:::: 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.