watching whales watching us

Yesterday evening and this morning I read this wonderful article in the NY Times magazine, “Watching Whales Watching Us“, about the return of almost-extinct gray whales to lagoons of Baja. They are called “Friendlies” by the locals and the biologists who study them, because they appear to be trying to gently communicate with the same [...]

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taking time (or using it well like momo)

In the children’s book “Momo” by Michael Ende, (same author of “The Neverending Story“), which I am reading in German at the moment, the young girl Momo follows a turtle to a street called “Nowhere Lane” with glass houses and seashell streets. It is a place outside of conventional time. To reach the door of [...]

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afternoons

or The Glamorous Germanic Life of An American Girl In Berlin — Part II My weekday afternoons in Berlin are generally divided into two parts. The first consists of gutting my brain’s previous syntactical superhighways and constructing new synapses suitable to German word order. The second consists of practicing “on the street” whether the synapses [...]

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authenticity over artifice

Wallace Stegner is one of the most natural voices of western literature (in my opinion). He influenced the United States to set aside vast tracks of land for preservation and protection. You can read his famous Wilderness Letter here. A few excerpts (for those who won’t read the whole thing–lazy!): “Something will have gone out [...]

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f#*&ing offend me, if you please

Last week I read an article from Seattle in the NY Times about the indie-hip rock star conservative pastor of Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll, long a thorn in the side of liberal Christians. The article was entitled “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” and talked about Driscoll’s unorthodox methods of condemning sin through shocking sermon [...]

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i wander as i wonder

In case you’re wondering, I’m still meandering around, having some interesting conversations, sometimes laying around in saunas, still wrapping my brain’s little wrinkles around the problem of the subjunctive mood in German, and in general living as though in one of those dreams that drifts merrily merrily merrily merrily downstream. One of my favorite parts [...]

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paddle rights

During a slow breast-stroke behind ten other people in a row at the Stadtbad Mitte swimming pool this evening, I thought about social order, the need for community structures to keep us all from swimming amoc. Today is Human Rights Day. If you’ve never read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, you can WATCH it [...]

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dirty shakespeare

(from October 16) I knew when I saw the mud pit that it was going to be bad. Last night I went with J and two of his friends  to see “Was Ihr Wollt” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The night before, I spent two hours reading through “As You Like It,” so that, [...]

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retreat into the written life

In a cafe called Strandbad Mitte today, only two minutes by bike from our apartment, I considered how it is no longer strange to hear German being spoken all around me. Then, as if the fates were testing me, three Americans came in and sat down at the table next to me. I was reading [...]

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