The year we make contact

By age 6 I had learned how to read. I loved reading reference books, especially encyclopedias and atlases. And comics. Also, I would gaze at maps for hours. When I was nine or so, my parents took me on a visit to aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara (in reality my grandfather’s first cousin) was a high school principal which, back then, was big deal, at least for my family. We discussed my reading habits and she talked to me about literature. I told her I didn’t like literature because it was boring (even today I hold children’s literature in contempt and I find it deeply patronising). Aunt Barbara was alarmed and scolded my parents for not having looked into the matter earlier and lent me three books. I read two of them, they were good and, and I sort of stuck with literature ever since.

Since that time, relatives would do their research before buying me a book. Some of them would do too much research. Once an aunt bought me Zola’s Une page d’amour, which I was almost totally unable to appreciate at age 12, before that (when I was 10) she had bought me Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which I had found terrifying and disturbing. And so on.

Around age 11 I was also given Arthur Clark’s 2010 Odyssey Two, my first sci-fi novel ever, by a friend of my mother’s. I liked it although I hadn’t understood most of it, as I realised years later, when I re-read it. What really had struck me the first time round, when I was 11, was the book’s cover, which was this:

2010 Odyssey Two

So, in my 11-year old mind, the year 2010 got linked to the image of a fetus in a womb (against Jupiter and facing Discovery, but still). Most fittingly, too, as it turns out in hindsight.

Writing about sex

A refreshing and astute view on why literary writing about sex is so difficult and/or awkward. A short quote follows, my emphasis (in italics):

[T]here’s a completely imaginary line between pornography and literature, and pornography has no time for your posturing and your irony because people only masturbate sincerely, and literature has no time for the pleasure of anything but literature, and good sex rarely makes for good literature, and pornography only yields to awkward and painful sex by accident.

My iPod and me

I read this post by the great Francis Strand. I have thought along these lines before and, more importantly, I have read and heard people making similar observations. This is serious. As Strand puts it “To me, Victorian means self-righteous, smugly pious, inhibited and stifling. [...] what’s happening in America regarding that issue closest to my heart, gay rights, makes me inclined to think that the moral hypocrites are winning.” But it is not just gay rights. It is also the regression in the way people seem to think about “women’s place in the world”, all the talk about the “sanctity of marriage” (including civil marriage, quite comically), the undaunted perseverance of Neocons to their ideals and goals, and so on.

I was thinking about Strand’s post walking back home. Now that the weather in the Outpost is bearable, I can walk more. I also need to walk more, as I have not renewed my gym subscription since last June, what with all that travelling and long absences. Thankfully, I now have an iPod Touch, a prized present by Jod. It made carrying a laptop with me almost obsolete. It enabled me to blog from a bistrot in Paris, while eating a gorgeous chèvre salad and an omelette. Above all, it has transformed my flâner, rendering it more profound, nuanced and dramatic, whether this be the 22 kilometres I walked in Paris within a single day or my daily walk to work and back, or to some place in the Old City to meet with friends. Some of the more spectacular moments include the rain in Capital City, my hood on and something very appropriate coming through the earphones, the beat accentuating rush hour crowd-mingling on the moving walkway in Châtelet, the wintry stroll back home in Home City.

Travels as trips (of self-discovery)

Every time I go to Paris, I am troubled. First of all, I love it. This would be a trite statement to make were it not for the fact that Paris is like Home City. They only differ by some 800 years of existence (Paris is older, obviously), several magnitudes of significance and trillions of francs more poured into the former.

So, every time I go to Paris, I am faced with an alternative version of myself, a bit like what happened in Cologne last summer.

What if I had insisted in studying in Paris? Ok, I would be a worse professional and maybe an unemployed one, too. But maybe I would have lingered on HERE, no negligible matter. I would be proficient in French, the language I love most besides my native one. I would have led a self-confident, bohemian and perhaps perpetually penniless existence. I would have paired up with any number of obnoxious but spectacularly charming somehow ugly (like me) Parisian women smelling of this 80s perfume I still cannot place (not Poison, not Opium and – dear oh dear – not Tresor, which to me was synonymous to sex for half of the nineties). I would take cheap great wine for granted. I would have developed an awful taste in music and I would mistake vaguness for depth and obfuscation for greatness. I would probably be fat, what with all that food, but much more self-confident.

I hate to say it, but it would probably not be me. All the above would take a different character, a different person. Therefore I am not of Paris. Couldn’t have been, too.

A short note on Chicago

Chicago, as you can see here, is impressive. It is the archetypal North American urban landscape. It is a majestic and impressive and awe-inspiring urban landscape.

Still, Chicago is like those cities I used to make with Sim City 2: it looks neat and tidy and gritty in well-proportioned parts. However, or maybe, this is why, it feels very artificial. It has character, what with the lake and the elevated railway and the parks and its landmarks. But this character also feels artificial. Maybe I spent too much time downtown — but no such issues ever arose in, hm, Manhattan.

Speaking of which: Where are Chicagoans? Well, they drive around and they ride the trains. But they don’t walk a lot, do they? Unless they are destitute. Or out-of-towners.

I liked Chicago, I admired Chicago, I enjoyed Chicago. However, I felt no real buzz. Nothing like the invigorating pretense and pretentiousness that, according to St, fuels New Yorkers.

All in all, great buildings and urban vistas don’t make a city — people do. Otherwise, Dubai and Shanghai and other nowhere places would make great cities.

At the end of the day, despite its breathtaking backdrops, count the films taking place in Chicago. I can think of two: the Blues Brothers and — hm — The Matrix. The latter is not really Chicago, either. And it was filmed in Sydney. So, there.

The land of endless summers

After the abundance of rain last September, we dared believe that autumn would be coming on time this year. We were, of course, bitterly deceived: for the eighth year in a row I have to trudge through a hot (highs of 29 to 32 degrees), dusty and humid October, with relief coming only in the evening. It is so tiresome, so disheartening, so grinding, this thing, this cruel summer from early May to late October, year after year after year.

Wings of Desire

Tonight I saw again a film that was in my top five during my youth, Wings of Desire. I hadn’t however seen it for years, out of fear that time and experience would discredit it in my not-so-young-anymore eyes.

Partly wanting to see Berlin as it was before, more than 20 years ago (already!), I played the DVD tonight.

It’s still one of the films that appeal to the sensitivities of my generation. Or it could be just me.

Tired?

Oh, well…

Seasons

Quite unexpectedly, this being my eighth autumn here, it has been rainy for the last week or so: a true foretaste of autumn. On our way to Aerosol to see eV in her new flat with the spectacular tropical view, what will all the palm trees and the beach, the weather was tropical too: balmy, then windy, then pouring down on us, then humid again, then with gusts of wind and dark clouds racing against the wind (!) — with silent flashes of faraway lightning never ceasing. The memory of the summer still lingers on, is still a topic to talk about — especially in the face of a tough season ahead.

eV’s film collection (in VHS and DVD format) is also impressive. I wish I had more appetite for watching films. But appetite is not in great quantities: tonight I skipped two potentially interesting gigs. However, Rite of Passage, a psychedelic rock band, were truly good last Friday. I also liked the crowds they attracted.

Degrees of separation

AW, a colleague, was taught at school by Haruki Murakami’s father.