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: