Die Dinge des Lebens

Juni. Die Badrenovierung ist endlich fast geschafft. Was bisher so trivial schien - Wasserhahn, Badewanne, Waschbecken, Wandfliesen, Lichtschalter - ist nun alles ein kleines Wunder mit mehrseitiger Gebrauchsanleitung. Wollte ich diese ganzen zivilisatorischen Details wirklich so genau wissen? Gibt es das alles nicht auch einfacher und gedankenfreier?

Zeit für Auszeit. Ich packe meine sieben Saunasachen, und verziehe mich erst in den Pool, dann in den Schatten, zusammen mit Peter Carey. Und muss elf Seiten weiter lachen.

"Strong work," she said.

"You can't come in."
"Don't worry. I wouldn't track mud into a studio."

Only later did I think how few civilians would have put it quite like that. At the time I was concerned with simpler things. I led her back across the walkway to Jeanpaul's house of few possessions where the only real room was a central kitchen with a square table made of Tasmanian blackwood.

I gave her our one clean towel, a dry shirt, a sarong.

"If you use the tub," I said, "you can't use soap in it."

"Domo arigato," she called."I know how to behave."

Domo arigato? It would be six months before I would learn what that might mean.

Das Haus der wenigen Besitztümer. Da ist er wieder, der Gedanke: Was braucht man wirklich zum Leben? Wie wäre es, konzentrierter zu Leben, sich von all dem, was sich in den Jahren sammelt, zu lösen?

Eine möglich Antwort gibt mir Annette Pehnt drei Tage später. Das Buch, auch so eines, das ich in der Hand hatte, dann zurücklegte, dann doch mitnahm: Der kleine Herr Jakobi.

Der kleine Herr Jakobi beschloß, auf die Dinge des Lebens zu verzichten. Er besorgte sich zehn große graue Kisten aus festem Karton, stellte sie mitten in der Wohnung auf und begann, alles hineinzuräumen.
Sinnend schritt er noch einmal durch die gelichteten Räume und ließ den Blick schweifen. Dann lehnte er sich an die Spüle und sah auf den Himmel. Nach einer Weile griff er hinter sich nach seiner blauen Tasse, aber sie stand nicht an ihrem Platz. Ihm fiel ein, daß sie in Zeitung gewickelt auf der Mineraliensammlung ruhte. Seufzend ging er auf den Balkon und öffnete den obersten Karton.

Die grauen Kisten. Hier sind sie gelb und blau, und stehen noch im Keller. Warten darauf, dass ich mich an etwas aus dem früheren Badschrank erinnere, etwas, das ich nun unbedingt brauche. Bisher ist das noch nicht geschehen. Ein Nebeneffekt der Badrenovierung: ohne Badezimmer reduzieren sich die Tuben und Dosen und Dinge des Bades auf ein kleines, handliches Kistchen, dass sich Beautycase-artig zur Campingdusche und zurück tragen lässt.

Wobei so ein japanischer Holzzuber mit Blick auf Papyrusgras schon auch etwas hätte. Auch ohne Seife.

~~~

Munro

it's a time of stories: a friend forwarded a link to a short story by Alice Munro in The New Yorker: The Bear Came Over the Mountain

i didn't really know Munro, but when i googled her name, i came to a longer interview in the “Zeit”, which was a good surprise read for Sunday: Munro is 75, and from Canada, and has such a laid-back professionalism. too bad the interview is in german. … let's see, if there is an English interview which conveys some of the passages.. yes, here:

~~

All writers are interested in depicting how their characters change over the course of a story; you frequently push your characters beyond a state of change—to the point of total transformation. Might you give us an example of this from your new collection?

I think it would be my father who actually changed in a way, through his children. I think it was because I had written a book or books, and he saw that there wasn't some “magical world” out there that people who lived where he lived could never reach. He saw that something like writing a book was a normal activity for some people. And that there wasn't this kind of fear of the world, that most of the people I knew had—a feeling that there were gaps that you could never cross over.

That must be a wonderful thing for you to know.

Yes, it is. But you know, with me, it didn't just happen. Everybody looking at the success they've had tends to think of their own perseverance, but in my case I just happened to be alive at a time when there were people who were there, in Canada particularly, with a strong nationalist notion of building a literature. And there were subsidies by the government. There were magazines just coming in when I was, say, in my thirties, and there was our national radio, which accepted things. And there was a kind of a—I wouldn't say it was a devotion to literature on most people's part in the country, but certainly there were people devoted to literature, to bringing Canadian literature out, and I was just in time to get this. Bob Weaver [broadcaster of Canadian Short Stories, later Anthology, on CBC radio, and a founder and editor of the Tamarack Review ] is one of the people that I really owe everything to. Also, as is obvious, it was an easier time to be a woman, especially as I grew older.

I don't think there was as strong a feeling in Canada as perhaps in some other countries about women being writers. I think there was a pretty strong feeling in the United States, in the Hemingway–Dos Passos era, and also in Australia—when I visited there, it was even worse, much worse. But in Canada, since we'd never had any writers to speak of, they were glad of what they could get.

~~~

(here the whole interview, it's long, i didn't read through it- i just browsed into it and came across the quoted passage)

it was so good to sit outside under the parasol, in the garden, reading the Alice Munro story, gazing at the flowers every now and then.

all those Important Things

solstice. and flowers, up in qarrtsiluni, in a poem titled “Transformer”- it caught my attention with the second line, and then stunned me with the last lines:

I used to think you're solid,
as I'm: like petals that
speak to the colourblind…

- Nicholas Y.B. Wong

~

in celebration of solstice, i went to the spa. and it was so good to be there again. i haven't been there for 3 weeks, with all the renovation going on. and i had a surprise book with me- it's like the story of the cousins of the gribble brothers. it's written by the Australian author Peter Carey (that's why i picked it in the library, thinking of 2028 and Elle, and not being able to remember if i ever read a book by an Australian author). the title is: “Theft”. it's about a painter and his brother. here some lines:

So clock this: eight miles out Bellingen, NewSouthWales, me in my shorts and bare feet and Amberstreet like some crane or heron with his short upper body and his long thin legs and cinched-in belt and the whole of his skeleton throwing all its force into his eyes as he looked down at my canvas. The work had a sort of nailed-down fuck-you quality with al the process showing. I had already begun to glue down rectangles of canvas on to the broader field. Even in the warm misty sunlight it looked very bloody good indeed.

..If I have made myself sound calculating, let me tell you: I had not the least fucking idea what I was doing.

the guy's name? Butcher Bones.

one peculiarity of the book: it’s written in switching points of views of Butcher Bones and his brothers, who is slightly mentally handicapped – in his narrative, all those Important Words were written like this: with capital letters, conveying the irony of all the Important Things that were happening around him.

die Zukunft, heute

Gedanken zur Zukunft im Briefkasten. A New Cultural Economy. Illustriert mit Piratenflaggen und mit - wie heißt es noch mal? Dieses kleine allesfressende Computermonster?

Die erste Zeile, Zukunft, heute.

Das Zeitalter von Copyright und geistigem Eigentum ist abgelaufen.

Drei Zeilen weiter dann die Klarstellung: die provokante Formulierung ist eine Kernfrage. Die im Futur zugegebenermaßen nicht so drastisch und provokant klingt: Das Zeitalter von Copyright und geistigem Eigentum wird ablaufen.

"Der Tag kommt, das weißt du. Das wissen wir beide, und damit müssen wir leben. Aber er kommt nicht jetzt. Nicht morgen."

Die Zeile ist nicht von ars electronica, sondern aus einem Zukunftsroman - Die Entbehrlichen. Von Ninni Holmqvist. Ein Buch über eine Zeit, in der die Menschen anhand ihres gesellschaftlichen Werts eingeordnet werden: es gibt die Benötigten. Und die Entbehrlichen. Diese werden in Sanatorien gebracht, an einem bestimmten Punkt ihres Lebens. Um dort doch noch von Wert zu sein.

"Ja, es gib ziemlich viele Intellektuelle hier, Leute, die Bücher lesen."
"Aha", sagte ich.
"Leute, die Bücher lesen", fuhr er fort, "tendieren dazu entbehrlich zu werden. In hohem Maße."
"Ach so", sagte ich.
"Ja", sagte er.

Jetzt fällt mir auch der Name des Computermonsters wieder ein, und das Prinzip des Spiels.

Pacman. Fressen oder gefressen werden.

~~