Yesterday evening Tracy and I came across a beach on the walk home from the train station. True, we live in southern Germany. There is a very green slow moving river in town, but the beach wasn’t built on the Pegnitz. A beach doesn’t need a body of water. All it really needs is a field of soft shifting sand, beach chairs, straw umbrellas, sun, and drinks.
Last weekend the entire city dressed up as a flea market. Stalls strung for kilometers displayed all you could ever need or hope for: bronze gongs, fur shoes, Smurf figurines, horned headdresses, engine parts, and piles of miniature porcelain arms, legs, and heads.
The best thing we’ve happened upon so far in our intent-on-entertaining city is this:
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In mad excitement for my guests, I spilled coffee on my computer. Then in a series of stupid acts, I erased all the pictures of their visit except for this--saved by Facebook.
After a delightful and stressful month or so that included:
- two weeks of teaching Russian students English online
- losing that job due to my sporadic internet connection (I signed my first contract for DSL in early February and am still waiting for it to be connected)
- a two-week training that qualifies me to teach for Berlitz
- an eight-day visit from my parents (which included eating lots of cake, drinking lots of beer, seeing a couple castles, learning European history, visiting several cities, taking lots of walks, and having meaningful conversations over many a delicious meal)
I suddenly found myself alone with several days in a row of unstructured time. You know what that means. I had no excuse not to write. Read more »
A Brave New Book
I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.
At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry. Read more »
Johann Strauss: German or Austrian?
We are in Vienna. Beautiful, grand, seductive Vienna. I had never given Vienna a single thought and now I’m a fool for the city.
Germany seems to get all the attention, and I wonder what Austrians think of that. It could, however, just be my problem. For instance, on this trip, I’m becoming aware of how many things I assumed were German when, in fact, they are Austrian. I thought I’d create a quiz so you could see how Austria-informed you are.
1) Falco
a. German
b. Austrian
2) Sigmund Freud
a. German
b. Austrian
3) Johann Sebastian Bach
a. German
b. Austrian Read more »
Next Time You Have to Speak in Public, Picture This
While watching bumper cars at a German carnival, I wondered how I’d give a presentation on superlatives for my new boss the next day using only questions. I was resentful that I had to worry when people around me were eating giant pretzels stacked with cheese, ham, and pineapple; being jerked through the air on the Devil Rocker; careening through Dämonium, “the most innovative haunted house amusement park ride in the world”; or crashing into each others’ rubber bumpers.
Fortunately a vision saved me from my own self pity: A man with feathery, close-cropped hair, a button down shirt, a pointy nose, and an expression always within a hint of a smile, shared a sparkling teal car with his 6 or 7-year-old daughter. He was letting her drive—except for when they got into horrible pile-ups. Then he would place his hand on the wheel and back up or make a hard turn. He seemed relaxed, pleased with his daughter’s driving skills. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Read more »
“I don’t like science being used to manipulate people,” one of my Russian students said about the reading we had done from The Culture Code, by Clotaire Rapaille.
Rapaille, who is French, has a doctorate in psychology and was working as a psychoanalyst before being invited to help Nestlé market coffee to the Japanese. What Clotaire found in his first focus groups was that Nestlé needed to create a positive coffee imprint in Japanese children in order to create a viable market for instant coffee. In response to Clotaire’s discovery, Nestlé began selling caffeine-free, coffee-flavored sweets to children. These sold well and eventually the instant coffee market also increased.
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If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you.
–Metallica, “The Unforgiven II”
Don't Get Trapped in the Yellow Dog Sentence
Back in my demolition days, I was going to a lot of Amazon parties. That was when Amazon had ads every week in the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in an ongoing hiring spree.
While Amazon snatched up my friends, I tore down walls. I remember describing some of my misgivings about my job to a woman while sipping wine from plastic cups in an overgrown yard in Wallingford. The sledge hammer was heavy, its blows loud. I wasn’t sure I had enough “rrrr” in me to last in the field.
The woman I was talking to had probably graduated from an Ivy League school and moved to Seattle to work for this start-up. She was the type of person who still thought she was the smartest girl in the world. She said, “You need to embrace your inner balls,” and then demonstrated how I should approach my job by springing into a lunge with fists punching the air, scowling, and growling. Read more »
Undoubtedly the Star of the Nineteenth Century
I’ve been making friends with a German woman who is studying to be a middle-school English teacher. She and I talk about poetry together and she has shared some reading lists with me from which she’s studying for an oral exam that will qualify her to begin her teaching practicum.
I was surprised by which poems were selected for the 19th Century American poems. For instance, I’d never read the poetry of Emerson. Don’t we seem to take his essays more seriously than his verse? William Cullen Bryant I had hardly heard of. And Longfellow—besides trying to memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 4th grade, I was largely unfamiliar with his poetry, too.
Poems of the 19th Century
1. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1832) Read more »
Do They Really Need to Be Separate?
When a friend recently asked my dude, Tracy, how Germany was treating him, he replied, “It is almost like Denver, it’s just that here I’m illiterate.
Life is full of fear and wonder when you’re illiterate. Getting the mail is daily cause for dread. Each envelope is filled with words that often don’t make sense even when typed into Google translate. Sometimes the temptation to ignore the documents in German is too great to resist. And then when you get around to looking at them, they can be very surprising.
Being from Seattle, the polite but not-so-warm way of Germans feels fine and familiar. When you do meet a warm person, however—and we have met one—it is really comforting. The nicest German we’ve met so far works at the Nuremberg equivalent of the DMV. He smiled at us, spoke to us in slow, simple, understandable German, and joked around that we should come back and chat with him so we could practice our German. He asked what we wanted our license plate number to be and gave it to us.
This week when I was looking through our auto paperwork so I could apply for a resident parking permit, I noticed a paper that didn’t look quite as official as the rest. It begins with, “You are valuable, Shira!” (Du bist wertvoll, Shira!) Read more »
The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.
This is what Jhumpa Lahiri wrote recently in the first piece of a new series called Draft in the New York Times, which will feature writing on the art and craft of writing.
They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.
–Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” The New York Times
Another article this week in the New York Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” offers a scientific explanation to this “live current” sensation that great sentences can evoke, as described by Lahiri: Read more »
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