The Ticking Final Days

Reality

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The days seem like hours now, so short they are in my perception.  I fly to Chicago on July 14th, where I will be picked up and delivered back to Iowa, where I’ll be until early August.

Yes, that means no more Guy in the Black Hat Meets Berlin in less than a week.  Egal – I’ll switch the name to Guy in the Black Hat Meets [Wherever My Permanent Residence Happens to Be at the Time].  I figure anywhere I go will provide me with interesting encounters to post on the Internet.  Long live Guy in the Black Hat Meets Northampton!

Berlin has been more than kind to me:  I have never felt as cosmopolitan before in my life.  I met filmmakers, drank in nice places/dives, attended a few concerts, saw a lot of movies, rummaged through archives, churned out articles and essays, visited Prague, Aarhus, Venice, Bremen and Göttingen, spent some time in an artificial tropical rainforest at Brand (Niederlausitz), saw the Frida Kahlo exhibit, experienced the elation of the Germans as Lena Meyer-Landrut won the Eurovision 2010 contest in Oslo, hung out with people from around the world, and managed to get plenty of much-needed sleep in the midst of it all.  All in all, I should not be complaining.  Still, a small update is necessary:

Just as my article and blog post on Uwe Boll came out, I discovered he was coming to the HFF on June 24th.  So I decided to audio-record the entire speech, which is an enjoyable 2.5 hours if you understand any German.  In fact, it was one of those instances in which understanding the German language quite literally gave me a better level of access to information about how the world works, which is why I am continuously baffled by why universities think cutting back on German is a great idea. Understanding German connects you with a whole next level of cultural production that, well, needs to be situated within its context.

Kat left for Iowa on the 29th, and I don’t think I’ve actually had a phone conversation with her since then, on account of her not having a cell phone but being on the road up in the Twin Cities and the time difference and all.  This makes me sad. 😦

All the more sad beyond having to leave Berlin and doing so alone is the fact that I missed the very wedding I didn’t want to:  that of Preeti Gupta and Seth Bacon.  These are two exceptional individuals with whom I’ve spent many a fine day, and whose wedding I knew was going to be awesome.  And then it was scheduled to take place within my last two weeks here, also on the very weekend I had a conference in Bremen.  So to all my Grinnellian alumni friends that were there (Taylor, Megan, Eve, David, John, Katie, Aaron, Ann, Sean… oh, the list is too long):  I missed dancing, gaming and reveling with Preeti and Seth.  And to Preeti and Seth:  the present’s on its way, but my well-wishes now will have to do.

So: the Bremen conference.  It was my first official conference paper delivered in German to a German audience on German soil, and I think it went fairly well.  The topic was “Turns und Trends in der Literaturwissenschaft,” and was designed to gather young scholars into debate about the field of Germanistik via papers delivered. I dealt with material pertaining to a racist “geopolitical fiction” science-fiction novel – Pereat Austria! – from 1907 written by a right-wing self-help author Marie Carola Freiin von Eynatten.  My paper was described as the “postcolonial turn” of the conference.  In any case, it will be published (with revisions) in German in October.  I’m psyched.  But I was even more psyched to by chance visit with Sarah, a former UMass professor, and her coterie of German exchange students to Dickinson College.  It was like being back with Grinnellians for the evening – interesting liberal-arts college types – and I felt suddenly at home amidst an otherwise somewhat alienating conference experience.

Naturally, we stopped our final discussion on Saturday as Germany trashed Argentina in a World Cup quarter final showdown.  Though it didn’t pan out for Germany in the semi-finals against Spain, the victory celebrations for the quarter final were extremely intense in Bremen, with cops and smoke bombs and yelling people and vuvuzelas and (enough booleans) such.  I remember exiting the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin and asking myself: “Is this a warzone?”  Men were hauling up random people off the street and stuffing them into a van to drink.  A couple in Tiergarten seemed to be celebrating with a deliberately heavy amount of heavy petting.  Bottles flew, music blasted, Germans yelped for joy.  Well, at least they made it to the semi-finals.

For reasons I’ll not state here, I was back early from Bremen and found myself in Berlin for the Fourth of July, which was celebrated at Tempelhof Park by the Young Democrats Abroad.  Hilary Bown ’02 and Justin Torrence ’03 were present and made me feel at home there.  We had a cherry pit spitting contest, and some guy named Jerry impressed me with his deep knowledge of Cold War history as an American ex-pat who lived in Kreuzberg.  Then Kira and I commiserated and had ice cream.

Monday night was a BBQ in Prenzlauer Berg in one of the older houses along Husemannstr.  After exactly one beer, I was repeatedly told by the Germans that I was “zu laut,” leading me to believe that I project my voice much better in the foreign language…

And now Peggy, my landlady, has come and inspected the apartment.  I am most definitely leaving, and the sparseness of my surroundings bears testimony to that fact.

But what’s life without melancholy, bittersweet endings, or the sending off of old friends to new places?

Fantasy

Die Liebe und die Königin (1976)

Based on Viktor Hugo’s novel Maria Tudor, this film stars Gojko Mitic as the dashing Fabiano Fabiani, an Italian nobleman who murders a Jewish loan-shark plotting to overthrow the throne, starting a whole chain of events.  The first time I’ve ever seen Mitic play a villainous role, though it looks like he’s still only got about two possible expressions.  It supports my argument for my GSA paper in the fall anyway…

Die schöne Lurette (dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1960)

An adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s operette by the same name.  Best watched on fast-forward, I think – then you see fast-moving soldiers and peasants weaving in and around each other, occasionally donning masks and kissing.  Much better than its awkward Powell/Pressburger aspirations.

Echo Bazaar

I took the (loneliness-fueled) plunge and joined a choose-your-own-adventure Twitter app called Echo Bazaar.  The premise:  you are a quasi-damned, quasi-deceased soul in Fallen London, an underground version of the same that happens to share a border with Hell.  Quite addictive and quite well-written (because it’s British), my character has already done any number of dubious tasks, such as fed a hapless drunk to a demon and composed an ode about a fungal creature.  Fun times.

Shifting Forest Storyworks

A LARP community in California, Shifting Forest Storyworks, has been so generous as to offer many of their written parlor LARP scenarios for free.  I took a gander at several, including the Mirror Room, and was pleasantly surprised with how tightly structured and playable they all seemed.  It made me excited to run several upon my return.  Any players willing to have a go?