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.