like his friend Hugh Kenner, embodied eloquence and a mode of bracing associative thinking, but who was tremendously awkward in three-dimensional social situations: taciturn, grumpy, removed. He seemed incapable of taking a vacation from his own mind. Like his characters — Musonius Rufus to Walser, Stein, and Pound — he always seemed out of step with his age.

One of O.’s other colleagues there once recounted how, at the end of the meal at a nice restaurant with a visiting writer, Davenport picked up the chunk of steak remaining on his plate with his fingers, delicately wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped it in the pocket of his sports jacket for later consumption.

If the story isn’t true, it should be.

:::: In a fit of unselfconsciousness, you once told a graduate student that when traveling one is either running towards something or away from something.

You then asked which applied in his case.

:::: I don’t know why we are here, Wittgenstein admitted, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

:::: Kafka scribbled this sentence in a notebook: I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.

A phrase that now adorns coffee cups in Prague’s low-concept Kafka Museum.

Right next to Kafka mouse pads, Kafka t-shirts, Kafka beer mats, Kafka metal magnets, and an I heart Kafka baseball cap.

:::: How long is now?

When you first arrived, every day seemed a week, there was so much news coming in. Now you blink, and the cleaning staff is knocking on your door again, and you are sitting in front of your German teacher again, and you’re at the dinner table again.

The replication of moments turning time bleary.

:::: Hugh Kenner’s command of any subject was such that he could lecture without notes or script, Davenport recalled to me once. Kenner had a folder of blank pages, or letters from friends, that he pretended to be reading from, to assure audiences that he’d written out what he was saying.

:::: Because the two-note sirens boiling up out of the Berlin streets are straight from Nazi central.

:::: Or the evening Samuel R. Delany and O. sat over dinner at Casa De Oro in Moscow, Idaho, delighting in their mutual admiration of Davenport’s mind and style as if they had been the first to revel in them.

:::: Exploring the shock of 2711 concrete stellae, each 7’10” long, 3’1” wide, arranged in tidy rows in the anti-park just south of the Brandenburg Gate: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman. When O. descends the slope into its 4.7-acre void he becomes disoriented by the graynesses and heft of the monoliths, some of which tower 10 feet above him, some of which lean in as if about to topple.

Leaving, he passes a young couple sitting on a coffin-sized block, bottle-feeding their baby. A giggling teenage gang of Japanese tourists playing hide-and-seek among the deaths. Two cute Italian women in their early twenties snapping photos of a cute Italian guy in his twenties striking beefcake poses astraddle two upright slabs.

Then O. is history.

Aren’t we all?

:::: Berlin is poor, but sexy.

Klaus Wowereit, Governing Mayor, to a TV interviewer in 2004.

:::: Paris is always Paris and Berlin is never Berlin.

Jack Lang, France’s Minister of Culture, in 2001.

:::: Orson Wells as Harry Lime to Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins in The Third Man in 1949:

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

:::: Andi and I are wired to be existentially fidgety. We moved from Iowa, where we met, to Virginia, Virginia to Kentucky, Kentucky to northern Idaho, where we lived in a cabin on a rolling countryside 40 minutes from sweet small-town Moscow where I taught. Eleven years later I quit my job there, assuming I’d left the academic net of disappointments and conservative bureaucracies for good, and we moved to a log home among the remote mountains and glacier lakes of central Idaho. The nearest town is 12 miles away, boasts 497 people when everyone’s home, which often puts me in mind of the cramped shabby hut Wittgenstein built in 1914 in the isolated Norwegian mountains, his plan being to walk, read, think, write.

:::: Six years later, the University of Utah approached me in the guise of Karen Brennan as Andi and I sat over lattés at a hotel café at a conference in Austin. She asked if I’d be interested in a position there.

How could I hesitate?

:::: In his novel Nietzsche’s Kisses, O. writes these sentences, pretending they’re fiction:

How, in the course of his life, did he arrive here?

At one time, there seemed to have been so many other places to go.

:::: Outside my window at the Academy, on the snowy hill below, a boy bundled like an arctic astronaut: the child of a fellow fellow sledding giddily.

As I watch, his father, a distinguished anthropologist with prodigious frontal lobes and a cowboy hat, takes the sled from him, steps onto it, bends slightly at the waist and knees, right arm steering a rope tied to his sled’s prow, left pumping a victory fist, and rides down like some wild surfer on a frozen wave.

:::: Over breakfast this morning Andi explains she realized the photographs she’d begun taking from our balcony between 7:40 and 7:50 the day after our arrival aren’t about documenting the transformations of what she couldn’t believe she was seeing.

Instead, implied in each is the presence of the house across Wannsee Lake in which that 85-minute conference took place on 20 January 1942. She plans to link them together to make a fast-forward film of her enterprise because every click of her camera represents an affirmation in the face of what went on in that place.

I’m still alive, each shot says. You’re still dead. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

:::: Which is to say we keep writing, making art, anyway.

:::: Until, of course, we don’t keep writing, making art.

:::: Davenport claimed he lived almost exclusively on fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars. He did so in near privacy on a road at the end of the galaxy — Sayre Avenue in Lexington, Kentucky, a leafy suburban street that sometimes felt farther away from the bustle of things than Wittgenstein’s hut perched on a rocky cliff above the innermost point of Sognefjord.

Andi and I dropped by Davenport’s house one afternoon for a tour. What I remember most was how, at the base of his easel in the bright alcove dedicated to his art, every brush was aligned with every other, every paint tube lay beside the next in a soldier-perfect row. He had meticulously squeezed each tube from the bottom so it wouldn’t form unsightly crinkles.

He still used a manual typewriter.

In his last letter to his sister Gloria Williamson, written on that typewriter just before his death by cancer in 2005, he wrote: I hope you’re as happy as I am.

:::: RHETORIC. The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.

Ben Marcus.

:::: Or the German street art chanced upon in a U-Bahn station: someone spraypainting across the filthy tiled wall: Question everything.

Beneath, someone else spray-painting: Why?

:::: We took our seats in the first row of an unmarked white van outside our hotel in Kampala for the drive to the airport. It was 3 a.m., we’d slept only two hours that night, and we were dazed, filmy. Three Koreans materialized a couple minutes later and climbed aboard. They sat directly behind us. The driver asked for our passports. When the Koreans saw we were American, they got up without a word and moved to the seats in the far back row. It occurred to me they considered us liabilities.

The dirt roads through the capital possessed no streetlamps. All the houses were dark. It was like driving through German expressionist cinema, and then there were five grim men in military uniforms blocking our way. They stepped from nowhere carrying machine guns and flashlights, both leveled at our van. The flashlights were canted to blind us.

Our driver rolled down his window and exchanged some words with them, handed over our passports.

Two minutes were found lacking.

Five.

Back came the passports. The soldiers waved us on. I think we’d been stopped at some sort of makeshift checkpoint, though what was being checked, exactly, and how, still eludes me.

Throughout the event the Koreans behind us remained very quiet.

:::: We are all cultural informants.

:::: What won’t leave me alone about Ben Marcus’s definition of rhetoric is how it is and isn’t one. How it is indicative of the backbroke sentences that comprise his bafflement before not-knowing, about conventional mimesis as a kind of somnolence, about the very problematics of representation. How this sentence, that is, like them all in The Age of Wire and String, is a post-genre edifice that exists in some smudge between or beyond theory and fiction, poetry and prose, meaning and the other thing, by means of what we might call paragrammatic illegibility that gives rise to an abstract language that almost means, but doesn’t, quite (why do alarm and harm rhyme so loudly, so close together? in what sense can language make someone receptive to a pain she or he can’t imagine? shouldn’t our listeners be our readers? and by our the narrator — who is, come to think of it, who, exactly? — means. . what, exactly?), a language whose signifiers point to non-existent signifieds, unhinge the process of reading by fashioning something approaching asemic wordage that looks and sounds like it should make perfect sense. . until, that is, you pay any sort of attention to it.

:::: Ten days ago cranes started showing up around Wannsee — on the docks at the marina, waiting for fishermen to motor in with their catches, at the edge of the woods. They had returned from France and Spain on their way to breeding grounds in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. But two days ago they started disappearing again. The news says they’ve called off their migration in response to the extended snow and cold, have begun backtracking to warmer temperatures.

This morning Spiegel Online reports a flock of ill-fated ones became disoriented in central Germany’s thick fog and icy wind and began slamming into buildings and cars. In November 2011 more than 55 cranes and 300 geese landed on a highway in Brandenburg, where they were run over by cars.

:::: Here is Alexander Pope: Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

:::: And Don DeLillo: We seem to believe it possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

:::: How Marcus’s sentence exiles readers from knowledge, forces them to imagine in slow motion. It bears family resemblance to one by Barthelme. It is fifth cousin to one by Burroughs. It performs what it has been about all along: how, in the end, it is what it is talking about, as all rhetoric should be, all art — how it causes life to be less believable, which is to say more conscious of itself as cultural construction, as experience mediated by language, a kind of fiction making itself strange in order to startle said reader into waking, again and again, in order to feel, which is to say to think, which is to say to feel in exciting ways that challenge all he or she takes for granted, again and again, about language and experience and therefore about narrativity.

:::: An email from my friend Rochelle Ratner, her lung cancer having metastasized to her brain: They have me on this experimental chemo pill, long-term, which is supposed to reduce the risk of recurrence greatly. The problem is it made my face break out in this horrendous acne-like rash. So I’ve cut back to half a dose and begun taking antibiotics as well as using all sorts of creams. My dermatologist’s assistant spent nearly an hour with me showing me how to use makeup to cover the rash. I’ve never used makeup in my life, and really hadn’t planned on starting now, but it does seem to make a difference.

:::: According to a recent study, 88.2 % of those who live in what was once East Germany consider themselves atheists. Almost half of all Germans do. This in a country which ranks 11th behind the most heathen in the world, Sweden, where upwards of 85 % weigh in as non-believers.

In the Puritan-souled U.S., only 3-to-9% of the population identifies itself as bored by belief in boogiemen and tooth fairies.

:::: A cage went in search of a bird.

Imagined Kafka.

:::: Click.

:::: Raymond Federman, Larry McCaffery, Andi and I racing a RAV through narrower and narrower washes in the desert near Borrego Springs where Larry and his wife Sinda live.

:::: Click.

:::: We weren’t meant to be here, the literary critic Brian McHale pointed out several years earlier, standing beside me on a ridge overlooking those vast, arid, reddish-brown California badlands that are just like Mars, only with oxygen.

:::: Click.

:::: The four of us had stopped to pick up sandwiches at the deli in town before heading out. Larry drove with a tumbler full of vodka over ice between his legs and Sonic Youth on his RAV’s crapulent sound system. (Or maybe it was Bruce Springsteen. I remember both as the case.) After a while we couldn’t drive any farther, so got out and walked. I think I recall Andi and me lugging a cooler between us (and I think I recall Andi and me not lugging a cooler between us). We ended up in a natural amphitheater, a large bowl cut from the loose dry soil, slick clay, deep sand, rock. Its walls sloped up 100 feet above us. From somewhere Federman produced the manuscript he’d been working on (I want to say Return to Manure) and started reading aloud. McCaffery extracted his video camera from his daypack (although I don’t actually recollect him wearing one, although he must have been) and commenced filming while backing up a path that snaked toward the top of the wash.

And then Andi and I were leaning back against a big boulder across from Federman.

Listening.

The sun fading.

Federman’s voice echoing around us.

McCaffery becoming a thumb-sized stirring above us.

:::: I just memoried on myself a little.

:::: Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, is daughter of a Lutheran minister and a teacher of English and Latin. She received a doctorate in quantum chemistry, the same field her second husband, Professor Joachim Sauer, teaches. Angela doesn’t like children or dogs.

In the context of German politics and media, it is inconceivable anyone cares about her religious beliefs.

:::: A hefty, baggily dressed man in his sixties, who in another life might have been a professor, but who in this one had misplaced himself, enters the train to Potsdamer Platz.

He’s talking loudly to no one. After a while he approaches a young woman reading a book whose title I can’t make out. From the fall of paragraphs on the page, I imagine it’s a novel. There is an empty seat next to her. The man asks her to move so he can sit down. His legs, he says, are killing him. His capacity requires two seats. She looks up, indicates the one next to her, looks down.

Die sind Kindersitze, he says. Those are children’s seats. Now he’s angry. The young woman looks up, says leider, sorry about that, looks down.

She reads on, expressionless, unruffled in a way I could never aspire to be, as the large lost man thumps up and down the car, explicating something repeatedly, for emphasis, to his invisible associates.

:::: When the Wall became a museum, large numbers of East Berliners moved west, leaving hundreds of empty apartments behind them. A year, and about 200 buildings had become the center of a squatter’s movement in Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, and Kreuzberg. By 2005 most of those buildings had been forcefully cleared by police and imposed rents had risen by more than 20 % to make way for gentrification creep. Over the last five years, real estate prices have amplified another 32 %.

Sexy, Berliners maintain, but no longer poor.

:::: All knowledge is a border problematic: what’s kept in, kept out, by whom, why?

:::: Get going, go away, head for, migrate, proceed, push forward, roll, skip out, ship off, traverse, walk, jog, journey.

Run.

:::: The MaerzMusik festival: 10 days of aural innovation every March, and Andi is filming rehearsals.

Beat Furrer’s Xenos III: the percussionist recites haunted language particles by the Austrian author Händl Klaus (who was born, inverted, as Klaus Händl) into the timpani while the orchestra presents itself as a miscellany of instrumental tremors, scratching sounds, long tones, and mini-gestures designed to make you think about what we mean when we say the words instrument, hearing, music.

Isabel Mundry’s Depuis le Jour: 15 strings and two percussionists allow the contrapuntal music of Late Renaissance Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck to swell among an atonal mulligan, all about making difficult the idea of spatial and temporal locality, how the memory of art’s past remains detectable in art’s present, the concept of the truly unique, the new, invariably amounting to defective back-fence talk.

:::: Art’s metempsychosis, Joyce called it, malapropped via Molly Bloom as met him pike hoses: the transmigration, not only of souls, but also of texts and genres, from one body to another, across border after border.

:::: The instant the upper edge of the sun appeared above the eastern horizon in Berlin on 3 January 2013, the day we arrived:

8:17 a.m.

:::: Lethophobia: the fear of forgetting.

:::: Oliver Schneller’s Polis, a sound installation that generates the aural illusion of being in four places at once by producing ambient noise from a quartet of geographically separate locations through a quartet of speakers: 11:00 a.m. in Cairo, 11:00 a.m. in Beirut, 11:00 a.m. in Jerusalem, 11:00 a.m. in Istanbul.

What does sonic identity sound like, if it sounds like anything at all?

:::: On 26 March 2013:

5:55 a.m.

:::: On 30 April 2013:

5:37 a.m.

:::: Music, then, as performance art. Why does it never occur to me to buy an album by one of Cage’s children? Because a key to the experience of their work is being there, learning to listen in an ever more nuanced way to sonics that refuse to become melodic, repeatable, albumizable.

:::: Which is to say David Clark’s hypermedial 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein: To Be Played with the Left Hand juxtaposes (mostly audio, augmented by visual and textual) narraticules about the Austrian philosopher with those about his pianist brother, Paul, whose right arm was amputated during the First World War, the Twin Towers’ undoing, astronomy, architecture, movies, Hitler and Charlie Chaplin.

These last two born in 1889, the same year as Wittgenstein.

:::: Or how this morning is so bright, the snow outside my window so glaringly white, that floaters keep sliding up into my field of vision in a ceaseless Brownian motion as I sit by the bureau in the corner of my bedroom with a computer in my lap.

I pretend I’m not paying attention to the shadow flecks, but their proteinaceous facticity will have none of it.

:::: Because my books would never have been themselves, in other words, without Andi most of all, her artist’s eye, her ability to teach me daily how to unlearn certain ways of seeing.

Every single sentence in every single one is dedicated to her.

:::: In part the outcome of Clark’s project is an investigation into the problematics of language, and hence of representation, how the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us that we are as flies trapped in a bottle called Western thought, how the words that that thought deploys to build various logical systems bear no relationship to, say, the apples we eat, the kisses that celebrate our visit on this planet.

How the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us — by making us aware of the bottle’s presence, and thus its inherent limitations into which we are forever bumping our foreheads — the means by which to get out, or, perhaps closer to the point, the means by which we can’t get out, no matter what we do, because the top is sealed, because we can’t think beyond language’s glass grammars, because our perceptions are mediated by what we imagine verbs, nouns, and the rest can do.

How one gets out (by not getting out), not through applying a single philosophical method to all the linguistic knottinesses, but by moving from topic to topic every which way in an ongoing calisthenics of inquisitiveness and alertness.

:::: Embarked, en route, bound for, in passage, on the road, on the way, bug out, light out, move out, cruise, decamp, depart, get going, get lost, hightail it, hit the road, on the lam, make a break for it, pass through, push on, push off, quit, set off, shove off, take off, skip out.

Split.

:::: Because 88 Constellations is about how Wittgenstein gave us a bricoleur philosophy that unfolds like an abundance of mini-therapies.

:::: Muscae volitantes: Latin for flies hovering, the medical metaphor for floaters, that cell debris trapped in the eye’s vitreous humor over time — and so I’m once more reading about skin’s leisurely failure.

Spots. Threads. Cobwebs.

:::: Death is so terrifying, Susan Cheever wrote, because it is so ordinary.

:::: Move from printed page to hypermedial pagelessness, and you move from the primary awareness of temporality to the primary awareness of spatiality.

Time traveler becomes pathfinder.

Because 88 Constellations is an investigation into the ways narrativity can function as desire for patterning, for sense-webbing, created anew by each reader/listener/viewer by means of joining the dots of the data constellation called experience in divergent, contradictory ways.

:::: And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Exclaimed Nietzsche, who, interestingly, could not dance.

:::: There is hope, the writer with a series of baseball caps designed to make money at his expense said, but not for us.

:::: Someone who has given up the idea of living life will surely never be able to embrace death, wrote Guy Debord. Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible to die without first arranging for the system’s adjustment to the economic loss one’s death will incur; and the promoters of the American way of death dwell solely on how much of the appearance of life can be maintained in the individual’s encounter with dying.

:::: The instant the upper edge of the sun disappeared below the western horizon in Berlin on 3 January 2013:

4:05 p.m.

:::: In Stockholm you rent a car and drive south in search of the farm your grandfather grew up on and described in his progressively sketchier, unmoored memoir scrawled in halting English near the end of his life.

Following the clues, you discover the right parish church, show the gardener weeding among the tombstones the farm’s name, a word that in my grandfather’s hand looks like, perhaps, Hocktorp, although it could be Hackthorp or Hacktorp instead. The gardener shows you the family plot, shakes his head. He can’t help you any further — which is when a mailman peddles by. The gardener flags him down, shows him the name. The mailman recognizes it right away, yet speaks no more English than the gardener, so is reduced to drawing a virtually unreadable map.

Still, a few kilometers and there it is: the phenomenological oddness of red and white cottage, pond my grandfather swam in as a boy over a century ago, cows grazing in the front pasture, pine forest hilling up around us.

:::: For some reason, I decide to Google my dissertation director, Douglas Day, of whom I have always been deeply fond, and discover that, eight months after suffering a debilitating stroke in February 2004, he raised a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

:::: A farmer with your grandfather’s name is working out front.

You pull up, swing open the door of your rented car, hand extended, smiling the lightly uncomfortable unwelcome-visitor’s smile, attempt to clarify what you’re doing breathing his air.

He has just enough English to understand, at least partially, and, wary of our intrusion from the start, shuts down completely once he figures things out. Dour, he explains that, by abandoning his people and emigrating to the States, my grandfather became the black sheep in the story called this family.

No one talks about him. No one has for decades. No one cares what’s become of him. His past — and, by implication, of course, yours — doesn’t exist anymore.

:::: The whole point is that no one says it, because if one were to say it to oneself, it would become something different.

Guessed Felix Guattari.

:::: In a sense, to open your mouth is to stop traveling.

:::: In a sense, it is to begin.

:::: Depart, wend, advance, cross, dislocate, drive, fly, bike, hike, boat, read, watch, hear.

:::: Last night I was surprised when a visiting former fellow and art historian misquoted Kafka to me over dinner, heartbreakingly: I ate from the tree of knowledge and gave up life.

:::: Or the night in a canoe on the Amazon, rocking gently in a narrow tributary, water sloshing against the hull, jungle screeching.

The mosquito cloud.

The myriad caiman eyes glowing greenwhite among the tangled brush on the shore as our guide swept his flashlight through the darkness.

Let’s just be still for a minute, he said, and listen.

:::: Because you are what you read.

:::: Because the herbal gel I have been using for a year now in an attempt to diminish the ambush of a craggy three-inch scar across my lower back where some suspicious skin was removed doesn’t work.

I stop using it today when the last jar I packed runs out.

:::: Trolling Facebook, which I employ daily as a mode of digital daydreaming, I’m shocked to land on a friend’s page and read she died yesterday afternoon.

She and her husband, who had since divorced, were among our closest friends and comrades while we lived in Kentucky a quarter of a century ago. We were both assistant professors, both barely out of our careers’ gates. We moved on from Lexington at the same time, lost touch. Cancer found and, I had thought, misplaced her. Andi and I bumped into her again in 2004 by chance during an intermission at a play in London. She looked good, happy. We caught up over drinks afterwards and promised to stay in better touch, which we didn’t.

What are the chances?

And what are the chances of stumbling across this without warning:

Dearest friends, for those who do not know, we must sadly share that we lost our dear friend, Patricia Troxel, Sunday afternoon. She was surrounded by an extraordinary amount of love and support during her final hours and transitioned very peacefully with both of her hands being held by dear friends. We will miss her so very much, but are so grateful that she is no longer suffering and can now rest in peace and light.

:::: Here is the sentence all writers write beneath the sentences they seem to be writing:

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. . aren’t I?

:::: Twelve hours after leaning in to listen to the former fellow’s sad admission, I wake with a reprobate cold. I’ve kept healthy for more than two-and-a-half months, more than half my time in Berlin, yet somewhere in the night’s lethophobic folds I almost imperceptibly passed through the permeable membrane separating feeling-okay from not-feeling-okay, being-at-home in my body from not-being-at-home in it: the faintest sigh of a sore throat, the negligible perception of post-nasal drip, the sense of very literally being someone I wasn’t when I went to sleep.

:::: Identity Tourism: Lisa Nakamura’s term for the process of appropriating another self on the web, especially one involving a gender and/or race other than one’s congenital own, in the interests of nothing beyond the search itself, the pleasure, the increase of experience.

A (pre-)condition of travel — if in a modified sense — in the world or the world of writing, too.

:::: Traveling as a state of finding and losing your selves, encounter-ing/performing others, rejoicing in that which you can never be, those places you can never reach.

:::: Traveling as a way of trying to unconvince time.

:::: A few minutes later, it is May.

:::: Or the bioengineered replicant Roy Batty to his creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, in Blade Runner a second before Roy crushes Tyrell’s skull, drives his thumbs into Tyrell’s eyes: I want more life, fucker.

Which is to say: science fiction as cognitive estrangement inviting us to re-view our present through a tissue of metaphor and temporal disruption.

:::: Circumambulate, explore, follow one’s nose, gallivant, globe-trot, hit the road, hit the trail, make a circuit.

Meander.

:::: Barthes wrote The Death of the Author upon his return from a trip to Japan.

:::: On 29 May 2013, the day we’ll leave Berlin (suddenly everything is about imminent departure) so I can deliver a talk at the Pompidou about Debord’s influence on Nabokov (such anachronous involvement impossible, and yet not completely impossible, and yet not not completely impossible), and so Andi and I can start making our slow way back to the States:

4:51 a.m.

:::: A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort.

Drummed Ivan Chtcheglov.

:::: Flâneur: French noun denoting stroller, lounger, loafer, with connotations of the amateur urban detective, the intellectual nomad and parasite, the waster of time — and in the nineteenth century referring to a way of existing in the European city.

The flâneur, Walter Benjamin points out, enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else at the same time.

:::: Good-bye, says the dying man to the mirror they hold in front of him. We won’t be seeing each other anymore.

Imagined Paul Valéry in a line Paul Bowles appropriated 17 years later for an epigraph to his investigation into travel as precarious caesura.

:::: Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

Wittgenstein’s final words.

He had been reading Black Beauty, of all novels, the autobiography of a horse that taught the simple (and simplistic) lesson: people should be nicer to each other. Anna Sewell wrote it between 1871 and 1877 during the last few years of her life when she was an invalid imprisoned in her own house and her own body, barely able to leave her own bed.

Her only book, Black Beauty was brought out by a local publisher. It went on to become the sixth best seller in English.

:::: In Wittgenstein’s wake: 30,000 pages of incomplete manuscripts.

:::: Ralph Berry, Wittgenstein connoisseur and overseer from 1999 to 2005 of Fiction Collective Two, or FC2 for short, the author-run publisher of experimental fiction, phoned me one evening shortly after 9/11 to ask if I would consider becoming chair of its Board of Directors.

He explained I would be replacing Ronald Sukenick, one of the project’s founders, who was suffering from inclusion body myositis, a disease characterized by the progressive atrophying of one’s muscles. While Ralph explained what would constitute my duties, should I accept, I thought about how much I had loved those books ever since plucking one of Ron’s—98.6—off the new arrivals cart by chance one Friday evening as an undergraduate in Madison, Wisconsin.

I was bored and sifting through just-in novels at the Helen C. White Library to pass time, and then I was opening Ron’s to that part where the pages become a violent documentary collage and I was connected to the world again by disconnecting from it.

I want to say this was 1975. I want to say I was 19.

That would have made Ron 43, 13 years younger than I am today.

:::: Because any new way of reading that goes against the matrix of time, which pulls us toward death, is a futile but honest effort to resist this inexorability of one’s fate, in literature at least, if not in reality.

Hopes Milorad Pavic.

:::: Who is wrong, but in a beautiful, indefatigable, eminently quotable way.

:::: FC2 was born as Fiction Collective in 1974 when Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Mark Mirsky, Steve Katz, and several others began meeting in Baumbach’s Brooklyn apartment to discuss founding a cooperative fiction-publishing venture by and for innovative authors.

They had become dismayed by editorial and marketing limitations imposed by commercial presses — what Spielberg referred to as literature defined by committee, books designed by cereal packagers, marketed by used-car salesmen. . and ruled or overruled by accountants.

The idea was to create a publishing experiment that would last, all things going well, two or three years.

2014 was FC2’s 40th anniversary.

:::: The last impression you have before reaching out to shut down your computer: the diaphanous clouds against an ash-blue sky.

:::: The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Believed Christopher Hitchens, after whom the asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named days before he died in 2011, to the bitter end.

:::: Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless.

Proclaimed Proust.

:::: How, shortly before his death in 1631, John Donne obtained an urn, his own burial shroud, and the services of an artist named Nicholas Stone. The poet wrapped himself in the shroud, posed atop the urn, and had Stone render a charcoal sketch of him, which the poet kept by his bedside throughout his final illness.

He wanted to remind himself there is a little less of us every day.

Seven words, nine syllables, 23 letters: all that is the case, precisely what we know about ourselves, sans irony, wit, desperate belief.

The only significant question is what to do with such preposterous knowledge.

:::: Prowl, ramble, reconnoiter, rove, straggle, stray, stroll, traipse, trek, bum around, knock about, peregrinate, range, vagabond.

Contemplate.

:::: Look up the first definition of present in the O.E.D. and you will find being before, beside, with, or in the same place as the person to whom the word has relation; being in the place considered or mentioned; that is here (or there). Opp. to ABSENT.

:::: [[That is here (or there).]]

:::: Because from 1 December 2012 through 28 February 2013, there were 91.2 hours of sunshine in Berlin.

Total.

:::: Let’s call travel contemplation in motion.

:::: Or Ed Kienholz’s corpulent embalmed body, which, pre-embalmment, divided its time between northern Idaho and Berlin from the early seventies to that June day in 1994 it buckled of a heart attack in the middle of a hike near Hope, was wedged into the front seat of the artist’s brown 1940 Packard, a dollar and deck of cards in its pocket, bottle of 1931 Chianti beside it, ashes of its dog Smash in the trunk.

Bagpipes complaining, the coupe, steered by his widow Nancy, rolled down into a huge hole.

Because Kienholz was Kienholz’s terminal installation.

:::: And then I was visiting Ron for the last time. It was a humid rainy Tuesday afternoon. It was his Battery Park City apartment. From his living room, we could see the Hudson and Jersey City’s skyline on the far shore.

It was 2004. I was 48. Ron was 72, 17 years after I first met him face-to-face when I invited him to read at the University of Kentucky. He showed up with his then girlfriend, Julia Frey, and spent the hours after his reading skinny-dipping with her in the staid hotel’s pool.

Inclusion body myositis eventually makes swallowing impossible, and next breathing. Ron had lost the use of his fingers, so had bought himself voice-recognition gear. He wrote by means of it. First thing he did when I showed up was to lead me into his study to show off his new gadget, with which he was wrapping up Last Fall, his 9/11 novel.

(He didn’t know it would be his 9/11 novel. He’d been writing what he believed was a different book entirely when he looked up that glistening morning and saw the first plane explode into the World Trade Center.)

(The very next sentence he composed reconceived what he was doing and why.)

(His novel changed course in a breath of white space.)

What was utterly uncanny about our meeting was how we both knew it was going to be the last time we would see each other, and how there were no social conventions to cover such a spectral occasion.

:::: Traveling is a condition enabling recognition of the limits of human knowledge and mastery, inviting us to orient and re-orient our selves to an existence that will always exceed our grasp.

:::: Das Umgreifende, that is to say: Jasper’s term, which passes into English as The Encompassing, for the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective life is possible, but which can itself never be apprehended rationally.

One only becomes authentically human when one allows one’s identities to confront such un-imaginables as universal contingency and the loss of the human, which is to say the loss of the body, which is to say insert euphemism here.

Everything else amounts to forms of resistance, repression, refusal, reptilian fear.

:::: This is, O. assumes, why Thomas Pynchon wrote the following sentence in the foreword to his short story collection Slow Learner:

When we speak of seriousness in art, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death — how characters act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate.

:::: Because the last words Roy Batty speaks, huddled on a dark rainy L.A. rooftop in 2019, are some of the saddest, most powerful, in the entire film: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. . All those moments will be lost in time. .

:::: Traveling as loss in the making.

:::: Birth, Beckett apprehended, was the death of him.

:::: The morning my cold finally dissolves I check the online news before beginning to write — an act comprising part of my daily hesitation ceremony — and read that at 5 a.m. work crews backed by 250 police removed four sections (each about three-and-a-half feet wide) from what came to be known as the East Side Gallery — i.e., the longest remaining stretch of the Wall, transformed within the months of the rest going down into a colorful homage to nutty invention — in order to make way for an access route to planned high-rise apartments along the River Spree.

:::: Or hiraeth: the Welsh word meaning homesickness for a place to which you cannot return, aporia where presence is always divided.

:::: Dirt nap. Done dancing. Kicked the oxygen habit.

:::: I went to Prague to take part in a private seminar with some dissident Czech philosophers who were banned from the universities, recounts Derrida in a snippet O. locates by accident on YouTube. I was followed by the Czech secret police, who made no secret about it. After the seminar I went for a walk around Kafka’s town as if in pursuit of Kafka’s ghost, who was, in fact, himself pursuing me.

:::: This piece of the Wall is the last memorial to the people who died and to the perseverance of freedom, announced David Hasselhoff to the crowd gathered before him the morning that crew began taking down the 15-foot section of this city’s ingenuity.

How this is the first time in O.’s life he finds himself agreeing with The Hoff, who went on to belt out a couple tuneless lines from Looking for Freedom for the attendant protesters — the same song he sang on stage in front of the Brandenberg Gate while sporting a jacket bedecked with miniature light bulbs on New Year’s Eve 1989, a month after the Wall became agitated memory.

Looking for Freedom, a Schlager about a rich man’s son who wants to make his own way in life, had stayed at the top of the German pop charts for eight weeks after its release a year before. Apparently, though, The Hoff’s followers missed its point: Its argument isn’t about the celebration of freedom, but about how freedom can never really be found, is a perpetually deferred condition.

Matthew Wilkening of AOL Radio philosophized that the song’s presence in the cosmos testifies to nothing less than the power of music — horrible, horrible music — to unite and uplift us all.

Being a brief parable about the Schlagering of U.S. writing practices.

:::: You remain cold-free for a week and then, walking the old Jewish ghetto in Krakow one bleak sleety afternoon, impressed by how there are no signs indicating this is the area where 15,000 were imprisoned in a space meant to be inhabited by 3000, you recognize a fresh scratchiness at the back of your throat.

Ten days later your second cold is inaccessible to your recollection in any detail.

:::: But paradise is locked and bolted. We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.

Prayed Heinrich von Kleist.

:::: My last reading in Berlin is with Donna Stonecipher at St. George’s English Bookshop, an epicenter of ex-pat writing. Donna has just translated a Nietzschean thought-metaphor by the Swiss author Ludwig Hohl: Ascent. It’s both about a pair of men attempting to climb a mountain and the complications of maneuvering through its own writing processes.

It took Hohl, virtually unknown out of his country (he had to publish a number of his works himself), almost 50 years to compose and recompose.

By way of introduction, Donna shows a video clip of an interview with him. His thick glasses distort his eyes into monsters on the screen. Out of nowhere the interviewer asks if Hohl notices things disappearing from his house. Hohl’s gigantic eyes widen as he begins to ramble on about small objects going AWOL everywhere.

He appears tremendously excited that someone else has finally noticed this phenomenon.

:::: Two minutes ago O. filled out an online questionnaire titled Death Forecast in an attempt to figure out when he will go AWOL in the largest sense.

He answered questions about his gender, date of birth, grandparents’ longevity, exercise regimen, diet, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, propensity to smoke and/or take drugs, history of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and depression.

It is estimated you will die at the age of 89, the results noted.

Initially the number delighted him. It gave him 33 more years, which sounded like a pocket-sized eternity.

Next he went to a time-units conversion calculator which revealed to his horror that 33 years is really only 396 months, which sounded like a lot less — and that 396 months is really only 1,721.85608 weeks, which is really only 12,052.9926 days, which is really only 289,271.822 hours, which is really only 17,356,309.3 minutes, which is really only 1,041,378,558 seconds, which seems like no time at all, none whatsoever, nix, naught, null, the beat of a nervous heart.

:::: Because standing among a group of tourists in the poorly lit gas chamber at Auschwitz, taking in the more-or-less-one-foot-by-more-or-less-one-foot hole in the ceiling through which the executioners used to spill waterfalls of light green-blue Zyklon B pellets on the terrified men, women, and children screaming below, you feel a tremendous wave of cognitive dissonance: repugnance and disbelief, of course, empathy, too, but also a grim fascination before this black wave of depravity, a torture-porn thrill you don’t believe those clicking their cameras around you would quite admit to but nonetheless are certainly experiencing, a blossom of comfort at the distance between where you are, where you could be, and where you inevitably will be — in 396 months or the following nothing flat.

:::: Addendum: achievement of full presence is, according to Derrida, another way of saying I’m dead.

:::: On a large enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.

Clarified Chuck Palahniuk.

:::: Optimist: the name of the small, single-handed sailing dinghy that doesn’t stand a chance in a heavy wind.

:::: My dying friend: A lot of the brain motor difficulties that I was expecting after the first surgery seem to be appearing now. My left hand feels more or less like a stroke patient’s unable to do very much except spill a glass of water on a computer keyboard or leave A. walking two blocks behind me because I had no sensation that I let go of his hand. For about two weeks there I was having some real palsy tremors, what they’re calling mini-seizures.

:::: Or watching Marlene Dietrich sing Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt in Der Blaue Engel, the first major German sound film, at the Kino Delphi, which used to show silent ones, and in whose neighborhood The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was shot in 1919. The humorless communists stripped the venue to bare cement walls and closed it completely in 1959. Now all that remains is a vaulted cement cavern, at one end of which lifts a cement stage, in front of which is sunk an orchestra pit, in which 13 musicians used to accompany Metropolis and Nosferatu. Tonight the Berlin Film Society has rented the place, set up tables, manned a bar selling absinthe, supplied a pre- and post-film D.J., bathed it all in a rich blue light, and created a cabaret ambience where young women wear tails, top hats, and drawn-on Hitler mustaches, men shiny three-piece suits.

There is no heat, so you huddle in your winter coat, scarf wrapped around your neck, picking at a pretzel, sipping a beer whose brand name is Bier (and whose motto is TASTE NEEDS NO NAMES), absorbing the fact that life gets no better.

:::: Because the birds are back today without warning, the sculling team slicing redly across the lake’s reflections, the small white triangle of a single sailboat gliding offshore.

:::: Which is to say it is as if someone flipped a switch. Two days ago it wasn’t spring, but this morning it is, and a team contracted by railway operator Deutsche Bahn has just defused a Russian-made aerial bomb weighing 220 pounds unearthed six feet from a train track leading into the Hauptbahnhof. More than 800 people were evacuated before said team moved in, which, it turns out, is nothing compared to the 45,000 evacuated from Koblenz in 2011 as bomb squads dealt with a 1.8-metric ton British device that could have wiped out the entire city center.

It’s always yesterday here, and yesterday can always bite.

:::: Which is to say in Walter Abish’s How German Is It the flourishing postwar community of Brumholdstein (named after the philosopher Ernst Brumhold, a fictive proxy for Heidegger) is built over the remains of a concentration camp and mass grave, the country’s preconscious forever churning just beneath the patina of la vie quotidienne, the museum by nature containing incomplete pasts, parallel universes, investigations into the impossibilities of full presence.

Abish, whose family fled Austria in the thirties, had never stepped foot inside Germany before his novel appeared.

:::: Because exile, Edward Said argued, is a permanent state. It isn’t something that can be gotten over, cannot be restored. It’s like the fall from Paradise. You can’t really go back. In that case, what is it that exile affords you that wouldn’t be the case for someone who always stayed at home, went through the daily routine? I think the essential privilege of exile is to have, not just one set of eyes, but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been. Therefore, instead of looking at experience as a single, unitary thing, it’s always got at least two aspects: the aspect of the person who is looking at it and has always seen it, looking at it now and seeing it now, and the person who remembers what it would have looked like from that other place. There is always a kind of doubleness to that experience, and the more places you have been, the more displacements you’ve gone through. . the more experiences seem to be multiple and complex and composite and interesting for that reason.

:::: The weather warming and bluing. Rectangular daffodil rugs appear in the garden down by the marina. Andi and I move out onto our balcony overlooking the Wannsee for breakfast. Two spindly chairs, a small round rust-red table. Early greenness fuzzing the trees.

We take a moment to make a little toast to the villa across the lake where that conference convened 71 years ago.

:::: Because back in Salt Lake City two large framed photographs hang on the walls of my study, both by Joel-Peter Witkin. They are the only ones by an established artist Andi and I have ever felt it imperative to purchase.

Each is a still life, a nature morte, a dead nature, constructed from corpse parts the photographer found and posed in morgues in Mexico and France.

:::: How, in the end, inside always becomes outside.

:::: That which separates us, exiles us, from the rest of the world — our sphincterial control, our skin, our existential spacesuit — gradually goes away as we become something other than what we are.

:::: The second video released from Bowie’s The Next Day is the Lynchian The Stars (Are Out Tonight). Tilda Swinton and Ziggy Stardust’s father play an older bourgeois couple whose comfortable existence dislocates when a pair of rockers (one a version of the earlier androgynous Bowie) follows them home from the neighborhood grocery store and commences haunting their physical and emotional space. Yet the predictable erotic/demonic alien invasion narrative perverts by the video’s conclusion: the older bourgeois couple turns out to be the opposite of what we anticipate. They begin haunting the younger couple even as they are haunted. Interpretive absonance erupts, unmooring the comment Bowie and Swinton exchange at the video’s outset: We have a nice life.

[[We]] [[have]] [[a]] [[nice]] [[life]] [[.]]

:::: The existence that the older couple performs/deforms disarranges their younger disruptors even as the heavy-energy vintage-Bowie soundtrack complicates any simple reading of Where are We Now, that first vulnerable video from The Next Day.

I’m still alive, The Stars (Are Out Tonight) song and video argue. You’re still et cetera.

:::: Melancholia: the condition of perpetual mourning, the refusal to be done with death(s).

:::: How do I live the violence of my formation?

Wondered Judith Butler.

:::: Sitting in the audience at Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, the 1983 operatic conclusion to his trilogy about three visions (Einstein’s and Gandhi’s form the first and second: i.e., ones concerning science and politics; this one concerns religion) which altered the age in which they lived, and remembering how remote, how exiled from any sonic homeland, his music sounded when you first heard it, how harmonic and melodic it sounds tonight, how everything you’ve heard since then has taught you how to rehear what you [[heard]] in the early eighties, how what you [[heard]] in the early eighties as [[avant-garde]] you now hear as some stepbrother of something distantly pop.

With nearly 2500 fans at more rock concert than classical performance in massive hangar two at Tempelhof airport, defunct since 2008, whose aerial layout resembles an eagle in flight, its semicircular hangars spread wings, intended by the Nazis who built it to serve as gateway to Germania and the new post-war Europe.

:::: The irony of man’s condition, advanced Ernest Becker, who as an infantryman during the Second World War helped liberate a concentration camp, is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

:::: Is there no way out of the mind?

Inquired undone Sylvia Plath.

:::: In Kafka’s prose poem, the Emperor on his deathbed whispers an urgent message to his herald, who immediately strikes off to deliver it to you. Yet it takes him forever to make his way through the crowd jamming the palace. And even if he were to succeed in reaching the exit, which he won’t, he would simply find more stairs, more courtyards, a second palace surrounding the first, and the infinite capital city beyond. So you are left alone, sitting at your window, dreaming of a dead man’s message that will never arrive.

Being a brief parable about how religion, exile, language, hope, reading, writing, and the idea of travel function.

:::: Postmodern allegories, Charles Jencks used to call such narratives, because they seem to point to another level of meaning, but what that level is is made hazy, multiple, conflicted.

:::: The first Witkin photograph on my wall: a plump old woman, the top of her head missing, her skin blotched, her body supported by wires, propped next to a table in a sparse room. On the table is a book. Her finger holds her place, although the arm to which the finger is attached is no longer attached to her torso.

Interrupted Reading, the photograph is entitled.

:::: Today’s laziness consists in lifeless motion.

Maximed Ludwig Hohl.

:::: Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

Apothegmed David Foster Wallace.

:::: Roland Barthes, redux: In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

:::: How my own mother, a startlingly good-willed, strong-minded woman who grew up on a cotton farm near Ganado, Texas, exiled herself to New York City as soon as possible, working as a visiting nurse, a hospital nurse, a humanities teacher. In the early seventies she exiled herself from Unitarianism into a New-Agey take on Eastern religions in search of the inaccessible land that lies beyond the horizon we think of as living.

How she primly waited to die in her living room in suburban Dallas, where my father (now dead himself) and she had retired (much to her chagrin) almost 20 years before. Also cancer, this time of the breast metastasized to spine, liver, brain.

Inventorying the clutter that took her nearly 74 years to quilt around her, she says unexpectedly, almost casually, as we sit together, to no one in particular:

All these things will forget their stories the second I’m gone.

:::: Because every once in a while Ron stopped talking, shifted in his electric wheelchair, increasingly banished from his own anatomy, looked out his picture window at the river glistening far below, glided back to alight on what we were saying, and we would pick up where we had left off. I drank bourbon, he tea through a straw. He was having trouble swallowing, was becoming tired very quickly. You could see it.

:::: The second Witkin photograph: a stuffed monkey slipping artificial flowers into (or perhaps out of) the unskulled top of a woman’s untorsoed head, its eyes closed, atilt on some dark surface.

Let’s call that surface a table.

Let’s not.

:::: You will never have seen such a lush, green city, promised a friend several weeks ago. Just you wait.

:::: Excuse my dust.

Reads Dorothy Parker’s epitaph.

:::: One of my fellow fellows at the Academy, who had lived in East Berlin for years when younger, expressing her heartfelt disappointment that, when she petitioned to find out after the Wall came down, she was told the Stasi possessed no secret file on her.

:::: One morning just under a month before we leave, Andi shows up in the living room with three packing boxes and begins to collect the winter clothes and books we no longer need.

That moment, and we’re traveling again.

:::: During the Cold War, a friend explains to me over dinner at Mao Thai in the gentrification creep of Prenzlauer Berg, those living in West Berlin were exempt from the Federal Republic’s compulsory military service, and so young radical artists, writers, and musicians spewed into the city.

Being a brief parable about how Berlin, a country subsisting inside another country, has happened for more than 100 years.

With, of course, a handful of notable exceptions.

:::: I want to enjoy my death, Beckett once wrote.

Presumably with some irony.

:::: Out of Print.

Being what Raymond Federman, whose parents and sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, along with more than a million others (including, of course, Kafka’s sister), wanted his epitaph to read.

:::: Rebecca Solnit, noch einmal: Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

:::: I would add, too, a simultaneous understanding, at least in the form of some abstract proposition, about how abridged each item on Solnit’s list is, how it is precisely that understanding that infuses each instant of travel with its idiosyncratic radiance.

:::: And so, as our last month at the Academy unfurls around us, everything becomes as shimmery as it had on that first drizzly day our taxi crawled through the heavy black iron gates toward the Italianate villa in which I’m now sitting at my desk.

:::: Standing on a corner, waiting for the red Ampelmann to turn into a green Ampelmann, my German friend grows impatient and steps out into the street, telling me over his shoulder:

Come. In Berlin traffic lights are just a suggestion.

:::: I lost all my hair two weeks back, Rochelle emails me. One of the things they talked about was the need to keep the head covered at all times and I ended up buying a large assortment of what they call chemo turbans, some of them reasonably stylish, to wear around the house. I mean, it’s a perfectly good wig, and I’m sure was once a very nice beaver or groundhog or whatever it was, but I hate it. The hair of my nightmares.

:::: The head. Not my head.

:::: As if she had already begun becoming something other than her own body, like the women in those Witkin photographs.

Which, needless to say, she had.

:::: Re: the wig: the perhaps forced — yet essential — humor.

:::: People flooding onto the streets from their winter nests to salute the weather, the sun, the blank skies, the bird chitter: onto the benches, grass swathes, monkey bars in the park along the lake, into the woods surrounding the city, into the squares and animated biergartens, the flea markets, the small tables outside cafés and bistros, reading novels and newspapers, scrolling down smartphone screens, visiting with friends, pushing strollers, holding hands, biking, window shopping, faces raised to absorb the rays streaming down, and it occurs to you you’re negotiating a different city that just happens to share the same name with the one you landed in more than a fourth of a year ago.

In less than a month you will be part of exactly none of this.

:::: Witkin’s goal slant-rhyming with Viktor Shklovsky’s: The technique of art being to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.

:::: O. attends a reading by and interview with William Vollmann at the Kino Babylon, chats and has his photograph snapped with the author afterwards at a literary gathering at the café next door. But it is only when examining that photograph the next day that O. notices what Vollmann’s t-shirt — an Indian warrior on horseback, rifle raised high above his head — says:

My heroes have always killed cowboys.

:::: Witkin’s goal slant-rhyming with Gaston Bachelard’s: Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.

:::: A friend recounting how, as the East Germans came across the Glienicke Bridge in November 1989, they were met by West Germans offering bananas — fruit the East Germans had seen on TV, but never tasted.

How bright yellow banana peels covered the road.

:::: Because at the confluence of reading and writing demanding texts, which is to say when traveling, we will always arrive at curiosity, relearn what movement feels like, concentration, which is to say how to be more like that set of fluctuations we mean when we say being [[there.]]

:::: Three and a half million people, at least 5000 of them homeless. 2500 public recreational and green spaces. The prices low, but the wages low, too — ranking beneath those in Copenhagen, New York, Munich, London, Frankfurt, and more than a dozen other cities. Ten million tourists annually. Artists everywhere, but few buyers. 18 percent woodlands. 18 percent unemployed. An average of 29 vacation days. 721 bikes per 1000 inhabitants. One in five children with at least one drug-addicted parent. 11.5 percent recreational areas. 61 intentional murders. 5 percent farming. 1960 robberies in public spaces last year.

All run on an economy of carnage tourism for those who need to relive the Second World War in a way one no longer can in, say, London.

Let’s call that Berlin.

Let’s not.

:::: If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

Encouraged Einstein, who, while on a visit to the States in February 1933 a few weeks after that loud stubby man with the goofy mustache called himself Chancellor, decided not to return to his homeland.

:::: Sailboats a flock of bobbing seagulls scattered across the denim-blue lake.

:::: Frank Berberich, publisher and editor of Lettre International, a big friendly gray bear who borrowed Friedrich Nietzsche’s mustache, explaining over espressos in his office in Kreuzberg, a Jörg Immendorff behind his desk floating at the corner of my vision, the distance between the PR associated with Berlin and boots on the ground.

When I ask about the possibility spaces by definition inherent in university students, he tells me a listless melancholia has replaced a latent rage in the young.

:::: Their inability, Frank says, to invent a language that allows them to think beyond capitalism.

:::: Because O. doesn’t know what he ate, or if it was in fact something he ate, or rather if it was something he touched instead, but the outcome is he divides the next 24 hours fairly evenly between boking it and a hyperbolic case of the trots, fever, fatigue, and stabbing abdominal pains. He wants to curl in bed, go to sleep, wake up when it’s over, but can’t find a single comfortable position. His stomach is killing him. Somewhere in the protracted dimness he leads a Ph.D. defense via Skype, remembers at one point asking the student on the other side of the screen: How does one write the contemporary?

Later he tumbles into an asymmetrical sleep.

Next morning he realizes he actually pulled a muscle in his groin from all that evacuation. Otherwise, it feels almost (but not quite) as if he had read about rather than experienced the identity that was his 24 hours earlier.

:::: In that race which daily hastens us towards death, Camus noticed, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

:::: If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.

Kvetched Woody Allen.

:::: Because Tennessee Williams accidentally swallows the cap to his eye drops and suffocates alone in his New York hotel room.

:::: Sherwood Anderson chokes on a toothpick at a party in Panama.

:::: Maupassant tries killing himself by slicing his own throat, fails, is declared insane, spends his last 18 months in an asylum, and dies from the syphilis he contracted in his youth.

:::: As does Manet. As does Gaugin. As does Schubert.

:::: As does Nietzsche. As does Scott Joplin. As does Baudelaire.

:::: Witkin asking his viewers to sympathize with the fragility of our human flesh, our human heart, the act of persistent lessening we call ourselves.

:::: How I was reading to my mother from Eliot’s Four Quartets when she died. Andi was holding her hand. We were at her bedside, talking to her, trying to comfort her, telling her what was occurring was okay, it was okay to stop with the fighting, she had fought plenty already, even though she was already unconscious, even though she had been for more than a day.

She flinched suddenly and then stopped breathing.

:::: My mother was herself and then that changed.

:::: A period of Q&A follows each fellow’s presentation about his or her work. At some point the same fellow’s hand invariably goes up. Earlier in the semester I found her bright questions complex and resonant. Several weeks ago it dawned on me they all boil down to variations on the same one — an inquiry that is less about the subject at hand than the nature of narratology in its broadest conceptualization:

You mean there’s no hope, no resolution, no such thing as a happy ending?

:::: You want to trot over and hug her every time you see her stirring in her seat.

:::: To hope is to contradict the future.

Emphasized Emile Cioran, who in 1933 studied at the University of Berlin and confessed in a newspaper column: There is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler.

:::: To simplify is to contradict the past.

:::: Because, after a little more than an hour, I realized I should take my leave of Ron. I don’t believe I have ever experienced more complication closing a door behind me.

:::: How that door remained both open and shut after I left because the only real closure can come in mimetic fiction and knee-jerk memoir, stories of trauma leading to redemption, triumph over adversity, faux wisdom hardened into commodity for those desperate to buy and believe it.

Like an order of Arby’s Cheesecake Poppers, only with your life.

:::: I think I’ve heard of Lance Olsen. I wonder who he was.

People in 50 years won’t ever say.

:::: If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.

Posited Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern pragmatism, who during the last two decades of his life couldn’t afford heat in winter and was forced to subsist on old bread donated by the local baker.

:::: No comment.

Reads the epitaph on Edward Abbey’s memorial stone.

:::: It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived, recounted Joel-Peter Witkin. We were going to church. Walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it, but before I could touch it someone carried me away.

:::: Death is not an event in life, Wittgenstein claimed: we do not live to experience death.

:::: Yes, I want to say, and no.

:::: Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.

Emma Bovary eats arsenic, Eva Braun cyanide, Alan Turing cyanide, Walter Benjamin morphine, Freud morphine, Raymond Roussel barbiturates, Abbie Hoffman barbiturates, Stefan Zweig barbiturates, Frieda Kahlo painkillers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman chloroform.

Attila the Hun, whose empire stretched from the Ural to the Rhine and the Danube to the Baltic, chokes to death at his own wedding feast.

:::: Sculptor Tony Cragg asking the audience during an interview with Ulrich Krempel at the Academy to imagine two dots on a piece of paper.

Now, he says, imagine how you might connect them.

Most of us would draw a straight black line from one to the other. The artist would see a plethora of opportunities, including a colorful filament that circles out and around Jupiter and back again.

:::: The polymorphous flare-up of white asparagus everywhere, each tapering penile stalk more than a foot long, an inch round.

Pan-fried asparagus. Wiener Schnitzel with asparagus. Cheesecake with asparagus. Asparagus lasagna. Asparagus quiche. Asparagus soup. Asparagus salad. Asparagus ice cream.

Asparagus, Proust’s narrator noticed, transforms my chamber pot into a flask of perfume.

:::: Because Virginia Woolf drowns herself in the Ouse, Paul Celan in the Seine, Spalding Gray in the East River, Hart Crane in the Gulf of Mexico.

:::: I think the future has it in for us.

Theorized Noel Gallagher, who may have been intentionally slant-rhyming with Jim Morrison’s not unfamiliar observation: No one here gets out alive.

Niemand hier bekommt lebend raus.

:::: God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.

Fussed Eugène Ionesco.

:::: Because Anne Sexton shrugs on her mother’s old fur coat, removes her rings, pours herself a glass of vodka, strolls into the garage, and starts her car.

:::: Consciousness’s continuous harassment by the flesh.

:::: God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable, felt H. L. Mencken. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

:::: He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

Saw Nietzsche.

:::: Because Patrik Ouredník tells how, during the first months Buchenwald was open for business, those in charge gifted the inmates with postcards saying: Accommodation is wonderful, we are working here, we receive decent treatment and are well looked after. The inmates were made to sign them and address them to relatives, some of whom apparently believed what they read. One Greek prisoner mailed his postcard to his father in Pyrgos. Three months later, the man arrived for a visit.

At the railroad platform, the son leapt upon him, strangling his father to death before the Germans could get their hands on the poor sap.

:::: Three weeks away from the taxi that will take us to Tegel, O. begins imagining what their suitcases will look like waiting next to their apartment door.

:::: That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.

Were Lou Costello’s last words.

:::: Beyond a certain point there is no return. That is the point that has to be reached.

Contended the writer with a t-shirt designed to make money in his name saying: Kafka didn’t have a lot of fun either.

:::: I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.

Wrote another editor when rejecting Gertrude Stein.

:::: O. invariably begins to imagine what comes after the finish line of every race long before the homestretch rounds into view.

:::: Death is the mother of beauty.

Penciled Wallace Stevens, who in 1935 confessed to his publisher he was a Mussolini supporter and added: The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors.

:::: Because my uncle had a heart attack on a beach in Texas while feeding the pigeons.

A good Scandinavian, he was too embarrassed to draw attention to himself, recounted his wife, who was sitting beside him at the time, and so he expired, sotto voce, on the spot.

:::: Or my cousin who went into the hospital for a routine hip replacement to fix his fullback years and caught a virulent bacterial infection. One week he was fine, the next on a ventilator, and the next his wife was emailing family and friends announcing the time and place of his memorial service.

:::: Andi’s grandmother refused to be buried, insisting on being entombed in a mausoleum instead because, went her reasoning, she didn’t want to get dirty.

:::: Or Cam Tatham, another dying friend. Another email. Another metastasis to the brain. Sorry not to have updated you sooner, he writes, but the fog is settling in so even this will have to be short. Not much news. I wish I could write something light and cheerful, at least something light and pomo-ish, but, fact is, cancer does suck. Or, rather, it’s the treatment that sucks: makes me want to do nothing but sleep all day (and night). Not much pain — occasional headaches, joint aches. What’s most scary is the felt deterioration of my mental abilities (such as they were) — each day, I get dumber and dumber, and know it. Memory loss, inability to follow conversations, inability to find words. B. finds it inevitably frustrating, seeing me standing in the middle of a room, clearly without a clue what I’m doing there; and never sure if I understand or will remember two minutes later something she asked me to do. Frustrating for me, too — feeling like a retard who needs to have notes pinned to his shirt.

:::: Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Queried Annie Dillard.

:::: Because Diane Arbus swallows barbiturates and slashes her wrists, as does Mark Rothko, as does Petronius, as does B.S. Johnson.

:::: Jerzy Kosinski swallows barbiturates and puts a bag over his head, as does Michael Dorris.

:::: Alice Bradley Sheldon, a.k.a. James Tiptree, Jr., blows out her blind and bedridden husband’s brains as he sleeps, then lies down beside him, takes his hand in hers, and blows out her own.

:::: Edwin Armstrong, inventor of the FM radio, jumps from a window, as does F.O. Matthiessen, as does Gilles Deleuze.

:::: Primo Levi leaps from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin.

:::: While I thought that I was learning how to live, Leonardo da Vinci apprehended near the end of his life, I have been learning how to die.

:::: Nietzsche, redux: The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

:::: Because each morning, as you rise from your bed, the belief hums through your head that you are going to die, going to die, going to die, yes, surely, no doubt about it, but not today — an observation that will remain correct every morning of your life, except one, because—

Because—

O. writes at the conclusion of his novel Calendar of Regrets, pretending et cetera, though what he can’t get beyond, rereading those lines now, is how bed and head form an unintentional rhyme.

:::: Every sentence is a kiss.

:::: All the Berlins.

:::: And I have come to relinquish that most modern of stances: uncertainty, Carole Maso submitted. I am certain now of what will happen.

:::: Which in the end is to understand fully by not fully understanding that no matter where we live, or for how long, no matter how we read or think or write, or in what configuration, we’re all just paying by the hour.

Content

Lance Olsen

acknowledgments