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Tumblr collaborations

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:57:00 +0100

It’s been a while since I have posted anything on this blog. I will get round it, particularly this week when I have a couple of deadlines looming and I’m being lulled by the sweet siren calls of procrastination. In the meantime I’ve been moonlighting for …Wins The Internet, a site cowritten with two far wittier friends. If anything you should check out their posts.

winstheinternet: As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:35:08 +0100

winstheinternet:

As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the strongest reason to have kids I’ve ever seen”. In noway is the not fantastically amazing.

Frankly, The Internet, you can close for the day, sit on the sofa and read the papers. This Wins The Interent.

“Inspired” by Apple: Some limericks about SOPA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:58:43 +0100

“Inspired” by Apple: Some limericks about SOPA:

inspiredbyapple:

There once was an bill called SOPA;
which resulted in blackouts all over.
Wikipedia went down*,
making school kids frown
in the US, Oz and Europa.

The bill’s meant to target “rogue sites”
but it’s drafted so widely it might
catch others which play
by the rules so they may
be closed in the dead of…

Hashtag Dystopia

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:46:00 +0100

Few things can make me as misanthropic as the recurrent popularity of doomsday druids. These days, it seems, slapping “dystopia” on anything automatically furnishes every old rant with deep social commentary and perennial fears towards ongoing technological progress masquerades as shocking incisive reflections. And the more apocalyptic their visions, the shallower they become. I call it “nihilistic porn”. No character development, no plot, just the money shot.

Which brings me to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a veritable hashtag stew of tweetable nihilism, wherein the viewer is spoon-fed Brooker’s trademark hyperbolic grumbling like an unsuspecting French goose. There’s no food for thought, only despairing dyspepsia, because everything is broken in Black Mirror. Every episode is a bleak yet hollow void with an almost complete lack of sympathetic characters taking part in this pantomime dystopia. It is the Daily Mail’s much ridiculed Broken Society but repackaged for Guardian readers by covering it with a shiny new coat of New Media buzzwords. In the first episode, in which the Prime Minister is forced to copulate with a sow live on TV to save the nation’s royal sweetheart, characters are unable to articulate any thought without wedging Youtube, Twitter or Facebook into every remark. Brooker’s version of Newspeak has replaced full stops and commas with hashtags as punctuation marks. What is initially amusing soon reaches saturation point, illustrated by an armed soldier who mistakenly aims at a journalist believing her to be the princess’s abductor. Instead of apologizing or ensuring she is not wounded, he shoots at her mobile and quips “There’s your RTS award!”. At this point I was expecting a ham-fisted Abu Ghraib reference to round it off.

The second episode set its sights on reality TV, so all us viewers who have Ocado on speed dial can sit and quaff about the plebe who watches The X Factor sans the required ironic hat. Then we can all make disparaging and completely original remarks about wheat products and circuses. The story is set in a nightmarish panopticon where the 99% are forced to pedal bikes all day - the reason is never given - and sedated through forced exposure to pornography. That’s right, by now we have come to understand that ‘subtle’ is not part of Hashtag Dystopia’s vocabulary.

The third and final part of the arc has been concocted by Jesse Armstrong, best known for the Peep Show and for being one of the writers for the brilliant political satire The Thick of It. It reworks the Perfect Recall trope familiar to science fiction and comic readers, and famously addressed in the Jorge Luis Borges short story Funes the Memorious (1942). In the Black Mirror version, a new technology allows people to carry a chip that records everything and can be played back on demand, with the possibility of sharing it on those -you guessed it! - omniscient menacing screens that rule our lives. Nobody else seems to have a particular good memory because the story very quickly descends into the classic alarmist ‘New Technology Ruins People’s Lives. And This Time We Mean It!’ Yes, there is the atomic bomb and countless other horrific examples. But take the internet - What would people have imagined 10 years ago if they knew we would all have portable devices that let us access and broadcast repository of information. I’m sure no forecast would have included lolcats. I will leave the Arab Spring to more respectable bloggers.

For somebody so seemingly intimate with new technology and who still - rightly so - extolls the creative possibilities of video games, Charlie Brooker sure takes an unnecessarily paranoid attitude towards progress more characteristic of somebody eligible for a Freedom Pass. Particularly when he occupies a privileged position from where he should be showing a more nuanced picture. This tirade is borne out of a sense of disappointment from somebody who loved TVGoHome and Screenwipe, but the misanthropic coat Brooke is fond of wearing has barely been changed and it is starting to exude a faint whiff of the reactionary.

Post-Rant

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:06:00 +0100

This uninformed rant was inspired by a recent visit to ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ at the V&A Museum. What follows is an attempt to articulate my misgivings about Postmodernism, understood by few and used by many, with a brief description of its predecessor Modernism, in the hope that a comparison between the two might sharpen the edges of blurry Postmodernism.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how much I dislike the term Postmodernism. What exactly does it stand for? The manipulative nature of its essentially empty rhetoric irks me, as when the Daily Mail resorts to ‘common sense’ or some luminaire in the Literary Review ponderously declaims that we inhabit a post-ideological world, then relentlessly pushes their own agenda, wrapped in an oratorical blanket of increasingly fatigued and meaningless prefixes. Postmodernism is the most recent movement and so exerts a great influence on our world-view, and yet there have been previous movements, and there will be something post-postmodernism, whatever we decide to name it. If I knew this future buzzword, I would probably not be a rich woman, but I would certainly get misquoted a lot, and you know that the more you are misquoted the more people you have reached. And the fewer have read you.

But I am ignorant as to what the future holds. Frankly, I am not even sure about the state of the present. That there is a retrospective on Postmodernism at the V&A would indicate that it is firmly in the past, further confirmed by the subheading ‘Style and Subversion: 1970-1990’. And yet the term ‘postmodern’ still gets its fair share of airplay in 2011. What I have noticed is that its temporal proximity - whether it has happened or is still unfolding - has led many to lose perspective. There is nothing revolutionary about Postmodernism, no more than there was about the Enlightenment or Romanticism. What makes it special is precisely the same immediacy that has rendered us so short-sighted; We are living it. Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things, yet everything is different, as it always is and always will be.

Thus we are uncertain if we inhabit Postmodern times, or what this entails, apart from this penchant for sticking arbitrary prefixes on words to increase their emotional resonance and impact. ‘Neo’ has become the preferred, catch-all, semantically slurred yet emotionally charged prefix for right-wing resurgences - neoliberalism, neocon, neonazism, neoprene. ‘Post’, on the other hand, is the default indicator for the discourse deconstruction and ‘decentredness’ that ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ celebrate. Whatever that means. We are constantly reminded that there is no ‘truth’ to be found, that everything is subjective and the idea of an objective independent reality is a mere mirage. The era of grand all-encompassing narratives like Christianity or Marxism is over. Yet people keep telling each other stories, only this time with more prefixes. These days, one has to muse about ‘subversion’ and ‘dystopia’, suspiciously close sometimes to the old ‘progress’ and ‘utopia’ but masquerading under less politically charged names, and without the whiff of fascism that ‘progress’ now gives off.

So what is ‘Postmodernism’? It peppers our academic speech and generously seasons our (my) half-baked remarks about art, music, and society. Even ‘conditions’. What exactly is the postmodern condition? Postmodernism was always one of those words that was semantically unstable, because it defined itself against the equally porous ‘modern’. The latter is normally applied to the first half of the 20th century - the era of Modernism. It is the term given to different artistic movements that rejected objectivity in favour of subjectivity — no longer was it about what we saw, but how we saw it. This was partly spurred — as are all new cultural expressions — by new technological developments. With (for instance) the increased popularity and availability of the camera, painters no longer needed to strive to perfectly reproduce reality. Instead they started to ponder the exact nature of this reality. They revisited that age old ontological conundrum that had taken Plato to his imaginary caves — what, if anything, is the essence of something? Picasso famously painted a violin from all angles simultaneously, which created a distorted image, but one still recognisable as a violin. In literature, the omniscient narrator and linear narrative were abandoned in favour of stream-of-consciousness and fragmented narrative, traditionally interpreted a reactions to the the totalitarian discourses and blind belief in progress that had led to both world wars.

Unsurprisingly, many people became wary of panoptic narratives with such an unwavering faith in their authority, and which caused so much pain and destruction in Europe. Modernism, then, is about the rejection of this authority. Modernists do not share the teleological views of history popularly associated with their predecessors, the Victorians. The two world wars put a dent in the the idea that humanity is progressing, that it has a final destiny towards which it has been advancing (‘telos’ being ‘end’ or ‘purpose’). Postmodernism is not particularly fond of grandiose statements either and, like Modernism, it is also characterised by fragmentation. The difference lies in how they approach this SHATTERED EXISTENTIAL MIRROR. Modernism traditionally laments the loss of this age of innocence in esoteric elegies about waste lands whilst Postmodernism famously celebrates this fragmentation through ironic pastiches and meta-patchworks of intertextuality set to groovy soundtracks. Basically, Postmodernists like Tarantino films and Tumblr, with its assorted quotations, random fonts, existential Instagrams and amusing gifs. What this definition tells us is that Postmodernism has really good PR. Any undergraduate who has trudged through the compulsory Critical Theory module will tell you that Baudrillard & co are not precisely happy chappies when they postulate the loss of objectivity, fixed meaning, and even reality in magnificently obscure sentences that sometimes undermine the most basic premises of grammar. They fill their intentionally playful and ambiguous prose with an irresistible intertextual insouciance. Apparently. (???)

Modernism, on the other hand, lacks such professional PR, partly because everybody involved is kicking up the daisies in Elliot’s wasteland, and can no longer defend themselves. Also, partly because everybody of my generation had to read Mrs Dalloway at school, a book that contains a disappointingly low number of ninjas and a complete lack of 70s blaxploitation musical references. The classic stereotype of the Modernist woman is of course Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide, and is hailed as part of the literary canon. But Modernists, particularly female, were not all as despondent as this portrayal. Many women were rather excited about the emancipatory possibilities that industrialisation brought. And as devastating as the two armed conflicts were, the absence of men meant that women had to replace them in factories, hospital wards, offices, even in the streets as bus drivers, as well as other public spaces normally reserved to men (they were sent packing back to their domestic spheres after the war, but the seed had been planted).

So things are not as simple as they seem. I want to finish this post with the classic ‘it’s complicated’, which is a rather fittingly postmodern end to this unfocused rant. I will, of course, describe my argument as ‘fluid’. Postmodernism - whatever it is - has claimed a monopoly on ambiguity. And yes, the irony is not lost on me. Ambiguity, together with subversion, seems to be one of its most frequent escorts whenever Postmodernism puts its ironic hat on and goes for a spin round the cultural landscape. Perhaps that is the reason why I have developed a dislike for Postmodernism — because it is so omniscient and at same time nobody can explain exactly what it is. A bit like gravity really. When it comes to gravity, few people gripe about the impossibility of escaping the laws of physics. But can we escape the Postmodern condition? Are we all Postmodern now? This was the question posed at the recent V&A retrospective, as we left the exhibition to the sound of New Order. What a fatuous thing to ask. Is this meant to be food for thought, something to ponder on the way back home? Of course we are all Postmodern now. And post-Renaissance, and post-Enlightenment, and post-Industrial Revolution, and post-Victorian and post-Capitalist and first-past-the-post and any other post you care to think about. It is all part of our cultural DNA.

Postmodernism has just made us hyperaware of the hybrid nature of our culture, that we are all assembled from the different discourses and ideologies that we have inherited and picked up along our trajectory. Just as it is difficult in this post-Freudian era to analyse our actions without resorting to the language of psychoanalysis, Postmodernism has simply given us a new vocabulary with which to articulate our experiences and preoccupations. Some are specific to our time and the moral dilemmas and problematic developments that advancement brings, such as cloning, or the internet. Other are age-old longings revisited, like the yearn for authenticity and distinction, now threatened by new technologies that can easily and cheaply reproduce anything, from an image to an expensive leather bag. All movements and cultural expressions have attempted to conceptualise and give voice to cultural neurosis and anxieties (in a post-Freudian era _everything_ is an anxiety). This is not new to Postmodernism. I’m still not sure if Postmodernism isn’t just Modernism in drag.

It’s complicated.

It's Grim Up North

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:27:00 +0200

I finally got round to watching The Killing (or Fobrydelsen, to use the original title), which most English viewers will by now know actually translates to “the crime”. And for somebody so fond of Scandinavian crime as me, it was positively - cliché alert - criminal that I had yet to be acquainted with Sarah Lund’s splendid collection of knitwear. When it was originally screened back in Denmark I was living in London, blissfully ignorant of the jumper fever that had gripped the nation. It certainly didn’t grip my family. When the BBC decided to finally broadcast it, I was based in Berlin. True, the Germans acquired the rights too and then dubbed it. But I didn’t want to see Das Verbrechen, I wanted to see Forbrydelsen. It was already quite amusing watching the subtitled version with my English boyfriend and noticing that many of the colourful expressions with which Copenhageners regularly pepper their speech had not made it into English. “Tager du pis?” became the prim “are you being serious?”. Even taking into account differing cultural expectations, it was always my impression that a great number of Brits swear like perpetually pissed sailors. Which is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here.

Anyway, my Berlin bubble kept being burst by news of this paradigm shifting Danish export that held BBC4 viewers - my people - enthralled every week. The Guardian was crushing so hard on Sarah Lund’s Faroese wool - henceforth referred as THE JUMPER - that it even made the smooth grey Mad Men suits turn green with jealousy. The Killing was even threatening to usurp The Wire’s crown and to steal its status as THE MOST NUANCED PORTRAYAL OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY EVER. People would ask me if it was always this dark in Denmark (it’s called winter) and how you pronounced “Theis Birk Larsen” or “Vagn Skærbæk” without dislocating your vocal chords (you can’t). And did Danes really wear THE JUMPER? It soon became clear that I was contractually obliged to see it, lest I risk expulsion from the Guardian guild, particularly before the broadcast of the second series this autumn when I would be back on the island. So I dutifully bought the entire series on iTunes and prepared to go on a Scandinavian noir bender, because if it was anything like The Wire the default mode is always “boxed set binge”.

I liked it. I really did. It was a bittersweet treat to have so much screen time dedicated to the family of the murdered girl. It was a reminder that every crime has its victim, a rather obvious point but rarely one developed in the standard formula followed by crime fiction, where the focus is on the investigator. And the acting was solidly lead by the very talented Sophie Grabøl and the eminently watchable and charismatic Lars Mikkelsen (he and his brother Mads Mikkelsen take up far too much prime estate in my head. The scene where Lars takes off his shirt - to show his vulnerability of course - made my ovaries stand up and give a loud standing ovation). Perennially rainy Copenhagen was bathed in lush non-light that made perpetual winter look positively attractive. Hell, it even made me homesick, a feeling I normally only experience in summer.

Now I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, as if anybody at this point would notice, but groundbreaking it wasn’t. Maybe BBC 4 viewers haven’t read and watched as much crime fiction as I (probably a good thing), but to me it was blindingly obvious who it was from around episode 3. The meta-narrative was just too predictable. It was meant to be dark and gritty, which normally translates into the expected shattering of domestic bliss and the crumble of institutions that are dear to us, like democracy. And it was it was 20 episodes long, so you could watch the first three episodes and the last two and not miss too much background, apart from more red herrings than a Christmas Day smorgasbord. You _know_ that the suspect in episode 4 was not going to be the killer. But then maybe he was, because I had repeatedly been told that The Killing challenged more conventions than an Iranian art house film at Sundance. In fact, since I’ve heard it had such a shocking ending, I spent considerable time building increasingly byzantine theories to dissuade myself from the textbook ending I had already sensed earlier in the series. I was desperately seeking subversion, I _wanted_ to see semiotic subversion everywhere, like a poststructuralist third-wave feminist analysing Almodóvar cinematography. This never came. As much as I enjoyed watching it, it would have been a less neurotic experience, and therefore slightly anticlimactic, if viewers had filled in my Scandinavian bingo card beforehand. I could thus have more accurately assessed its revolutionary credentials.

I would like people to complete it _before_ the start of season 2 due this autumn:

1) Does it assume GRITTY means REALISTIC?

2) Does everybody end up depressed and miserable? And by everybody I mean everybody. Scandinavians are very literal people. We’re not only talking about the victim/s family/partner/friends but also the police, and neighbours, and distant relatives and acquaintances. And their Facebook friends. The police’s Facebook friends. The Facebook friends of Facebook friends. That random guy in episode 2 who was asking for directions. His Facebook friends. In fact everybody involved should just join Google+ and add each other to the all-engulfing circle of misery.

3) Does there seem to be a shortage of lightbulbs / sunlight in general?

4) If the investigator is male, is he an alcoholic? Does he have - at least one - a failed marriage? If she is female, does she get branded mentally unstable at some point? Does her long-suffering partner leave her at some point? (I presume that Sarah Lund is also familiar with this convention and has already prepared for this inevitability by dating a psychologist.)

5) Does anybody have time to finish eating their already harried kebab, pizza or burger grabbed from the local take away run by the token friendly “totally integrated” immigrant to remind the viewer that Scandinavian capitals are like SO MULTIETHNIC (read “gritty”, see point 1)

6) Corruption: is something rotten in the state of Denmark (read: EVERYTHING, see point 2)

7) Is the happy Scandinavian welfare model just a mirage? Are you being shown the dark underbelly of this seemingly perfect society where everybody is actually miserable, or will be soon (see point 2) and from which not even their stylish knitwear or flair for interior decoration can protect them?

8) Do bad things happen in woods? Do people go into woods despite knowing that bad things happen in woods? Are they familiar with Hansel and Gretel?

9) The weather heightens the misery:

Choose between these options:

a) It’s raining, ideally a constant drizzle that makes everybody soggy and miserable. A corpse appears. Everybody’s day, especially the corpse’s, just got more soggy and miserable.

b) It has been heavily snowing, and a frozen corpse of woman appears the day after. It’s always a woman and she is always described as a macabre ice figure or a morbidly beautiful snow queen. I think there’s some metaphor or deep cultural commentary here. So far I’ve only managed “don’t be a woman when it snows in Scandinavia”.

c) There’s a heat wave, i.e. More than 20 degrees celsius and a less than fragrant corpse appears in the woods (see point 8). The investigator/s spend the entire book sweating like an overripe stilton. Apparently nobody has heard of air conditioning in Scandinavia. This mystery is never resolved.

10) It stars one of the Mikkelsen brothers, preferably shirtless. If it contains both, just drop everything and alert me immediately.This point might not be necessarily related with any of the ones above. Or the article at all.

I will add more points as they occur to me but that should do for the moment.

Beards, Brows and Procrastination

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:07:27 +0200

Today was one of those muggy languid days that compels you to dramatically lower your standards to reap a sense of achievement, any achievement, at the end of it. Or dispose of standards altogether. In this way such mundane pedestrian activities such as cheese eating, wall staring or even hand-eye coordination will seem like a veritable tour de force.

Speaking of which, I was browsing GQ today.

Reason 540 why I hate GQ: Spinning some vacuous bile about the fear of appearing middlebrow as if you were the freaking Bourdieu of coolness, while failing to mention that the high/low culture divide is a deeply ingrained arbitrary divide borne out of the Industrial Revolution, developed specifically to preserve a condition conceived of as “high” from dilution and corruption by new forces seen as “lower” - for instance mass-production and increased purchasing power. See how easy it is? I don’t even know what I wrote there - I just turned on my cultural theory babble mode. Obviously this writer’s switch has been stuck since 1960. Which would explain GQ’s attitude towards women.

(Yes I did just lambast GQ’s lack of incisive cultural critique. I must obviously be insanely highbrow. In fact my brows are so divorced from my eyes that a look of permanent incredulity frames my face. Like finding out that Zach Galifianakis’ beard is apparently lowbrow. And that I should care.)

My Imaginary Berlin

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:34:00 +0200

Berlin is now part of my imaginary landscape, joining Copenhagen, but not London, which once more becomes my home. And as much as I like Berlin, I must admit, that I occasionally prefer its imaginary, more malleable counterpart. An imaginary city is a thing of beauty, built on fragmented, diffused, sunny memories filtered through the prism of nostalgia. Like an old faded overexposed photograph. Yes, all my memories of Berlin are in Instagram, a visual condition that seems to affect an alarming number of Berlin residents, perhaps caused by their beloved skinny jeans that lead to poor circulation and, presumably, impaired colour vision. My imaginary Berlin contains a significantly smaller number of these self-appointed urban bohemians. They have either been brushed out or made more tolerable by nostalgia, the photoshop of memory. Bills, bureaucracy and other blemishes that could tarnish these recollections have been omitted. This is a Berlin without long cryptic dispatches from the health insurance, without icy slippery pavements that conceal frozen dog excrement and discarded cigarette butts. In my Berlin, it is always summer. In my Berlin I am never bored, never afflicted by existential ennui. I never mope or procrastinate. Youtube doesn’t exist. There are no videos of dancing budgies balancing precariously atop tennis balls.

This is my Berlin, the idealised version of a metropolis I once called my home. A whimsical version perhaps, but no less quixotic than the Berlin celebrated in the countless blogs, articles, travel guides, and assorted Instagram eulogies that populate Tumblr. Like one of those polaroids sold at Mauerpark, forever static, frozen in time, before it was tainted by Capitalism and dismantled by gentrification. The Berlin of counterculture, the postmodern capital par excellence, the forever changing yet permanently static cosmopolitan hub, where everywhere permutation paradoxically needs to be previously approved by the committee of urban desolation fetishists. This explains, perhaps, most members’s fascination with photography, as if constantly portraying the city with a Leica keeps the city safe in a pre-digital age. The only difference between their Berlin and mine is that theirs is mostly imagined whereas mine is hundred percent imaginary.

Imaginary cities have many benefits. They are blissfully free from those pesky people that have stridently different opinions and life goals, and insist in living in your beloved metropolis, despite you making it adamantly and constantly clear in your livestream that these philistines are diluting the city’s essence and making it less genuine. Yes, multiculturalism is an essential part of the urban experience, but bad taste is not a culture, and should be derided and despaired through the medium of Helvetica Neue! In imaginary (and imagined) cities everybody thinks like you.

Imaginary cities are also very cheap destinations, a major benefit in the current economic climate, particularly since I have become once more a student. They are also easily accessible from anywhere. This morning, for example, I spent a couple of hours in a sunny Berlin park downing beer when I should have been engaged in archival work in rainy London. In fact, there are days where I seem to invest more time bumbling round my mythological atlas than at my current location, a universe that contains unanswered emails, unfilled paperwork and unhelpful bureaucrats. You are welcome to join. In fact, to all those people in Berlin that made my stay so memorable, please do so. Our shared memories is what makes this Berlin, my imaginary Berlin, so special. Did I mention it is always summer?

And another book quote...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:21:49 +0200

Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the newsagent’s for a travel pass or a pack of gum. There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-face museum guards from the days when I still went to museums and the scenester kids plowing through the flea markets in search of the holy vintage grail and the stern women from the bank and the post office with their eighties hairdos and the ice-cream place on Stargarder Straße, where there was always a line, even in winter, and that German punctuality, which made you miss your bus by seven seconds but also ensured you arrived at your appointments on time, and of course the voice of the S-Bahn announcer as he rolled off the stations and Alexanderplatz with its ever-changing face and the yellow streetcars, napping or in motion.

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

How to Speak and Write Postmodern

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:20:14 +0200

First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let’s imagine you want to say something like, “We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us.” This is honest but dull. Take the word “views.” Postmodernspeak would change that to “voices,” or better, “vocalities,” or even better, “multivocalities.” Add an adjective like “intertextual,” and you’re covered. “People outside” is also too plain. How about “postcolonial others”? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentrism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).

Finally “affect us” sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like “mediate our identities.” So, the final statement should say, “We should listen to the intertextual multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities.” Now you’re talking postmodern!

Stephen Katz, How to Speak and Write Postmodern

Desperately Seeking Berlin

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:06:00 +0200

Spring has finally arrived in Berlin and the city’s veritable army of urban bohemians and perpetually-broke Mac owners have colonised terraces and parks, all airing their totally unique and identically cropped leather jackets. Individualism never looked so uniform. These very public displays of mainstream disaffection occasionally make me wonder whether I am the only Mitte resident under 30 that wasn’t drawn to Berlin by the capital’s irresistible counterculture magnet. I was not sitting in London one day feverishly trying to tell Helvetica apart from Helvetica Neue when my zeitgeist antenna registered the sweet siren calls of bohemia from across the continent. I ended up in Berlin by accident. The start-up my boyfriend toiled for got acquired by Nokia. Nokia, in Berlin. So we had one week to decide whether we wanted to up sticks and cross the Channel. Neither of us had been to Berlin before. Both of us liked the idea, and in particular the property prices. A month later I was ploughing my way through the inch thick snow that had accumulated overnight on Goltzstrasse completely oblivious to the counterculture cornucopia unfolding further up east. The only culture of cool I was aware of during our first fortnight in the German capital was the one located at the bottom of my thermometer. Ignorant as I was of the city’s ungentifried hotspots I picked Schöneberg for our hastily found temporary base partly because I vaguely remembered Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin taking place in the neighbourhood. So I guess I was following the hype, only my hype was 60 years old. And although we no longer live there, the area between Nollendorfplatz and Hauptraße occupies a cherished place in my personal atlas. I have many happy memories of exploring the shops occupying the Goltzstrasse/Akazienstrasse stretch as the permanently bewildered Ausländerin I still am; of Saturday mornings at Winterfeldplatz market inflicting my phrase book German on the potato seller, of trying to locate the final resting place of the Brothers Grimm at the Matthäus Kirchhof. I even ventured down to the Schöneberg Rathaus, backdrop for J.F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It was a cold November night and I was standing in front of the illuminated building trying to feel the spirit of history but in the end I couldn’t feel my toes.

That was the time when I was still ingenue and my experience of the city was mainly shaped by Schöneberg, before I was alerted to the undiluted Berlin essence that was to be found in neighbouring multikulti Kreuzberg, in ungentrified Neukölln and in ostalgic Friedrichshain. Schöneberg it seemed, was less Berlin than other parts of Berlin. For all its eventful history and cultural heritage, the current dominant definition of Berlin, the one that has been rammed down my throat ever since, was surprisingly simple. I also think that it does the city a disfavour. Berlin is more than graffiti, techno, smokey bars and second-hand shops. It contains parts oblivious to Berlin’s status as the new New York. Whatever that means. Maybe they want higher rents after all. Berlin is not even allowed to be Berlin, and at the same time there seems to be a neurotic pursuit in tracking down the city’s essence. After all Berlin is a place in flux, an ever changing urban landscape, a metropolis condemned to forever become and never be. I wonder if Berlin has been engaged in this Sisyphean task of ‘never being’ for its entire 800 year history, before the advent of Lonely Planet travellers and urban fetishists. And for how long it remained static before it entered its current fluxy phase. As opposed to other European capitals, which are presumably entirely rigid and static. Which place worth visiting isn’t in flux? And what do they mean by flux? This is the postmodern dynamic urban fluidity that new Berliners will wax lyrical about to wide-eyed newcomers in a clandestine Neukölln bar. But is also the much maligned gentrification that new Berliners will fret about in a clandestine Neukölln bar while observing the incoming droves of wide-eyed newcomers. In these circles it is received wisdom that whilst urban flux was beneficial in the past, it must now stop. Just after their arrival. Any further newcomers dilute the essence of Berlin. A rather essentialist view for a city that celebrates its pluralism. Essence is what your travel guide promises. Lifestyle magazines might crown Berlin as the new art capital, and yet a large number of its inhabitants still think that Basquiat is what French people put baguettes in. Are these people not part of the real Berlin? The truth is that there is no essence, no existential anchor and in this way, at least, Berlin is fittingly postmodern. This search for the capital’s soul reveals more about the people seeking this holy grail than the city itself. It exposes them as newcomers and tourists. Nobody in their hometown frets so intensely about authenticity as when abroad. Then suddenly no restaurant is genuine enough unless it contains a toothless old matriarch busying herself over a stove with whom you communicate through the exclusive medium of hand gestures.

I do not want to extract you from your Lonely Planet universe (a very crowded place), but you won’t find such a lady in Berlin, metaphorically speaking or not. They have very good dentists in Germany. But you will find many people looking for her, so you can join the search party. You will even come across people that claim to have seen her before she disappeared, swallowed by the mainstream wave that’s threatening to make Berlin less authentic that it has been for the last 800 years. No wonder they can’t find the city’s essence. It is in the past.

The Romantics: Wagner, Techno and Additive-Free Tobacco

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 15:43:54 +0200

What do Wagner, techno and American Spirit tobacco have in common? Apart from the fact that they should all come with a health warning. Their continued popularity and appeal throughout the years flies in the face of logic, defies all explanation. It has been taunting my - admittedly scant - rational self for some time. Where is this famed Teutonic rationale? And why would it willingly subject itself to an 18-hour opera, which libretto reads like some turgid fan fiction concocted by a 17-year-old feverishly chaste Evangelical with a worrying Dungeons and Dragons habit? Why is techno, electro, minimal or whatever name this many headed yet monotone musical hydra now goes by, still so omnipresent in Berlin? Why is a 90s fad still styled as the the soundtrack of a brave new urban utopia? Every other country left the party a long time ago. They even left the after-party. And finally, why do health stores in Germany sell tobacco? Maybe they favour a holistic approach and offer all sorts of health states, including very poor ones. Maybe some people equate “additive-free” with “addictive-free”. Maybe the carbon monoxide produced by smoking tobacco, all tobacco, has finally affected their oxygen-deprived brains, and they are now under the illusion that nothing “natural” could possibly harm them. Arsenic is a natural ingredient. Maybe they pour arsenic into their daily latte of delusion. I add two heaped teaspoons of sarcasm.

But why should Germans be exempt from the whims and fancies of irrationality? Why do we insist on placing them into the technology-worshipping-automaton box, the one into which Germany has recently been shoving Japan? I think it is about time that we inducted Germans into the Hall of Irrationality where they can join every other nation on earth. I myself have been a proud member ever since I discovered that eating fair-trade chocolate increases my karma but not my waistline.

Not all German are engineers. In fact, the country is facing a shortage. Germany, a byword for engineering excellence throughout the world, had 70,000 unfilled engineering posts in 2008. To address this gap, the Chancellor has been in talks with other European countries, such as stereotypically passionate Spain, where engineers are plentiful. What the poet quota in Germany currently is, I cannot say, but once upon a time, when Berlin was capital of Prussia, the kingdom excelled in exalted bards and balladists. Few people would describe the Germans as romantics, but that’s precisely what they were famed as at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, where the Romantic movement with a capital “R” thrived in the country. A reaction to the Enlightenment and its systematic thinking, Romantics rebelled against this reverence for reason, which they saw as a straightjacket that stifled spontaneity and everything creative. German Romantic literature’s main ingredients include an exaltation of the individual, particularly of the Genius, an undefined longing or Sehnsucht for something sensed but not known, and that characteristic German Innerlichkeit or “sense of inwardness, or remoteness from reality, of intimate community between self and the mysterious forces of nature and God.”* Goethe, who was later to label Romanticism as positively unhealthy, spearheaded the Romantic revolt with his seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship about a young man that abandons his comfortable life to travel the world, returning changed. Goethe’s book kickstarted the concept of Bildung (education), where people travel not to educate themselves about the world or learn new skills, but to ultimately discover themselves. That’s right, Goethe is indirectly responsible for Eat, Pray, Love and plastered gap year students in full moon parties in Thailand. Which means that by the time he wrote Faust he already had experience in giving his soul to the devil.

Germans were the Romantics of Europe. The French were fascinated by their neighbours’ eccentricity and erratic behaviour, so different from the cold rationality that characterised Gallic literature at the time. To them it was refreshing and charming that Germans would abandon the strict symmetry of French landscaping, as epitomised by Versailles (originally Baroque), in favour of the undomesticated and mysterious German forests. So now you know, fellow Ausländer, forests have been the natural habitat of Germans for at least 200 years, but have only been their premium barbecue spot for half a century. Germans kept flocking to forests despite their reputation in German fairytales as the setting of sinister events. Just ask Hansel or Gretel. The fairytale with its fantastic tales and folksy roots captured the public imagination and were collected by people such as the Grimm Brothers (also famous for being the founding fathers of Germanic philology and German studies). Fairytales appealed for their “unspoiled nature” and “innocence”, traditionally the literary medium of the peasants, who were regarded as the true embodiment of German culture, free of artificiality, foreign intrusions and the trappings of modern city life.

Yet anybody who has read the unfiltered stories, before Disney sugarcoated them, will be familiar with the violent imagery that pervades them. Hansel and Gretel evade their fate by shoving the old lady into the oven, the hunter saves Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother by chopping open the wolf and Cinderella’s stepsisters, in a desperate bid to fit into the dainty glass shoe, mutilate their feet. Foreigners might be amused by German Romantic sensibility and their camp Schwärmerei, but in typical Romantic fashion, something sinister lurked under the movement. Already Heinrich Heine was warning about Romanticism’s dangerous obsession with death and destruction. Many Romantics, preoccupied with a higher spiritual realm, were unconcerned with such earthly matters as politics. Often conservative, they mourned the passing of a golden - yet never discerned - utopia, and were rather vague about how to return to this prelapsarian state. Most disturbingly was the recurrence of total annihilation or obliteration as spiritual cleansing found in the writings of some of these Romantics. While there was no precise cure to be found for the social malaise and decadence in their often cryptic and esoteric prose, the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes would have devastating consequences. Inevitably, Hitler was a Romantic. The connection was evident to the German novelist Thomas Mann who, shortly after the National Socialism Party rose to power, wrote:

It may seem daring to associate the nationalism of today with the ideas of a romanticizing philosophy, and yet the connection is there…[and serves] to support…the National Socialist movement from the spiritual side…We find here a certain ideology of philologists, a romanticism of professional Germanists, a superstitious faith in the Nordic - all emanating from the academic professional class, and the Germans of 1930 are harangued in an idiom of mystical philistinism and high-flown tastelessness with vocables like “racist”, “völkish, bündish”, “heroic”, which give the movement an ingredient of cultured barbarism more dangerous and more remote from reality, flooding and clotting the brain more grievously, than the Weltfremdheit and political romanticism that led us into [WW1]”

This is not to argue that a penchant for fairytales and forests led to Nazism. The rise of fascism in Europe in the 30s (Germany was not the only country so affected) was due to a toxic and complex combination of social, economical and political factors. But it did not help that many of these new Romantics had been heavily criticising the political efforts of the troubled and short-lived Weimar Republic. Not that they themselves offered any practical solutions to the young republic, disdainful as they were of the mundanity of politics, which they regarded as a pedestrian occupation. The Führer was also mocked despite them indirectly having helped created a political climate open to escapism and vague affirmations about a lost German golden age.

The Romantic impulse knows no hues or political affiliation. It was later strongly to reemerge in the student revolt of the 60s, whose participants had a characteristically vague goal besides the dismantling of the old order and the creation of an intuitive new society. It took once again a more sinister turn in the 70s with the Baader-Meinhof Group, led by Andreas Baader, who was seemingly of the conviction that burning down department stores would somehow incite a sexual and anti-capitalist revolution in Germany.

Berlin’s actual anti-imperialist urban guerilla factions show less propensity towards violence and prefer to express their Weltschmerz through the medium of Photoshop and electro music. The turntable has, it seems, superseded Wagner as the primary source of musical escapism among the disenchanted German bourgeoisie. Romanticism was from its inception a middle-class pursuit. Factory workers during the Industrial Revolution rarely got the chance to experience longing or ennui. So it was up to the children of the bourgeoisie to campaign on behalf of the ungrateful proletariat. But I digress and it’s taking me longer to get to the point than Wagner’s Ring Cycle or a Ricardo Villalobos track. What do these two musical genres have in common and what so Romantic about them? Well both last an eternity and have a relentless insistence to them. You will be familiar with techno’s repetitive hypnotic beat but perhaps less with opera so I will give you an example. In his prelude to The Rhine Gold, Wagner (according to Gordon A. Craig) at some points extends the figurations on the chord of E flat for a whole 136 bars, so as to mimic the slumber of a river. Proto-trance music! Throw in a couple of dragons and vikings and you get the Love Parade. Both musical styles appeal to this German Innerlickheit or inwardness. Both disconnect you from your immediate surroundings and plug you into a higher but more diffuse reality. Next time you go to the opera or a club, notice how often German Romantics close their eyes. Particularly when they are dancing. They are not there. They are back in the woods!

It is in these woods, their spiritual home, where they can commute with nature by smoking. Like that nice Indian American chap on the packet of American Spirit tobacco. Winnetou (created by the pathologically sentimental Karl May) and all the other tribe members live to an old ripe age despite communicating through smoke signals. Apart from all the ones that were directly or indirectly exterminated by white pioneers. Which is actually the majority. But German Romantics are already know that American Imperialists are bad for your health.

* Quote taken from Gordon A. Craig The Germans. In fact the chapter Romantics was the main inspiration for this entry. All brilliant insights are his, all bad jokes and accidental insults are mine.

I Am Now Integrated

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:37:00 +0100

If I’m sounding a tad more Teutonic today it’s because I recently - and rather unsuspectingly - took part in an integration ceremony. I have now an urge to barbecue nine months of the year and buy jars of Nutella large enough to hold all my written correspondence with German bureaucracy. Other side effects include worsening of pre-existing syntactic complications, also commonly known as the inability to write sentences containing less than three subclauses or syntactic non-linearity, together with an increased belief in the all-healing powers of homeopathy.

It all started with yet another letter from the unending sea of paper that life in Germany entails (I have yet to reconcile this epistolary enthusiasm with the equally Teutonic fondness for forests). This latest missive congratulated me on passing the so-called German language test for immigrants and invited me to a ceremony where two very official sounding officials would hand over my certificate. The letter also encouraged me to bring along my children, who would be freed from school upon the presentation of said letter. Since my progeny currently amounts to zero I wondered if it would absolve my fiance from attending his pre-planning planning meeting instead. Though, like most children, he would probably sit at the back and play during the whole ceremony. And I don’t want to take his iPhone away.

I had no choice but to attend the event sans better half and non existent quarter halves. Thursday afternoon thus found me in a chalk-smelling mossy green locale in Antonstrasse’s Volkshochschule, together with the 20-odd other recipients and their children, partners and other assorted family members. I was one of the few people, it seemed, that had arrived without an entourage, a camera, or a recent visit to the hairdresser. I had already gathered that I wasn’t part of the usual demographic, not only was I the only female there dangerously close to her 30s without descendants, I was also in the rather lucky situation that I did not need the certificate for visa reasons, nor would it have any effect on my professional prospects. My posts might often give the wrong the impression, but I was there just for the love of German. I’m a professional linguist, I can’t live in Berlin and not learn the language. Yet there are many people that don’t - hence the integration courses. All the people gathered that Thursday in room 305 had successfully completed such a course. The only non-compliant element to be found, much to the chagrin of the representative of the integration ministry, was the sound system. Microphones rarely want to integrate.

We all waited patiently in our seats while I tried to discreetly eyeball the cake table. A couple of babies started loudly protesting, perhaps also piqued by the lack of Hanuta bars (Danish butter biscuits at a German induction ceremony? I thought I was there to be integrated, not the other way around) While I pondered the symbolic ramifications of baked goods, the integration ministry delegate successfully integrated the microphone. What followed was a predictable speech on the importance of language to German society. Partly catering to the linguistic level of the attendants, partly to hammer the message home, her rhetoric was littered with keywords such as “society”, “community”, “common language”, and “increased opportunities”. She reminded me of a nationalist Buddhist monk repeating a particularly cherished mantra. We were then serenaded by a capella version of the national anthem. I really wanted a Hanuta bar. We were called individually to receive our certificates. One by one we went up and were handed a red rose and our certificate by the two official looking officials. I also found out why so many of the recipients had been to the hairdresser. We were meant to greet the suits and then have our picture taken sandwiched between them as a memento. I had not been coiffed nor did I have a photogenic baby to accessorise my certificate and rose. Merely my awkward smile. If I had known in advance that the pampers count was going to be this high I could have borrowed one - I live in Prenzlauer Berg after all. For an integration ceremony I was feeling rather out of place.

The capella group reappeared and gave us a Spring hymn, for which they received some ~~integration~~ singing roses. Then the teachers were honoured with some more red buds too. Maybe Interflora was sponsoring the event. I would have preferred Hanuta. We all politely clapped. Then people broke off to get some tea, Turkish tea, coffee and decidedly non-German biscuits. Alas, I had another appointment, and left with my rose and certificate, soon to be accompanied by an integration Ritter Sport.

Always the Exophone, Never the Ex-phoney

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:57:00 +0100

I’m writing you this letter to tell you I’m on my way

I’m coming home

And nothing, nothing, nothing can’t get in my way

Babe, I’ve changed…

– Goldhawk Road, Tina Dico

Some time ago I was labelled fat-skinny by Grazia, a rigorous publication with impeccable scientific credentials, and a respected authority on nutrition and €4,000 must-have ostrich bags. Now, I would never normally harbour doubts against such an assertion, but I have occasionally pondered whether fat-skinny is yet another hare-brained collective delusion courtesy the thick-thin Grazia writers. It is, after all, the year of the rabbit.

Now my beloved Guardian (et tu, Brute?) informs me that my voice inhabits a grey zone, a metaphorical one, as opposed to the physical space occupied by my semantically indecisive body mass. You see, I have been put into the “exophone” box (provided that my fat skinny body fits, of course). Exophone, derived from the Greek prefix “exo”, meaning “outside” and the word “phone” denoting “voice” or “sound”, refers to the phenomenon of writing in a language other than the one you were born into. Like I’m doing right now. At this very instant. Have you found any syntactic incongruity yet? A suspiciously foreign word choice that grates on your native ears? A dubiously placed preposition perhaps? If you haven’t, you’re probably going to now.

I grew up speaking Danish and Spanish. Does my Spanish background betray me? Perhaps my vocabulary is characterised by a marked preference for Latin etymology rather than Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon, i.e. Old English, is a West Germanic language. So is Danish. Well, it is actually a North Germanic language. I’m sure all you Germanic connoisseurs detected a certain je Norse sais quoi in my writing*. What can I say, it’s in my blood. My Spanish plasma does not contain red blood cells, it contains rrrrred blaaad sills. I am an exophone, forever condemned to a self-imposed linguistic exile, forever shackled to this phoney feeling.

The addition of German to my linguistic repertoire is not going to help matters (and it will certainly upset the North versus West Germanic equation, as I assume that German is Omni-Germanic). Not that I speak Luther’s language fluently, not by any means, but I have established friendships in which German is the main medium of communication. The German I is not as fully-fledged as the English I, the Danish I, or for that matter the Spanish ¡ay, caramba!. Which one is the real I? Is it a combination thereof? I have spent roughly a third of my life in each of Denmark, England and Spain.

Most of my adult life has taken place in England, so it is only natural that I should formulate my adult thoughts in English. They’re few and far between to begin with. Most of my half-baked ideas and fully-fledged rants are product of over-dinner conversations with my English fiancé (I should’ve probably plumped for the Anglo-Saxon “betrothed”, but I have no dowry and Richard III is no longer king of England). It is only natural that I should want to record these exchanges and conclusions in English. Why would I want to translate them into Danish or Spanish, stripping them in the process of subtle yet vital nuances and removing them from the original context. Because I can’t feel in English?

Karen Blixen: Not included in the Guardian’s list.

The term “exo” in “exophone” implies an emotional disconnection, a semantic slap to the face. And I never liked metaphorical violence, or real insults for that matter. The linguistic essentialism latent in the term troubles me. Am I unable to express genuine emotions in English? Perhaps the 1985 Spanish me is somehow more real than the 2011 English me. Maybe I have an immutable mother tongue kernel to which I’m no longer loyal. That would be rather unfortunate, because for the past 10 years English has been the language in which I have loved. I was proposed to in English, I accepted in English. In fact my constant bad punning and penchant for wordplay could be read as an ongoing love letter to my future husband, a homage to the linguistic treasures I’ve stumbled across during our decade-long dialogue.

Or maybe I am destined to forever be the exophone, never the ex-phoney, because I will always be phoney, a linguistic transvestite masquerading as an English speaker. Pity, I actually prefer the newly coined “ex-phoney” , which is a misleading hybrid just like myself. The prefix “ex”, like “exo” denotes “out of, from out” but it normally precedes words borrowed from Latin. The “phoney” found in “ex-phoney” is also not a corruption of the Greek “phone”, as some might assume, but an alteration of “fawney”, a gilt brass ring used by swindlers, from the Irish Gaelic “fáinne”, meaning ring. You could say that “phoney” is a phoney “phone”, an etymological red herring. No wonder a phoneys like myself likes it. So to recap, “exophone” is made up of two Old Greek components. “ex-phoney” is composed of the Latin suffix “ex”, cognate of the Greek “exo” and customary chaperone of Latin nouns, plus an Irish Gaelic corruption disguised as a Greek word. A true linguistic mutt.

“Exophone” is, on the other hand, a pure Hellenic neologism coined presumably by exophonic people themselves, who wanted to put their Classics degrees to use and whose dabblings in the Greek language should, according to their own linguistic intolerance, be as genuine as the Sirtaki dance in Zorba the Greek. Confused yet? You should be.

All this fancy terminology cobbled together from two dead languages, Latin and Old Greek… who since the 6th century has been able to claim that Latin is their mother tongue? Apart from the Pope, of course, whose views are, incidentally, also stuck in the Dark Ages.

Thanks to the enthusiastic coining of these exophones, Latin and Old Greek now boast a larger semantic pool than they did in the times of Socrates & co. Because nobody actually speaks these languages anymore, it is quite common to encounter accidental amalgamations of Latin and Greek roots. The word “television”, for an instance, is a well-known example, consisting of the Greek word “tele” (far) and the Latin word “visio”. These hybrids are known as heteroradicals (the Pope is a huge fan), “heteroradical” being, of course, also a heteroradical word (from the Greek “hetero” meaning “to differ” and the Latin “radix” i.e. root). You might be shocked to hear that some purists dislike these heteroradicals. I believe these are the same people who get their pedantic panties in a twist every time they suddenly encounter a split infinitive. I am more astounded by the fact that a purist should show opposition to a word containing “hetero” and “radical”.

I am also slightly perplexed by people who can so authoritatively argue about an obsolete language that has been relegated to scientific nomenclature and intellectual pomposity. And also used to label, in the best Foucaltian fashion, linguistic dissidents like me, who have spent most of their adult lives thinking, dreaming and being perplexed in an adopted language.

Some time ago I went to see Tina Dico in concert. Danish by birth - her surname is actually Dickow - this singer-songwriter spent a large part of the last decade living in London. I actually attended a gig at the Union Chapel during my own London years. And now she was in Berlin, touring after her recent return to Denmark. She was no longer based in the British capital and yet the city had left a visible imprint. Her Danish cadences had, like mine, been gradually eroded and I even detected the hint of an Estuarian accent. Dico has always composed in English and her songs often revolve around the themes of exile, belonging and travelling. Berlin’s Admiralspalast was thronged that evening with the Danish diaspora and as the opening chords to “Count to Ten” echoed throughout the hall, they rose to their feet, as if following an invisible command, and enthusiastically accompanied Dico in her tales of transience and topographical dislodgement. They were all singing in English, united by their Danishness. Singing in Berlin, many accompanied by their German partners. I could hear one of them waxing lyrical about Dico’s English lyrics in fluent German to her partner. I guess I had stumbled into an exophone convention.

*Anglo-Saxon purists, I have some bad news for you! (apart from the obvious fact that you’re Anglo-Saxon purists in the 21st century): The UK (particularly northern England) attracted some - presumably very lost - Vikings on the way to Mallorca in the ninth century. As a result, English contains large swathes of North Germanic words. In fact, “Words of Scandinavian origin rarely look or feel foreign to modern English-speakers. They have been completely assimilated, and most denote everyday objects” (From The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, Henry Hitchings.)

I Think, Therefore I Am (German)

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:25:00 +0100

In a day and age when professional alarmists fret about the dumbing down of humankind - because all medieval peasants were avid readers of the Literary Review - it is reassuring to know that thinking is positively thriving in at least one country. Germany is rather fond of pondering, dissecting, mulling, musing, ruminating and other mental gymnastics. Germany has been the main exporter of dry philosophy since time immemorial, before the French started smoking and hanging out in cafés. Often it is sublime and other times it is tad too dense. Martin Heidegger’s magnus opus Being and Time was according to Roger Scrutton “formidably difficult - unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it”. This incidentally is often how I feel when I peruse the politics section of Süddeutsche Zeitung.

George Bernard Shaw claimed that “an Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable” . A German, on the other hand, feels uncomfortable when he thinks he is being moral. Can he ascertain this morality? How do you define morality? And what social forces cause him to question his morals in the first place? Which role does the concept of moral play in today’s society? At this point, and to assuage his (or her!) guilt, a German feels compelled to write a 5,000 word editorial in the Tagesspiegel consisting of 10 line sentences containing 20 subclauses interspersed with 30 brackets and asides written exclusively in the passive mode, so they can bring out their entire collection of “geworden gewesen wurden haben” verbs they have been keeping for those special occasions. Whatever the conclusion (spoiler: it might be America’s fault), rest assured that readers will be reminded of their victimhood. In an Advanced Capitalist Society we are ALL victims. Blame it on the Advanced Capitalist Society. Whatever an Advanced Capitalist Society is (clue, a German philosopher* is its main analyst). But if it weren’t for an ACS (I’m not German, and got tired of typing) there wouldn’t be editorials, debates, opinion of the day. There wouldn’t be any Tatort!

With this in mind I recently came across a piece in The Economist on Muslim immigrants learning about Germany’s Nazi past. Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), a peace organization founded to confront the legacy of Nazism, is running a series of seminars and tutorials about the third Reich targeted at immigrant women who want to know more about this episode in history. This has provoked controversy and much soul searching in Germany and its brooding inhabitants and led to yet another wave of editorials. I don’t know about you, but at this point I’m expecting editorials whenever Facebook changes its layout. Anyway, on the one hand there’s scepticism in certain quarters about the genuine interest of immigrants in the Holocaust. The course is partly funded by the interior ministry who is eager to prevent anti-Semitism and discourage Islamist extremism, as well as reach out to the country’s large Muslim community. There are, of course, many Germans who welcome interest in Hitler’s regime on the part of guest workers and encourage them to contribute with their thoughts on the subject. The whole kerfuffle is Germany in a nutshell:

The unspoken assumption is that there is a middle ground between German remorse and indifference. As enlightened Germans, the seminar-givers see the Holocaust as a unique crime committed mainly against the Jews. Yet they must make room for the views of women whose backgrounds have little to do with the persecution of Jews and who may have suffered horrors of their own. Taking their experiences seriously matters as much as instructing them. There is a risk of “relativising” the Holocaust, says Astrid Messerschmidt of the University of Education in Karlsruhe. Yet the German version of history “cannot be imposed from above”.

Most fraught, says Mrs Weduwen [who organises the seminars] , are discussions of the Middle East. The women learn that both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have grievances. The message can receive a hostile reception when Israeli commandos storm ships trying to break the Gaza blockade. Mrs Boumekik is involved in educating Arab families who blame Jews for the conflict. That is like assuming Muslims are terrorists, she says. With hostility to Muslims mounting in Germany, some women draw parallels with Nazi racism.

To a German pundit, this news item is a dream come true. Sod Advanced Capitalist Societies! It contains National Socialism + Collective Guilt + Immigrants + Women in Headscarfs + Israeli-Palestinian Conflict = Editorial Gold! Throw in a healthy dose of nuclear energy, a sprinkle of homeopathy with a side of Hartz IV, and I guarantee you that Germans will be thinking for a very very long time. Anyway, I don’t know what these poor women have to do to integrate into German society. They’re already willingly taking part in a 60-hour tutorial about the Nazis (and knowing Germans I suspect this is one session). Maybe they could engage in a 7 hour debate on what it means to be German, and whoever refrains from rolling their eyes and beating other participants over the head repeatedly with an unabridged copy of Being and Time gets a German passport.

* I actually happen to like Habermas

Latest report from Google Analytics: To the person who stumbled across my blog after entering...

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:19:00 +0100

Latest report from Google Analytics: To the person who stumbled across my blog after entering “annoying answers” - Today is your lucky day! To the one who typed “goat cheese incontinence” - Please keep searching.

German Dentistry and the Rant-Free Live

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:39:00 +0100

Søren Kirkegaard, Danish philosopher and all-round cravat aficionado, once claimed that a bad conscience can make life more interesting. Which is why I avoid New Year’s Resolutions like I should have avoided that last Jägermeister shot. And yet I have recently been troubled by this - universally shared - tendency to furiously pound on my keyboard only when my sarcasm levels are reaching critical levels and venom is seeping from my fingertips. The final product is dumped on my blog, host to all my eye rolling, teeth grinding and hair pulling. And into the internet’s infinite cesspool it leaks. Yet most bloggers seem committed environmentalists given the amount of recycling that takes place in the blogosphere.

My wise father once urged me to pick up the pen not only when something bothered me, but also when something pleased me. Because it so rarely happens. People are more than happy to jump on the nearest soap box and loudly proclaim their disagreement/air their conspiracy theories/correct your grammar/invoke Goodwin’s law/ plead assistance on behalf of ailing Nigerian benefactors. Particularly, nay, only if they only made it as far as the fourth line of your argument. And this is the crux of the problem as the journalist Geoff Nicholson so lucidly put it: “people think you’re talking sense only when your prejudices coincide with theirs. Dissenters tend to raise the question “Who asked you anyway?” Nobody of course, apart from that little persistent voice in your head. The one that makes you go Eureka in the shower and comments on that woman’s pink UGGh boots at the bus stop. And this voice believes that I should rebalance the equation by writing something nice for a change.

I would therefore like to sing the praises of dentists, German dentists. My previous experiences in the UK had led me to believe that this profession was still filled by barbers, Medieval barbers. So awed was my deutsch dental practitioner the first time she set her eyes on the dental work performed by her colleagues across the Channel, that I feared she might cart me off to the DDR Museum near Unter der Linden. The filling material found in my molars had not been spotted in oral cavities since the fall of the Wall. My mouth was like a Hominina fossil, the missing link between historical orthodontics and modern dentistry. Great Britain might have won the war but Germany won the battle against shoddy fillings, botched roots canal treatments, unnecessary excruciating pain and peagreen coloured waiting rooms!… What’s that conscience? I can’t restore my karma by making another country the target of my bad puns? I was under the impression that throwing some abuse at my former host country would cancel out all my recent gripes about Germany. Like the yin and yang of insults. Ok, back to square one.

Berlin's Monokulti

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:48:00 +0100

If you live in Berlin or were even planning to, you’ll be aware that the city is a veritable melting pot of cultures, a modern day Alexandria. Or so you keep hearing. Kotbusser Tor is a delta into which many a meandering and permanently plastered Erasmus student has converged. It is not the Nile, but they’re certainly in denial. You see, Kreuzberg is multikulti, if your idea of a transcultural encounter consists of purchasing a falafel from a Turkish joint at 4 am before moving on to the next clandestine bar. Here, of course, you will hobnob with other fearless intercultural explorers, with whom you share a passion for fried chickpeas, cheap beer and other less legal substances. And they will most certainly be white. Berliners like to picture themselves as extras in a Benetton advert, whereas in reality the city has the ethnic diversity of an Al Jolson concert. But refrain from saying this aloud, mentioning the city glaring lack of different skin tones will not get you many Frühstück invitations. Contrary to what you might think, pointing out the Emperor’s lack of clothes will not cast you as the innocent lonely voice, perilously floating on a sycophantic sea. Instead you’ll get the look normally reserved for Swabian real estate speculators.

But enough with tortured analogies, let’s return to overstretched definitions, like the semantic content of this Berlin mantra. What is “multikulti” exactly? And why does it differ so significantly from its English equivalent? According to the Oxford Dictionary of Politics, “The term ‘multiculturalism’ emerged in the 1960s in Anglophone countries in relation to the cultural needs of non-European migrants. It now means the political accommodation by the state and/or a dominant group of all minority cultures defined first and foremost by reference to race or ethnicity; and more controversially, by reference to nationality, aboriginality, or religion, the latter being groups that tend to make larger claims and so tend to resist having their claims reduced to those of immigrants”.

Call me a pedant if you like, but labelling Berlin “multikulti” just because it contains an unusually high number of Swedish graphic designers and Chilean DJs strikes me as a tad inaccurate. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but I seldom meet someone of Turkish descent not manning a deep fryer. I have no intention of discussing the merits ,or lack thereof, of cultural pluralism, neither is this a contribution to the assimilation debate. And yes, Berlin does contain a visible smattering of individuals that hail from other continents with higher concentrations of melanin in their skin, but these are not usually the main actors in Berlin’s much trumpeted multiculturalism play, full of sound and fury but little else. Amongst the ensemble we encounter Scandinavian art students, interning Iberian architects, Icelandic illustrators, French Erasmus students, Midwestern fashion designers, Estonian bloggers, English TEFL teachers, Australian backpackers, and Polish programers, all of whom enthusiastically take part in this self-proclaimed cultural cornucopia. A pluralism that boils down to bar hopping around Kreuzkölln, drinking cheap beer on public transport and in parks, demonstrably slouching in squatter chic cafés or scouting flea markets for the holy grail of vintage. All while waxing lyrical to new, wide-eyed Ryanair arrivals, about the truly diverse scene, home to a plethora of different lifestyles. Some might start viewing this constant reminder of Berlin’s status as a hotbed of cultural interactions and encounters (it is full of Erasmus students after all) with suspicion, as a symptom of a barely disguised inferiority complex.

But let’s view it in a positive light. With the worrying rise of the extreme right in Europe and many pronouncing multiculturalism as a failed social experiment, it is reassuring to know that MacBooks and street art can unite so many people. So let’s hail Berlin’s monokulti, because frankly there’s no escaping it. Originating in Mitte and moving to Prenzlauer Berg, it is an unstoppable mono culture that keeps expanding, always in search of a non-gentrified host in which it can propagate, colonising Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain and spreading to Wedding and Moabit. Like a huge petri dish in which identical scarf wearing non-comformists are cultivated. I should know, I myself am part of this micro-cosmos.

Berlin Related Books

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:42:00 +0100

In my blog I often poke fun at my current host city, which I would also do if I were still back in London, but, to Berliner’s misfortune, I started my public whining career in the Prussian capital. If you’ve occasionally laughed or curled your toes with embarrassing self-awareness at my gripes and complaints, I recommend you the book “Ich werde ein Berliner” by Wash Echte, the anonymous author behind the eponymous blog. With his characteristic sharp wit, Wash Echte cuts straight through Berlin’s hype and lays bare its new bohemia and their rites of passages. Often reading like an acerbic anthropology manual, nothing escapes the author’s unimpressed gaze: from club veterans, complicated relationships, counter-culture, creativity, to the omnipresent techno. Isn’t it just another book satirising hipsters? Well not really. First of all, the word “hipster” is avoided as a label. This is because hipsters are just the latest incarnation of the flâneur, the urban figure Walter Benjamin was already raving about at the turn of the last century. Benjamin grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Berlin and had a lifelong phobia of meaningful employment (he only considered joining the workforce as a secondhand book dealer funded by a loan from his father. His idea, not his father’s). Instead he spent much time in cafés refining his sauntering and lounging techniques after developing an admiration for substance-abusing tortured Parisian poets, all whilst griping about the shallowness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie. Sounds familiar? Then go to your nearest bookshop and pick up a copy of “Ich werde ein Berliner”.

A Year Onwards

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:42:00 +0100

I am the passenger and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, the bright and hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

So today I woke up nursing a hangover - not that this is unusual for a Sunday - and realised that on this date, a year ago, I arrived in Berlin. That’s all I’m able to muster really, because Berliner Kindl (filed under “acquired taste”, “beggars can’t be choosers” and the sadly overused “Why?”) really affects your ability to string coherent sentences together the following day. Some things are never a good idea. Like invading Russia in winter, declaring your ship unsinkable and letting Leonardo Dicaprio play an Irishman. Or mixing cheap beer with raspberry syrup to hide the flavour.

Anyway, so in honour of this anniversary I’m playing a Berlin soundtrack of sorts, something with depth and melody, a classic. In other words, no techno. Long before The Age of the Turntable, Berlin inspired many artists, like Iggy Pop, a passenger who rides through West Berlin in the 70s and finds himself full of lust for life.

Thanks for being such a wonderful host Berlin!