:::: 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.