Deutsch fürs Gespräch

There are only eight hours of daylight in Berlin this time of year. The sun sets at about 4:15 and it is as dark as midnight by about 4:30. I got out to Charlottenburg relatively early this morning, not to do anything touristy, but to check out a couple of book stores. I came up from the Earnst-Reuter-Platz U-Bahn station and headed for Knesebeckstraße--and it was then that I learned that the stores opened at 10 a.m., not 9.

Not a problem. I bought postcards and headed for the post office, which was not only open but rather busy. Post offices in Germany are more civilized than their U.S. counterparts. German post offices also function as banks for a lot of people. Anyway, I sat down at a desk and wrote my postcards. (U.S. post offices don't have chairs.) By the time I handed my postcards to the lady it was nearly 10. I didn't see a place to get a snack in the area; so, I went straight to the bookstores.

One of the things I like to do when I travel in non-English-speaking countries is buy their books on learning English. I use them in reverse, and I happened to find three good ones this morning. The resources for Germans learning English are far greater than our resources for learning German. (And the French have greater resources for learning English than we have for learning French.) So, once you have a foundation in grammar and vocabulary, if you want to learn German, get those books that Germans use.

At Knesebeck Elf I bought Englisch ganz leicht. Wortschatz, which was only €5, and Große Lerngrammatik, Englisch, by the same publisher. My favorite, though, is Englisch fürs Gespräch, which is not only a wealth of things we say all the time in English, it is also a convenient pocket size. When I go on to Amzon.de, I see these books' siblings, which I did not see in the stores I went to. I suppose I'll buy them online at some point. I did not buy any audio books today. At Marga Schoeller I bought a few other books, German translations of books I know in English (which means I can use the English version as a crutch as I try to improve my reading). I was surprised that I did not see any of the dual-language books published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. I have bought several of those on eBay, and I suppose that's where I will continue to find them. If you want to learn to read German, buy these books (and other dual-language books by other German publishers). To repeat: The German resources totally blow away our resources.

I dropped my sack of books off at my hotel and headed out to another neighborhood to check out its used bookstores. I changed trains at Alexanderplatz. Since you asked, the answer to your question is yes, you can buy a copy of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookstore in the Alexanderplatz station--however, that is a very long book that is waaaay over my head. Instead, I bought a Leberkäse im Brötchen.

Leberkäse is pink meat that is the approximate size and shape of loaves of bread and it sits under the glass in hot steel pans waiting to get sliced up and served between two halves of a roll. The man at the Leberkäse stand in the big train station, in his tattoos and leather, with a lean, hard face, looked like he would rather beat me up than sell me a sandwich. But when I asked him (in German), he was very polite. He took out a big knife and sliced a slab of meat for me. When I didn't understand his question about the mustard, he switched to English--my semi-useless American phrasebook had not prepared me to be asked whether I want sweet or hot mustard. I also ordered a Heineken. A Leberkäse im Brötchen is about the size of a hamburger.

The meal was delicious! Leberkäse is similar to what we think of as hot dog meat, although it is lighter and less salty than a hot dog, and it has a mild taste that I enjoyed. By the way, you can buy beer in Berlin the way we can buy, say, Coca-Cola, and you're allowed to drink it in the street without that beloved American charade of hiding it in a small brown paper bag. When I finished off my brunch, I handed the empty Heineken bottle back to the leader of the pack behind the counter, and he politely thanked me. With a light lunchtime beer buzz I headed through the tunnels of Alexanderplatz to find the U-Bahn that would take me to a neighborhood that had a used-book store.

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ

I first heard about Père Lachaise years ago, in college, while reading an article in Rolling Stone that mentioned that Jim Morrison is buried there. I was curious about this vast necropolis, but I never got to visit it until the spring of this year. I was there again today. I did not visit Marcel Proust again this time.

We got to the gate before 9 a.m. The light was beautiful and almost no one was there except a few workmen tending graves and a couple of guys who wandered in the same direction as us to see you know who, which is where we went to first--my friend wanted to see this famous tomb and we had a plane to catch.

I first visited Paris when I was 12, and after college I went four or five more times, but it was only this year that I traveled with people whose idea of Paris was similar to mine and who were inclined to explore it accordingly.

I have spent so many years not traveling that I devoted too much of 2007 to making up for lost time this year. I went to Europe three times, including Paris twice this year. It's a bit disorienting to hear about Père Lachaise and then not have a chance to visit it for a quarter of a century and then this is a year in which I visited Jim Morrison’s grave twice. By the way, I have never bought a Doors album. It's strange that considering all the famous people who are interred there it is Jim Morrison who seems to have put the place on the map. (Georges Bizet, Maria Callas (sort of), and Frédéric Chopin are buried there, along with a lot of other notable musicians.)

There are two people that I know of who I saw in life who are now interred in Père Lachaise. I saw Stéphane Grappelli perform three times. His ashes now rest in the Père Lachaise's columbarium. I never saw Michel Petrucciani perform, but I once saw him being pushed in a wheelchair on the Upper West Side. There are maybe others, but I haven't thoroughly combed the list of Père Lachaise's residents.

I got to visit the grave of a childhood hero of mine, Jean-François Champollion--who lies in an easily found area where paths converge on a circle (one of which leads toward Jim Morrison). And, after threading our way up through quite a hillside of graves with only a so-so map to guide us, I found Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), a painter who I learned about and admired in high school (although I had seen his paintings when I was a child but didn't remember his name). I was stuck by the contrasts that time wreaks. Chopin’s music sounds alive now (but, of course, music is an art that is experienced in living time, although I guess all art requires the devotion of some amount of time on the part of the experiencer). Stepping into the little walled garden of Corot's grave I thought of the vividness and beauty of his paintings. But Corot's grave is overgrown with weeds and the stones have shifted and his bronze bust is patinaed bordering on rust. There are thousands of graves here that are not standing up well to the onslaught of time. Ars longa, as they say. I have two translations of À la recherche du temps perdu: I can look at any page at random and even in translation the writing is beautiful and the tone and ideas are not musty or undergoing the kind of degradation that crushes stones. Then again, the forces that have been shifting the masonry of Corot's grave since 1875 might not amount to a millimeter a year of pushing.

When we came out the corner door, the one near the Père Lachaise Mètro stop, the crèpe store was opening up. I had a Nutella and coconut crèpe and an amazingly great café crème. There are many things to appreciate in life.

With my phrasebook in hand I asked the man behind the counter where a post office was--and I understood him! There was one nearby. I stopped at an ATM to get some more euros and asked the lady at the post office for the stamps I needed to send my postcards. This very useful question was not in my semi-useful phrasebook. However, my butchered French was sufficiently understandable and I got what I assume are the necessary stamps.

We then had to catch our ride to the airport to fly to Berlin, a city I have never been to.

[Postscript: "Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού" is apparently loosely translated as "True to his own spirit"; like you, I have no idea where this phrase came from and am curious about its source. By the way, the phrase is apparently in Ancient Greek, not Modern Greek.]

Reasons to be cheerful

Even if you don't own stocks directly, you may have been watching your 401(k) go haywire since approximately February. If you financed your home with a "liar loan" that has reset lately, you might not have been cheery--this whole mortgage meltdown/turmoil in real estate thing. But today I read the following encouraging comment:

Phil Dow, director of equity strategy with RBC Dain Rauscher, also thinks that the economy is in reasonably decent shape.

"There is a disconnect. The economic reality isn't as bad as some are indicating," Dow said. A mentor of mine told me that real risk is at its highest when perceived risk is low. But right now, people are afraid of their own shadow."

(God it must be annoying to work on Wall St. and have "Dow" as a surname, although I guess having a last name such as "Standard" or "Poor" wouldn't be any walk in the park either.)

Anyway, there you have it, a pre-Thanksgiving contraindicator. If more Americans had been scared shitless when they took out all those ARM loans for homes they couldn't afford, we might not have got into this mess in the first place.

For more information about mentors, click here. For additional reasons to be cheerful, here is the full list.

I'm only sleeping

A rare instance in which my cat is awake and I am not.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Pygmalion

I thoroughly enjoyed Shaw's Pygmalion today. I must say that I had my doubts after a couple of Gawkers trashed it. I thought they were criticizing Claire Danes's acting ability. But having now seen the Roundabout Theater Company's production I realize that they simply don't know much about Edwardian London, England's class system, and the vast disparity between the rich and the poor at the time. Danes did a fine job, and the interplay between her and Jefferson Mays was superb. (If I may trash the Gawkers for a moment, I don't think they can get over the star of "My So-Called Life" doing a fine job in a great role in one of the twenteith century's great plays.)

I read the play so long ago (college) that I wanted to reread it--also I had never seen it before. But I ended up being too busy cramming for my German exam (I'm flying to Europe on Thursday, and I am going to Germany for the first time).

What struck me about Pygmalion today was, first, that Prof. Higgins has Asperger's syndrome. Hans Asperger described the syndrome in 1944, but Shaw put it up on stage 30 years earlier. Just skimming through the Wikipedia entry on AS one finds phrases such as "characterized by difficulties in social interaction," "Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance," "show a theoretical understanding of other people’s emotions; however, they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid real-life situations," "Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic," and so on.

I had always thought of this as Liza Doolittle's play, but I don't now. I see Henry Higgins in his parallel Asperger universe--he holds his own, but he does so in his world. At the end of the play he is convinced that it would be a great idea if Liza Doolittle joined him and Colonel Pickering and they lived as three bachelors. If only Liza has Asperger's as well, she probably would have agreed--but then the play would have lost a major dimension of its conflict. I'm not saying it's a story of a man with Asperger's; I'm saying the conflict arises from two universes that cannot intersect--and disparate universes that can (I'm thinking of the themes of wealth and class, which Shaw disaggregates). Shaw apparently wrote an essay explaining why Liza does not marry Prof. Higgins; however, I have not read it. By the way, the funny scenes in this play are really funny.

The second thing I noticed is how Existential this play is--chiefly at the instigation of Prof. Higgins, who is surrounded by non-Existentialists. I have read more Sartre, Camus, and Beckett since I graduated from college--and if I hadn't, I don't know that I would have recognized this strain in the play, including how it informs the social commentary that runs through the work, which on the surface is quite slapstick and layers below pertains to the core of what it means to be a human being. Shaw has become a much better playwright since I first read him in college.

Generous Idealist

"Composition with Red, Yellow Blue and Black," by Piet Mondrian, 1923



"Red and White," by Josef Albers, 1963

"Generous Idealist," by Tony Powell (with a little help from http://personaldna.com/), 2007

I hope . . .

. . . Lakshmi Tatma pulls through her operation today and goes on to have a great life--but what were the chances of her being born in India?

Who needs American Idol . . .

. . . when there's YouTube. This is talent:



I admit it, I'm a YouTube addict.