What sees me through December

In Germany, December is dark. In December, Germany is dark, too, but that makes the whole thing sound much more sinister than it really is. Anyway, you may think that the 8 hours and 3 minutes of light between sunrise and sunset sounds like just enough, but then you assume all sorts of things about the quality of light that are simply unrealistic (for instance, that one may experience two days in a row without rain). My instinct is to ingest an unholy amount of gebrannte Mandeln and hibernate, but the powers that be will admit no such thing. I AM NOT A BEAR, I repeat to myself each morning. But I am not yet fully convinced.

And so, dear readers, I give you yet another list, this time of my December survival strategies. It is not overly-lengthy, but, then again, neither is the time until cookies become the mainstay of my diet.

1. SWEET POTATO!! the concept, the smell, and the pie. I recently learned that China grows 80% of the world's sweet potatoes, which lead me to declare that I was moving there immediately. I subsequently read that they feed 60% of this 80% to pigs, which means that 48% of the world's sweet potatoes are eaten by even-toed ungulates. No matter, the humans are winning.

2. Elaborate fantasies in which I am seduced by Ernst Haeckel in the Canaries. None of these involve him drawing my nasal flora in exquisitely beautiful detail. Of course not. That would be perverse. Nor would it involve playing house in a cave and playfully throwing loquats at one another while watching the sun set over Teide. Absurd! But who am I kidding, really? I would settle any day for his assistant in the photo, Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay. Can't you tell from his swagger that that man's an abolitionist?

3. Last, but very much not least, embracing rejection! Or shall we say refusées? Why is 19th century modernism so much more charming than the twentieth century variety? I say we go back to embracing this productive loser dynamic, or at least use all of the hideous wallpaper of the world to say a thing or two.

The Questions that I Exorcise

The curse of reading widely is that all sorts of questions that only tangentially relate to the subject at hand constantly knock at the door to the mind and, oftentimes, forcibly enter. You first detect this mental burglary when you see that you've read a paragraph, sometimes an entire page, without absorbing any of the content written. And yet you cannot simply recognize this and go on-- you know these webs of distraction are sometimes as fruitful as they are inhibiting. I've taken to writing questions down as soon as they come to mind to force them out of my system, into the future. These were today's questions, and some of them were even answerable:

1. Why does the air smell metallic when it gets very cold?

Verdict: Unknowable or not yet known- the internet could not tell me a thing, but perhaps you, dear reader, can. Am I the only one with this affliction?

2. How does cinnamon simulate heat?

Verdict: Apparently there's something called 'cinnamaldehyde' or 'cinnamic aldehyde,' which reacts with the censors in your mouth that normally detect heat, called trigeminal nociceptors. I find the name of the receptor somewhat lacking, but I'm reconsidering names for my first born after thinking through the myriad of nicknames one could have for 'cinnamaldehyde.'

3. How much does the heart of a blue whale weigh? (A fact I had learned in grade school, and promptly forgotten, only to have it surface [ha!] years later)

Verdict: An awful lot- over 1000 pounds, at least. I particularly liked this formulation of the question. 'How heavy is the blue whale's heart'? sounds to me like a delightfully terrible folk song. When I recounted this fact to my boyfriend, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, "Just one heartbeat could kill you!" Indeed. And according to the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a human could even crawl through a whale's aorta, though the fantasy that we could endlessly circulate through a whale is probably entirely untenable. Pity- no matter how obese we become, we'll never know what it's like to be giant.

4. What does mold look like to ants? (I had been reading about the leafcutter ant's magnificent mold gardens in the amazon)

Verdict: It turns out the gardens of the leafcutter ants are mostly just amorphous and fuzzy, though they're impressive agriculture feats. In the process of researching this, though, I came across a couple of magnificent pieces by the artist Stacy Levy. The image above and the one below feature images of magnified mold (penicillium and aspergillus respectively) which have been sandblasted onto glass plates. Cultures of these very molds are then grown on the plates themselves, to fill in the crannies. Does everything that is moldy twice over acquire such beauty? It makes you wonder what would happen with a third iteration, a third level of moldiness...perhaps everything would just become disgusting again.

A-roving

Immer Was Los, a publication detailing all kinds of noteworthy events in and around Gießen, Hessen, Germany, where Lauren currently makes her home, had informed us that there was a big to-do in Hungen.

What, precisely? A Krämermarkt, or ‘stuff market’. Address? Hungen. The entire town, apparently. We realized that this would either be sublime (i.e. a Christmas market in early November), or dreadful. So we decided to go.

We spent the 24-minute train ride admiring German animals and planning our futures living happily in Lich, a seemingly v. pleasant neighbour of Gießen. We emerged from the forest, the charming brick and reassuring fields, to find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic junk yard. Like much of Germany on a cloudy day, it smelled like poo. This wasteland was Hungen.

Oh mein Gott, we said. What have we DONE.

We trudged towards civilization, after checking the schedule for the next train out of there. Along the path were what may or may not have been trash compactors, bulldozer tillers, and various piles of yellow and orange things, whose purposes remain a mystery probably even to themselves.

But then we smelt the waffles cooking. And we saw a Turkish restaurant. And we turned the corner and saw a stand that sold nothing but eight thousand varieties of candied almonds, and another stand that sold nothing but alpaca socks, and dozens and dozens of stands that stretched all the way down the street (which was a very charming, seventeenth-century German sort of street), and shortly afterwards we began our careers as supermodels.

It was freakishly cold. Spotting some choice knitwear, we proceeded to gleefully try on what, by German standards, would be considered far too many hats. We attracted the attention of numerous vendors. DIE SIND ALLE HANDGEMACHT! [These are all handmade!] insisted the sales lady (who never said anything else afterwards). HOW FANTASTIC, we said with our eyebrows, and crowded around the mirror to admire our marvelous taste.

Then suddenly there was a jolly man with a giant camera bag, asking if he could take some photos of us trying on hats for the local paper. We said yes, and then promptly realized that it is impossible to look candid and photogenic at the same time. So we were trying to make happy shopping faces and nonchalant faces and in the meantime this man was taking about fifty pictures a second, and it was all a bit confusing after a while. We felt we really should buy some hats then, so Lauren got a beautifully cozy white one with brass buttons and Maddy got a slouchy blue one with a secret geometric design on the back. These were not the hats we were wearing in the pictures. But some level of anonymity must be preserved.

(Full disclosure: we spent quite some time trying to track ourselves down in the slideshows of the Allerheiligenmarkt that we found on the websites of Hungen's local papers. It seems we were passed over in favor of the very young and very old. Are we not yet suffiiciently German?)

We wiled away a few hours in this fashion, always discovering new delights- exotic succulents, flammkuchen, FREE SHRIMP. The succulents were particularly memorable, because the succulent man (it's not what you think!) was very stern about us watering our LEBENDIGE STEINE [LIVING STONES] every 14 days for 30 minutes at a time. He also refused to sell us a specimen in a hanging pot, claiming that if he let it go, nobody would ever believe the species capable of blooming. We certainly wouldn't have.

When we move to Hungen, and I'm certain we will any day now, we will live in the Schloss (which is also the synagogue). We originally thought it was a gymnasium [fancy high school], but it seems to have been turned into some sort of apartment complex for Hungeners/Hungers. We want the roof apartment (WITH FOUR TURRETS!). We will play in the leaves in the back. We will have friends in the houses nearby, which are made from curvy beams and mud and straw. Though you might expect these friends to have dirty faces, they will not. This will be our life in Hungen.

It's a good thing that our life will be so pleasant, because escaping Hungen is nigh impossible. We tried, thrice, and were thwarted the first two times. Why? Our zug was simply ausgefallen, a word whose exact meaning we're not precisely sure of (though we always know it spells inconvenience), but we were not alone in our strandedness. We were joined by two helpless Slovenian transplants, a mother, who referred to Madeleine as a gutes Mädchen, and her daughter, who took a special joy out of crossing train tracks rather than using the subterranean stairs. They didn't take kindly to the delay, and, suspecting strikes, ranted about poor people, to our shock and delight. The old woman found our hangman game, which we played whilst waiting for a train to come and which must have been entirely unintelligible to her, hilarious.

What follows is a list of our hangman words, in order: split-pea soup, allspice, echidna, balustrade, incongruous, toreador, pamplemousse, antifreeze, strumpfhosen, laissez-faire, mise-en-abîme, flohmarkt, australopithecus, expressionismus, megatherium, vulcanologist, chaos, vestige, so we'll go no more a-roving, pluck, why, om, and kulturindustrie.

On taxonomy

I think every biology teacher I’ve ever had has rolled her eyes at the thought of taxonomists. They are necessary people, yes — they speak Latin — but they are (apparently) kind of a drag to be around.

Hence my (slight) reluctance to admit my fascination with taxonomy and my own catalogic tendencies. I’m obsessed with Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia, for one thing, in which animals are fitted into categories like “belonging to the emperor,” “fantastic,” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” Also, I have recently discovered the OED Historical Thesaurus — a taxonomy of every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary — which is incomprehensible but astoundingly poetic. Here, for example, is how you may reach the word ‘shell’:

the external world > abstract properties > existence > substantiality or concreteness > unsubstantiality or abstractness > [noun] > unsubstantiality or lack of substance > superficiality or hollowness > superficial or hollow thing ►shell (1791)

How is “unsubstantiality or abstractness” a sub-set of “substantiality or concreteness”? Why is it “unsubstantiality” instead of “insubstantiality”? Can’t a shell also be a tangible thing, and if so, why is it considered an “abstract property”? Dare I question the methods of the OED?

One of my professors recently asked us to make a list, from memory, of every book we’d ever read, and to then somehow organize this list. How to organize everything I can ever remember reading in my life? Right now, my categories are kind of boring — “books from childhood,” “poetry & drama,” that sort of thing. But might it not be more accurate to have categories like:

• books I read when I was probably too young for them;
• books I refuse to travel without;
• books whose titles I have lost;
• books I wish I had more opportunity to quote from;
• books I claim to have read but haven’t exactly read read ... ?

And — since this is an assignment for a translation class — shouldn’t I also include “books I tend to think about in German” or “books I tend to think about in French” or “books whose original language I will probably never be able to read”?

But actually translation and taxonomy seem to me to be natural partners. Taxonomy is merely the art of making distinctions, and therefore every language is a kind of taxonomy; every language makes different types of distinctions. In Latin or Russian, for example — languages with complex case systems — it is important to distinguish the role of each noun: is it singular, plural, masculine, feminine, a direct or an indirect object? The case ending will tell you. In Chinese, par contre, what is important about nouns is not what they are doing, really, but what they are. Each noun is accompanied by a “measurement word”, which indicates a sort of category: “long soft things,” like fish and feathers, have one measurement word, and “long hard things” like pencils and dogs (?!) have another. Books have their own measurement word, and so do people, and so do cups.

What do these taxonomies tell us? More about the culture than about the objects themselves, I suspect. To go back to my list of books: what would happen if I organized them, not into piles, but into a continuum — based on color, for example, or length, or by when I read them or how much I love them? Would the way I organize my reading material — that is to say, my past — determine my relationship to it?

Translation is: difficult; music.

Taped on the wall just above my desk in my apartment in Paris are a picture of Darwin and a picture of Leonard Bernstein. Darwin is there because G.G., a professor of mine once printed it out for me, saying, “I’m not sure why I’m printing this for you, but I think you should have it.” He has enjoyed pride of place ever since. And Leonard Bernstein is there because I’m obsessed with him.

However, I have come to realize that these two serve a metaphorical purpose as well, and I’m keeping them there to remind me about the ethics of translation. It seems to me now that Darwin was a kind of translator, observing nature meticulously, obsessively, in order to re-write it, its genealogy and present state, in another language: a human one. Another of my professors has asked whether translation can be defined as “writing under constraint”; I think that’s really not a bad definition — and Darwin was certainly constrained.

So he reminds me, basically, to just keep at it: keep observing, keep reading, agonize if you must, and then produce something, even if everyone thinks you’re crazy (and they probably will).

The photo of Bernstein I have is my favorite picture of him: conducting, head thrown back, arms upraised, eyes closed, as if at any moment he will transubstantiate and simply turn into music. He once said that his engagement with music was “a total embrace,” that knowledge of a work makes you belong to it, and not it to you.

He was also absolutely fanatical about loyalty to the composer, and remains remarkable among conductors for sounding noticeably different with each composer he conducts. Conducting, he said, is exactly like breathing: the preparation is inhalation, the music is exhalation.

So Lenny, eyes closed, is winking at me and reminding me to be loyal to the composer (or in my case, the writer), and not to engage except by total embrace; the work must live inside you; you must be inhaling and exhaling it.

(For in fact, literary translation is very much like musical interpretation: Bach as played by Perahia is not the same as Bach by Gould, but Bach is always there, and music is always the goal, the necessity.)

Paris: la belle, la bête, et le what now?

Amazing things about Paris:

1) WARM BAGUETTES: The best things ever. Somehow I’ve had incredible luck for three days running, and have never yet walked home with a less-than-piping-hot baguette.

2) Chocolate éclairs: OH. MON. DIEU. The best things ever, after warm baguettes. Didn’t realize they were chocolate when I bought them — I mean, they had chocolate on top, of course — but they had chocolate mousse inside, and I bit into one and almost died right then and there of happiness.

3) Daily life in Paris can be rather complicated and difficult, which means that even tiny victories (e.g. food) can be celebrated all out of proportion. Perfect example: learned today that my super-fancy, cutting-edge contact lens solution is available here, albeit it for €18/ginormous bottle. Danced all the way home.

Less-than-amazing things about Paris:

1) The national telecom company blacklist, which I have inexplicably found myself on. (Now, true, I have had fantasies about getting into some sort of political trouble in a foreign country, but I was hoping to be able to say something more along the lines of, “Ah, Liechtenstein! Yes, I was once deported from Liechtenstein,” and less, “I was blacklisted by every phone company in France for a while.”) After paying an exorbitant fee, I have freed myself from this blacklist, but only after “twelve to fifteen days” of processing time. Because they who control the blacklist don’t have computers, I guess, and so need to inform each other of my acquittal by carrier pigeon.

2) Not nearly enough executive transvestites hanging around with mice, cats, and monkeys.

Incredibly weird things about Paris: there’s only a need for one: Marie Antoinette’s dulcimer-playing android. Android, as in Data, only in the eighteenth century.

You say goodbye, and I say hello

I wrote before about the death of one of my former professors; I’m back in Paris now, which meant I was able to attend her memorial service yesterday, on what would have been her birthday, in one of the rooms that used to be part hers. She would come in — tiny, blonde, often in a red coat and usually dragging a wheeled suitcase — say, “Okay,” and then lecture for ninety minutes, without ever once looking at her notes.

I loved hearing people talk about her. They all said the same things — she was brilliant, she had a terrifying reputation but was a genuinely kind person, she held everyone up to rigidly (but not impossibly) high standards. One of her colleagues, another of my former professors and still a dear friend, said that he was so happy that he was able to teach with her and not be graded by her! I was crying by then, but that phrase made me laugh out loud.

I wish I’d known her better, or at least longer; even so, something about her death has made me deeply sad and I notice her absence on campus and in my life, somehow. Forces of nature don’t go missing; but she has.

A couple of strange things about funerals (or rather, memorials), and this one in particular: (1) I always feel incredibly hungry afterwards. It’s probably just a desire to remind myself that I am still alive, but I devoured two glasses of grapefruit juice, half a pain suisse, and some kind of strange lemon poppyseed cookie right after the service, and in a way this was also part of saying goodbye. (2) This service gave me a chance to see several people I hadn’t seen yet since arriving in Paris, very dear people, old friends, old professors, etc. Having to greet old friends on the occasion of someone’s death is very odd — there’s a slight awkwardness at the joy of it, but the joy is also intensified by the reminder of its fragility.

Afterwards my very dear friend Lily and I spent a long time on the Champs de Mars (the park near campus and directly in front of the Eiffel Tower), catching up and processing each other’s lives, talking about our old and new homes, old and new relationships, and ending up, as always, with Virginia Woolf.

And all of this was, in a symbolic and particularly poignant way, representative of my first two weeks in Paris: made up of goodbyes and hellos.

I’m just starting my MA and realizing (as usual) that I don’t know ANYTHING, that academically I am pulled in about fifty-seven different (and opposite) directions, but that everything is exciting and thrilling, I love my professors, my classmates are v. interesting, intelligent, and fun, and Paris seems like a brand-new city, not at all like it was two years ago, except for the quality of the pastries, which is and always has been exceptional.

Not that anything particular has changed about Paris; minor things only; but I have changed, and all things are ready, if our minds be so.