Sunday, July 31, 2016
Potsdam, Last Sunday: III
Beneath Schloss Sanssouci.
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Near the obelisk entrance. ↑ ↓
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Friday, July 29, 2016
Friday, July 22, 2016
Ping Pong, Staircases, and Serendipitous Swift
This evening, after a long and aimless day, my sister and I wrapped up our evening at work with a ping pong game — far less a battle than a polite exchange, except whenever the ping pong ball went careering off into the table legs, chair casters, black cords, and cushioned chairs of the office. Then we clapped together the table again, opened the windows now that no ping pong balls could seek freedom out of them, returned to our tasks, in my case gobbled down a slice of quiche that T. had made and brought to the office, closed the windows, turned off the lights, locked the door, and then left out the courtyard in the front.
I went on no proper walk today, since it was 28°C or so and I wore a turtleneck for some reason, and instead I retreated to the staircase every now and then — with its linoleum?-lined treads, thickly painted wood railings in warm brown, old-fashioned turbid white windows with multiple frames and little window hatches inside them, and the dark painted bricks in the pleasantly cellar-cool walls. And I sat down on the steps to cool down again. At times I don't have much need of a thermometer to gauge the weather, since my temperament's temperature rose in rough proportion, and against heat my capacity for stoicism has its evident limits. It breathed a dead, desert-like heat in the morning, and reminded me of beetles that eat carrion and stones that crumbled long ago; but later there were cool wisps of wind that were so chilly in contrast that they nearly gave me an 'ice cream headache.'
Two days ago I did go on walks and stumbled upon a funny thing, which I've already told ad nauseam to my patient family: I was walking along the sidewalk when I saw something hanging from far higher in an apartment building. Once I reached the hanging object, I saw it was a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve with rainbow-coloured writing on it. It looked like something made by children for school. But instead it said: 'Ich sammle für den Urlaub. Freue mich auf jede Spende.' I am saving up for a holiday. Every donation is appreciated.
I passed by the sign a third time — it vanished for a while, as I had expected because perhaps a passerby would pinch the money, or be angry and rip it down to get rid of it, and I saw nothing the second time. I saw as I had expected — I was too dazed to inspect the eleemosynary contraption more nearly the first time around — that there was a coin box attached with the sign. But what I did not expect was to walk a bit further, and then see another venture that had been apparently, if halfheartedly, inspired by the first. It was a piece of yarn, which dangled from one corner of a window in the ground floor much like a cigarette from the mouth's corner of an exhausted smoker, with a plain white plastic drinking cup attached. 'Bitte Spenden' — 'Please Donate' — was written in black letters. It was an odd form of urban fishing.
Hypocritically, though, I enjoyed a huge 'freebie' myself. I walked along a little farther and saw a cardboard box on the sidewalk. 'Zum Mitnehmen' — 'Feel free to take' — was written on a plain sheet of paper above it. Nearer our apartment, I've come across some lovely stuff that people have cleared out of their apartments before, although I rarely (subjectively speaking) take advantage of it, so I was eager to see what there might be this time. Underneath a plain book in a paper sleeve and a magazine of sorts, there were clothbound and leather-bound editions of Herder, Möricke and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. And, to my especial delight, there was a tastefully powder-blue clothbound translation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, from the 1960s. I took it with me back to work, and when reading the preface on the U-Bahn afterward, decided that the word choice of the translation was as exquisitely direct but well-chosen as I had sensed that it might be. I last read much of Swift's magnum opus in 2003; at the time, A Modest Proposal thrilled me more than Gulliver's Travels. At the same time I did not necessarily want to wade through the fussy older English. In short, a translation is just the right thing.
***
As for work, there was a lot; but then it disappeared again because my orders changed. And then I was left at sea, unable to do very much because Monday has a heavy workload anyway which it's best not to aggravate the week before. Then work reappeared that I haven't much experience doing, so that will have to wait until Monday. And I felt rather sad about the amount of work I get done. Perhaps not very much? As for lunch, we had chicken roulades with a dark mass of spinach, like the knobbly green background of a medieval tapestry, in the centre, and the spinach had flecks of red pepper and a mighty suggestion of garlic about it. Oddly enough, the garlic did not prevent it from being gentle on the stomach (please pardon the TMI). It lay on a bed of orzo grains in a creamy sauce; and I also took rice from the vegan bin, of course trying to make sure that it wasn't so big a portion that the vegans didn't get any. And the air smelled of kerosene again.
(Also, the repairs on the staircase in our building still aren't being carried out, but everyone who has tried it has complained about the complex arrangements one would need to get in through the back entrance: double gates, button that would cause an alarm to resound through the entire building, locked door at foot of rear staircase near the garbage bins, and need to prop the corresponding door to our floor on the staircase open. Next week should be interesting.)
***
Afterward, T. and I walked again to an U-Bahn station — past the trottoirs with their tables, signposting decorations, foliage of potted plants and after-working-hours crowds — I had another of my adventures-that-are-not-adventures again.
On Fridays the U-Bahn is paganishly festive; it is also the apex of the tourist season: people more brightly dressed than usual, with bright red or pink shirts, carrying things whose purpose is amusement — beer or otherwise — and more talkative and inebriated. Only a BVG (Berlin transport authority) worker tootled with a neutral mien up and down the platform, pushing in front of him a brightly orange rotary vehicle that washed the floor. Inside the train later, two women, one in tight black clothing with a slit-back skirt and the other in a festive flowery skirt and red top, were raising themselves in partial chin-ups on the horizontal bars in the U-Bahn. One of them demanded the attention of a pink-shirted tourist of middle age in a voice so high that I was convinced she was a child. A hardboiled-looking young worker with a tough though symmetrical face, in blue garb, watched without much apparent interest. And a shortish-looking middle-aged man sat on the bench and played slap-hands with a boy likely over ten. The boy seemed too big to shriek as delightedly as he did, and accidentally brushed or raked my arm with his fingertips in his enthusiasm. But neither of us minded (much).
As for the 'adventure':
I was fascinated by the sight of a man who was sitting in the fold-down afterthought seat at the end of the wagon, beside the door. The first thing I seemed to see of him was a wheeled dolly that had a dark grey backpack resting in its c-shaped frame, and a pile of empty banana cartons that seemed taller than the dolly was high. Then his feet, bronzed like our Hawaiian cousin's, in green-strapped sandals. The silky-looking synthetic cuff of his black pants — walking pants possibly or simply track pants — and a short-sleeved white and red plaid button-up shirt. His garb, I thought, and his backpack, were those of a tourist. I guessed from elsewhere in Germany.
But when I changed to an empty space beside the door (not for spying purposes but for being-out-of-the-way purposes) and caught sight of him properly, his neat black wristwatch, his eyeglasses, and his respectably cut grey hair and expression, denied the bohemian suggestions of the scuffed boxes and the synthetic sandals. His wedding ring made me wonder what his wife was like, since I thought that he seemed like half of a comradely couple that would be much more likely to be traveling together than apart; and I wanted to imagine her face and what her opinion was of her husband's banana boxes (or if she was the originator of the idea). More to complete the story, as a fictional thing rather than reality — not because I was really hellbent on finagling details about a stranger in real life.
His tiny, leashed dog was a piece of a 'tale,' too. From time to time it lifted up to the traveller large eyes that were fairly pale and yet — of course — profound in their expression. It had white cropped hair all over, and reminded me of a little elderly cousin of Milou from the Tintin comics, crossed with a lady's companion dog from an 18th-century painting. When its owner pulled the banana boxes nearer to himself and to the dog, to make space for new ebbs and flows of passengers in the train, it shifted uneasily from the foot of the tower. By the end it had found refuge under the folding chair, resting with its paw angled sideways under its head, looking thoughtful; and its little tongue (rather disturbingly) perhaps instinctively lapping at what must have been an incredibly dirty floor for a while — until the dog found its repose. I wondered whether the dog would usually walk in the countryside rather than the city, where it would walk (green fields? suburban pavements?), and whether it felt that its owner was dragging it around uncomfortable distances or it was content as long as it wasn't being threatened with being crushed under banana boxes, and if it was in an uneasy or tired mood as it appeared to be.
Long story short, it seemed to me that the banana boxes, the small dog, and the owner were full of stories, and that I had just stumbled into the middle of one of them.
(Of course it also struck me that I might have been staring a bit too much.)
I went on no proper walk today, since it was 28°C or so and I wore a turtleneck for some reason, and instead I retreated to the staircase every now and then — with its linoleum?-lined treads, thickly painted wood railings in warm brown, old-fashioned turbid white windows with multiple frames and little window hatches inside them, and the dark painted bricks in the pleasantly cellar-cool walls. And I sat down on the steps to cool down again. At times I don't have much need of a thermometer to gauge the weather, since my temperament's temperature rose in rough proportion, and against heat my capacity for stoicism has its evident limits. It breathed a dead, desert-like heat in the morning, and reminded me of beetles that eat carrion and stones that crumbled long ago; but later there were cool wisps of wind that were so chilly in contrast that they nearly gave me an 'ice cream headache.'
Two days ago I did go on walks and stumbled upon a funny thing, which I've already told ad nauseam to my patient family: I was walking along the sidewalk when I saw something hanging from far higher in an apartment building. Once I reached the hanging object, I saw it was a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve with rainbow-coloured writing on it. It looked like something made by children for school. But instead it said: 'Ich sammle für den Urlaub. Freue mich auf jede Spende.' I am saving up for a holiday. Every donation is appreciated.
I passed by the sign a third time — it vanished for a while, as I had expected because perhaps a passerby would pinch the money, or be angry and rip it down to get rid of it, and I saw nothing the second time. I saw as I had expected — I was too dazed to inspect the eleemosynary contraption more nearly the first time around — that there was a coin box attached with the sign. But what I did not expect was to walk a bit further, and then see another venture that had been apparently, if halfheartedly, inspired by the first. It was a piece of yarn, which dangled from one corner of a window in the ground floor much like a cigarette from the mouth's corner of an exhausted smoker, with a plain white plastic drinking cup attached. 'Bitte Spenden' — 'Please Donate' — was written in black letters. It was an odd form of urban fishing.
Hypocritically, though, I enjoyed a huge 'freebie' myself. I walked along a little farther and saw a cardboard box on the sidewalk. 'Zum Mitnehmen' — 'Feel free to take' — was written on a plain sheet of paper above it. Nearer our apartment, I've come across some lovely stuff that people have cleared out of their apartments before, although I rarely (subjectively speaking) take advantage of it, so I was eager to see what there might be this time. Underneath a plain book in a paper sleeve and a magazine of sorts, there were clothbound and leather-bound editions of Herder, Möricke and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. And, to my especial delight, there was a tastefully powder-blue clothbound translation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, from the 1960s. I took it with me back to work, and when reading the preface on the U-Bahn afterward, decided that the word choice of the translation was as exquisitely direct but well-chosen as I had sensed that it might be. I last read much of Swift's magnum opus in 2003; at the time, A Modest Proposal thrilled me more than Gulliver's Travels. At the same time I did not necessarily want to wade through the fussy older English. In short, a translation is just the right thing.
***
As for work, there was a lot; but then it disappeared again because my orders changed. And then I was left at sea, unable to do very much because Monday has a heavy workload anyway which it's best not to aggravate the week before. Then work reappeared that I haven't much experience doing, so that will have to wait until Monday. And I felt rather sad about the amount of work I get done. Perhaps not very much? As for lunch, we had chicken roulades with a dark mass of spinach, like the knobbly green background of a medieval tapestry, in the centre, and the spinach had flecks of red pepper and a mighty suggestion of garlic about it. Oddly enough, the garlic did not prevent it from being gentle on the stomach (please pardon the TMI). It lay on a bed of orzo grains in a creamy sauce; and I also took rice from the vegan bin, of course trying to make sure that it wasn't so big a portion that the vegans didn't get any. And the air smelled of kerosene again.
(Also, the repairs on the staircase in our building still aren't being carried out, but everyone who has tried it has complained about the complex arrangements one would need to get in through the back entrance: double gates, button that would cause an alarm to resound through the entire building, locked door at foot of rear staircase near the garbage bins, and need to prop the corresponding door to our floor on the staircase open. Next week should be interesting.)
***
Afterward, T. and I walked again to an U-Bahn station — past the trottoirs with their tables, signposting decorations, foliage of potted plants and after-working-hours crowds — I had another of my adventures-that-are-not-adventures again.
On Fridays the U-Bahn is paganishly festive; it is also the apex of the tourist season: people more brightly dressed than usual, with bright red or pink shirts, carrying things whose purpose is amusement — beer or otherwise — and more talkative and inebriated. Only a BVG (Berlin transport authority) worker tootled with a neutral mien up and down the platform, pushing in front of him a brightly orange rotary vehicle that washed the floor. Inside the train later, two women, one in tight black clothing with a slit-back skirt and the other in a festive flowery skirt and red top, were raising themselves in partial chin-ups on the horizontal bars in the U-Bahn. One of them demanded the attention of a pink-shirted tourist of middle age in a voice so high that I was convinced she was a child. A hardboiled-looking young worker with a tough though symmetrical face, in blue garb, watched without much apparent interest. And a shortish-looking middle-aged man sat on the bench and played slap-hands with a boy likely over ten. The boy seemed too big to shriek as delightedly as he did, and accidentally brushed or raked my arm with his fingertips in his enthusiasm. But neither of us minded (much).
As for the 'adventure':
I was fascinated by the sight of a man who was sitting in the fold-down afterthought seat at the end of the wagon, beside the door. The first thing I seemed to see of him was a wheeled dolly that had a dark grey backpack resting in its c-shaped frame, and a pile of empty banana cartons that seemed taller than the dolly was high. Then his feet, bronzed like our Hawaiian cousin's, in green-strapped sandals. The silky-looking synthetic cuff of his black pants — walking pants possibly or simply track pants — and a short-sleeved white and red plaid button-up shirt. His garb, I thought, and his backpack, were those of a tourist. I guessed from elsewhere in Germany.
But when I changed to an empty space beside the door (not for spying purposes but for being-out-of-the-way purposes) and caught sight of him properly, his neat black wristwatch, his eyeglasses, and his respectably cut grey hair and expression, denied the bohemian suggestions of the scuffed boxes and the synthetic sandals. His wedding ring made me wonder what his wife was like, since I thought that he seemed like half of a comradely couple that would be much more likely to be traveling together than apart; and I wanted to imagine her face and what her opinion was of her husband's banana boxes (or if she was the originator of the idea). More to complete the story, as a fictional thing rather than reality — not because I was really hellbent on finagling details about a stranger in real life.
His tiny, leashed dog was a piece of a 'tale,' too. From time to time it lifted up to the traveller large eyes that were fairly pale and yet — of course — profound in their expression. It had white cropped hair all over, and reminded me of a little elderly cousin of Milou from the Tintin comics, crossed with a lady's companion dog from an 18th-century painting. When its owner pulled the banana boxes nearer to himself and to the dog, to make space for new ebbs and flows of passengers in the train, it shifted uneasily from the foot of the tower. By the end it had found refuge under the folding chair, resting with its paw angled sideways under its head, looking thoughtful; and its little tongue (rather disturbingly) perhaps instinctively lapping at what must have been an incredibly dirty floor for a while — until the dog found its repose. I wondered whether the dog would usually walk in the countryside rather than the city, where it would walk (green fields? suburban pavements?), and whether it felt that its owner was dragging it around uncomfortable distances or it was content as long as it wasn't being threatened with being crushed under banana boxes, and if it was in an uneasy or tired mood as it appeared to be.
Long story short, it seemed to me that the banana boxes, the small dog, and the owner were full of stories, and that I had just stumbled into the middle of one of them.
(Of course it also struck me that I might have been staring a bit too much.)
Monday, July 18, 2016
Kohlrabi, Incense, and Ocean Liners
Since on Mondays there is a mountain of work that has piled up over the weekend, I suppose like a new underwater volcano in the vicinity of Iceland, there is nothing of sparkling novelty to tell of the day.
So I will describe the lunch. Lately we have received official catering of sorts, the food being set up in steel bins that are set wigglingly on a pond of water in another steel frame, with blue kerosene flames underneath. At least, one of my colleagues mentioned kerosene as the fuel. The fumes of it are slightly perturbing as they furl through our room en route to the window, but one hopes our brain cells will not be affected greatly by our exposure to them. In one wobbly bin there was the vegan entrée: curried lentils with boulders — or koh-i-noors, depending on one's opinion of the vegetable — of halved or quartered kohlrabi boiled into it. It was actually quite delicious, but I took a tiny portion out of consideration for the genuine vegetarians amongst us, and in any case had no raving appetite for something turniplike.
For the rest of us: fusilli-like pasta, and white rice; and finally a bin of Geschnetzeltes — morsels of meat in a cream sauce. I was too greedy or hungry for a dispassionate inventory, I think, so I do not remember if green peas or other vegetables were part of it. Since I ate early, I took a seat at the vegetarians' table, and liked the conversation — it was more a relaxed everyday sort of conversation, rather than the brut-champagne-like effervescence of dry wit of other times, although I like both — a great deal, even if I was too reticent to take part in it very much. It ran on for longer than usual, and whilst dealing necessarily with the backlog in my work, I did think rather wistfully that it would have been nice to listen to more. (But since our managers are not Dickensian despots in nature, it is my own fault for not sticking around.)
But a colleague also had his birthday today, so he brought along two tortes. So eventually I roamed over to the food table and took a slice of the white cake slathered in cocoa whipped cream and decorated with still darker chocolate sprinkles; and in the evening I had some of the coconut milk rice pudding that the caterers had 'thrown in' with our lunch gratis.
I went on two walks today, both ten minutes or thereabouts, with a fresh wind and sunlight and the smells and sights and sounds of the periphery of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. A shop for 'upcycling furniture' with a lifelike taxidermied fox stretching in the half-light along the top of an upright piano/shelf/dresser like a cross between a stole and a housecat, a gaunt man resting after stripping the paint from the frames of another shop to reach the underlying raw wood, Middle Eastern ladies in flower printed headscarves, a lady not much taller than four and a half feet examining skeins of acrylic knitting yarn that were in bins at the doors of a retailer from a careful distance while gripping her walker, a fashionably dressed young woman chatting on her smart phone, a few tastefully perfumed and besuited entrepreneurs in a dark suit or an Italian-looking elegant pullover who were conversing in American-accented English, venerable bicycles and hand drawn carts folded tightly along the wall around the cellar entry to a bicycle repair shop, bakeries full of customers — especially half-bored seeming men of middle age who were talking amongst themselves or examining the sidewalks with interest —. There was even a whimsical barrel-shaped-like hut of raw wood on wheels with rustic green-painted(?) wooden roof tiles that was arranged sort of like a landlubber houseboat to be drawn behind a car or a van or a truck; it was parked at the side of the street. Then there was construction work that blotted out half the street with white and red barriers and pale dust, and the fascinating conversational fragment, "Well, it's a protected historical building, so never mind . . ."; and hanging from a wall the planter full of thick, dark strawberry plant leaves on a brightly painted and large café that did not appear to be open yet.
There was also the fragrance of sandalwood incense on one street corner; and of course baking smells near the shops. And menacing cracks in the glass of the bank on the corner, which people use rather like a toilet with a grim sort of necessity, where trails of garbage flotsam ran parallel to the edge of the disabled persons' access ramp.
Altogether, it was a remarkable unremarkable day. Work: I was by no means finished with all my tasks, but the really necessary stuff was done, and in the end it looked like I was the second-last person there after all. Last week I had felt very dizzy a great deal of the time, even at home, so I had made great resolves to leave work earlier this week to avoid stress; 7:30ish was not particularly early, but I felt pleasantly liberated. The remaining colleague, with an air of it being very much contre son gré, was tending to the food leftovers, which is a task that's left to the last person standing. I felt slight guilt, but on the other hand had rinsed a few dirty dishes that others had left in the sink and placed them in the dishwasher, a task that also brings out heavy grimaces amongst my coworkers. (Living in a household of seven, one becomes less fastidious, as long as one can clean one's hands properly afterwards.) Then in the subway I had to wait nine minutes for a train, which just seems like a lot when 4 minutes is the customary rhythm; but later, after having thought my own thoughts for a while, I took out A Writer's World and read about the Queen Elizabeth II liner's arrival in New York harbour in 1969.
And during the morning I had meditated happily on the story I was working on writing over the weekend — one of my 'lousy' stories, though, it must be admitted.
So I will describe the lunch. Lately we have received official catering of sorts, the food being set up in steel bins that are set wigglingly on a pond of water in another steel frame, with blue kerosene flames underneath. At least, one of my colleagues mentioned kerosene as the fuel. The fumes of it are slightly perturbing as they furl through our room en route to the window, but one hopes our brain cells will not be affected greatly by our exposure to them. In one wobbly bin there was the vegan entrée: curried lentils with boulders — or koh-i-noors, depending on one's opinion of the vegetable — of halved or quartered kohlrabi boiled into it. It was actually quite delicious, but I took a tiny portion out of consideration for the genuine vegetarians amongst us, and in any case had no raving appetite for something turniplike.
For the rest of us: fusilli-like pasta, and white rice; and finally a bin of Geschnetzeltes — morsels of meat in a cream sauce. I was too greedy or hungry for a dispassionate inventory, I think, so I do not remember if green peas or other vegetables were part of it. Since I ate early, I took a seat at the vegetarians' table, and liked the conversation — it was more a relaxed everyday sort of conversation, rather than the brut-champagne-like effervescence of dry wit of other times, although I like both — a great deal, even if I was too reticent to take part in it very much. It ran on for longer than usual, and whilst dealing necessarily with the backlog in my work, I did think rather wistfully that it would have been nice to listen to more. (But since our managers are not Dickensian despots in nature, it is my own fault for not sticking around.)
But a colleague also had his birthday today, so he brought along two tortes. So eventually I roamed over to the food table and took a slice of the white cake slathered in cocoa whipped cream and decorated with still darker chocolate sprinkles; and in the evening I had some of the coconut milk rice pudding that the caterers had 'thrown in' with our lunch gratis.
I went on two walks today, both ten minutes or thereabouts, with a fresh wind and sunlight and the smells and sights and sounds of the periphery of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. A shop for 'upcycling furniture' with a lifelike taxidermied fox stretching in the half-light along the top of an upright piano/shelf/dresser like a cross between a stole and a housecat, a gaunt man resting after stripping the paint from the frames of another shop to reach the underlying raw wood, Middle Eastern ladies in flower printed headscarves, a lady not much taller than four and a half feet examining skeins of acrylic knitting yarn that were in bins at the doors of a retailer from a careful distance while gripping her walker, a fashionably dressed young woman chatting on her smart phone, a few tastefully perfumed and besuited entrepreneurs in a dark suit or an Italian-looking elegant pullover who were conversing in American-accented English, venerable bicycles and hand drawn carts folded tightly along the wall around the cellar entry to a bicycle repair shop, bakeries full of customers — especially half-bored seeming men of middle age who were talking amongst themselves or examining the sidewalks with interest —. There was even a whimsical barrel-shaped-like hut of raw wood on wheels with rustic green-painted(?) wooden roof tiles that was arranged sort of like a landlubber houseboat to be drawn behind a car or a van or a truck; it was parked at the side of the street. Then there was construction work that blotted out half the street with white and red barriers and pale dust, and the fascinating conversational fragment, "Well, it's a protected historical building, so never mind . . ."; and hanging from a wall the planter full of thick, dark strawberry plant leaves on a brightly painted and large café that did not appear to be open yet.
There was also the fragrance of sandalwood incense on one street corner; and of course baking smells near the shops. And menacing cracks in the glass of the bank on the corner, which people use rather like a toilet with a grim sort of necessity, where trails of garbage flotsam ran parallel to the edge of the disabled persons' access ramp.
Altogether, it was a remarkable unremarkable day. Work: I was by no means finished with all my tasks, but the really necessary stuff was done, and in the end it looked like I was the second-last person there after all. Last week I had felt very dizzy a great deal of the time, even at home, so I had made great resolves to leave work earlier this week to avoid stress; 7:30ish was not particularly early, but I felt pleasantly liberated. The remaining colleague, with an air of it being very much contre son gré, was tending to the food leftovers, which is a task that's left to the last person standing. I felt slight guilt, but on the other hand had rinsed a few dirty dishes that others had left in the sink and placed them in the dishwasher, a task that also brings out heavy grimaces amongst my coworkers. (Living in a household of seven, one becomes less fastidious, as long as one can clean one's hands properly afterwards.) Then in the subway I had to wait nine minutes for a train, which just seems like a lot when 4 minutes is the customary rhythm; but later, after having thought my own thoughts for a while, I took out A Writer's World and read about the Queen Elizabeth II liner's arrival in New York harbour in 1969.
And during the morning I had meditated happily on the story I was working on writing over the weekend — one of my 'lousy' stories, though, it must be admitted.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Staatsoper Für Alle
An Aimless Prologue, gathering possibly inaccurate facts from the rubbish-heap of memory:
On Saturday I toddled off to Unter den Linden, on foot, to hear the annual concert that the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, presents on the Bebelplatz every year in summer. It is surrounded by history, from the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great with glimmers of green corrosion, linden trees newly planted since the Second World War but literally in a long line of tradition, stretching away toward the Brandenburger Tor. Across the street and flanking the Bebelplatz, central buildings of what used to be the Berlin University, born of the Humboldts and their generation, and later hosting as professors Max Planck and other scientists and learned men of similar or lesser renown. In one corner, almost humbly, the dome of the St. Hedwig's Kathedrale, emblem of a long religious history; down the street, less purely religious, the Berliner Dom which was a bit of a personal ambition of William II. In the centre of the square itself, a memorial to the notorious burning of books by the Nazi regime. And, all along one side, the Staatsoper itself, which is being renovated, so that its musicians and stagehands and set designers and everyone else have been been evicted for years to the Schiller Theatre.
None of this is news to any Berliner, of course, except if one or two details are so inaccurate that I have just invented them.
***
At any rate, I mixed up the way to the German faculty and other faculty buildings of the Humboldt University, with the way I wanted to take to the Bebelplatz, so I arrived there later than intended at perhaps 5:20. The Platz itself (judging from my view) seemed full already. So I set up camp with my back to the staircase at the Faculty of Law or a nearby building, cobblestones underneath me strewn with the detritus of the linden trees. Despite the acute angle of vision, I had a splendid view of the viewing screen left of the stage — especially when I stood up.
An elderly lady with a camping stool established herself to my left. Less to my enjoyment, so did a German tourist family of limited conversational powers: a mother, father, and two children. The father audibly could not get over the fact that the hot dogs he bought for everyone — from the food stall set up in the middle of the street (where the emergency vehicles and staff were also hovering) — were €2.50 apiece. It did not seem terribly expensive. The children were hoisted onto the railing of the stairs, where due to my shortness I had not been able to find a seat, and then ate their hot dogs, one of them dropping a chewed crumb onto my shoe. I tried to flick it off, but due to its soggy consistency that was only half successful, so I felt a thunderous expression settling on my face. One child felt momentarily uncomfortable with his perch on the railing and asked his father to help him off. "Stay there, or else you'll lose the seat!" his father responded without sympathy, reflecting the greedy grabbing of prime and prime-er positions that was going on generally. When the music began and one of the children asked "Is that an oboe?" and the mother answered, "Yes, it is!" I feared the worst: namely, a detailed verbal inventory of every instrument in the entire orchestra. But surprisingly that was largely the bulk of their conversation during the music.
I also felt mean-spirited when the johnny-come-lately portion of the audience filled the sidewalk underneath the staircase. It stood right in my face as I sat on the ground, and in the old lady's face as she sat on her chair. Unfortunately, due to my professional occupations on weekdays, my attention was greatly distracted from the Sibelius Violin Concerto by staring at the shoes unwillingly and mentally attributing them to brands and types. 'Superga — I entered that brand into the database myself. Art of Soule, New Balance — shudder, lots of shoes there — Skechers, and is that Nike or Adidas? — Well, if I can't tell, I can't be too badly traumatized. — Tourist couple is wearing Dolomites. Hadn't heard of those, I think. Blue leather loafers with a stenciled cut pattern there, espadrilles with canvas in blue and white stripes and braided soles, black crocs with a thin strap at the back,' etc., etc. The people kept shuffling past left and right (depending on whether they were entering or leaving the concert), through the entire concert, and so the parade of shoes was interminable, and very gradual because they had to push past reluctant people, and I kept an eye out for ones that reappeared from the right direction eventually.
But I did think of the legs of people as trees, because they did filter out the light when the crowd was particularly dense, and because Sibelius is associated for me with 1. Finland, 2. forests, and 3. a certain painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it put me in the mood reasonably well. But although I liked the sound quality very much, and I thought that the soloist played the Sibelius concert reasonably well, I felt that it was too polished and not as spontaneous as I'd have liked. But it did have the type of spontaneity, from time to time, reminiscent of an enjoyably wild, stubborn session in a practicing room when nobody else is around. On the other hand, when I got home and listened to a recording of Jascha Heifetz, which did appear very intelligent and especially sublime now that I had an already good version to compare it to, I didn't feel that he particularly liked the concert.
Then, after a brief pause, where wisps of musicians tuning their instruments flew on the breeze, the orchestra started the Eroica symphony of Beethoven. At this point, all of the history that I 'wittered on' about at the beginning of this blog post fell into place, and I felt transported into a genteel living room in the very early 19th century, full of clever, cultured, and unnecessarily rich people, quietly listening, in carefully harmonious surroundings. The natural linden trees, the composed blue sky and the grey but smallish clouds, the picturesque but orderly artistic proportions of the buildings, the intellectual history emanating from their stones . . . 'A well of German, undefiled' by nationalism, I've thought; on the other hand, I don't think Beethoven was at all averse to nationalism, so that isn't particularly accurate.
Fiendishly, I left early. I did not want to (hyperbolically speaking) harm my legs irreparably by sitting awkwardly much longer, and I felt that I had gained the maximum of enjoyment from the concert already. So I went leftwards out of the crowd — brown leather ankle boots, unknown brand — to its fringes. There I listened to the Eroica's 2nd movement. Then I went off on the long walk home.
P.S.: In general, musicianship in the open air clearly had its risks. A dog barked in rough rhythmic accompaniment to the percussion, at one point; a lady in the audience yelled, 'Louder!' during the Sibelius — I wondered later whether I should have said 'Unverschämt!'; a baby cried heavily although briefly; and a car or motorcycle driver let his engine roar up the street. But the musicians seemed unperturbed, and after the first movement of the Sibelius, I could hear no hints of distraction anywhere. Also, the audience clapped between every movement. By that point I thought it would be rude not to join in, but I might have to perform penance later.
On Saturday I toddled off to Unter den Linden, on foot, to hear the annual concert that the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, presents on the Bebelplatz every year in summer. It is surrounded by history, from the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great with glimmers of green corrosion, linden trees newly planted since the Second World War but literally in a long line of tradition, stretching away toward the Brandenburger Tor. Across the street and flanking the Bebelplatz, central buildings of what used to be the Berlin University, born of the Humboldts and their generation, and later hosting as professors Max Planck and other scientists and learned men of similar or lesser renown. In one corner, almost humbly, the dome of the St. Hedwig's Kathedrale, emblem of a long religious history; down the street, less purely religious, the Berliner Dom which was a bit of a personal ambition of William II. In the centre of the square itself, a memorial to the notorious burning of books by the Nazi regime. And, all along one side, the Staatsoper itself, which is being renovated, so that its musicians and stagehands and set designers and everyone else have been been evicted for years to the Schiller Theatre.
None of this is news to any Berliner, of course, except if one or two details are so inaccurate that I have just invented them.
***
At any rate, I mixed up the way to the German faculty and other faculty buildings of the Humboldt University, with the way I wanted to take to the Bebelplatz, so I arrived there later than intended at perhaps 5:20. The Platz itself (judging from my view) seemed full already. So I set up camp with my back to the staircase at the Faculty of Law or a nearby building, cobblestones underneath me strewn with the detritus of the linden trees. Despite the acute angle of vision, I had a splendid view of the viewing screen left of the stage — especially when I stood up.
An elderly lady with a camping stool established herself to my left. Less to my enjoyment, so did a German tourist family of limited conversational powers: a mother, father, and two children. The father audibly could not get over the fact that the hot dogs he bought for everyone — from the food stall set up in the middle of the street (where the emergency vehicles and staff were also hovering) — were €2.50 apiece. It did not seem terribly expensive. The children were hoisted onto the railing of the stairs, where due to my shortness I had not been able to find a seat, and then ate their hot dogs, one of them dropping a chewed crumb onto my shoe. I tried to flick it off, but due to its soggy consistency that was only half successful, so I felt a thunderous expression settling on my face. One child felt momentarily uncomfortable with his perch on the railing and asked his father to help him off. "Stay there, or else you'll lose the seat!" his father responded without sympathy, reflecting the greedy grabbing of prime and prime-er positions that was going on generally. When the music began and one of the children asked "Is that an oboe?" and the mother answered, "Yes, it is!" I feared the worst: namely, a detailed verbal inventory of every instrument in the entire orchestra. But surprisingly that was largely the bulk of their conversation during the music.
I also felt mean-spirited when the johnny-come-lately portion of the audience filled the sidewalk underneath the staircase. It stood right in my face as I sat on the ground, and in the old lady's face as she sat on her chair. Unfortunately, due to my professional occupations on weekdays, my attention was greatly distracted from the Sibelius Violin Concerto by staring at the shoes unwillingly and mentally attributing them to brands and types. 'Superga — I entered that brand into the database myself. Art of Soule, New Balance — shudder, lots of shoes there — Skechers, and is that Nike or Adidas? — Well, if I can't tell, I can't be too badly traumatized. — Tourist couple is wearing Dolomites. Hadn't heard of those, I think. Blue leather loafers with a stenciled cut pattern there, espadrilles with canvas in blue and white stripes and braided soles, black crocs with a thin strap at the back,' etc., etc. The people kept shuffling past left and right (depending on whether they were entering or leaving the concert), through the entire concert, and so the parade of shoes was interminable, and very gradual because they had to push past reluctant people, and I kept an eye out for ones that reappeared from the right direction eventually.
 |
| Winter Landscape in Moonlight, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1919) I was remembering another painting, though. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
But I did think of the legs of people as trees, because they did filter out the light when the crowd was particularly dense, and because Sibelius is associated for me with 1. Finland, 2. forests, and 3. a certain painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it put me in the mood reasonably well. But although I liked the sound quality very much, and I thought that the soloist played the Sibelius concert reasonably well, I felt that it was too polished and not as spontaneous as I'd have liked. But it did have the type of spontaneity, from time to time, reminiscent of an enjoyably wild, stubborn session in a practicing room when nobody else is around. On the other hand, when I got home and listened to a recording of Jascha Heifetz, which did appear very intelligent and especially sublime now that I had an already good version to compare it to, I didn't feel that he particularly liked the concert.
Then, after a brief pause, where wisps of musicians tuning their instruments flew on the breeze, the orchestra started the Eroica symphony of Beethoven. At this point, all of the history that I 'wittered on' about at the beginning of this blog post fell into place, and I felt transported into a genteel living room in the very early 19th century, full of clever, cultured, and unnecessarily rich people, quietly listening, in carefully harmonious surroundings. The natural linden trees, the composed blue sky and the grey but smallish clouds, the picturesque but orderly artistic proportions of the buildings, the intellectual history emanating from their stones . . . 'A well of German, undefiled' by nationalism, I've thought; on the other hand, I don't think Beethoven was at all averse to nationalism, so that isn't particularly accurate.
Fiendishly, I left early. I did not want to (hyperbolically speaking) harm my legs irreparably by sitting awkwardly much longer, and I felt that I had gained the maximum of enjoyment from the concert already. So I went leftwards out of the crowd — brown leather ankle boots, unknown brand — to its fringes. There I listened to the Eroica's 2nd movement. Then I went off on the long walk home.
P.S.: In general, musicianship in the open air clearly had its risks. A dog barked in rough rhythmic accompaniment to the percussion, at one point; a lady in the audience yelled, 'Louder!' during the Sibelius — I wondered later whether I should have said 'Unverschämt!'; a baby cried heavily although briefly; and a car or motorcycle driver let his engine roar up the street. But the musicians seemed unperturbed, and after the first movement of the Sibelius, I could hear no hints of distraction anywhere. Also, the audience clapped between every movement. By that point I thought it would be rude not to join in, but I might have to perform penance later.
Wednesday, July 06, 2016
A Lunch, A Fit of the Vapours, and The Wind
This day began, promisingly, with rain. I decided against taking along an umbrella since powerful winds were forecast. A raincoat still seemed too warm. In the short trip from and to the U-Bahn, I didn't really need it.
At around 9 a.m. I entered the courtyard at work with bicycles wedged in racks, dandelion-yellow plaster, a squarish piece of sky at the top, and a warning that 'roof avalanches' were possible from the good four or five stories' apex of the buildings. Then I climbed the creaky old stairs with a linoleum-like covering to our offices. The door was open, the lights were on, and although absent from her computer at the moment, T. was already there.
There was work from the day before that I finished, and then I agonized a while about an email I had to send with information that a colleague could pass on to clients. And then the full routine began, clicking and going through pictures of hundreds or thousands of products, etc., and listening in passing to dramas with the technical aspects of the work that I don't quite understand.
At lunch we briefly broke off our efforts and sat together. I like being in one of the rooms more than the other because conversations about 'girls never grumbling about anything, wink wink' and 'the national habits of the Finns' are rather too nationalistic and sexist (philosophically speaking) for me not to squirm with discomfort internally; and the vegetarian round has more of the kind of tame, friendly, and politically correct conversation I like. This time I think we were too famished to talk. We had a Turkish take-out lunch. Broth-flavoured bulgur wheat kernels (I think) with thin scraps of noodle mingled in it, served in a large round tin for everybody; another tin of a vegetarian meal that had, as I recall, beans and tomatoes in it; meatballs (köfte) in another sauce that likely had tomatoes and red capsicum in it; and a fourth large round tin that had an iceberg lettuce and cherry tomato salad with a little lemon juice sprinkled into it (I surmise) and tiny spears of shadowier arugula here and there. The köfte were garlicky and therefore flavorful, but the rooms were inconveniently perfumed afterward; and I always enjoy the salads from that take-out place, even if a colleague characterized it as 'rabbit food' and I admit that the tree-trunk-like lengths of green onion that were once thrown into a salad seemed a little impractical.
Although grumbling about the food knows no boundaries, it was a good sign that the vegetarian and vegan colleagues seemed happy today, too. There was no significant injury of the delineation between vegetarian and non-vegetarian food — such as meaty burritos being mislabelled for the vegetarians or the emergence of ham in the vegetarian pasta — In general, the great partitioning of the workforce into those who partake of the general meal and those who want to order food more to their liking individually — a partitioning suggested on Friday — has not taken place after all.
The wind 'wuthered' so powerfully this afternoon that it repeatedly slammed shut the windows, which were tilted open at their tops, until the colleagues near the windows closed them. (The fact that they were shut was also why the lunch's garlicky aroma lingered.) Right after lunch I went for a short walk up and down half the block in front of the workplace, which I generally do to reattain a state of equanimity or just because it's nice to be out of doors, and the wind had raked up a mixture of dry leaves* and an embarrassing 'find' of garbage into the middle of the sidewalks. But I like this weather, and the surprisingly chilly air leafing through my hair and taking away the tepid warmth and any trace of the sedentary, and perhaps taking away some of the grumpiness that accumulates too in the course of a tangled working day, was a real restorative.
* Although the linden trees are shedding their early petals, as usual, so they are perhaps not as unseasonal as they seem. And golden seedheads and pollen have sown themselves over many car hoods I've passed in the streets and even, I think, foamed the street gutters in recent rains.
I had tasks until after 9 p.m., and T. was there that long too, so I fetched sugary fruit candies from the table outside the kitchen and consumed them one by one in the last minutes. To be honest, I still haven't figured out the proper balance of water, food, exercise, and stress, because I appear to get more woozy feelings from drinking or from eating something sugary, when under stress (at home I am far less sensitive), than I would if just not eating except at lunch. When I feel stressed or angry or particularly ill I have sometimes also climbed around three or so flights of stairs up and down in the building, so as to get the effect of a longer walk in a brief time. The good news is that I haven't really turned into a hypochondriac, because there have been two days without wooziness that have pointed out the difference between my normal perceived state of health and this. But in general I am not too worried about it, because to be honest I've never particularly objected to enjoying trifling physiological ailments as they arise and measuring symptoms, etc., like a four-year-old child playing doctor.
When T. was satisfied with her work, we left together. So I shut down the computer quickly. She made sure that all the windows in the other main room were also closed, although colleagues of ours were gathered in the Conference Room, so that they would not have to do much housekeeping-style checking before they left.
We walked from work to the Südstern U-Bahn station along broad residential sidewalks, shaded under leafy trees, brightened with rosebushes and perhaps oleanders and other flowers in beds and flowerpots, a few modern shopfronts but also formal elderly buildings in brick that were once (apparently) benevolent institutions, and one soccer-pitch-turf-green television screen after the other transmitting the noise of Wales vs. Portugal's soccer match for the UEFA European Championship semi-finals in the shade of restaurant and cafe awnings. It was noisy enough that we could hear it down and across the street.
Not as many football spectators, perhaps, as in gentler weather or for a German game — but patrons were gathered, sitting on benches and at tables on the sidewalks. It was 0-0 at that time in the first half of the game, and since I have little enthusiasm for Portugal as a team whose joint effort makes it worthy of a championship, or Wales as an exemplar of excellent football (though this may be unfair), I surmised that a tedious match was being realized.
In the end, then, I only watched the last ten or fewer minutes of the game, since my parents were watching it at home.
Note: I forgot to mention the U-Bahn trips. Jan Morris's descriptions of Peru were my reading on the way to work, and on the way from Südstern station I was in the middle of the part of The Quark and the Jaguar where the author describes how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. There are more frequent U-Bahn ticket patrols, by the way, and I never really like them. A few Berlin political parties have proposed that public transit be made free, and I like that far better than trying to catch people out. I also find my conscience inconveniently tumbled about, since every single U-Bahn ride in the evening so far seems to have meant a panhandler asking passersby for money. I don't know quite how to come to terms with it especially, as I will say self-commiseratingly, at the end of a long day's work.
At around 9 a.m. I entered the courtyard at work with bicycles wedged in racks, dandelion-yellow plaster, a squarish piece of sky at the top, and a warning that 'roof avalanches' were possible from the good four or five stories' apex of the buildings. Then I climbed the creaky old stairs with a linoleum-like covering to our offices. The door was open, the lights were on, and although absent from her computer at the moment, T. was already there.
There was work from the day before that I finished, and then I agonized a while about an email I had to send with information that a colleague could pass on to clients. And then the full routine began, clicking and going through pictures of hundreds or thousands of products, etc., and listening in passing to dramas with the technical aspects of the work that I don't quite understand.
At lunch we briefly broke off our efforts and sat together. I like being in one of the rooms more than the other because conversations about 'girls never grumbling about anything, wink wink' and 'the national habits of the Finns' are rather too nationalistic and sexist (philosophically speaking) for me not to squirm with discomfort internally; and the vegetarian round has more of the kind of tame, friendly, and politically correct conversation I like. This time I think we were too famished to talk. We had a Turkish take-out lunch. Broth-flavoured bulgur wheat kernels (I think) with thin scraps of noodle mingled in it, served in a large round tin for everybody; another tin of a vegetarian meal that had, as I recall, beans and tomatoes in it; meatballs (köfte) in another sauce that likely had tomatoes and red capsicum in it; and a fourth large round tin that had an iceberg lettuce and cherry tomato salad with a little lemon juice sprinkled into it (I surmise) and tiny spears of shadowier arugula here and there. The köfte were garlicky and therefore flavorful, but the rooms were inconveniently perfumed afterward; and I always enjoy the salads from that take-out place, even if a colleague characterized it as 'rabbit food' and I admit that the tree-trunk-like lengths of green onion that were once thrown into a salad seemed a little impractical.
Although grumbling about the food knows no boundaries, it was a good sign that the vegetarian and vegan colleagues seemed happy today, too. There was no significant injury of the delineation between vegetarian and non-vegetarian food — such as meaty burritos being mislabelled for the vegetarians or the emergence of ham in the vegetarian pasta — In general, the great partitioning of the workforce into those who partake of the general meal and those who want to order food more to their liking individually — a partitioning suggested on Friday — has not taken place after all.
The wind 'wuthered' so powerfully this afternoon that it repeatedly slammed shut the windows, which were tilted open at their tops, until the colleagues near the windows closed them. (The fact that they were shut was also why the lunch's garlicky aroma lingered.) Right after lunch I went for a short walk up and down half the block in front of the workplace, which I generally do to reattain a state of equanimity or just because it's nice to be out of doors, and the wind had raked up a mixture of dry leaves* and an embarrassing 'find' of garbage into the middle of the sidewalks. But I like this weather, and the surprisingly chilly air leafing through my hair and taking away the tepid warmth and any trace of the sedentary, and perhaps taking away some of the grumpiness that accumulates too in the course of a tangled working day, was a real restorative.
* Although the linden trees are shedding their early petals, as usual, so they are perhaps not as unseasonal as they seem. And golden seedheads and pollen have sown themselves over many car hoods I've passed in the streets and even, I think, foamed the street gutters in recent rains.
I had tasks until after 9 p.m., and T. was there that long too, so I fetched sugary fruit candies from the table outside the kitchen and consumed them one by one in the last minutes. To be honest, I still haven't figured out the proper balance of water, food, exercise, and stress, because I appear to get more woozy feelings from drinking or from eating something sugary, when under stress (at home I am far less sensitive), than I would if just not eating except at lunch. When I feel stressed or angry or particularly ill I have sometimes also climbed around three or so flights of stairs up and down in the building, so as to get the effect of a longer walk in a brief time. The good news is that I haven't really turned into a hypochondriac, because there have been two days without wooziness that have pointed out the difference between my normal perceived state of health and this. But in general I am not too worried about it, because to be honest I've never particularly objected to enjoying trifling physiological ailments as they arise and measuring symptoms, etc., like a four-year-old child playing doctor.
When T. was satisfied with her work, we left together. So I shut down the computer quickly. She made sure that all the windows in the other main room were also closed, although colleagues of ours were gathered in the Conference Room, so that they would not have to do much housekeeping-style checking before they left.
We walked from work to the Südstern U-Bahn station along broad residential sidewalks, shaded under leafy trees, brightened with rosebushes and perhaps oleanders and other flowers in beds and flowerpots, a few modern shopfronts but also formal elderly buildings in brick that were once (apparently) benevolent institutions, and one soccer-pitch-turf-green television screen after the other transmitting the noise of Wales vs. Portugal's soccer match for the UEFA European Championship semi-finals in the shade of restaurant and cafe awnings. It was noisy enough that we could hear it down and across the street.
Not as many football spectators, perhaps, as in gentler weather or for a German game — but patrons were gathered, sitting on benches and at tables on the sidewalks. It was 0-0 at that time in the first half of the game, and since I have little enthusiasm for Portugal as a team whose joint effort makes it worthy of a championship, or Wales as an exemplar of excellent football (though this may be unfair), I surmised that a tedious match was being realized.
In the end, then, I only watched the last ten or fewer minutes of the game, since my parents were watching it at home.
Note: I forgot to mention the U-Bahn trips. Jan Morris's descriptions of Peru were my reading on the way to work, and on the way from Südstern station I was in the middle of the part of The Quark and the Jaguar where the author describes how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. There are more frequent U-Bahn ticket patrols, by the way, and I never really like them. A few Berlin political parties have proposed that public transit be made free, and I like that far better than trying to catch people out. I also find my conscience inconveniently tumbled about, since every single U-Bahn ride in the evening so far seems to have meant a panhandler asking passersby for money. I don't know quite how to come to terms with it especially, as I will say self-commiseratingly, at the end of a long day's work.
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