:::: 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 experimentaclass="underline" 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.