View high resolution

Charlie survived (possibly thrived?*) during my watch. My work here is done. Bird sitter out. 

*Apparently he is found of classic Madonna tracks. Who knew?

Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding. —“Berlin and the Artist.”

I’m not even quite halfway through Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and it is all I can do to stop myself from blogging nearly ever single sentence. First, “noble sluggardizing”! Then, throughout the “prose pieces,” as they are designated, there are phrases like “that blue-eyed marvel, the early morning” and “magnificent restlessness” and “where poesy can be felt, poetic flights are superfluous.”

The book is one of my favorite types, the musings of a flâneur and metropolitan chronicler who observes the whirling city from its bars stools and park benches, its opera boxes and streetcars. It is the kind of book that affords the reader the eerie delight of life explicated just as it is. It is poetic and deeply felt even in its flippancy. 

Even though Walser was writing about Berlin in the early 1900s, it is hard not to draw parallels to New York, for a certain type of person who has moved to the city to live a certain type of life, no matter the decade or century in which they arrive. That is, for me, both a help and a hindrance as I am trying, after a five month absence, to fall in love with this city again. 

But! This post is mostly in service of encouraging you to pick up the slim volume, if you are certain type of person who is drawn to a certain metropolitan life; if you ponder, like Walser, “what plays will be put on this winter,” if you enjoy long, contemplative walks smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and if you find the thrum of urban life to be a source of endless fascination. 

When picking up the keys yesterday I was informed that the bird I’m meant to be sitting may in fact be dying. So. It has now become a bird hospice situation, possibly. Further updates as warranted. 

ourmaningraz: Hauptplatz

A thoroughly incomplete list of things I will and will not miss:

I will miss the euro but not euro coins. I will miss legally drinking on the street but not the teenagers drinking on the buses. I will miss the nachtwurststandl and the kebap place that’s open on Sunday when everything else is shuttered. I will miss learning German but not being asked if I’ve conned the grammatical complexities of the language in only five months. I will miss sitting and smoking in cafes undisturbed for hours. I will not miss the 24 hour clock. I will miss tipping by merely rounding up to the next whole number. I will not miss people treating their public displays of affection like an extreme sport. I will miss living in the 8020, aka the wrong side of the river. I will not miss people’s inability to queue at the post office, the movies, or the bank, really anywhere one should know how to stand in line. Nor will not miss people’s refusal to utilize all available space on buses and trams. I will miss paying five euros for a prescription. I will miss kürbiskernöl. I will miss my bike, die Frau. I will miss the Hobbit bar and cheap beer. I will not miss terribly made cocktails. What I will miss most I’m sure will be what I’ve thought least of while I was here.