Rondeau

This post is dedicated to the songbird of unknown identity who sang gloriously all day long in my backyard yesterday.

Le temps a laissé son manteau

De vent, de froidure et de pluie

Et s'est vêtu de broderie,

De soleil luisant, clair et beau.

Il n'y a bête ni oiseau

Qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie:

"Le temps a laissé son manteau

De vent, de froidure et de pluie."

Rivière, fontaine et ruisseau

Portent, en livrée jolie,

Gouttes d'argent, d'orfèvrerie,

Chacun s'habille de nouveau:

Le temps a laissé son manteau.

              --- Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465)


Nature has taken off her coat of wind, of rain and of cold, and is now clothed in embroidery, in bright and beautiful sunlight.
There is no beast or bird which in his own tongue isn't singing or shouting: nature has taken off her coat.
River, fountain and creek are dressed in beautiful clothes, wearing drops of silver from the smith.
Everyone dresses in new clothes: nature has taken off her coat.


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The Hoehne Intensive

Once when I was teaching in Hamburg in the early 80's I got sent to a town called Hoehne in Lower Saxony to lead an English language intensive for some corporate folk. For purposes of the immersion course we were all incarcerated together a couple weeks in a company retreat center out in the woods somewhere. The winter weather was awful and the deserted grounds were enveloped in ground fog the whole time we were there, a great opportunity for some atmosphere pictures.

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Slavoj Žižek

A terrific pleasure to see and hear Slavoj Žižek at City Arts & Lectures the other night. He covered his usual themes with customary élan, saying what he has talked about in more than 2K videos currently available on YouTube. The audience consisted mainly I think of philosophy and cultural studies majors from local universities, and it is interesting to see how he entrances a younger generation of intellectuals, if for no other reason perhaps that he puts forward a new image for the modern philosopher—a scruffy-looking, grubbily-clad contemporary Diogenes with a Slovenian accent and a disorderly manner and a taste for off-color jokes. No wonder he received the Guardian's award in 2011 for "Coolest philosopher of the year." Academic teachers of philosophy look like bureaucratic twats in comparison.

In addition he really delivers the goods, at least if you're interested in Lacan, Hegel and Marx, who have always been my own favorite theorists. Žižek, who can write books faster than I can read them, just released a thousand-page volume on Hegel and Diamat (dialectical materialism) entitled "Less than Nothing." Bang goes my summer reading list.

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Lüneburg — Part Two

Lüneburg has three red-brick Gothic churches, my favorite being St. Nikolai, an extremely unconventional design, being long and narrow beneath a very high roof (28.5 m) with graceful rayonnant decorated vaulting. It is also the youngest (!) of the three main churches in Lüneburg, dating from the 1420's. St. Nikolai doesn't look like much from the outside, but its interior dimensions are extraordinary.

I can't find a slide taken from the outside of the Nikolaikirche, so I lifted this one off Wiki Commons. It's clear how the placement of the buttresses enable the unusual height of the building.

But the best recreation in Lüneburg was to wander through the thoroughly medieval streets, empty of traffic on Sunday afternoons.

The local Communist Party headquarters.

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Lüneburg — Part One

One issue that confounds Americans living in Europe is that there is often little to do on Sundays, local traditions dictating that mornings are reserved for church and afternoons to visit to relatives or friends. Coming from California where the sabbath is utilized for shopping and the stores are always open, considerable mental readjustment was required. I responded by vacating Hamburg on Sundays and going off on train trips.

Lüneburg, an ancient Hansa city about an hour's ride south, was a perfect weekend day-trip. By some oversight it had escaped Allied bombing in the War, a reminder of how much of Germany's national heritage has been lost. The town reached its economic apogee in the late Middle Ages when it manufactured and exported salt all across Europe. When the money eventually ran out, the city remained frozen in time as it was in the late 15th century, built mostly of red brick, since building stone is rare in the north of Germany.

Am Sande.

St. Johanniskirche, begun in 13th century.

Ich bin die schönste Katze in Lüneburg.

In the St. Johanniskirche.

Its splendid Baroque organ.

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Street art in Berlin

Photo: Dieter Grzondziel

Is it local patriotism on my part that leads me to think that street art originated in San Francisco in the Seventies? Long gone from here, but flourishing evidently in the streets of Berlin, shown from this fabulous sequence of 252 photos from the online Media Center at Der Tagesspiegel. (You have to click on the picture of the kid wearing a blue hoodie and holding a pole.)

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Hamburg's Flea Markets

Every Saturday there was a Flohmarkt across the street from our apartment building. Most of the stuff consisted of old clothes and cheap crap made of plastic, rubber and stainless steel, valued mainly by societal bottom-feeders.

Occasionally however you could find some interesting collectibles from Germany's past.

Including the inevitable garden gnomes, which function somewhat alarmingly as indecipherable fetish objects in the German horticultural imaginary. Who knows what malevolence lurks beneath their benign appearance? The one on the right may be masturbating.

Perhaps they arrived at the flea market in this gleefully illustrated Fiat.

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Hamburg's monuments

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In Hamburg during the 1980's there were various remnants from the Third Reich still around, including this masterpiece of brutalist architecture across the street from our apartment.

A marching column of Nazi soldiers, spattered with red paint and graffiti, look like they're about to trample over a kid sitting at the left. The inscription says that "Germany must live, even if we must die."

Reichsadler on a watertower with its swastika brushed off.

Funerary monument in the Ohlsdorf cemetery by Christian Marcks, dedicated to the victims of the civilian bombings who are conveyed to the netherworld by the ferryman Charon.

Apparently not all the monuments in Hamburg have been greeted with the same degree of seriousness as their creators intended.

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Hamburg

In 1981-1983 I lived in Hamburg and worked at the Hamburg Fremdsprachen-Schule, one of the more prestigious private language schools in Germany, teaching economics translation and oral interpreting.

John Chapman and I lived together on the edge of the Karolinen-Viertel, an older and somewhat rundown district in the city, and therefore all the more attractive.

From our kitchen window we could look up to the tv tower,

from the top of which spectacular aerial views of the city were achieved.

 

Otto von Bismarck admonished me to duty on the way to work each day,

while taking the U-Bahn back and forth provided ample opportunity to survey the shipping in the harbor.

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