squirm

Tower of Bookish Power

as noted earlier this year, each trip back across the ocean to the ole' homestead occasions a new foray into the cellar to rummage through my archived library. after a good chortle and gape, i take to fondly stroking their spines until eventually extracting a few volumes to bring back to berlin in the belly of an aircraft. lucky for me, my fellow passengers and the airline, the sturdy canvas bag i use for this procedure has but a limited capacity. even so, this time i was able to stuff it full of an impressive 40 kilos of wordy goodness - and a couple of dvd's came along for the ride. among the new arrivals:

barbara maria stafford - body criticism: imaging the unseen in enlightenment art & medicine
jennifer pearson squiers - peek, photographs from the kinsey institute
eberhard roters - berlin, 1910 - 1933
torsten neubauer - the weimar republic through the lens of the press
robert held - inquisition / inquisicion, a bilingual guide to the exhibition of torture instruments from the middle ages to the industrial era presented in various european cities
barbara miller lane - architecture and politics in germany 1918-1945
peter krietsch - pathologisch-anatomisches cabinet
h.m. pachter - weimar etudes
peter levenda - unholy alliance: a history of nazi involvement with the occult
maria tatar - lustmord: sexual murder in weimar germany
guido knopp - hitler's women
cees noteboom - all souls day
thomas powers - heisenberg's war: the secret history of the german bomb
steven heller - the swastika: symbol beyond redemption?
william s. burroughs - my education
william s. burroughs - electronic revolution / die elektronische revolution
william s. burroughs - the cat inside
william s. burroughs - naked lunch
david e. murphy - battleground berlin: cia vs. kgb in the cold war
norbert wiener - god and golem, inc.: a comment on certain points where cybernetics impinges on religion
f. gonzales crussi - suspended animation: six essays on the preservation of bodily parts
z.a.b. zeman - twilight of the hapsburgs
dave flitton - the occult history of the third reich
joseph roth - the wandering jews
denton welch - a voice through a cloud
denton welch - i left my grandfather's house
vincent michael colapietro - glossary of semiotics
jean baudrillard - simulations
werner herzog - of walking in ice
walter ruttman - berlin: symphony of a great city
paul leni - waxworks
brion gysin - the last museum

the old man and the sea of products

two weeks, two cat mummies

this one in Kassel's Ottoneum

and this one in the window of Maud Piquion in Brunnenstrasse

how not to see your feline friend

we have always filched in the kassel

arrived in kassel just before noon to find that my room at the stadthotel was not yet ready, the lobby crowded with an outgoing tour group.  the desk clerk encouraged me to leave my bags next to his office and return in two hours.  i took a few necessaries out, double checked that he would be around to keep an eye on things, and wandered down to the ottoneum, kassel's natural history museum, to wonder at their collection of taxidermy and an 18th century library of 'books', created from the woods of native trees.

a grey screen of showers slowed my advance as pushed back to the hotel at the appointed hour. completing the formalities and acquiring my cardkey, i dragged my bags into the elevator and punched the button for the fourth floor. thats when i noticed that my bag had been opened and i was peering into a nylon lined abyss where my laptop used to be. 

drat and double drat.

now, a police report, several hours of online hassle, and a chinese buffet later....i am left to fend off the gathering shadows armed only with my phone, a blackberry and alan clarke's tale of the disastrous clash of monstrous armies on the plains outside moscow some sixty odd years ago. 

poor bastards. now i know how they felt. 

just another day at the office

  

car talk

this XJ-S has been parked in the same spot before my apartment house for several weeks collecting tree droppings and, given the local leftist's frequent torching of luxury automobiles, making me a bit nervous. i assume the owner is on holiday, incarcerated, or otherwise indisposed. part of me likes to imagine him as an international man of mystery, an arms broker or dealer in sketchy financial instruments, who has been taken to task by a few unhappy customers, liquidated and left bundled up in the boot of his sleek ride. unfortunately a sniffing circumambulation detected no untoward odors...

jouissance

a lazy morning spent lounging in bed,  reading short texts on artistic rivalries in renaissance venice and the mind boggling body counts of 20th century europe's dueling dictatorships. this last inspired me to crack open alan clark's narration of the greatest land war in history, barbarossa, the russian-german conflict 1941-45, and begin my long march across pages thick with political prophesying, military maneuvering, and human suffering. after the opening vollies and firsts offensives, i consolidated my position and, sliding a bookmark between the pages, hunkered down with powers of horror, julia kristeva's examination of the abject. while her essay is an almost impenetrable bog of psychoanalytic terminology, theoretical weavings and wry observation, my strenuous efforts at sifting through the muck are occasionally rewarded with precious nuggets:

"the writer is a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs."

and further on,

"voyeurism accompanies the writing of abjection. when the writing stops, voyeurism becomes a perversion"

well we can only hope so, julia, we can only hope so...

lately work doesn't seem as exciting as usual

  

und ich auch...

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles from lexela on Vimeo.