Autobahn (eine fixe Idee) Die Autobahn ist die Metapher für das Leben nach dem 2. Weltkrieg. Die Autobahn ist der Ort, an dem wir uns jetzt befinden, der Ort, den wir hinter uns lassen, ein Nicht-Ort. Die schnellste Überlandverbindung von A nach B (in anderen Ländern ist dies die Zugstrecke). Durch die Autobahn wird alles zwischen A und B genichtet, zur Fassade degradiert. Wie die Landschaftselemente in einem Videogame. Die Wiesen, die Natur, die Städte am Rande der Autobahn sind völlig virtuell. Je schneller wir über die Autobahn fahren, desto mehr werden wir eins mit der Autobahn. Wenn man die Autobahn ernstnehmen will, muss man mit einem schnellen Auto über sie hinwegrasen. Und wenn man genau das versucht, dann stösst man auf Widerstand. Auf andere Autofahrer, die einem den Weg versperren, die z.B. plötzlich nach links ausscheren und einen zum Bremsen zwingen. Was würde Gott in so einer Situation tun? Ganz klar. Gott würde das nicht passieren. Er würde alle anderen Autofahrer ganz einfach fernlenken wie Spielzeugautos auf einer Wohnzimmer-Carrerarennbahn. Er ist allmächtig und würde nicht nur sein superschnelles Auto lenken sondern auch alle anderen Autos, die auf der Autobahn herumkurven. Er hätte freie Fahrt, da er die Autos aller Fahrer, die versuchen würden sich vor ihn zu setzen, sofort aus seiner Bahn weglenken würde. Er wäre immer der erste am Ziel. Andererseits wäre es Gott wahrscheinlich ziemlich egal, ob er fünf Minuten eher an seinem Ziel wäre als die anderen. Gott hat Geduld. Zeit spielt keine Rolle für ihn. Er steht über der Zeit. Gott würde nicht auf der Autobahn fahren. Er würde den Feldweg nehmen, zu Fuß. Den Weg, der das Ziel ist, nicht den Weg, der nur weg von hier ist.

Oh! Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it. We went to see Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde at the English Theater in Frankfurt (website not really up-to-date) last night. They had some financial problems recently which is not surprising considering that they solely live on sponsors and entrance fees and do not receive any public funding. Like Holzmann, the tumbling Frankfurt construction giant they somehow raised the funds but unlike Holzmann they used the money for something that pleased me a lot. A great performance of a great piece on a woman who succeeds in preventing her daughter from sharing the same unlucky fate as herself without telling her the truth.

The Best Meals of My Life (Joseph Duemer) "When I crack an egg I usually think of the French girl who lived downstairs in the boarding house where I endured the winter following my first marriage. She would never go to bed with me but showed me instead in her generosity how to slip my finger in a circle inside the two halves of a freshly broken egg shell to extract the last slick white to dribble it into the skillet. Her parents had lived through Nazi poverty & she lectured me—profligate & depraved—on thrift & virtue. Out of kindness she gave me instead of what I wanted meals of potatoes & eggs & that is the way, isn’t it, of virtue— to give not pleasure but what is necessary to sustain life: eggs & potatoes & salt over which it becomes possible to talk & even to think. Life of the body, life of the mind."

[Spud Songs, Helicon 9 Editions, 1999]

Joseph Duemer is also responsible for the excellent reflective weblog reading & writing and blogs about reading the Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein together with Christopher Robinson (via douze lunes). P.S. I feel a little guilty of posting a long poem which is not by myself but it could have been. Or to be less presumptuous it spoke of things I can relate to. About the preciousness of small things. I do the same with the white of the egg but I don't exactly remember from whom I learnt this. Probably from my parents I guess.

Literatur-Archiv Gutenberg-DE ab sofort bei Spiegel Online Der Spiegel hat die Gebete der Weblogger und anderer surffreudiger Literaturfreunde erhört. Ab sofort findet man Gutenberg-DE im Kulturressort des Onlineangebots des renommierten deutschen Nachrichtenmagazins. 250.000 Seiten große deutsche Literatur vor dem Verlöschen im digitalen Nirvana gerettet. Bravo Herr Augstein, so sie denn für diese literarische publizistische Glanztat verantwortlich zeichnen. Die neue Internetseite ist momentan vom Farbeinsatz noch nicht so ganz das ästhetisch Optimale, aber das wird sich bestimmt noch ändern.

There is no genius without a mixture of madness (Seneca) Or more precise: genius and madness are brothers and sisters. Simon Singh writes a very interesting short essay on John Nash's achievements in game theory in the New Statesman. Apparently the rules for the auctions for the telephone frequencies which raised about 50 billion euro in Germany alone can be derived from Nash's equations. The article ends with a scene from the opening page of Sylvia Nasar's biography A Beautiful Mind which served as the basis for the Oscar awarded movie: a friend visits Nash in the hospital and asks him how he could believe that aliens were recruiting him to save the world and Nash replies: "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously" (via arts & letters daily). P.S. The comments are back but I am still seriously thinking of moving. I have reserved the Antville name ignorant already. For the time being that address is just used as a clipboard for thoughts and links.

Silence #1 "Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness" (André Maurois). The comments are gone. Don't ask me why. I think I am going to move soon.

Vocabulary I like the word "snoozefest" though I can't find it in my dictionaries. Does it really exist? Google finds only 1,180 occurences which makes this word a little dubious. Or is it new? I am heading for a snoozefest in the positive sense right now.

There is a direction, even if the map's lost (Spin ARG on Giant Sand) In my case it is more like: I have got the key but I can't find the lock. I have been asking myself for a while if I am addicted to the internet. I spend most time online reading weblogs and discussing on music at ILM. According to this interesting article (via troubled diva) a good question to ask is: "First of all, can somebody not accurately predict how much time they're going to spend online, prior to getting online?". Often I set myself a limit of half an hour or one hour and then I break it. So I know of the problem and try counter-measures which don't always work. I feel that my online behaviour is still ok if I look at the ILM statistics page (attention loads very slowly) with my 600 or so posts in about 8 months compared to other people who posted almost 4,000 times in less than 2 years. That is still not a lot compared to a German student in Munich who submitted more than 10,000 posts to a forum in about the same time. I still have a real life. But sometimes when I ask a new question at ILM I can watch myself hitting the reload button twenty or thirty times in a row to see if there are new answers. What a stupid waste of time. I am so bloody impatient. And to be honest these discussions are often not on a very high level and don't always answer the questions. A little bit of a waste of time. So I know that something is going wrong (have the key) but I don't know how to get out of it (find the lock).

I listened to three tracks from the forthcoming Breeders album Title TK on the 4AD site. The single Off You which came out today is amazingly calm. Kim Deal almost covers Nick Drake terrain here. A beautiful slow gloomy guitar ballad. Son of Three rocks harder and sounds more like the 1993 Breeders but without having the punch, the hooks and the freshness. Forced to Drive starts slow and does not really gain momentum. A little bit of a bore. Altogether the 2002 Breeders sound very weary and Kim Deal sings as if she were on sleeping pills. The album will be released May 20th.

Three unreleased Lambchop tracks Another good review of Lambchop's latest by Tangents