O. is suggesting, however, New York brings out less of it—much less of it — than it once did. Nor does he want to submit that alternative presses don’t bring out some embarrassingly simple sloppy stuff. Still, those small presses constitute important sites of aesthetic, political, and philosophical anti-Oedipal resistance.
They remind us with each publication that our writing, and hence our lives, can be other than they are.
:::: No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke, David Foster Wallace advanced: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.
Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
:::: Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock.
Donald Barthelme once described his fiction as.
:::: When in the condition of traveling, you can by definition never take anything for granted.
:::: During the war, tankers my father sailed on were torpedoed and sunk two times. Once he was forced to jump overboard into a burning sea while a U-Boat circled, machine-gunning the survivors of the initial blasts.
By the time you hit the water, he told me, you have either chosen to believe in God or chosen never to believe in Him again.
My father got on the latter tram.
:::: [[Yesterday will invariably remain a rumor.]]
:::: When Linda Hutcheon talks about historiographic metafiction, she’s talking about writing practices aware of themselves as writing practices, aware that pastness occurs only in an incessant process of being un- and re-written.
:::: Wandering from room to room in the Wannsee Conference center, you wonder how Germans can carry such history on their backs from one day to the next.
A thought which leads you to wonder how Americans can do the same.
:::: Facts, Hutcheon continues, are discourse defined. Events are not.
To narrate, naturally, is to constellate facts.
To tell is by necessity to tell through the glitch of memory and fuddle of ideology.
:::: The genocide of Native Americans. Slavery. Vietnam. Und so weiter.
:::: I sit across a table from a French fellow at dinner. She lives in America, does German philosophy. Her father spent the butt ends of the war in Buchenwald, then Dachau, for working in the Resistance.
Her young communist self believed the G.D.R. was populated by utopian communes where girls in spotless white dresses played on lawns green as those now covering the remains of the Führerbunker — until she arrived in East Berlin to spend a righteous summer building housing for the comrades, only to find herself living in a hovel in a muddy field in one of the drabbest, meanest corners of earth.
That is, she explained, she’s had a profoundly complicated relationship with Germany all her life and yet, after spending many months on and off in Berlin since those strange early days, she caught herself last week strolling down a street in the city center loving the country without qualification.
Why?
The Germans, she explained, have more fully, more honestly confronted their heebee-jeebies yesterdays than any other culture she could name.
:::: The first definition of the word experimental is of a witness: having actual or personal experience of anything.
:::: Wandering Berlin’s streets, I find myself thinking about the morality of architecture: what you choose to reference, demolish, build, rebuild, reshape, augment, bury, unearth, partition, rename, retell, put a plaque on.
How. Why.
:::: Ampelmännchen: the dapper male figures wearing hats that comprise pedestrian-crossing signals here. When red, their arms are outstretched to block the way. When green, they appear in mid-stride to suggest it is safe to walk. Designed by a psychologist worried that about eight percent of any population is colorblind.
Born in East Germany in 1961, Ampelmännchen are one of the few communist symbols to survive the Wende — the Peaceful Revolution, the fall of the Wall, the transition to democracy in the East — and infect the West.
:::: Because the worst has already happened in the world of books. They have come to seem over the last four or five decades an increasingly conservative, market-driven form of communication. There exists a censorship in publishing based on an economic ecology. In addition to the current outlandish situation in Manhattan, even bestsellers now exist in a secondary position to the spectacles of film, television, the web, the Xbox, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.
Not 100 thriving houses, not 60 or sixteen or six, but three behemoth media corporations dominate commercial publishing.
They employ the print arms of their swollen conglomerates as tax write-offs.
:::: It’s always Stunde Null, Zero Hour, in Berlin and innovative writing practices.
:::: Which is to say the Khmer Rouge. Rwandan genocide. Israel’s freakish execution of its own Berlin Wall and ghettos for the unwanted.
Why. How.
:::: Our verb narrate comes to us from the Latin narrare, meaning to tell, relate, recount, explain, literally to make acquainted with, which comes to us from the Proto-Indo-European root gno, meaning to know.
To tell always resulting in a failed stab at understanding.
:::: Magnus Hirschfeld was an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the increasingly tolerant interzone of the Weimar Republic, he opened the Institute for Sexual Research a stone’s throw from the Reichstag in 1919. The Institute provided medical consultations and housed both a library with a vast collection on sexuality and the Museum of Sex, the latter of which was regularly visited by eager schoolchildren on fieldtrips.
:::: Fourteen years later, 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz to watch books go up in smoke.
Into a huge bonfire went 20,000 by those the Nazis deemed subversive: liberals, anarchists, communists, pacifists, socialists. Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Karl Marx. Helen Keller. Ernest Hemingway. H.G. Wells. Jack London. Sigmund Freud. Sinclair Lewis. Albert Einstein. Rainer Maria Rilke.
Joseph Goebbels honored the enthusiastic crowd with a speech. Scholarship had gradually isolated itself from real life, he said. He said the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism was over. Yes to decency and morality in the family and state, he said.
Sounding a lot like a commentator on Fox News.
The books you see the Nazis tossing into the flames in the famous newsreel footage supposedly belong to Magnus Hirschfeld’s library.
:::: Arriving at a new destination, you pay attention in a way you’re never able to do after having lived there for even a few weeks.
How the doorknobs are handles placed slightly higher than you’re used to. How some of the street-crossing signals sound like metronomes while others don’t. How non-fat milk, yogurt, and lattés are virtually unheard of outside Starbucks and the robot voice on all trains tells you politely a minute before you reach the next station which side to expect the platform on.
As it always is with leaving home, Anthony Doerr noticed, it is the details that displace us.