life as a journey

31, or: diary of... january

2012-01-31T22:03:00.004+01:00

today: january 31
and with it: the completion of 31 days of small stones.
they are all lined up in my "p art ici patio n" blog:
a river of stones, january 2011

*

some reflections on stones / attentive notes:
in some ways, it's just a small thing: some lines on a specific moment of the day, every day. but what this challenge did was: to make me more attentive for the everyday, for all the moments it brings. to look for stones.

it also made me go take my camera along, to take a photo somewhere along the way. and then, while out there, turn that extra corner, or take a road i havn't taken before. and: be more focused. here's where stones connect to that (seemingly) simple zen advice: when walk, walk. when eat, eat. when see, see. like when i went swimming – and there was the light floating through the windows, reflecting on the water surface. and it was almost hypnotic. is it different? i wondered. but it probably was my attention that was different.

another thought: i think one of the effects of the river of stones is that it gives a name to those nameless moments, and with it, brings more attention to them and makes us more aware of them.

looking at the page of images and notes also makes me think of the peculiarity of our own perception. every day is full of hundreds of moments, but at the end of the day, just some are standing out in our memory. there could have been a completely different set of 31 entries, based on the same days.

another side effects of the stones: not only did they make go and try other roads, they also let me go and try some other templates, and arrive at the mosaic-style one, which was perfect for this, as it shifted the mosaic of images with every new entry. just like a new experience can shift our take on things that happened before.

also, the stone time made me go and revive my tumblr account life as a journey. i reblogged some of the stones there in larger format. it's one of the things that fascinate me: how the same content feels different when presented in another shape / size. which of course relates back to the whole idea of moments of the day, and the size / attention we give them on our way through the day.

here's the link to the river page again: The River of Stones, January 2012

now, to read the other stones of today
:)

january blue

2012-01-31T15:03:00.000+01:00

Paris Was Ours (global reading challenge #3)

2012-01-29T08:48:00.008+01:00

last year in July, i visited Paris. it's a trip that still resonates, with all its moments and sights - and memories of earlier trips to this city. before i went there, i bought 2 books: "One Year in Paris" - the story of a woman who moved there for a year. and "Shakespeare and Company" by Sylvia Beach, who founded the famous bookshop and published Ulysses, and tells the shop's story in the book, and with it, her own life story.

fast forward to December: knowing about my trip, a friend mailed a book suggestion: "Paris was Ours", a collection of 32 essays on living in Paris. it's a book i read since December. now i finished its final essay, and collected the mail notes i wrote for it, to use the one or other for a short review. but looking at the notes, i felt: from format, they are the equivalent to the book. so here they are:

23.12.
the Paris book sounds beautiful. looking for it, i saw that there was just 1 left in stock, so i ordered it.

24.12.
this morning brought a good surprise: the planned delivery of the Paris book was "28th December". yet today, during breakfast, the doorbell rang, and the postman was there, with a book parcel in his hand.

25.12.
i read a first story from Paris: it was about a homeless family. what a start. but it connects to one of my own memories of Paris: leaving the Musee d’Orsay with all it’s richness and wonder, and then walking along the Seine – such a romantic place. until you start to notice the tents under the bridge, the rolled-up mattresses: huddled lives.

27.12.
i opened the book at random again, and read the next story: it's from a cook. an own world, again, the restaurant world there, the rites of passage it holds for the people who work there, who cook in restaurants and in parts of the city they both couldn’t afford themselves. the term they have for it: to work “sur” Paris – on Paris, not in it.

30.12.
the collection, so many good parts in it. yesterday i read the one about the writer who finds a place stay in the bookshop Shakespeare&Company. of course, it brought memories of my own visit to that bookshop(here's a photo+note). it’s a place that seems to be like a Paris inside Paris.

2.1.
today, i read the story of a woman from Teheran who went to Paris in 1980 for what she thought was just a spring holiday stay with relatives there. but through the politics of that time, she can't go back home. which changes the perception of the city, of everything. this also connects to this paragraph from a previous story:

"I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris."
"Becoming a Parisian", Walter Wells

5.1.
after reading randomly at first, i now started at the start. this book - and this city - it has so many layers. and every story adds a new, unexpected one. i want it to last longer, and so try to read only one story a day.

23.1.
while in Munich, i came to talk about the Paris book with a friend, who knows someone who is bring interviewed for a job that is in Paris. so we came to talk about the book, about living in a city, about the way our own identity is shaped by the place we live in - which directly connects to the language/place edition with the theme "another language, another place, another self". and i just looked, and yes - there also is a story included that is set in Paris, and a poem: Paris 1986.

25.1.
the Paris book: it’s a read that takes its time. i finished the last stories last weekend, and want to blog about it in the next days. which will be an unexpected transition in the blog: from Munich to Paris. but it fits, this reflecting on cities and life in them. i took a book photo already, with the map of Paris in the background, and the cover of the brochure i was handed at the tourist info when i arrived at Gare St. Lazard: "Paris est a vous!": Paris is for you.

and as ending note, a quote from the friend who recommended the book: "life in the city. so much happens around us, unseen, unspoken, unknown. when you were in Paris, you were surrounded by these stories, passed them on the street, sat near them on the metro."

----
Reading Challenge Notes
this year, i am taking part in a global + an european reading challenge. the idea: to read books from each continent of the world / several countries of europe. i started the Paris book before i learned about that challenge, and it fits right in, as book #3. here the previous book notes:
- Global Reading Challenge
- book 1: The Tigers's Wife (former Yugoslavia)
- book 2: Anar (Middle East)
- virtual bookshelf

water sky toyology

2012-01-28T16:57:00.000+01:00

it's day 28 of the river of stones, this challenge of noticing one moment of the day and putting it in words. it seems a little thing to do, but it makes a difference, especially in this month of brown-grey landscapes and overcast skies: not all is grey. here's the colors of this month so far: p art ici pation / a river of stones

one of the stones even caught the attention of the spa blog, and now lead to a visual poem based on it: a thought in baths.

the daily practice also branches into another challenges: the see haiku blog has the feature theme "toys", which sparked an observation of childhood memories: the toy most attractive

3 more days / stones to complete january.

photo friday greenery find

2012-01-28T07:29:00.000+01:00

photo friday's new theme is "Greenery". 149 greens went online already, many of them about nature. i browsed my files, thinking or looking for a non-nature green, but then was pulled to these two images of city green: the first, a park moment, with the trees growing to ever-larger size. and the second, nature recapturing stone stairs and walls. the photos are from Bratislava/Slovakia, a city i visited as spontaneous sidetrip from Vienna

in a parallel of theme, today's "small stone" is also about green, yet in a much smaller form: find.

(and here's more about Bratislava: Vienna, Bratislava, Istanbul).

art moments in Munich

2012-01-26T17:32:00.002+01:00

one week ago, this time, i was in Munich. it's a trip i am still processing, especially the visit to the museum of modern art: the Pinakothek der Moderne. i already blogged a bit about it in the Munich travelogue below (link), which then lead to two mail conversations and some more exploring. thought i add them here as own post, with quotes and pictures.

Rose:
Pinakothek is such an odd name(?) Where does it come from, do you know? I love that silver crinkly thing.

Dorothee
About the Pinakothek: i wondered about that, too, and just looked: "A pinacotheca (Greek: πινακοθήκη) was a picture gallery in either ancient Greece or ancient Rome." - The old Pinakothek dates back to 1826, and was one of the largest museums of the world at that time, hence the name.
_

The Pinakothek also has an area that is about design - and itself, is design: it is built in modern architecture. here's a photo from the view towards the design area:

the museum offers a lot of open spaces, so when moving through it, you see the different paintings and sculptures speaking to each other in different angles. added to that, there are areas with large windows, to bring in the outside. which connects to one of the temporary exhitbitions that is on: “Durchs Fenster” ("through the window"), by artist Sabine Hornig – she focuses on photography, especially on window reflections.

here’s one of her photographs that spoke to me especially:

and here, a photo from the first floor, with a second window installation in the background, and the "shiny crinkly thing", from the original blog post, and neon sculptures setting a light mode.
the thing about the neon scultpure is that when i tried to take a photo, it came out strange - i tried to adjust it with photoshop, that's how the collage on top came together, with none of them representing the real room color.

Dorothee:
The neon sculptures on the left and right side are from Dan Flavin - i read about him last year, he is included in the US landscape art book, together with Donald Judd and his home / museum.
i actually looked for the artist of the sculpture in the museum leaflet, but it’s not listed. will mail the museum and ask.

Rose:
Of course, Dan Flavin! Have been looking at a bit of his stuff, comes up all the time with reference to Judd....[Rose is hosting a Judd Box tumblr, hence the focus on this reference]

*
Dorothee:
surprise: the museum already wrote back with name and artwork. here's the answer:

Sehr geehrte Frau Lang,

bei der Skulptur handelt es sich um ein Werk von John Chamberlain (1927-2011): VENERABLEFRIENDSHIP (2008)

Mit freundlichen Grüßen | Yours sincerely

and the Pinakothek had an exhibit with Chamberlain's works last summer. sadly, he died in December. here's more:

i think i will put together a blog post tomorrow, also with the window reflection. still processing the visit. one thing about those huge museums is that they are great – but all overwhelming. since there, i 've been looking up some of the artists with google images:

Dan Flavin (light)
Sabine Hornig (photography)
Fred Sandback (now for a category..)

and here, 2 more images from the visit: another view of the design area:

and a thought-provoking poster from the exhibition:
"Unplugged. Mirko Borsche. Design Works!"

some relating links:

website Pinakothek with current exhbitions
the Judd Box tumblr
the Munich travelogue
the Land Art blog entry

colors of morning

2012-01-25T16:42:00.001+01:00

after days of grey: finally a morning in colors.
(more skies)

digitech directions tag cloud horizon

2012-01-24T10:59:00.000+01:00

just a little photo play with layers and tag clouds

haiku dragons & munich dragon

2012-01-23T18:24:00.003+01:00

today is Chinese new year: with new moon, the year of the dragon starts. to celebrate this event, a fabulous dragon haiku collection is now featured in the blueprint book blog: "The Language of Dragons" - a free PDF-book.

here's one of my favourites from it:

ocean hiss
up from the cliffs
the language of dragons
- Peter Newton

and more dragons: in Munich i came across an impressive green dragon, right at Marienplatz - see photo above. and yesterday, during a sunday drive, i came across a bridge named "Drachenlochbrücke" - "Dragon Hole Bridge". i tried to find out more about the place, without luck - but i came across another place, in Switzerland, with a similar name: Drachenloch: the highest prehistoric cave in Europe, with relicts that date back 50.000 year, a time when people believed that dragons were real - a time when they became part of legends and tales that still reverberate in our time.

happy new year!
may the water dragon bring good energies~~

Munich (a travelogue with art + winter/summer photos)

2012-01-22T13:28:00.006+01:00

the first trip of the year: a trip to Munich, to meet up with a friend there. i've been to Munich before a couple of times, but this was the first winter visit. the whole trip in fact was a short trip of 24 hours in the city. but back home, i felt like i had been 2 days.

the first photo of the trip: Marienplatz, with all its old buildings. the city itself dates back to 1100, which is on the "younger" side of cities, but still is hard to imagine. the neogothic building is the town hall of Munich.

from there, we headed towards Odeonplatz. so much to see at every corner - at one crossing, we stood, and saw a neon sign on such a facade: “We are poems”. such a beautiful moment.

it took a moment to realize it's all an installation: the wall and the neon sign. there is lots of construction and renovation going on in Munich, and they often put huge facade paintings on the construction sites, so that on first glance, it still looks like the building is still there.

we moved on to the “Hofgarten” – the royal garden at Odeonsplatz. arriving there, we happened to walk right into the blue hour, with the sky turning to blue, and windows starting to glow in yellow.

the Hofgarten also is home of the memorial stone of the “Weiße Rose" - a reminder of the Nazi time, and the student resistance back then. across the street, the Haus der Kunst waited - i remembered that from a previous trip to Munich, and walking towards it, my mind walked back in memory. now i just looked, and found a note from the previous trip, and photos - they also show how different this city is in summer:

-----
May 2005: a day in Munich

the first stop was the Neptun fountain, from there we moved to the Marienplatz, and had a Munich beer and white sausages, the local treat. sitting there, we talked about the internet, the forum we met, and how so many connections come from there. and that one of the keys that makes it so special is that it really doesn't matter how old you are, where you live, what you do for a living.

then we walked on, towards the English garden. near the Southern entry of it, there is the "Haus der Kunst" - the house of art. it was built during the Nazi reign, a very formal building where propaganda art was shown. after the war, they reopened it, and now it's a place of modern art, and provocative pieces

at the moment, they show a photo exhibition: "Der Körper der Photographie" - "The body of photography", and we went inside, with no real clue what to expect. and found ourselves - in a room filled with glass vitrines filled with old travel photographies, from journeys taken in the 19th century. pictures of Egypt, India, Persia, Greece, Bolivia.

in perfect contrast to those images: the exhibition they were setting up in the hall: Paul McCarthy. some of it, in the second photo, the huge inflatable sculpture that is now crowning the museum facade.

after the art, we went to the English garden. it's huge, with small streams going through it, small forests, it feels like being out of the city. and it has a great beer garden that is set under a Chinese tower. so there we sat, and listened to the Bavarian music played by a band in the second level of the tower, and had Italian food, and felt metropolitan in a very Bavarian way.

****

now, back to the recent trip:

on friday morning, when we went for the breakfast room, it started to snow: big white flakes. it looked lovely, but got us worried: if it snowed on like that, both driving back and flying back might become difficult. but the snow was kind, and stopped after an hour, just as we were getting ready to leave.

so we walked through Munich again, this time to visit the Pinakothek der Moderne: a museum of modern art, which itself comes in modern architecture.

it’s amazing, and i was excited to see the Donald Judd Room there. now, Ganesh smiled: guess which room of the Pinakothek currently is cleared for another exhibtion? yes. the Donald Judd room. but there are so many other sights, and we had those audio things where you can type in the number, and listen to an introduction of the painting or sculpture you stand in front, so that was good.

from the Pinakothek, we walked in a small loop that brought us back to Odeonsplatz, and to Marienplatz, where we went to have a goodbye lunch at a bavarian restaurant. and then, we walked back to the hotel. the sky still dry. my friend left for the airport, and i started the drive back home – and just after 5 minutes, it started to snow again, heavily. oh dear, i thought. but then it stopped after 10 minutes. then started again, with lighter flakes. and so it went on, all the way home. but i was lucky: no snow traffic jams.

and thinking about the trip when driving, i had to smile: it was the things that i expected that didn’t happen: i thought we would have rain for both days, but the umbrellas had remained closed. and i thought i see Donald Judd’s cubes, but not so. yet instead it brought back memories of this earlier trip to Munich.

such a good trip. still processing. and now i wished i had taken a photo of the photo in the lobby of the Haus der Kunst that showed the facade with the Paul McCarthy installation.

the blue hour

2012-01-22T06:44:00.002+01:00

the first journey of the year
arriving in the afternoon
and going for a city walk,
without map, without plan
following streets, thoughts -
and ending up in the centre
of the old Hofgarten
just at the blue hour,
this meeting point of ancient times
and of new, possible futures

-
this entry is for this week's photo friday challenge theme: Pristine.

some more images of this first journey are up at: Munich (a travelogue)

today: Munich (+ rain)

2012-01-19T10:36:00.003+01:00

today to come: a short trip to Munich. will do some live-blogging from there, when things work out. one thing that already isn't working out, though, is the weather: it was blue sunny sky for days - just until yesterday. now skies switched.

it's a 2,5-hour drive when traffic is okay. i just put an audio-book in my bag, will see how that works (German author: „Von allem Anfang an“ by Christoph Hein). will see how that feels, to drive and listen

one of the things i hope to see, inspired by Rose Hunter's Judd tumblr: Judd's boxes in the New Pinakothek. they have a permanent Donald Judd room, a photo is up in the Judd-Box-Tumblr already.

more notes, places & snaphots: to follow.

btw, the photo above is from a previous trip to Munich, that was in summer - with the Biergartens open and the weather almost too good to be true. so seen like that, in the global balance of things, the clouds today are fitting. well. or, at least they brought stone #17 of my river of stones.

When 2 Things Connect (or: An Aotearoa Affair)

2012-01-18T13:42:00.001+01:00

so much happening in the last days: the launch of the Lost in Translation edition, and beyond it, a larger, new project that leads to the other side of the world and back: An Aotearoa Affair. i started to write this blog entry a couple of times, but always felt i got the wrong start. or rather: i didn't have the start. so here's a walk through time, to connect the happenings of these days:

It was in summer 2010, after a family dinner with relatives from the Rhein region, just when everyone was starting to say their goodbyes, that my aunt invited me to stay at her place: "If you ever are in the Frankfurt region, make sure to let me know. We have a free room, it's waiting." It was right there that an idea clicked into place: Frankfurt. Home of the book fair. And this invite, of a room waiting.

So I went there in October. To meet up with my aunt, and to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair, with all the different regional halls full of books in different languages. And with all those different moods: the futuristic Galeria with its glass roof. And on the other side, in the centre: the Lesezelt - "Reading tent".

The guest of honour in 2010 was Argentina. In a special pavillon, the country presented itself in a labyrinth-like architecture that invited the visitor to explore both the history and the literature of Argentina.

Of course, there isn't enough time to see it all. It's like an ocean of books, like worlds inside worlds. The impossibility of the task can leave you feeling despair. And on the other side, the vastness of those worlds inside worlds brings a lightness.

And it was there, in Frankfurt, that another element connected: just some days before visiting Frankfurt, a friend had sent an invite to join a blog carnival about trees. I hadn’t known about blog carnivals before that, and instantly was amazed by the concept: a publication that keeps changing its host and its shape with each edition. And at the same time, there is a specific continuity to a carnival, a base theme, a mood. I especially liked the idea that it has elements of an online-magazine, but works de-central: instead of gathering the contributions in one spot, a carnival branches out into the web.

That's how the idea for the language/place carnival surfaced: in some ways, a continuation of visiting the book fair, of walking through floors of books, through halls sorted by continents.

Back home from the book fair, I put up an invite page and sent out mails. The first edition of the language/place carnival went online November 13: "a joined blog cyber journey featuring international perspectives on language and place."

Since then, the carnival keeps moving through themes and places: from Slovenia to the USA to Hong Kong to London, encompassing themes as contrasting as The Poetry of Place and Food! , from Another Self to The Heart and Soul of the Cultural Landscape. On Sunday, the latest edition went online: Edition #13: "Lost in Translation".

The edition is all about language and how humorous or just plain hard it is to understand when it's foreign. "Lost in Translation" is the first multiple-view edition which invites to get lost in different ways. I have a piece in the carnival, too, which is from a journey into a country far away: India: "Three Cups of Chai"

Which leads back to the theme of journeys: my first world trip alone wasn't to Asia, but to a country that almost is on the other side of the world, seen from Germany: to New Zealand. It's a journey I came to remember more in the last month, as Michelle Elvy - who organised the 52/250 Year of Flash forum - is living there. And every now and then, when we mail, my thoughts wonder back to that trip, to Auckland, to the Marlboro Sounds, to places i have forgotten the name of.

During a mail dialogue in December we realized that New Zealand will be guest of honour at the big book fair in Germany in October. Which sparked an idea that derives both from the Flash forum, and the language/place carnival: to create a virtual blog fest for writers and readers from Germany or New Zealand, or with some connection to it. A virtual space that invites readers and writers and bloggers to connect across those hemispheres. And now, just some weeks later, this idea launched as a website. Below, a screenshot and the introduction:

Frankfurt Bookfair 2012: An Aotearoa Affair - A Blog Fest is a literary web initiative in anticipation of the Frankfurt Bookfair in October, where New Zealand is the Guest of Honour.
The website just launched with an invite to join: "In these pages we’re highlighting Kiwi and German writers in 2012 and creating a space for interested readers and bloggers to connect and share related posts."

The first entry highlight went live already, too: a poem by poet and author Tim Jones that also could be part of the "Lost in Translation" edition: The Translator

And the next highlights are in the making. It's a thing that keeps amazing me: the vastness of the world, and the way the internet allows connections beyond our usual horizons.

So much for now. I will be packing bags this afternoon, and get some things wrapped up - tomorrow and friday I will be in Munich, for some real world travel time. Ah, life.

links:
- photos + notes from the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010 visit
- language/place blog carnival

angle of light

2012-01-14T10:17:00.000+01:00

the new photofriday theme is cloudy. this is almost a theme made for me and my sky series, i thought first. but then i felt: maybe i should look for a different “cloudy” image. and now found this one, from a bay walk on Lanzarote on an overcast day. for some moments, the sun shone through the clouds, creating an angle of light that reflected in the waves.

Anar (global reading challenge #2)

2012-01-13T17:10:00.006+01:00

After starting the global reading challenge last week, the memory of some older books in the second row of my bookshelf surfaced. They are from Unionsverlag - a german publisher with a focus on books from different and “uncommon” countries. One of the books is from Azerbaijan, from the author Anar. The German book title is "Der sechste Stock eines fünfstöckigen Hauses" ("The sixth storey of a five-storey house"). The original title is: "Bes Mertebeli Evin Altinic Mertebesi". The book was first published in 1982, the German version followed 1989. I googled, but there doesn't seem to be an English version of it.

The book is really good, well-written and capturing. It gives a feeling of life in Azerbaijan, and the changing state of society by telling a love story, only that it’s not a happy story: man meets woman, but man’s family already has wedding plans arranged, and the woman he meets is "modern", as in: has her own take on life. So his family opposes her, and starts to undermine their relationship to make him come back home and follow their arranged plans.

Reading this also made me think of a quote from Nelson Mandela about his biographie, here the historic note: “He and his cousin Justice ran away to Johannesburg to avoid arranged marriages and for a short period he worked as a min policeman." (http://www.nelsonmandela/ )
In the quote i heard, he said: “If I had stayed, my life would have been a very different one, I would have been one of those round-bellied chiefs with a lot of cattle.”

Parallel to reading the book i looked up the country on a map and read a bit about it in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan). The photo above again is from the older book of maps. Azerbaijan is in the lower left corner, I marked it with an arrow. The photo on the top is the Moscow seen from the sky - which fits, as an essential chapter of the book is set in Moscow.

After listing the links below, i realized that arranged marriage is also a theme that is part of the Tiger's Wife - who was married to a poet who was in love with her sister. Nothing but pain came from the marriage, for both. Looking at it now, it's interesting that both books approach the theme from the view of the male partner, while features in magazines and TV usually pick up the woman's view, at least from what I saw and read.

And another afterthought: the memory of a conversation in India, with a shopkeeper who was curious for life in Germany. Which lead to a dialogue about marriage, "Yes, it's true that in Germany, you can go and look for your partners yourself," I explained, and then asked how it works when parents arrange the marriage. He answered: "It works the other way round: first you marry, then you fall in love." Then he paused, and added: "And you better fall in love, otherwise you will have a very sad life."

Reading Challenge Notes
I am glad I came across this reading challenge. Here the previous notes that relate to it:
- Global Reading Challenge
- book 1: The Tigers's Wife (former Yugoslavia)
- virtual bookshelf

blue stone water boxes

2012-01-12T17:04:00.001+01:00

some small big moments from January:

Blue Fifth Review switched their header image for 2012 - and included an abstract photo variation of my "Source Code" image. it's online here, together with their Poetry Special: Blue Fith Review: Blue Five Notebook Series

the River of Stones project reached day 12 today - here is my collection of "stones"/moments so far, today is pink: p art ici patio n

not only is it a time of stones, it's also a time of Tumblrs. Rose Hunter started a Judd Box Tumblr, which also includes a quote that i found in a box. And Karyn Eisler started a Spas Baths Hot Springs Tumblr - it brought me back to a Roman moment from a while ago, which i tumblr-submitted. it's online now: Limes Therme

as different as the 4 moments are, all of them are about the beauty of small everyday moments, and basic structures and shapes, things we've seen thousands of times before: a circle, a box, a petal, water.. things that easily might be missed.

The Tiger's Wife (global reading challenge #1)

2012-01-10T17:47:00.005+01:00

The Tiger’s Wife is a complex read. It's set in former Yugoslavia, a country I visited years ago, on a summer trip. I still remember how unreal it felt when war started there some years later, and refugees arrived here in Germany - while young man who had family there went to join whichever side their family belonged to.

The book avoids the direct taking of sides by using fictional names for the places. To encompass the different "worlds" (before the war, during the war, after the war), the narrative crosses and connects different timelines. In addition to the timelines, the story itself changes from present narrative, to connected family stories of the past, to fairy-tale-like parts, and then back - it's a carpet of story altogether. Not all connects, some edges of the stories remain broken, missed, unsolved – and reading it I thought, that’s what war does. Making stories unwhole. Leaving open edges. Refusing the ending answers, the conclusion, the neat roundup.

Reading challenge + political/geographical notes:
The book was a chance find: I came across this book in the most unlikely of places: in Spain, on a beach supermarket shelf. Unsure if to by it, i looked for an online review - that's how i came across a book blog from the UK (savidge reads), which i recently revisited. Following a link from there, i arrived at a “global reading challenge”. The task: to expand ones reading boundaries by reading a novel from each continent in 2012. I blogged about it below, with my continental booklist of 2011: books by continents. The Tiger's Wife now is my first official reading challenge book.

And following the theme of borders and boundaries: the map above is from my old school book. In it, Yugoslavia is still 1 counry: "Jugoslawien", just like Czechosolovakia ("Tscheslowakai), and like Russia. While Germany is still 2 countries in relating blue colors: "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" and "DDR". Makes you realize how things changed in the last 30 years. And how lucky any country is that makes it through a split or a reunion without war.

09.01

2012-01-10T10:27:00.000+01:00

scattered in the sky this morning:
a handful of blue

(more: sky diary)

mooncandle, autofocus & fuckyeahxy

2012-01-09T16:34:00.000+01:00

it's day 9 of january. and as january is the month of the river of stones, it's also stone #9 today. a stone is a note on a detail of the day, noticed by paying attention, and written down. today's stone is inspired by the full moon and a morning moment: "mooncandle".

the collection of all stones i gathered / noticed so far is up in the blog i started for another challenge, and that is now also home of stones: p art ici patio n.
which also comes with a new blog layout that creates image collages. the template is called autofocus, almost in humorous contrast of the idea of stones.

it's one of the things i consciously try for these days: newness. trying something else, or trying another way of doing something. looking at things from a different place. point of view, it makes such a difference. change the layout of something, and other elements move into focus. or take yesterday: looking at my bookshelf from another, new category: books by continents. which brought a book into focus that i almost had forgotten about - a book from Azerbaijan. a country that i need to spellcheck, and mapcheck. i think i never read a book from there before.

and another new thing: fuckyeahtumblrs. obviously there are hundreds and thousand of them out there. hadn't known about that until Rose mailed about it while cruising blogs and boxes for her boxy new Judd Box Tumblr Blog. which then also lead to this link: http://fuckyeahstreetlights.tumblr.com/

and to the bluebox of yesterday.

now it's raining. (she said, in a shift to the world beyond the other window, and checked if there is a fuckyeahnewness tumblr. well. nope.)

books by continents (global reading challenge)

2012-01-08T08:38:00.013+01:00

in September, after registering with Goodreads, i arrived at a profile question on the kind of books that i like - which made me inspect my bookshelves from that angle, lay out a collage (photo above) and blog about it: what kind of books do you like to read?

now i arrived at another way to categorize books, through a blog-based reading challenge that focuses not on genre or topic, but on the continent the book is coming from:

The Global Reading Challenge
"The Global Reading Challenge challenges you to expand your reading boundaries, go where you haven't been before, move a little outside your comfort zone."
- The Easy Challenge: Read one novel from each continent in the course of 2012
- The Medium Challenge: Read two novels from each continent in the course of 2012
- The Expert Challenge: Read three novels from each continent in the course of 2012

The continents:
- Africa
- Asia
- Australasia/Oceania
- Europe
- North America
- South America (please include Central America where it is most convenient for you)
- The Seventh Continent (here you can either choose Antarctica or your own ´seventh´ setting, eg the sea, the space, a supernatural/paranormal world, history, the future – you name it).
From your own continent: try to find a country, state or author that is new to you.

Here's the link to the challenge: 2012 Global Reading Challenge

There's also been a global reading challenge 2011 and a global reading challenge 2010, both with lists of books for each continent.

Continents
The whole thing made me look for a world map by continents. it's a topic many books were written about, and you could probably create an own reading challenge about it. here's a summary: wiki/Continent. below, an image with the various ways to distinguish continents:

My own continental bookshelf 2011
Of course, i got curious for my own reading seen from this continental aspect. So i revisited the books i read in 2011 - all read during a time i didn't know about the challenge. Here's the continents i covered in 2011, with a focus on books that are about place. The links lead to the relating book posts in this blog, or in the blueprint book blog:

Africa: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (about Nigeria)
Asia: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (a Japanese zen priest)
Asia: When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (about Israel)
Asia: Walking the Tiger's Path by Paul M. Kendel (about Iraq)
Europe: A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton (Heathrow diary)
Europe: Kleine Freuden by Hermann Hesse (with journey notes, revisited)
Europe: Netzkarte by Sten Nadolny (German train trip)
Europe: Schwaben, Schwafler, Ehrenmänner by Joe Bauer (about Stuttgart/Germany)
Europe. Dossier by Imre Kertész (about Hungary)
Europe: Deutschland, eine Reise by Wolfgang Büscher (along-the-border trip)
Europe: Atemschaukel ("Everything") by Herta Müller (about Romania)
North America: Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan (about the USA)
North America: and see what happens by Ursula Vaira (3 Canadian journeys)
North America: turn left at the trojan horse by Brad Herzog (US road trip)
North America: A Foal Poem by Rose Hunter (Mexico)
North America: The Peppermint Bottle by Sherry O'Keefe (USA/Montana)
North America: Curving the Line/Curvando la linea by Carmen Lenero (Mexico)
Central America: Alle träumten von Cuba by Miguel Barnet (about Cuba)
South America: Patagonian Road by Kate (journal of a journey)

also, there were mixed continent reads:
global: Common Boundary / Stories of Immigration (revisited)
global: you are here - the journal of creative geography
global: walking journey by Hamish Fulton (international art walking, revisited)

Paris at day's end

2012-01-07T16:08:00.002+01:00

the first photo friday challenge of the new year is: "Day's End". as i am reading a book with reflections on Paris, it was the Paris photo file i opened first, remembering the bus ride i took at the end of my first day there: i wasn't sure of the route the bus would take, all i needed to know was that it would stop at Gare Saint-Lazare, where my hotel was.

the bus arrived, i climbed in - and watched Paris flow by. the bus first drove along the Seine. then it took a turn to the right, drove across a bridge - and approached a pyramid-shape building: the Louvre, at day's end, bathed in light, surreal and real at the same time, like the whole city at that hour, which felt like one endless impressionist painting.

PS:
more moments from this trip are up in Paris dans le Calme.
and more about the book, soon :)

"Sitting With" the statues in the British Museum (qarrtsiluni Worship issue)

2012-01-06T12:00:00.001+01:00

in August, qarrtsiluni had a call up for their "Worshop" issue - a theme that made me ponder, then skip it, just to return to it again, ponder on it some more, and come up with a submission of a photo i took a while ago, of 2 people and 3 statues. it is online now: "Sitting With".

above, the image that i took right before "Sitting With", it also hints at the place: it's not a temple, but the Asian section of the British Museum. a museum that, seen from another angle, is a temple itself: a temple of knowledge, discovery and memory. here's another photo i took there, that's the library section:

when i saw the 2 people in the "Sitting With" picture, i wondered what exactly they are doing there - praying, resting, reading? and looked over their shoulder. to find: they were sitting with the statues in front of them to draw them.

it's exciting to see this photo go online now, just some days after i came across the theme in of worship and paying attention / sitting with in a quote by David Foster Wallace (more here: T-Truth). and another moment from the British Museum, here: London - around the world in a day.

2nd hand book-joy from Cyprus, Argentina & New Zealand

2012-01-06T08:19:00.001+01:00

second hand book joy - i found and ordered 3 books in December, they all were written in different countries, and arrived here now after travelling the world:

"Ledra Street" by Nora Nadjarian, Cyprus - arrived via Berliner Büchertisch, Germany
"Possessed by Shadows" by Donigan Merritt, Argentina - arrived via Chicago, Illinois, USA
"Some Other Country" - New Zealand's Best Short Stories - arrived via Houston, Texas, USA

looking very forward to read the books, especially as i know both Nora (blog) and Donigan (blog) from blogging and mailing.

Three Cups of Chai (Varanasi, India)

2012-01-05T06:41:00.005+01:00

this post belongs to edition #13 of the language/place blog carnival - the feature theme is: "Lost in Translation", it's online now at I Must Be Off!

Varanasi, India
THREE CUPS OF CHAI

Some warned me that it would be terribly dirty, especially when it rains, with all the cowpats. Others explained that it is a magic place, and I just have to go there. My guidebook described it as the holy city at the Ganges River. Plus there was a night train, leaving Agra in the evening, to arrive in Varanasi in the morning. Thus, I said good bye to the Taj Mahal, packed my bags once more, and took a rickshaw to the train station, to wake up to a new place some hours and some hundred miles later.

It’s quite hectic for a holy city, was one of the first things I thought when I arrived there. Later I learned that Varanasi is only hectic from the outside. Once you made your way to the inner city, and found yourself a room, the place changes. Behind all those streets, beyond all those motion, there is – the reflection of water. And beyond that, nothingness. No bridges lead across the water. No buildings wait on the other side. It’s a free space, right next to the crowdedness.

At the river Ganges I sat, and watched the water float by. In my hands, a cup of chai, bought from a Sadu, a holy man. It became one of my favourite places, this river side café that consisted of nothing but the steps that had always been there, the teapot of the Sadu, and some glass cups for the tea. It was also the place where I met other travellers - like Mary and Jean, who were coming from Nepal and heading towards Thailand, where I'd been a year before. Sitting there, we exchanged travel tales and sipped tea.

Came the day the Sadu ran out of tea: “Three cups”, we said, like so often before. The Sadu nodded. Then he took his teapot, and walked down the steps. Towards the Ganges. The holy river. Also known as one of the dirtiest rivers of the world. When he reached the water, the Sadu kneeled down. And filled the tea pot with Ganges water. Then he walked up the stairs again, to prepare the tea. When he saw our startled looks, he lifted the teapot, and turned to us. With a gesture of reassurance, he pointed at the teapot. "Holy tea," he explained, enjoying our embarrassment in the compassionate way of a true Sadu: delighted by the experience his teapot held for us.

this is a true story. it's also true that all of us felt just fine after drinking the ganges tea.
another moment from there, in an image-text-installation: sometimes in Varanasi.
more "teacups" from India are included in Masala Moments, my travel novel from India.

previous contributions to the language/place carnival ("Food Slurs", "The Art of it", "Home, the road, and the global village"..) can be found at: life as a journey of language and place

in search of antimaterie and greening winds: sundust

2012-01-03T17:15:00.004+01:00

a quartet of news from yesterday and today:

Referential Magazine started their new year with a poem by Joshua Gray which refers to my artwork Antimaterie (which itself was inspired by the poem "One Layer Deeper" by Helen Losse). as the image now has more than one referral now, it has been moved to an own Referential Antimaterie page.

Sweet oversesas arrival in the mail: a christmas card from California with a poem included: "in search of water". thank you, Marcia!

And more new year poetry: the Leaf Press co-op poem 2012 is online, and includes a photo i took in December during the day of heavy snowfall: Lines Drawn from Greening Winds

Also, it's day 3 of the river of stones - which, seen from a literal/elementary point of view, perfectly connects to the search of water, even though my third stone is of the blue-sky-dusty kind:

the first day of blue sky
after an overcast week:
the dust on the windows
lights up in dots and comets.

conneced to the stones: today i found this description of the stone-exercise which wraps a lot of it up in 2 lines: "It’s a small and magical practice. Stop. Look. Here you are. Right here. Right now. What do you see? Pay attention. Write it down." (- Jean Morris)

the lines also made me think of photography. this moment of holding in, of trying to catch what we just saw, what touched us for some reason.

2012, T-Truth, water, stone

2012-01-01T20:07:00.003+01:00

there it is. 2012. still feels strange to type it: 2012. 2012.

and with 2012, the river of stones is now on, this joined exercise of paying attention to the everyday. the first entry came easy, right in the morning, before sunrise: Neujahr.

after sunrise i revisited an essay i read last year for new year. back then, i folded into the bookshelf, to return to: the T-shaped, thought-provoking commencement speach of David Foster Wallace: This is Water. it included the lines below that connect to the stones idea and on another returning theme of these days: worship.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
here's the full essay online: This is Water.

--
PS: the worship connection? it's the current qarrtsiluni theme issue, which, when announced, made me ponder and skip and then get back to it, and where i now have a contribution upcoming. here's the issue link: Worship.

Best of 2011 + everyday a different sky

2011-12-31T08:22:00.001+01:00

this time of transit from one year to the next.

and the tasks coming with it. photo friday is asking for "Best of 2011". which image to pick? i scrolled through files, and then found it. not 1 image, but 1 series: the sky diary photos i started to take at some point in time. most of them are from the same window.

& another good task: the twitterstream that asks to put #2011in4words. no answer to that yet.

tomorrow to start: the river of stones. yesterday i had the brainwave to revive my 100days blog for it. blogging each stone will probably make the participation in the river a bit more focused and dedicated. the blog's name and link: p art ici patio n

it holds the first stone now already, connected to the sky images:

everyday the same sky
everyday a different sky

Happy Ending of 2011 + Happy New Year 2012!

Snowman haiku + the tangled fascination of life

2011-12-30T12:31:00.002+01:00

it's a windy grey sky day today. all the snow that fell last week is gone - but the whiteness of it returned today, in the lines i wrote while the snow was falling. lines that now are transformed into an haiga by artist Kuniharu Shimizu. it's online here, with a wind note: Snowman haiku 11

i'm happy and excited to be part of this snowman series. such a fascinating format, and so many takes on the theme already. for more about the series, here's an introduction.

my snow lines were also inspired by the upcoming river of stones, which will start on the first of January and is about paying attention to the everyday moments, and putting one of them into words each day for a month (more on it, here). there already is a twitterstream, and there also will be a blogroll - following the link in the note to it, i arrived at these lines:

“What a tangled fascination, this life. What luck there is in the world, and what horror.
The stories we are telling. The food we are putting in our mouths. The weather, how large it feels. How we go on, about our days, remaining calm. The moon can sweep us off our feet at any moment. The air can change. We can get dropped. At any moment.
Everything matters. Movement, especially, is key.“ (link)

yes, i thought. movement.
falling, rolling, being -
snow, wind, stone.

re/solutions

2011-12-29T18:32:00.002+01:00

today i made time for sorting and thinking forward, and also for revisiting previous end-of year notes. that's how i came across these lines and links from 2007 again:

new year: i came across the first resolutions, in NoTellMotel editor Reb Livingston's blog. this is what she wrote:

“Getting a jump start on new year resolutions -- hence I haven't been blogging.

1. Focus and work harder on outstanding projects (working on Shafer's book these past few days and I responded to all outstanding e-mail in my general mail folder, probably the first time all year).

2. Take better care of my health. Well, I half-started that. Back on the treadmill. Haven't improved the diet yet, there are still holiday chocolates to finish.

I try not to make unrealistic resolutions, mine are more in the vein of improvements. There was an AOL VP of Member Services (i.e. customer service) who was all about 1% improvements. The idea is we can always make a 1% improvement from what we're doing now and if we keep doing that, over time, wa-la, the noticeable difference.”

i liked that: not planning to take huge steps, but take 1% turns.

and another interesting page, about habits – i found this one when following a link in lonely planet to an essay of Shelley Stile, who works with people who face changes in their life.

here's a passage that sums the essay up in 2 paragraphs:

“Seek to develop new habits. If your life was run by bad habits then conversely it can be run by good habits you consciously choose. To develop a habit you simply must stick with for about three months and you are home safe. Just create the picture of what you want your behavior to look like and list ten habits that will get you to that picture of yourself.

It works the same with your life. Where would you like to be in ten years in terms of who and what you are and what you are doing? Think of ten habits that will get you to that Future Self and start today in adopting those guideposts. Work backwards from the future.”

Betwixt Humankind Realism

2011-12-28T14:40:00.005+01:00

it's the time of year again that makes me wish there was an extra-shelf appearing in the bookshelf, to make space for the books that wait to be read in the new year. also, it's the time of year that makes me wish letting go was easier. so here's an approach of saying good-bye to some books: revisit, and pick the one or other quote. and then, move on from bookshelf to other shelvesinneedofspace in this place...

for the start, a book that has the perfect title for such an undertaking:

Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism
(Conjunctions #52)

"Given the immensity of the challenge, let me suggest that we start immediately," I said. "There's no time like the present, right, Your Holiness?"
"No, Taktra Kunga, there's only a time like the present," my teacher corrected me. "The past is a tortoise-hair coat. The future is a clam-tooth necklace."
- James Morrow, Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva

"Human greed, corruption—indifference. Humankind has always known what the good life is—except it's fucking bor-ing." Woods spoke cheerily as if by rote. There was a curious—chilling—disjunction between the accusation of his words and the playful banter of his voice.
- Joyce Carol Oates, Uranus

airportree

2011-12-27T13:33:00.002+01:00

Flughafenweihnachtsbäume.
(airportchristmastrees)

PS: the German language actually works like that: to specify a noun, you can directly add another word, and thus create a new word. like, changing to rails: Bahnhofswärterhaus (literally: trainstationguardhouse).

new moon, new year of life, growth, and time ~

2011-12-24T07:41:00.004+01:00

it's new moon today. and also, the first day of the new year of my life. my horoscope greeted me today with the lines:

Happy birthday! Today the Sun returns to the position it was in when you were born. As would seem appropriate with this transit, today is a day of new beginnings, and the influences you feel today will affect the entire year to come. You are receiving a new impulse from the energy center within you, as symbolized by the Sun. Whatever you do or begin today will bear the stamp of your individuality more than anything else. This is the day to assert yourself anew.

which made me wish for an extra day. today is full of christmas and other themes already.
but beautiful, the thought of new beginnings. of new growth. it made me think of the lines from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.

I live my life in growing circles
that reach out across the world.

the lines then made me go and look for the tree image above, which still lingered in the November photo file, and i still remember the moment: standing at a red traffic light, seeing this view, searching for my camera, and hoping the traffic light would stay red until i took the photo. and it did.

so now: a new circle. which is overshadowed by the illness of a family member. which lead to a hospital date yesterday. entering the hospital, the first thing we saw was a christmas tree. and then, all those corridors. which brought the physical feeling: we are not alone in this. so many go through difficulty. so many ways our bodies (and souls) can run into trouble.

which made me feel: each birthday we reach really is reason to be thankful for: another year circle of our life reaching completion. and spotting those first grey hairs: a sign that we made it this far. back home, i browsed the archive pages of my own blog, by months. so many moments. then i thought: that is the real life celebration: finding and making space for beauty in the everydays of our life.

which then connected to a wish in a mail from a friend, Marcia Arrieta:

here is to the creative connections, the wish for good health, and always the hope for the good, the positive, and the fortitude

to understand and learn and grow from our challenges and experiences--

winter solstice & small stones

2011-12-22T11:05:00.004+01:00

today: solstice
today: rain, melting the new snow away
today: revisiting last year's december photos and finding this sky
today: sending out a december newsletter for blueprintreview. such a joy.

& in between all, this moment:

solstice, 7am.

turning out the light, the world outside takes shape in the window.

--
this moment, it now is the first in my "stone" notes -
in january, i will join the river of stones challenge again. the simple and difficult task: attentiveness to the small moments of our days. more about it, here. there already is a twitterstream of stones, here: #smallstone

snow. and snow. + some thoughts on life here in Europe with this walking ghost of a crisis.

2011-12-20T13:53:00.003+01:00

snow arrived. and then more snow joined.

in the street, a young BMW driver tried to make it up the slight slope anyway. after trying 3 times, he gave up, and asked an elder couple for advice. "Patience," they answered. "Remain here. And wait until the snow patrol clears the road again..."

that was half an hour ago. right now, there are 4 cars sitting there, waiting.

the thing is, this year all seems to come in heaps. there was no rain during October, then torrential rain in November. and no snow until now, apart from some single snow flakes (see flake photo from yesterday below). and today, it's snow without end.

the only thing that is continuing steadily since months is the troubled news - one Euro crisis after the other. yesterday, the European Central Bank warned that there's a risk of a systematic bank crisis, like in 2008. and each month, the amount of money needed to fix credit gaps and to avoid the worst rises. millions and billions here, then there. amounts that are impossible to imagine. where did all the money go? and how long will the money-patrol be able to keep this going? it's like a ghost - in the streets, life goes on as always. and no one really can imagine how it would look like: the worst. and what would it do to everyday life. and what is the answer to it could be.

(..and now i just looked for an earlier blog notes on it, with a title i can't remember.. now how to find that. there was the word "gap" in it, but blogger doesn't pick up on that. instead, i arrived at this recent note on the wealth of the world and the new German pirate party, and this one, ironically fitting in this winter, about Greece: Zombie Summer.)

first snow flakes

2011-12-19T13:31:00.002+01:00

today: the first snow flakes in the air. they didn't show in the first photo i took, so i tried this version with flash, which made them visible in the photo. now, just an hour later, the sky turned to overcast grey.

as for the next days: it looks like there won't be snow for christmas - the temperatures probably will even rise again a bit, while another sky date is approaching this thursday: solstice. "Wintersonnenwende" it is in German: "winter sun turn".

more sky photos, most of them taken from the same window: sky diary

in a window, on a road

2011-12-18T08:37:00.004+01:00

2 island photos, for the new photo friday theme "Meditative"

the first is a double window reflection. the photo is taken from inside through a window - the white wall and the palm tree are the real outside, and the yellow reflection is showing the view towards the sunset side of the sky, hence the color.

and the other is a simple road photo. LZ-1 stands for Lanzarote island road 1 - it leads up to the Northern end of the island, along the shore. a great road to just drive and reflect.

for more Lanzarote sights, try this tag: life as a journey with photo friday moments. the latest 3 entries are from the island: Depth Perception, Hervideros Birds (with another road included), and Nueva York.

more photo meditations:
some links to photo meditations from other photo friday contributors. more than 150 images are up already. i browsed some, and arrived at this beautiful spot of My Zen and at this Quiet Morning. clicking on, i arrived at something that either is also a window reflection, or a 2layer photo: Location Zug - Schweiz. clicking on from there, i arrived at a blog about Peru by the same photographer. South America, it seems to be a theme i keep coming across these days, just like the zen / meditation theme itself, like in the post below from Thursday: ...Zen Mind Radish Teachings. the Meditative theme directly connected to it.

Tiger Savidge Space + Zen Mind Radish Teachings (or: additional content)

2011-12-15T20:21:00.004+01:00

at Leipzig Book Fair this year, one of the continuing focus themes was: e-books, and the additional content the publisher is able to offer in this format. like with film dvds and the extras they include. only that this isn't really something that is super-new and extraordinary, not even for the good old printed books - that's what i thought last week, and this week again. as in our time, it's simple to get additional content for almost every book: just do a quick web-search. and then see what comes up - in my case, a web of links first, and an additional book next. here the stories and the links:

Tiger Savidge Space
last week, while in Spain, i came across Teá Obreth "The Tiger's Wife" in a beach supermarket shelf while looking for other things. i was drawn to the book, yet unsure - so i first checked the web for reviews. and found some interesting book blogs after reading a book review at Savidge Reads, a blog i hadn't known before. in addition to the review, the most current blog post on Savidge Reads was on book blogs, publishers and perceptions. interesting theme itself, but even more interesting are the book blogs links there and in the Guardian article and comments. here's a quick starter list - with each blog leading to more book blogs in the sidebar.

Savidge Reads
This Space (with some books from German authors)
Pechorin's Journal (focus on international fiction)
A Rat in the Book Pile

--
Zen Mind Radish Teachings

the second story is about a book i had picked for the island time: “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” – the classic zen book by Shunryu Suzuki. it was up at Amazon on a special offer of “buy 4 english paperbacks for 15$”. and the Zen book, it’s wonderful. here’s the wiki description:

"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is a book of teachings by the late Shunryu Suzuki, a compilation of talks given to his satellite Zen center in Los Altos, California. Published in 1970 by Weatherhill, the book is not academic. These are frank and direct transcriptions of Suzukis' talks recorded by his student Marian Derby. Trudy Dixon and Richard Baker—Baker was Suzuki's successor—edited the talks by choosing those most relevant, arranging them into chapters. According to some, it has become a spiritual classic, helping readers to steer clear from the trappings of intellectualism."

with this book, i ordered it by title and mini-description, and then first started to read the book itself. around halfway in, i got curious about the Zen center and the time and started to google - and arrived at a wonderful page that is brimmming with background information, interviews with students and friends, and even with large excerpts of another book. the page is Cuke.com - an archival site related to the life and Zen teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, hosted by David Chadwik. the site comes with a quote page, and from there i arrived at the interview page - which includes this note in the list:

Ed Brown, excerpts from Tomato Blessings, Radish Teachings. Extensive.

Extensive it is, indeed. this link, and the others. reading, and the web.

Christmas market, Stangenbrot + More Food

2011-12-13T19:12:00.003+01:00

the mediavel christmas market is on in my hometown - i went there this afternoon with my mum, for a visit, and a town walk. in the last years, a lot of the old buildings got restaurated, and the old wooden architecture is now showing in many places. so good. the building in the second photo is the old town hall. yes, strawberry-colored!

and the third photo: that is "Stangenbrot": "Stick Bread", it's sold at one of the mediavel stalls. if you look closely, you can see the old town hall reflected in the window. of course, they also sell Glühwein at the market, and sweets, and "Hanfbread" (which looks like Gryos), and Met - mediavel beer.

more food
for more food, check out the new edition language & place blog carnival is online - for this edition, poet & writer Linda Hofke prepared a large table full of food posts - true stories, receipts, flash fiction + poetry, in 25 entries from around the world, from Eating in Iceland with Beth Adams, to Meeting Mr. Ice Cream in Acapulco with Rose Hunter; and on to Memories of culinary life in France with Jean Morris and Personal Encounters with Mexican Chilis with Michelle Elvy, and many, many more food moments. i have a dish in it, too: an e-flection on multicultural mockings titled Food Slurs.

the whole menu is up at Edition #12 of the >language >place blog carnival.

on the way back home: Africa + the Strait of Gibraltar

2011-12-12T07:24:00.001+01:00

back home. the sky was kind yesterday: calm at home, without snow and above freezing. and during the flight, some great views, and i was lucky and had a seat a the "sight" side of the plane.

in the first photo, you can see the coast of Africa - that's Marocco, and the hills in the background belong to the Atlas mountains range. and below: the Strait of Gibraltar. the place where Africa ends, and Europe starts, where the Atlantic flows into the Mediterranean Sea. (here are more images, via google, including some maps).

language sidenote: in German, this place is called: "Straße von Gibraltar": Street of Gibraltar. as if it was a road.

flight & finalities

2011-12-10T23:07:00.000+01:00

It’s the evening of the last island days. I am packing things. Tomorrow will be the flight back home – and as always, a part of me wants to stay, and another part is looking forward to being at home.

The picture above is from the day of arrival: Lanzarote from above. The white spots are settlements. the hills that look like vulcanoes are indeed vulcanoes. One day, they will wake again. Like in El Hierro, another one of the Canary Islands. One of the off-shore vulcanoes there is active this year. Scientists say there even is the chance for a new island to be born.

On a note of smaller wings, there's a new entry up in the YB blog which opens with a butterfly-photo i took at home.
Now, off to finish packing, and reading the final chapter of the German roundtrip-border-journey book - which now moves towards Lake Constance, in November, with snow falling.

Depth Perception, Los Valles

2011-12-10T08:45:00.000+01:00

yesterday, before going for an island drive, i checked the new photo friday theme. it's an abstract one this time: Depth Perception. i looked for a fitting image during the drive, and found it in Los Valles.

today: the last of the island days.

island reads: Faraday's discovery of light, Büscher's journey around Germany + Teá Obreth's Orange Prize novel

2011-12-09T19:58:00.004+01:00

in Septemer, the Goodread's question "What Kind of Books Do You Like to Read?" made me go and explore my home bookshelf, and put together a book collage and a clip (here).

now, on the second to last day on the island, looking at the books i am reading here made me put together a mini-collage. interesting to see how each books actually relates to a previous book i read on another journey. it's one journey leading to another, one book leading to another.

there's Ralf Bönt's novel "Die Entdeckung des Lichts": it's the life story of chemist and phyisician Michael Faraday, who discovered electromagnetisicm, written in novel form, with many small notes on the time of Faraday's life, from Napoleon's Battle in Leipzig (which i visited in March), to the Cholera in London, and to Darwin's journey around the world. i hadn't thought of that when picking the book, and didn't even know about the Darwin connection - but the last time i've been here, i read a non-fiction book about Darwin's journey, written by a science writer who followed the itienary of said journey himself: Wolfgang Neffe, that was.

the second one, "Deutschland - Eine Reise", "Germany - a journey": that's the account of Wolfgang Büscher on his roundabouttrip along the border of Germany in 3 months, taking trains, buses and ships, and walking. in his previous book, Büscher walked from Berlin to Moscow. i just looked, i didn't blog about it, but i think i read it in France.

and the third: is a surprise that waited in the supermarket shelf here at the bay, between the usual packs of romance and crime: this year's Orange Prize winner: Teá Obreth "The Tiger's Wife". i read several of the previous winner books, the last one was "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett, which i read in Mallorca (link), and which indirectly brought me to this quote on life and journeys:

The goal is to experience it [life] and see how it changes. I certainly have resolved some things with myself, but it's important that it's a journey, and that you keep yourself open to how things change and grow as you go through life. - Julie Powell.

right now, i am still reading the Germany journey book. but i googled the Tiger's Wife already, and arrived at the blog of a book blogger who read almost all books on the Orange longlist, here's his note on it: SavidgeReads/Orange Prize. and here i was, thinking i read quite a lot of books. oh well :)

Caleta de Famara (or: 2 sides)

2011-12-08T19:27:00.000+01:00

same place, same time, 2 sides:
at Caleta de Famara
(a bay that constantly comes with a red flag)

& news from home:
we missed the first snowrain of this winter.

to be arrieta & feliz upclose

2011-12-07T18:43:00.001+01:00

today: driving down to Punta de Mujeres, following the bay road, and arriving in a place called Arrieta - which of course made me think of Marcia Arrieta, and the literary journal she edits: indefinite space.

this is for you, Marcia :)

the second image is a view of the bay road. and the third - a closeu-up of the Canary Christmas Tree, which today stood in full sunshine. (see some posts below for the first image, here.

PS: and yes, i got the sign wrong. it actually says: "de arrieta". but i read "be arrieta" first.

Patagonian Road and other crossings

2011-12-06T23:24:00.002+01:00

two more moments from today: a street corner in Haira, and driving down the road from a place called Ye to said Haira.

also, i found a perfect road read, or island read: Patagonian Road, a blog by Kate, who travelled from Guatemala to Patagonia in 2011, making the trip mostly overland by bus. i came across the link through Donnigan Merritt, a citizen of Buenos Aires - who is friends with Rose Hunter, Mexico, to follow the chain to its start.

back to Patagonia now, and lines that bring back my own memories of long bus rides through foreign countries. so now, while i drive down the roads here in Lanzarote, all those places start to cross and entwine while the country slides past: India, South America, Haria..

These days, I walk the streets in a nostalgic haze. Sometimes I am laughing, sometimes I am smiling, sometimes I am crying. Tomorrow I leave this apartment, this massive city, to take a bus through the night until I reach Cordoba, one of Argentina’s cultural gems. Part of me knows that I’ll get on that bus and it will make me feel alive, the wheels on the pavement in the night and the stars all around us as we cross the Pampas. Now, I love the rhythm of buses. I can ride them for hours or even days. I can sleep on them; I can read on them. No one bothers you here if you’re weeping, or eating, or drinking wine alone. They just let you be, stare out their window until the bus rolls into the city you’re trying to reach. The ayudantes help me with my backpack and call me mi amor. The country slides past.

sky & wall

2011-12-06T18:53:00.000+01:00

und hinter der wand?
wer weiß.

(and beyond the wall? who knows.)

Canary Christmas Tree

2011-12-05T19:30:00.010+01:00

Note: this is a blog post from Lanzarote island, which belongs to the Canary islands - politcally, this group of islands belong to Spain, but geographically, their closest neighbour is the West Sahara, about 100 miles away.

Lanzarote island isn't a place of many trees - the ones that grow are mainly palm trees, many of them single trees, looking like natural landmarks in the vast, empty lava landscape.

There also are some olive trees growing in a few places, and in some frontyards, you can see Dracaena trees - which are called "Drachenbaum" in German: "Dragon Tree". But fir trees? No chance. So the Christmas decoration here mainly consists of stars, angels and assorted blinking figures which are hung across streets or added to lamp posts. But in some places, people get creative and shape their own christmas tree. Like this one:

For a larger version of the image, click here.

And for another southern version of a christmas tree, try this link from Rose Hunter, Mexico: Christmas Tree.

Feliz Navidad - Happy Christmas!

---
More trees + more moments from Lanzarote

for more tree moments from around the world, visit Treeblogging - a forest of arboreal links, which also features this post
and for more moments from Lanzarote, try this tag: notes + photos from Lanzarote

attempts to capture the now

2011-12-05T09:10:00.005+01:00

the second monday on the island. after yesterday's rainy morning, the sun is there for sunrise today. and with it, a photographer who tries to capture it, together with a friend/assistant who comes running with a bit of missing equipment, for the moment won't wait.

those attempts of us, to capture the vastness of now.

and this question, lingering here, on the edges of the resorts, in the sand: what defines a life well lived?

(the island were this took place is Lanzarote. more moments from there, in inversed order, thus starting at the end and moving towards the beginning, here: island moments)

today: in Florida

2011-12-04T16:43:00.000+01:00

today: bein in Florida, for some minutes. Florida, Lanzarote, that is.

island animals + das Rauschen

2011-12-04T13:29:00.000+01:00

island time is different. maybe it's the constant rhythm of the waves, like a natural breath that surrounds the ground, fills the air with a low, permanent hum. the song of the sea. and all that is invisible, there, beyond the water surface.

that's what i thought about when i stopped in Orsola, the norhtern tip of this island, to take this photo of a wall / ocean mural - which also connects to the new issue of YB: animals. here's a stanza from one of the poems (Badgley) that i noted down to take along:

I might head down through the canyon
past Batopilas, look for a way
over the ridgeline. A map? No roads
there, just me and the elements.

and another animal moment: the book i finished reading today, "Überm Rauschen" - "Above the river's murmur".

it's set in a small town next to a stream in the Eiffel region of Germany, and didn't really speak to me, here, after the road books. but of all places abroad, it inclued: Montana again, personalized in Paul and Norman Maclean, the fly fishers, who - in the story - arrive there as US soldiers in a helicopter, to go fishing. truth or tale? who knows, in a fiction book that also includes the line: "Köder: Alles ist Täuschung, nichts ist wahr. - Aber vielleicht täuscht der Fisch auch uns."

which, with the help of babelfish, translates into: "Seal: Everything is deception, nothing is true. However perhaps - the fish deceives us, too."

Hervideros birds, panorama drive, and some rain

2011-12-03T17:59:00.002+01:00

some moments from today - which turned into a day of changing skies here, starting with rain, and then continuing with sun, clouds, sun, clouds, rain, sun...

the first photo is my contribution to photo friday's theme "Graceful". the second picture shows were the birds were surfing the sky: at the cliffs of Los Hervideros, where lava met the ocean in the 18th century, during the last vulcanoe eruption here. and the third one: is from this morning. which fits the current sky. rain again, for some minutes.

2 horizons

2011-12-02T20:12:00.000+01:00

2 horizons from here. what i so enjoy about this island is that it is rugged and soft, windy and sheltered, endless and insular. it's like multiple islands wrapped into one.

Berlin, Wolf, black, white, here, there.

2011-12-01T20:06:00.004+01:00

while i am here on an island .. the new Blue Five Notebook went live. the theme of it: Black/White. i sent some images to Michelle Elvy and Sam Rasnake, the wonderful editors of the notebook series a while ago, and one now turned into the cover: a picture of the genocide memorial in Berlin. it's a memorial of a different kind: a field of stones, open to walk through, even to sit on them, to get lost, to contemplate. the outer stones are small, so you keep the view at first. then it turns into a labyrinth, cutting the view, leaving you there in a world that turned huge and solid, with no visible exit.

Berlin, it is a place that seemed far away from here until this morning, but now connect to another moment of this week that isn't about being on an island, but about the past, and the world: Christa Wolf died. i read about it in the news this morning, and what followed during the days were the memories of her books - her diary, her novel on Tschernobyl, and the essay she wrote earlier this year in the Zeit, at age 82, her mind still bright and clear. she's seen so many sides of Germany - born in 1929, she witnessed the second world war, and lived in East Germany - and always spoke her own mind.

i just looked for the blog note on the Zeit essay, here's a quote:

-----------------
the dilemma of our society
the national "Zeit" (Time") newspaper celebrated its 65th anniversary with a "best of" journal, with essays from authors. included: Christa Wolf - probably one of the most influential and known writers from the former East Germany. she was born in 1929. in 1965, she protested against the censorship of writers at the national literary meeting - and wrote about that moment in 2009. Wolf also wrote a novel after Tschernobyl, "Störfall" - and now was interviewed about Fukushima. Unafraid of challenging statements, she stated a thought that made me keep the page:
"Je bequemer wir leben, auch durch die massenhafte Herstellung zum Teil überflüssiger Industriewaren, desto näher kommen wir einer Zerstörung unserer Welt. Wir müssen das Dilemma unserer Gesellschaft endlich diskutieren." -
"The more comfortable we live, also based on the mass production of partly unneeded industrial goods, the closer we move towards the destruction of our world. We finally need to discuss the dilemma of our society." - blog note
----------

Christa Wolf also lived in Berlin for a while.
i just looked for the original image of the title above:

here, i am still reading the Trojan road trip book. which leads both back to Odysseus and the Greek gods (jhere's a line from the Greek mythology, about the arrival of Gods: "First came Chaos"). parallel to that, it leads through North America: Oregon, Montana (hi, Sherry!), North Dakota. all those places. reading and thinking about them while on an island makes both stand out more: the here, the there. especially as this island used to be a transit place, a place for ships to stop on the way into the new world, beyond the Atlantic. it still is, in a painful way: it's a place Africans try to reach as passway to Europe. and at the same time, it's a holiday island. 2 sides, again.

PS: and an extra link - while looking for the Wolf essay i realized that she also is part of the mail-dialogue that i put up again for the language/place carnival. the dialogue also includes own reflections on black and white.

roads, turns, reads

2011-11-30T20:16:00.003+01:00

"This feels like driving through Arizona," i noted today. Not that i've ever been there. But it's how i imagine it: a huge empty landscape of sunburned fields. Of course, it's not Arizona but Lanzarote: drive for another 40 miles, and you are at the northern end of the island.

the drive along those roads also connects to the books i am reading - the first is “Netzticket” by Sten Nadolny. "a road movie on rails," announces the backcover: the story of a journey without itienary, based on buying a train ticket that is valid for the whole of Germany, for one month. the muliple options of travel bring multiple questions - and also, an openness to explore:
"Vielleicht hätte ich schon umsteigen sollen. Es taucht die Frage auf: was mache ich dann um diese Zeit in diesem Ort? Aber das ist es gerade, was ich wissen will. Erst wenn man einmal ohne jedes Ziel an einem Ort war, dann weiß man, was daraus werden kann."
"Maybe I should have changed trains already. The question arises: what will I do at this place at that time? But that's exactly what I want to know. Only if you have been to a place without aim, you will know how it will be."

And today I started to read “Turn left at the Trojan Horse” by Brad Herzog, which is “a would-be hero’s American odyssey”, with a Kerouac quote on page 9, which comes in 1 paragraph with a Socrates quote:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“The road is life.”
To which Herzog concludes as he starts his drive: “Some combustible combination of the two notions is the spark of my mission.”

more roads to come, tomorrow.

bay morning, two sides

2011-11-29T20:15:00.000+01:00

this morning, i went for a beach walk around sunrise time. walking, i thought of the 2 sides of things: what appears as sunrise is in fact the world tuning while the sun remains in its place.

another play with perspective: the same place, the same time, 2 photos of opposite directions:

today: lava beach + vulcanoe avenue

2011-11-28T20:15:00.000+01:00

Lanzarote is a vulcanoe island. so today was very much about vulcanoes: a drive to a lava beach, and then onwards through the Timanfaya National Park, which is all about the "montanas fuego": the fire mountains. whích also inspired the name for the main road in the town beyond Timanfaya: Avenida de los Volcanes.
and a deja-vue moment: the cactus in the second photo - i just had to stop there and take a photo of the larger view. a closeup is online in the BluePrintReview (dis)comfort zone issue: Agave.

on the way to Lanzarote: the Pyrenees

2011-11-27T19:27:00.001+01:00

arrived. so good to be here again. the flight already was a treat: some clouds over France, but then the view cleared, just in time for flying acress the Pyrenee mountains.

it felt like journeys crossing: the Pyrenees, it's a region we've been to earlier this year, as daytrip from the French coast. flying across them showed the mountains from such a different angle, almost like in a different dimension. here's a moment from back then: 9 miles to the summit.

now to come: spanish dinner.

1 more day

2011-11-26T17:32:00.000+01:00

soon now. soon :)

on a more technical note: i should have wifi in Lanzarote and will do a bit of blogging, but might take a while to respond to mail.

+ in preparation for leaving, i updated the list of current calls, deadlines are upcoming for the Language/Place, (30th), and the Tree Carnival (29th). the next Language/Place call is included, too.

the next blog entry will be from the Canary Islands :)

nueva york (Nov 2010)

2011-11-25T06:37:00.003+01:00

saturday morning and it's new snow. a week ago, i still was in Lanzarote, this place of black sand and vulcanoe fields. that's where the image above is from: a view of the Timanfaya National Park. the southern sun, for once overcast. the vulcanoes quiet - or "tranquilo", as the Spanish say.

tranquilo was also the state of my writing while there, and the state of the web connection. it was good, to have these days. there was one thing that tempted me to write, though: the next 52/250 theme: "urban convert" - together with a Spanish copy of the lifestyle magazine Marie Claire, it made me sit in the shade and pen an urban poem:

---------------------------

Nueva York

They change style overnight

Reinvent themselves, merge

aaaaaaaaa Tradición y future

Check in and out of clubs, hotels, lounges

Always on the hunt for

aaaaaaaaa La look muy chic -

They walk down avenues, cross paths in perfect timing

aaaaaaaaaToday: fashionista ultraclásico

aaaaaaaaaTomorrow: fantasía urbania

Their secret code: la nouveau parfum malicieux

Their destination: unbranded

----

the poem includes Spanish fashionista terms. they form an own metropolitan language almost, those glossy fashion style words. the title of the december Marie Claire itself was: "Navidad Cool". "Navidad" is "Christmas" in Spanish, a word that popped up more and more during the stay, as people started to put up christmas decoration and happy "Feliz Navidad" signs. the magazine also included a travel section, and that's where i found the title of the urban poem: New York in Spanish actually changes into "Nueva York".

buenos dias ~

PS: the poem is now part of the urban issue: "Nueva York".
PSS, a year later: and this photo is now my contribution for photo friday "Rugged"'
PSSS: more about Lanzarote, the place i return to tomorrow, right above this photo

3 more days: stones, drives & feeling grateful

2011-11-24T18:33:00.004+01:00

3 more days to the island.

a time of preparing and wrapping up, of closure and calendar, of spending hours at the desk to have free hours there. in between all, a mail from a friend, with lines on Thanksgiving. it's not celebrated here in Germany, but it's a beautiful concept: to take one day to give thanks. thinking about it brought me back to a reflection on life and a note of gratefulness, from the very first issue of BluePrintReview. here's a line from it:

Today I am grateful. For my life. For everything that I have experienced and everything that I have been spared. - Today

on the theme of taking time, i revisited the river of stones page today, and picked it up for the blueprint lit blog. and then thought: i might make that a part of each island day: write a stone. and then join in january for the full month of a river of stones.

also, i took some time to spend some moments on the island - virtually, through the images i took there during a previous visit. and then stopped at a road. i think i never opened this image in full size before. click for full view.

Everyday Heroes (or: photos of 2011, and the complexity of this world)

2011-11-23T18:50:00.000+01:00

this week, the news ageny Reuters released a blog post with the "Best photos of the year 2011". the post contains 100 photos and starts with a warning: some images contain graphic content or nudity. you can view the images with a slideshow, which makes them move so fast that you don't have a chance to read the notes, which sometimes leaves you clueless about who is shown in the photo: the good guys, or the bad guys? sometimes the ones with uniform are the ones who rescue. sometimes they are the ones people hope to get rescued from.

looking at the images made me think of 2 books i read in the last weeks. one is "Heroes and Philosophy". the Heroes in the title refers to the TV-series, which is about several people who discover that they have superhuman abilities. they also discover that an evil company is scheming behind the scenes, and that the destruction of New York City is looming. to make things a bit more complicated, not all of them are out to save the world. the book now takes a philosophical look at the series, and deals with general themes like: the social contract, the ethics of sving the world, time and the meaning of life (hello Nietzsche), hero archetypes, the science of time travel, the philosophical implication of memory loss etc.). Here's a bit of it:

"Superhero stories usually make no secret of who the good guys and the bad guys are. Superman good, Lex Luthor bad. Batman good, Joker bad. Heroes began this way, too: Peter good, Sylar bad. Heroes good, Company bad. But as we discovered in Volume 3 ("Villains") things are not always so clear; heroes can become villains an villains can become heroes. Even the series' signature icon - the eclipse - signals that the Heroes moral universe is more complex and, in fact, darker."
- Peter S. Fosl, chapter 16: "Are the Heroes Really Good?

the passage, it's not all that striking when read at first. after all, we're talking a fictional series here. and we all know that the real world is a complex place, in many aspects. but just some days later, i received a book that was about current political happenings. it's a book that i didn't know of until it arrived in my postbox: "Walking the Tiger's Path" - a soldier's spiritual journey in Iraq. It's the story of Paul M. Kendel, who found himself in a place where he hoped he could make a difference, and had to realize that his approaches singled him out, and let his fellow soldiers wonder about his intentions, and about the definitions of good and bad : "My interest in the people and lack of hatred and anger towards them has often been seen as suspicious. In the army you are trained to hate your enemy, and compassion and kindness are for the weak".

the irony of course is that as an archetype, heroes are lead by compassion, but also are powerful.

with all this in mind, i browsed the TEDtalk archive, and arrived at a talk that that is about: heroes. as in: ordinary people faced with situations that bring out the best in some, and the worst in others:
"Why ordinary people do evil ... or do good" by psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

here's a passage from it with an ending line that sounds so easy, and is so difficult.

"So situations have the power to do, through -- but the point is, this is the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation. And you're on one side or the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, "Don't get involved. Mind your own business." And you have to say, "Mama, humanity is my business."

5 more days

2011-11-22T07:11:00.000+01:00

5 more days until there.

and: 50 more things to do until there.

("there" is Lanzarote island, which somehow turrned into November island for us)

towards a tree / from a tree

2011-11-22T06:08:00.007+01:00

this post belongs to the Festival of the Trees #66

it's Tuesday 4pm on the way back from the city. i stop and go, stop and go until i finally reach the turn to the old park and the villa merkel. a new exhibition is on there, sculptures and photos about "Raum" - "Space". i park the car, walk down the park trail towards the villa, and slow down after passing a huge tree. the slowing leads to a stand, and an inversion: i take steps backwards until i arrive in a different place, one that leads to walking towards a tree. from there, i take some more slow steps, and arrive at from a tree.

--
towards a tree

--
from a tree

--
a photo that gives a larger view of the park and the tree is online at tuesday 4pm.

more trees in this blog: life as a journey with trees

sky + advice

2011-11-21T07:40:00.006+01:00

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

from: Advice, like youth...
*
update: and more skies for this day (just came across them)
L'histoire du ciel - best viewed full screen

Found Poetry: Or, a Moral Inventory

2011-11-20T07:36:00.003+01:00

the fall issue of the Found Poetry Review is online. their tagline: "celebrating the poetry in the existing and everyday." which connects to the whole theme of revisiting, reshaping, recreating. so i opened some existing poetry: "Foal" by Rose Hunter. and started to leaf through it, not reading the full poems or stanzas, but only single lines from each page.

and arrived at: Or, a Moral Inventory

piecing the found poem together also made me look up garrafones: they are huge water bottles, their name derived from a measure: a garrafon equals 5 gallons. the other spanish word in the poem, Los Muertos, i knew from the festive day: "Dia de los Muertos" - the day of the dead.

the audio? still shy about recording my own voice, but interesting to hear the same lines in the different voices.

and the place in the picture - that's Lanzarote island. the photo actually is taken at the southern bay, yet looking inwards. another photo from the same place, same day, is online here: rainbow day (2nd photo). which now leads to another returning / found question: how many different images can be found in one place?

noon

2011-11-18T22:36:00.002+01:00

photo friday's new theme is "noon".

it brought me back to a city walk at noon time. this is from a past January: the inner courtyard of the Staatsgalerie museum in Stuttgart.

and a second noon photo: same day, same walk, a bit later with more sun:

a first time: "Leipzig, or: East West Real Life"

2011-11-17T15:59:00.000+01:00

my first e-book.
about my first visit to the other side of Germany.
...is now online

the cover photo is right from the middle of Leipzig city, East Germany.
more about the book, free sample included:

Leipzig, or: East West Real Life

(if you want to read it all, make sure to follow the hint - it leads to a coupon)

Life In A Day

2011-11-17T06:11:00.005+01:00

currently watching: "Life in a Day"

"On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day”, a historic cinematic experiment.." ...which is online now. full length. 1hour 34minutes. here's the link:

YouTube: Life in a Day

moving and overwhelming: this world. so huge. so full of moments, people, emotions, places, life. i'm watching it in 15-minutes parts, to make the day last a week.

update: finished watching the film on sunday evening. the last 10 minutes, so intense. the final scene (at 1h29m) - i revisited it this morning, to brighten up this gloomy mood that got me wrapped since yesterday morning and turned sunday, this day of ease, into a burden.

tuesday 4pm in red

2011-11-16T06:16:00.004+01:00

a moment from today: the plan was to visit the gallery Villa Merkel. turned out, the park of the villa is part of the treat: natural tree art.

being there made me remember a spring moment in this park from last year. here's the post: into the dark (man son 1969). the park photo is at the bottom of the post.

November, or: the blue of the sky in the water

2011-11-15T22:55:00.005+01:00

same place like the "tuesday 4pm" photo above, just some steps further, and turning towards the other side.

time & space: Rome and Vienna

2011-11-14T21:37:00.007+01:00

two city moments - and also, two of the images that formed the base for the time & space series (see post below) - the first is taken right in the middle of Rome, at the Forum Romanum. the second is from Vienna, taken in one of the museums at the Museumsquartier. (and interesting, all the stairs in the 2 images, almost leading into another when placed like this)

Time & Space - Mixitini Matrix

2011-11-14T11:23:00.002+01:00

Mixitini Matrix is a new multigenre and multidisciplinary journal of creative collaboration. The first issue is online now.

Time & Space
The cover is titled "Time & Space" and is set up as a photo-roundabout - if you click on the smaller images, they enlarge and move into centre. So exciting to see those visuals online, here's the note that explains why:

"This summer, the 100 Days Project gathered artist and writers in a creative joint effort to make, remake, shape and reshape, inspired by other participants. Both Dorothee Lang (at participation) and Julia Davies (at 100 Magpie Days) participated in the project, and based some of their works on the other's days. After the 100 Days ended, the spark of creative inspiration moved on between them, leading to the Time Space series."

2 Layers
And there's more! 2 new images of the "Layers" series are included in this issue, too:
Sand Sky and Camel Road.

The images belong to a longer line of work that is based on 2 layers: a pairing of contrasting images from different continents, merged into a single layer to show a reality disparate from any that truly exists. Yet some pairings unite global parallels, while others show distinctions between the places that form this world.

Road / One / Travel

2011-11-13T07:25:00.004+01:00

photo friday's new theme is: One. more than 170 one-images are up yet.

here is mine: a road moment from Lanzarote island. i tried a colored version first, but felt the black and white works better with this solitary tree. here's the colored one:

the road moment is also up in my tumblr-blog which now also is named "life as a journey". i set it up last year, and left it lingering with one post. now i took a bit more time to explore tumblr, and discovered that there is a “tag” option. pretty cool. it’s like the Twitter #hashtag, only that in tumblr, the whole posts come up, and form a theme-stream.

of course, i had to try tumblr/tagged/travel
and also: tumblr/tagged/road

Food Slurs: an e-flection on multicultural mockings

2011-11-12T15:36:00.004+01:00

this post belongs to edition #12 of the language/place blog carnival, which is hosted by Linda Hofke at Lind-guistics and has the feature theme: "Food"

Food Slurs

An e-flection on multicultural mockings that starts with depictions of racism, and moves on to ethnical food, blacks and whites of thought and skin colour, to shades of political correctness and situational incorrectness.

Eric (Ohio)
Did you see this link on McSweeney’s? - "Conversations I've Had During A Normal Day In Los Angeles, Modified To Include The Shocking Depiction Of Racism Found In Paul Haggis's 2004 Film Crash, by Brendon Lloyd."

“CO-WORKER: I can't freakin' stand those Indians”
“ME: I'm part Cherokee.”
“CO-WORKER: Then why don't you go smoke a peace pipe and get the hell out of my country?”...

Dorothee (Southern Germany)
That’s rough. Do people really talk like this?

Okay. Ignore the question. It just sounds so weird to me because of the racial references that are uncommon here. I mean, there aren’t that many Cherokees living in Germany. But you might hear Turkish men being addressed with the line: “Was willst du, Knoblauchfresser?”—“What do you want, garlic-eater?”

Eric
Wait wait wait wait WAIT.... You actually hear people call Turks "garlic-eater?" And is that offensive to the Turkish man in this scene?

Dorothee
Yes, you sometimes hear people call Turks "garlic-eaters". Just as you sometimes hear people call Italians "Spaghetti-Fresser"—"spaghetti-devourer".
But I would suggest to not try this while visiting Germany. Or, if you try, then RUN — as yes, you bet that this is understood as offensive.

Eric
Spaghetti-devourer. I would be amazed when I hear it. Because I would be like, "you can't be serious, but you are." But then, sometimes Americans call Mexicans “beaners”. Not as much here, because there aren't many Mexicans around. But in places where more Mexicans live, there are those who talk like that.

Seen like that, it is a little amusing that racial/ethnic slurs are sometimes based on the food people eat - garlic-eater, beaner, kraut, limey (british). Actually, the more I think of it, the funnier it is, because it is so stupid that this is all the better we can do — to make fun of the food.

I don't know why they call the irish "micks." I think something more descriptive, such as "bog trotter" is funnier. Potato-eater would be the best food one.

Now this is making me hungry. (For colcannon.)

Dorothee
Krauts for Germans. I heard that before, but it’s still odd, as it’s really not very popular any more to eat kraut. Only in autumn, when there are some small towns who have a “Krautfest” with lots of food stalls.

More food-related slurs this made me think of: rice-eater (Chinese).
Smoerebroed-muncher (Swedens).
Vodka-drinker (Russians).

And it's true, it's really the cheapest way to mock someone from another culture, to make fun of their eating habits. But then, eating habits are a basic of daily culture. So this hits right in the daily habits of people.

Eric
About rice: I used to work with a guy who—this is lame—when we had to wait to hear back from a client, he would sometimes say, "we'll just let them stew in their juice for a while." Meaning wait and let them make a decision. But we had a Vietnamese client named Bau, and everyone liked him, so I don't think my boss meant anything bad when he said, "We'll just let old Bau stew in his rice for a while."

I'm going to make up my own random food-related slurs. "Ice cream eater!" "Get away from me, you milk-drinker." Or non-food related. "Belt-buckler."

Dorothee
Milk-drinker actually a teasing name here: “Milchbubi”—“little milkiboy.”
It’s tossed from the big muscle guys to those who are slim and don’t have muscles.

“Was willst du, Milchbubi?”—“Got a problem, milkiboy?”

And some 2 or 3 years ago, there was a hype of teasing names that went along your ideas, to be tossed randomly at random people, without any further founding of fact and logic: „Bleistiftspitzer“—„pencil-sharpener“. Or things like "Fussföner".

Eric
I can't believe someone beat me to milk-drinker. Wouldn't be all that offensive, I guess.
But Fussföner. What does it mean? It sounds fun. "Listen here, Fussföner, I ordered a SOY latte!!"

Dorothee
That would make you a soy-latte-drinker: "Hey, soy-latte-drinker, you think you are somewhat cooler than a Fussföner? Well let me tell you the tough truth: you aren't."

Fussföner: someone who dries his feet with the hair dryer, to make sure they get all dry. Same category as the Duschgel-Anwärmer: someone who warms up the showergel before applying it on the skin.

I think it all started with an overload of political correctness that erupted into situational incorrectness on all levels. You didn't have that in Ohio?

Eric
Well, we certainly have political correctness that goes too far. But not so far as to have non-namecalling names. My kids do sometimes. "You eraser head." Things like that—it means nothing but sounds like something.

Oddly, it used to be that a man who draws engineering drawings and blueprints was a draftsman. Now it is drafter. That is fine. A policeman is a police officer—a patrolman is a trooper. Waiters and waitresses are servers. Stewardess is flight attendant. Those are all fine.

But to go so far as to make up the names. And then there are others like "mentally challenged," and differently-abled. And then some people call short people "vertically challenged." On the Ohio drivers license, on the back, there are special categories, and one is "shortness of stature," for short people. Some people are "beauty-challenged."

For the record, I wouldn't order a soy latte, for fear of being accused of being man-challenged. A girly man. And while I don't usually use the hair dryer for my hair, let alone my feet, I am not ashamed to say: I have been known to warm the shower gel. There's no shame in that. Is there?

Dorothee
I have been known to warm the shower gel, too. No shame, as long as no one gets to know about it.

“Vertically challenged.” This one I heard somewhere. It really left me clueless about its meaning at first. And another word I came across today, in the book I am reading right now—it's the yearly diary of Christa Wolf, a German writer who lived in East Germany until the reunion of Germany. It's a fascinating book, starting 1960 and ending 2000. Every year, Wolf described her current life by describing one day, the 27th September. But back to the word: in the diary entry of 1966, she mentions the race riots that happened in San Francisco at that time, and refers to them as: Negeraufstand. "Negroe-uprise". She didn't mean this offensive or negative, it was just the word used for the black people back then: Neger.

Even in the seventies, there was this creamy candy with chocolate cover called "Negerkuss” here in Germany—"negroe-kiss". Later they renamed it "Schokokuss"—"chocolate-kiss" to avoid any racial association. How are those called in the US?

Eric
I don't know what we call those kind of candies. Marshmallow cremes, or chocolate cremes. Maybe cordials, but that usually has fruit, like a cherry in the center. And chocolate kisses are like hershey kisses—you have those? They look like a drop, with a little curl on top.

There are a kind of nuts—filbert might be the official name, but some times they are called brazil nuts. They are bigger than the other nuts in a dish of mixed nuts. When my mom was little, they called them "nigger toes." But that was many years ago, now she would never say that.

Which makes me think of the time when I used to deliver furniture with this kid who was semi retarded, I mean mentally challenged. Slow. And we drove through a part of the city where there were a lot of black people standing around, working at a car wash—pretty stereotypical. And he said, "what do we call those people?" And I said “what people do you mean?” He said, "you know, the darkies." And of course I about died, and told him, "african american? or black? but not darkies." And all of a sudden he remembered, and beamed, and ROLLED DOWN THE WINDOW and waved, yelling, (cheerfully), "Hey, negrettes!"

We didn't wait around to find out if that was acceptable terminology.

That's interesting, the concept of Negeraufstand—race riots seem like such a far away thing, for people our age. But even in the early '90s there were the LA riots that were racial, over the Rodney King verdict. Do you remember that?

Right around then, I was painting a house where a crack dealer lived—Mad Maxx—and he was sitting on the steps telling me that he could beat me up and no one would care, since it would look ok that the black guy beat up a white guy instead of the other way around for a change. A couple days later, he told my brother Ian and me that "Jimi Hendrix was the baddest motherfucker to ever cut a record," and then went upstairs and threw a chair out the window at me. Actually it came through the window, glass flying everywhere. Then he came downstairs and took Ian's hammer and ran down the street, hitting street signs with it. Ian chased him and was all, "give me my hammer!" and Maxx gave it back. The next day he got kicked out of the apartment because they didn't want crack dealers throwing chairs at the white boys, I guess. Black rage, they called it back then.

Dorothee
That story about the negrettes is great—and the other one about the crack dealer is scary. I think what was so good about LA Crash that the film addressed the racial theme through different views, and there was none all-bad or all-good character. No black and white of thought, just different shades.

Which makes me remember something a Canadian said to me once, when we talked about travelling, and about options in life. He was still hurt from a relationship that didn’t work out, not because they didn’t love each other, but because they were from completely different backgrounds—she was European and worked in a huge company, he loved to be in the wilderness—and so they didn’t find a place and a way to make it work. That’s why he went to Asia, to get away from it, and also because he had this dream of doing canoe trips in the mangrove forest of Thailand. We talked about life, work, careers, travelling - at that time I was at a kind of crossroad, wondering which direction to take jobwise. And he looked at me, and said: "You are young, you are intelligent, you are white. How could you not be successful?"

This line, it remained with me. I think I never have heard anyone putting it as bluntly as that.

Eric
What an interesting equation: young, intelligent, white = success. I think looks and height play a part as well. If you have all those, then it is hard to fail. But the intelligence is important, to know how to capitalize on the other factors.

At the same time it’s true about race attitudes being grey. In Crash, you first see the Matt Dillon character as being a total jerk, but then come to see him in a different way, and you think, how can someone have both of those natures within themselves, but we all do in some ways. We're all a little grey.

-------------------------------

Notes & References

This essay is the slightly edited copy & paste of an e-mail conversation between Eric Wrisley, who lives in Ohio and is a contributing writer at Blueswax magazine, and me. "Food Slurs" went first online as part of the "Mulitcultural Minglings" issue of the magazine Sage of Consiousness.

The McSweeney piece is still online: Conversations I've Had During A Normal Day In Los Angeles..

Previous contributributions to the language/place carnival are gathered at: life as a journey of language and place

light is nothing but

2011-11-11T16:18:00.000+01:00

Scientifically seen,
light is nothing but
an electromagnetic radiation
with a wavelength
that is visible
to the human eye.

(from November 2006)

journey leading to journey leading to e-book, or: please assign an ISBN to Leipzig

2011-11-10T17:59:00.005+01:00

the first journey (or: the first time)
it was in 2005 that i first visited Eastern Germany - i was in Berlin before and after the wall opened, but not to any "real" East German places. the spark for the journey was delivered by: books. a friend came up with the idea to visit the book fair in Leipzig. so the trip fell into place: 3 days in Leipzig. 3 days of books, art, Leipzig city and reflections on life, history, words, and that strange, huge ride that is human civilization.

the second journey
this year i returned to Leipzig, to visit the book fair again - and while preparing for it, i came to think about my first visit, and put the essay i wrote back then up in my blog again - the title of it: "East West Real Life".

a book
in the last months, i found myself returning to Leipzig in thoughts, and at some point, i started to look for the other notes i wrote back then during that first journey, to collect them in a file. and this file now turned into a chapbook - the story of a journey, and at the same time, a reflection about the West, the East, the past, the now - real life, and the questions it poses.

it's almost complete now, just some formatting matters to be solved. the size of the book is about 50 pages - a good size for an e-book. yesterday i did a first test upload at smashwords, the e-book-page where authors can e-publish their books. the good thing about smashwords is that it includes a multi-generator for many e-format. and that it offers ISBN-numbers. that's how i arrived at this funky spot that showed the book as thumbnail, and looked all serious, unaware of the double meaning of the request:

website / link
some more notes on the book are up on a website - photos and map included already. the book itself hopefully will follow soon. here's the website link:
Leipzig, or: East West Real Life

yellow city

2011-11-09T06:37:00.000+01:00

two hometown moments, from yesterday: without and with people.

and more seasons

fragments of Vienna

2011-11-06T06:36:00.001+01:00

the new photo friday theme is: Public Space. it made me revisit my photo files from city trips - and arrive at this curious bridge moment from Vienna again. the bridge is right next to the MAK, the "museum of applied art". the river is the Danube - the "Donau". which is huge, but is locked away in Vienna in a deep canal.

the text on the bridge stone is from Heraklit, Fragment 12 - i looked for an online version of it, and arrived at this Heraklit wiki-quote-page, strangely, the one above is not included there, but it includes other flow / water fragments, starting with this classic one: "Everything flows, nothing stands still."

the second image is the same view, seen from the other side, and a larger angle. i looked, but there was no note on the sculpture.

more on Vienna, here: moments from Vienna

WOR(L)DS on a beach

2011-11-05T07:49:00.004+01:00

this snapshot arrived yesterday from Jessi, the editor of Folded Word. so good.

the book in the image is a proof copy of "WOR(L)DS APART" - the book i wrote together with a friend in Asia: Smitha. it's an ongoing dialogue across continents, a sharing of journeys, joys, longings, and life lessons along the road. great to see the book taking an own journey now, too.

there is more of the beach online, as beautifully captured by Jessi: Coastal Meditation 1 + just in: Coastal Meditation 4

and there's a bit more on the book, here, in the WOR(L)DS APART - blog.

in the mail

2011-11-04T11:07:00.000+01:00

in the mail today: a Frida Kahlo postcard from Mexico
+ a letter from Germany with a magazine about America
loved the matching skirts in the 2 images.

as to electronic mail, i am waiting for the second edition of Found Poetry Review to launch, it will include a found Mexican poem i sent. and Mixitini Matrix - a new journal of creative collaborations will launch in November... ah, patience.

directions

2011-11-03T06:06:00.001+01:00

roads. every crossing offering a choice, an option.
what if we would take the other direction?

the original photo, from the long drive home - from south of France to south of Germany in a day (some more French moments).

of course, there are more roads.

Goldener November

2011-11-02T06:00:00.003+01:00

today: a bank holiday ("Allerheiligen")
today: a drive
today: red & orange & yellow & green trees
today: the Euro, ín a new round of tumbling
today: life, going on as always
today: the secret of happiness in a youtube-clip: why are we happy
today: yesterday, actually.

(PS: the title words are German - interesting how they stay almost the same in English.)

crowds / switch / thingbooks + a paradox

2011-11-01T07:42:00.008+01:00

pick 3 books
in October, when i looked for a book with stories from the Ruhr region to take along on the short trip there, i stumbled across an offer i couldn't resist: Amazon Germany invited to "get 3 english books for 15$”. there was a list of about 150 books to choose from. i browsed it, and after some forth and back, finally arrived at 3 non-fiction books:
- The Wisdom of Crowds
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Crowds
the Crowd book, that was inspired by the whole theme of identity and crowd, which also reflected in the blueprintreview theme issue: #26 Identity. there is a long note (or rather: dialogue) on the process included, which both picks up on both themes: Identity and the Crowd, here a quote:

....what surprised me is the positive view of crowds: “The second obvious feature of crowd phenomena is that they are not only shaped by society but that they in turn bring about social change.”
and here the next surprise: the introducion even moves to the theme of identity: “In other words, the psychological processes which relate society to crowd action are those of identity."

the main point of the Crowd book is that we live in a society that still believes single experts are the ones that are most qualified when it comes to making decisions and developing future scenarios (and this goes both for science and economy: doctors and CEOs), while case studies generally show that the best results are achieved by diverse groups under the condition that all group members give their input. will look for a quote that sums it up, but what i thought interesting is that this relates back to the crowd quote above: the positive view of crowds, and their quality to induce social change.

Switch
which now leads to the other book from theme "Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard". it's a book that offers some new, surprising approaches to deal with difficult situations. a key of it is: when the problem is big and complex, we tend to look for a big and complex solution - or give up by the task. while the key might be a small solution. here's an excerpt, a story that moved me when i read it, as it includes a simple – but very unusual question – to adress and improve difficult situations: a Switch story.

deja-vue & non-fiction
and some additional notes: when i logged into Goodreads to add the "Switch" book to my list of "currently reading", the latest review popped up again: turned out, it's from Jessi Carty, and seeing it, i remembered reading it. so it seems, i hadn't consciously remembered the book, but my memory picked up on. (here's the link: Switch on Goodreads)

also, looking at the books, i realized all 3 i picked are non-fiction books. which is a curious category, seen like that: defined by negation. in Germany, the word for non-fiction books is: "Sachbuch": thing-book. novels are "Romane".

non-fiction clips
and more non-fiction, in another format: yesterday, while doing some non-thinking-required repetitive photo work, i let youtube clips play, from the TEDtalks - the "ideas worth spreading" conference (here's more: TED conference). there are so many, and some are so good. like this one, about all the choices our western world offers product-wise and life-wise not necessarily makes for a happy life, and some scientific reflections on that: Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

another paradox: little-known bestselling facts
looking at the title theme of those talks: "Ideas worth spreading", and at the books - one thing that surprised me: both books were New York Times bestsellers a while ago. still, the studies in them and the summed-up knowledge - despite all the books sold - seems to be remain passive, on the page. i haven't seen it picked up in magazine articles / analysis. seems the hardest thing in this fast spinning world is still to question the status quo and to overcome long-grown beliefs and systems.

horizons

2011-10-30T06:26:00.009+01:00

photo friday's new theme is Wide Angle. it brought me back to this endless bay in South France, with view to the Pyrenée mountains, and to the Spanish coast (at least that's how it felt). a larger image is online here: Wide Horizon in Full Size ...

...and for an even wider angle, try this video. same bay, but in the morning, and in a 360°-video:

language place #11: Streets, Signs, Directions

2011-10-28T05:17:00.013+02:00

One year ago, the first edition of the language/place carnival went live:
"> Language > Place: a joined blog cyber journey featuring international perspectives on language and place."

Since then, almost monthly, a new edition followed - each a journey in itself, hosted by different bloggers in places that reach from Hong Kong to Slovenia and New Zealand to the States.

Now, for the anniversary edition, the blog carnival returns to its place of origin in Germany - the "life as a journey" blog. The theme of this edition is: "Streets, Signs, Direction" - and following its own theme, this edition offers 3 ways to explore and visit the contributions:

> a found poem, based on single lines from each contribution
>> an itinerary: all contributions with notes and links
>>> a geographic map which also includes the former editions

enjoy the journey!
Dorothee

> Streets, Signs, Directions - a found poem

a sign of the times. a time of signs.
I am hunting the wild poetic in all its true, I walk
in a circle of simultaneous past and present,
here, there

and then on to Berlin for half a day,
too tired and in a hurry to bother stating that it felt weird to be back
wandering the vibrant neighborhoods
pulsing in different directions at the same time

fearful of being stuck there,
I close my eyes, hear the miles below the tyres
corrugated iron canopy steps telegraph wires
dog rebar water tank satellite dish

even time slows (like in a dream)
the world as I know it will end,
the day after tomorrow, and then it will restart

but not now and not here
old breath vision time and sensation
that is the only way I know where to go:
the necessary

not so long ago I was awestruck by the automation, the orderliness,
and the speed I saw all around:
there was always something happening

I focused on taking a lot of pictures
these photos served as a reference point
I am still processing

here we are standing, appropriately:
innuendos bubble champagne lipsticked rims,
sighs hopes promises unfurled
talk about crossing boundaries and borders

I hadn't expected to be so impressed by
the promise of what lays ahead -
this departure

we have a map drawn by the friend of a friend.
it evokes so many feelings
we thunder down the street
and the sensation is like flying

as we drive higher, deeper into the rolls of mountains
we have only the clouds for company.
who am I, I wonder, in this landscape?

>> Streets, Signs, Directions - an itinerary

A sign of the times. A time of signs.
For Swati Nair from India, a large part of her cherished memories lie in streets, signs and roads. "It brings this big swell of joy in my heart just thinking of the various places I have seen, the people I have met and the things I have experienced." - Signs from London

i am hunting the wild poetic in all its true, i walk
Inspired by the topic, Penn Kemp picked two poems from "Dream Sequins", a manuscript in process. Two other poems came from her travels, the first from Morocco, the second from a collection of artificial butterflies. Follow her Walking / Paraclete / From Dream / Travelling

in a circle of simultaneous past and present
here, there
On the third day of her trip to Paris, Dorothee Lang arrived at a reflection pond in the middle of the city: "I walked through the glass lobby of the museum named by it's former use: l'Orangerie, then stopped in front of a sign with a suggested mode for visiting" - Paris dans le Calme

And then on to Berlin for half a day
Nine from Northern Ireland is skilled in the art of finding cheap ways to get from A to B via C, D and E. In March she arrived in Sweden, coming from Kurdistan, and heading to Berlin. Meet her Everywhere and all over

wandering the vibrant neighborhoods
A stroll through the memories of a journey to Portugal inspired Steve Wing to create a collage of sideway mosaics: Streets, Signs, Directions

pulsing in different directions at the same time
Siddartha Beth Pierce is a Mother, Poet, Artist, Educator and Art Historian from Washington, DC. Her contribution reaches out to Africa, Petersburg and to Ireland in artwork and poetry, online at buddhetat's Space

fearful of being stuck there
"With hindsight we certainly would have done," Sandra Davies explains and recollects a trip that was planned as a summer stay, yet demanded some pioneering spirit: Road to Spurn

i close my eyes, hear the miles below the tyres
Sheree Mack recently was at a workshop. "We just played with words, but other poets words and then made then our own. This is a mash up I’ve made which I think fits the theme this month ’street, signs and directions. The quote used here is something my mum once told me regarding childbirth" - The Sinking Road Remix

corrugated iron canopy steps telegraph wires
dog rebar water tank satellite dish
While in the Mexican town of Tecpán, Rose Hunter sat and wrote the first draft of this poem and took this picture at the same time, from a balcony At the Hotel Virrey, Tecpán

Even time slows (like in a dream)
Sometimes direction can be found in unusual things in our environment, notes Brigita Orel. "When I get lost and the road signs are too far away to read them properly, I strive to reconnect through words" - My road signs.

the world as i know it will end,
the day after tomorrow, and then it will restart
For Julia Davies, signs are reminders of the rules of how to live, tried and tested methods for avoiding accidents, mishaps, in getting things right. "But there are so many of them, it seems like every one of them, every combination of them tells a different story, sends you in a different direction." - the highway code

but not now and not here and not present
old breath vision time and sensation
Far away in a haze of mental distraction, local signage brings Karyn Eisler back home, and reminds her that elsewhere doesn't mean better: home sense memory.

that is the only way I know where to go:
"I am very bad at directions but use other senses in good measure to find my way to places and back," says Abha Iyengar. "Though this can be embarrassing , it has never stood in the way of my adventurous streak." - With Due Respect to Those Who Eventually Find Their Way

the necessary
Peg Duthie appreciated a stranger's wordless annotation in Jerusalem: The Necessary. For more abroad signs, visit the next blog entry, too: Roaming Near the Read Sea.

Not so long ago
It rained the whole week Jean Morris spent Up North in August, "rather undermining my cherished personal ideal of rural Yorkshire, so the signs felt particularly poignant on that damp afternoon. In retrospect and in the photo, it looks a lot more Arcadian that it felt at the time" - Not so long ago

I was awestruck by the automation, the orderliness,
and the speed I saw all around:
Forced to commute to work for a few days by bus, Parmanu finds that a regular bus ride in small-town Germany can lead to surprising encounters and discoveries: The bus ride to work

there was always something happening
Wetteravia. Known to few. Rarely mentioned on the new, slick maps of the 21st century. Pockets of memory exist in the northern valleys of Wetteravia. There is a Hof there still - Let Roucheswalwe tell you of a time it was run by Hennis Lina: Gewürzkuchen und Schattenmorellen

I focused on taking a lot of pictures
Nine is currently staying in Barcelona, and sends a photo essay from sunday protests in Barcelona: taking to the streets! Somos los de abajo

These photos served as a reference point
"Signs, signs, every where a sign..." When Linda Hofke recently went through her summer vacation photos, this sign song kept running through her head, and she realized how many pictures of signs she had taken: The Value of Signs

I am still processing
Daniela Elza purposefully stumbled onto the Occupy Vancouver rally at the Vancouver Art gallery. "There were places one could make a sign if they did not have one" - pre.occupied: intersection, street, direction

Here we are standing, appropriately
Donigan Merritt lived in many countries - currently he resides in Argentina, and walks the streets of Buenos Aires almost everyday - Another day in Buenos-Aires

innuendos bubble champagne, lipsticked rims,
sighs, hopes promises unfurled
Linda Wastila may live in Baltimore, but her soul lives in Boston: "There's an energy on the street, an excited chitter-chatter, it enervates and leaves me feeling oddly alone." - The City Street

Talk about crossing boundaries and borders
Michelle Elvy was out sailing last week, and following the nautic theme, together with her partner Bernard Heise contributed an adventure of the Bay of Islands: The (Road)way of the Orca

i hadn't expected to be so impressed by
Dave Bonta looked for a video poem: "I think this poem by Pablo Neruda, "Fable of the Siren and the Drunks," might fit your theme ("how to navigate in a foreign place and surrounding - what to do when we don't understand / or aren't understood..."): Lorelei

the promise of what lays ahead
Michael Solender reflects on the directions and streets of life in a flash story: Life is in the Right Always

this departure
Nicolette Wong sends a photo from her 100-day project; Le Bleu du Ciel blog: "...because all departures are forced.": Departure

We have a map drawn by the friend of a friend.
"One of the things i like so much about living where i do is that directions are vague and at once specific," notes Sherry O'Keefe from Montana. "We were given directions on how to get to a place to catch catfish. the place is called gritty stone, but instead of saying "drive out to gritty stone", a map of sorts was offered" - the not-a-problem hand wave

It evokes so many feelings
"I'm a sign enthusiast. Is there a word for this type of person? Here are 10 signs (from dozens) I've photographed this year. Signs are like a higher being talking to us, directing us, entertaining us. No one should ever overlook them," states Christopher Allen, and sends a Year in Signs

We thunder down the street and the sensation is like flying
Jonas Knutsson is preparing for the cold winter and long nights in Iceland, and sends a couple of connected/disjointed riffs from Rejkjavik - Street Scenes

As we drove higher, deeper into the rolls of mountains
we had only the clouds for company.
Uma Gowrishankar is a writer and artist from Chennai, India. In her blog, she recently explored how a place and the story attached to it rests on a terrain where history merges into myth and legend. - There was once this man called Parashara

Who am I, I wondered, in this landscape?
Not the same person, surely
Signage tells us a lot about culture, especially when we're being warned about what not to do. "I thought we were pretty laissez-faire here in Quebec, but a recent trip to Iceland revealed a new level of 'proceed-at-your-own risk," Beth Adams notes in Fire and Brimstone

>>> Language > Place - a world map
This map leads to the locations of the language/place carnival #11, marked with blue pins. Also included: the previous carnival homes, marked with yellow houses. Click the places on the map to enter. There also is a larger popup version of the map. (and if you are interested in creating an own map, there now is a quick guide on how to create a map)

Streets, Signs, Directions - larger version / größere Karte

The blog carnival and Edition #12: Food!

You can read more about this blog carnival on the >Language >Place info page, which includes guidelines, a note about the carnival, the list of previous editions and related links.

Previous host Parmanu added a reflection on the carnvial as it developed in his blog: "With age, the carnival begins to show its value as a concept. So much of individual writing on the Internet is buried under a tangled web that search engines can barely reach; a carnival like “Language-Place” offers a theme-based portal to navigate such writing." - the whole entry is online at: Parmanu/Language-Place blog carnival.

Some notes on how the three-pronged presentation appraoch are online in Karyn Eisler's blog Living ?s, starting with General Thoughts, and moving to The Map, The Poem, The Itinerary...: here's the link: Living ?s / Language/Place

Edition #12 will be hosted by poet & writer Linda Hofke. Though a Pennsylvania native, Linda has lived in Germany for over a decade. She blogs at Lind-guistics and Linda's Life on the Other Side. The feature theme for this edition is “Food" - but as always, a wide range of contributions is welcome. The edition is planned for late November 2011. Submissions are open November 1-20, more details in the guidelines, and a personal invite here: Food for Thought.

Thank you for visiting!

Paris dans le Calme

2011-10-26T21:15:00.011+02:00

she picks her place to stay by a conjunction of names:
Charing Cross at Gare Saint-Lazare. one of six, she marks
the other stations on the map - Austerlitz, Bercy, Est, Lyon, Nord

in her room with no real window. in the night, she listens
to the trains, their constant arriving and leaving, a second layer
to this city named after a kelitc tribe that settled here bc: the Parisii

her second day in Paris. by now, she knows
where the next bus stop is, and which line to take
to get to the centre, which looks so close on the map.

bus 42 takes her along the Champs-Elysses,
to the Place de la Concorde, easily recognized by the l'Obelisque.
it's all surrounded by TV trucks that day, speaking a language
she doesn't know, a language formed by signs
three millenniums ago: triangle over water, circle inside cirlce

at the end of the Tuilerie Gardens: l’Orangerie
once the winter home to the king’s tropic plants,
it now surrounds lakes of water lilies
painted and assembled by Claude Monet
as a resting place – an impressionist reflection pond
in between all those busy city streets.

she walks through the glass lobby,
then slows in front of a sign with a suggested
mode for visiting the place: dans le calme -
in a calm state.

she enters, follows the water, the paint brushs,
walks in a circle, and in another circle
inside and outside of a pond, of a city,
of simultaneous past and present
here, there.

**
this post...
belongs to and is inspired by the language/place blog carnival #11: "Streets, Signs, Directions"

the photos...
are from Paris. more of the city, here in this blog: moments from Paris
+ practical travel and museum advice: Paris travel advice

related links...
some previous carnival posts: life as a journey of language & place

stranded in public traffic...

2011-10-26T13:52:00.001+02:00

"because this train already runs 20 minutes late, it will end at this station today."

october moon

2011-10-25T10:52:00.000+02:00

a photo from earlier this month: almost full moon.

tomorrow to come: new moon.

and on thursday or friday to come... the anniversary edition of language/place :)

Time Shift - The Fine Line

2011-10-24T17:25:00.001+02:00

The Fine Line compiles art, fiction and poetry into online editions. Fine Line #3 is dedicated to "Transition". it's up at Issuu: The Fine Line 3

if you click into it, you can find one of my photos right at the start, on page 11: Time Shift. which is so fitting for these days: the last week of October, it is. and next weekend, the time will move to wintertime here in Germany.

the photo itself, i took it in May, while on Mallorca island: it's an experimental shot of street lights, reflected in water. in blueprintreview, there is another photo from a different place, but with the same technique: nightfall.

2 "little" book moments

2011-10-22T20:25:00.001+02:00

photo's friday new them is: Little. it made me think of walking through Essen city centre area, past those huge houses and stores. one of the largest, with an overpowering entry tower, suprisingly is dedicated to "Bücher" = "Books". standing in front of the huge building, thinking of the thousands of books inside, i felt small.

the counterpart moment was waiting on the other end of the city centre: a public building, "Haus der Technik". and in front, the statue of one single person, book in hand: a reader / thinker / ponderer.

Essen: Chipperfield, Comics & Café Köller

2011-10-21T22:10:00.001+02:00

back home from the Ruhr Region. here's one photo i really like, and that also gives an idea of Essen: this mix of local and international atmosphere: Happy New Ears next to Hoffmanns Erzählungen. and just steps from there: a modern museum of old and new art, designed by David Chipperfield, and named: Folkwang.

no photos allowed inside, but here's one from the entry area that gives an idea: inside merging with outside

and here is a youtube-clip: Museum Folkwang

in contrast to the modern art and architecture, a moment from the old centry of the city:
the "Burgplatz" with historic statue.

some more mixed moments from Essen, below: statue, comic fair, you are here, drive..

the art of sketching a superhero

2011-10-20T18:36:00.000+02:00

manga meets vader

2011-10-20T18:34:00.000+02:00

days of wonder

2011-10-20T18:33:00.000+02:00

Essen: ComicAction + Messe Spiel 2011

2011-10-20T11:48:00.001+02:00

arrived in Essen. tomorrow to come: art & comics

2011-10-19T23:52:00.000+02:00

on the way to the Ruhr region, near Limburg

2011-10-19T12:12:00.001+02:00

mobile-blog-test: preparing for the Ruhr region

2011-10-18T13:57:00.011+02:00

....
test test this is a test post...

i just checked the mobile-blogging option again. in France, it cut away any accompanying text. same again in this test post: all that arrives is the title and the image sent (maybe due to the mobile-phone routine that turns the original photo in a smaller one to send?).

so i will stick to photo-posts with longer title. and good that the book in the photo arrived today - just in time. it's a collection of essays on the Ruhr region. the translated title means: "Directions for Use: Ruhrgebiet".

and the printed map in the background: that's the city map of Essen, where i will stay. "Essen" also is a verb in German, it means: to eat. so when you try and photo-google Essen, you arrive at a mix of food-related photos and photos from Essen city: Essen, or: eat it...

photo format update
i now tried a second photo size. it displays as the same format, but when you click it, there is a larger version.

France, Ruhr, Atlanta. or: "you are here"

2011-10-17T17:50:00.008+02:00

France
one month ago, i came back from the French Alps and the Mediterranean Coast. back home, the new edition of the journal of creative geography waited for me. it's title, a moveable confirmation: you are here. the theme of the edition: Dislocation.

one of my images made it into the Dislocation. it's from another road trip to France - the photo itself is a mirrored moment from a Swiss Autobahn: Decision Point.

the edition also includes a collaborate work from the 2-layer-series with Steve Wing: Timespace Discontinuum. which fits with the special concept of the edition - the editors wrote: "The journal will not have a traditional “Table of Contents.” Rather, each selection will be placed in context with other selections, creating a sense of dislocation and renewed attention to the strange patterns of continuity that emerge from such juxtapositions."

it's a thought i like to keep, i think it also goes for journeys, the way they connect, and the places they lead to, in an unexpected and unplannable pattern of juxtaposition and thematic connections. like the one that is upcoming:

here and there
right now, i am at home, but tomorrow, i will pack a small bag for a short trip: to the Ruhrgebiet. it's a region i visited in March last year for the first time. this time, i will be there to visit the comic fair - and to do some live blogging from there for a comic website. but i also have an extra day, to explore the region a bit more, and visit the Ruhr museum, and an art museum - both rather new. i might try some juxtaposed live blogging again in this blog, too.

Ruhr
2 links that lead to the Ruhr Region: the first is from this blog, from my first trip: Ruhr Metropolis. and the other is from the first language/place carnival, from Kate Thorpe who at that point was exploring the metropolitan Ruhr region in Germany as part of a poetic Fulbright project. the images there are from a place that is similar to the one i plan to visit.

Atlanta
the second book, "I Am Here Right" is an e-book from Deckfight Press - i came across it last week, and read the first stories. it's availaible as PDF online, and about place, too: all stories are set in Atlanta. (where i've been to, once, but then, not for real: all i saw and been to was the transit area of the airport).

[update, 1 day later]
this is me in Y
the lines on being here / there made me remember the lines from a conversation that happened on London a while ago. here's the passage:

"The gap between reality and expectation – there’s this friend of mine, we met in London, and went to a place at the Thames riverside, and then crossed London Bridge. It was there, in the middle of the bridge, that my friend held in, and said: “This is me in London. .. This is me in London.”

She explained that it is her way of connecting to a place, of letting the realization of being there sink in. There is a second way to read this, of course: if we are somewhere else, in another environment, with other persons around, this also reflects on our personality, and brings out other aspects of ourselves - makes us someone slightly different."

here and there (or: links)
- the Atlanta e-book is featured in the blueprint book blog: i am here, right
- the creative geography webpage is: you are here - the new edition isn't up yet
- the Ruhr place i plan to visit: Ruhr museum (with photo stream on the starting page)
- and another Ruhr link: Museum Folkwang
- the London lines are from a talk with Rose on stories, places, anticipation, reality

gates, again

2011-10-15T13:53:00.001+02:00

i drove down this road today, and thought: see, you don't need to take this picture. it's already taken and uploaded, in this blog post from October 2009 named 'gates'.

gates
there is this road, not far from here, framed by trees. now they all turned yellow. kind of like the natural autumn version of Christo's gates, i thought, while driving through them.

---
and interesting, to visit the diary from October 2009 - which starts with an entry called "Zeit" = "time", followed by the road pic, and then the clip of Sliver: October 2009.
.