I have to ask you dear about the tan line on your ring finger

I remember feeling shocked the first time I saw ads projected in a subway tunnel, still images arranged so that they produced a moving image. When the El slowed, I got a look at just how many pictures of the Honda Accord were projected onto the wall: lots. I was reminded of this when I was walking up the jetway in Heathrow yesterday upon returning from Berlin. I saw an ad for marriage, I think, or an ad for a bank. Hard to be sure.

There's a particular kind of ad that always seems to appear in jetways, one which involves a repeated image with different captioning. So, for instance, sometime last year I saw these paired diptychs of side-by-side photos of a businessman and a rock star, with respective captions of "normal," "groundbreaking"; "groundbreaking," "normal." I think the ad was for a bank, so presumably they were more on the suit side of things. But advertising in a space like a subway tunnel or a jetway, where passengers are on their journey from a to b, dreaming of buying a sandwich or finally getting to use the bathroom or maybe just idly wondering how long it will take to get into the city or whether they can remember where they've parked their car, seems often to capitalize on fantasies of reinvention. Walking off the plane into Heathrow, behind a French man who looked like Prince but twice the size, who was wearing a gold leather jacket and a gigantic faux-diamond cuff, I passed three images of plastic figures of a bride and groom on top of a wedding cake with the captions: fear, fate, fairy tale. Sure, there are people who think these things about marriage -- probably a rare cross section who think that it's all three -- but because this was about financial managment, why the cake? But of course, marriage and money cross paths again and again. I was just watching this BBC program called "Who Do You Think You Are," which is a delightful mix of geek-out genealogy and celebrity gossip, because it traces the family lines of various stars (Jerry Springer; today, the character Mark from Peep Show). The highpoint of the episode was when Mark goes to visit a distant relative who's got a copy of Mark's great great grandfather's will, in which he writes his wife out of it because of her "intemperance." "I regret to say," he writes, "that to my beloved wife I can leave nothing." He goes on to catalogue her sins. But to get back to the image of the wedding cake as a way to convince weary travelers to use this bank instead of another: what is the idea there? That I'll have a kind of pavlovian response of either fear or fate or fairy tale, understand the multiplicity of views on marriage (much like the multiplicity of views on investing!), and figure out which term (which investment strategy) is right for me? I'm leaving out the other option, which is that I'll desperately want to eat the cake. I think that's the most likely.

Rebecca Mead and others have said earlier and better what I might on the topic, so I won't add anything, but I do think that the chroniclers of late capitalism (yes, that's you, FJ) should be rushing to their typewriters to ask why we're suddenly producing more and more powerful images of permanence at a moment when we're discovering that credit isn't a guarantee. Certain forms of the virtual are failing us, but at the same time we're holding on to them. I suppose what I mean is that I think the resurgence of the desire for stability (whether through marriage or through investment strategies) is about fictions of stability. And of course stability has always been accomplished through fictions, but these seem different.

Sign language

On my way to the laundromat yesterday, I stopped into a corner shop to buy a bottle of water so that I'd have appropriate change for the machines. This was my second experience at the laundromat, and this time I didn't need to look up various words (waschpulver!) in my pocket dictionary to confirm that it was indeed soap I was getting to put into my clothing. I was waiting in line with my water and my ten euro note, and everything was going fine until the very friendly proprietor offered me a date stuffed with a walnut. Thanks!, I said, eating it appreciatively while he told me what it was. Turns out that the German words for date, walnut, and coconut are all practically homophones, and I could see what it was anyway. After I finished chewing the proprietor was waiting expectantly for my response, and all I could do -- because I sheepishly didn't want to admit I didn't know German -- was make an ok sign with my hand, which didn't seem to mean much to him (thankfully I wasn't doing this in Brazil, where it's the equivalent of giving someone the finger) and say thanks again. The one other phrase I've mastered in German is I'm sorry, do you speak English?, and I say it several times a day, when someone asks to borrow a pen, or asks for directions, or asks me whether it's cold in the library (oddly, it isn't). So it's decided, I think: it's time to learn German.

Also on the topic of language appreciation, there are certain phrases that are particularly funny to my American ear. In addition to the worldwide phenomenon of wearing t-shirts with phrases in foreign languages that you think are cool but really don't make sense (do you know that says Media Blitz, Mr. Cool?), the names of German bars amaze me. The Rodeo Club. The Polish Losers' Club. Muschi Obermaier.

I'm going to leave that last one untranslated. It's probably for the best...

On Berlin

When Tom and I were trying to find a mop in a department store yesterday -- a necessity that our flat lacks, given its resident's clear prioritization of things mental over things physical -- I said to him, 'I don't think this guy has cleaned since the wall came down.' While that surely is an exaggeration, it's nevertheless the case that the wall -- and the building, razing, and rebuilding it has entailed -- continues to be a part of everyday experience here, and is characteristic of how this city is uniform only insofar as it's a consistent hodgepodge of squares and train stations and different period styles which were all built, more or less, over the same two or three decades after WWII. The diversity of postwar reconstruction is genuine, but it's nevertheless peculiar: all of the columned, neoclassical buildings look convincingly old, but as soon as you remind yourself that the majority of the city was flattened in the war, you recognize that the stately buildings along Unter den Linden, which runs from the Brandenburg Gate past the opera house and Humboldt University are actually the same vintage as the geometrical, primary-colored highrise apartment buildings that are clustered in different neighborhoods of the city. The old is as new as the semi-new; you can't trust your eye to date buildings based on period appearance. Because rent in Berlin is so low, you see shops in the middle of the city that you would never see in London, say: walking from our flat to the Lidl (the Aldi-equivalent supermarket), you pass a shop that only sells wheels for heavy-duty carts, and a shop that sells gadgets to assist the elderly with bathing and walking, and a variety of other clubs and shopfronts. In a way it evens things out, so that cheap places and expensive places exist side by side, but it also makes for a randomizing effect such that a collonade, which appears to have survived the war, is across from the industrial wheel shop.

I don't have a clear sense of the East vs. West legacy: parts of the wall are in many places throughout the city, in the East Side Gallery, in Potsdamer Platz, where I get off the train every morning, in museums and on posters and reproduced in shops. A friend says you can tell East German men by the vests they wear, khaki for the workplace and black for dress (witness Brüno's assistant). It's easy to stop noticing them; they're usually obscured by tourists anyhow. But it's hard to stop noticing the inconsistencies in the city's reproduction of the accumulation of styles over time: when you realize that the concert hall is no more baroque than the gigantic, space-age Kulturforum, which is mustard yellow and really appears to be designed by an alien architect, it's like seeing the wires suspending the acrobat. The reality effect of this city is a simultaneity that wants to stretch over time, and does, largely because almost all of it is covered with graffiti. As soon as you cover a wall in spray paint, it matters less whether it's old or new, I think. And in any case, one of the ways this city expresses its delightful unruliness, in the midst of an otherwise bureaucratic and rule-bound state, is through all this scribbling. Even the walls of the Camper store along one of the trendy shopping streets are covered with graffiti. When you go in there you can write on the walls. Maybe once it's become part of shoe shopping, it's hardly the same sort of activity, but even so, I like trying to spot artists' work across town. One of my favorites is a Warhol Velvet Underground banana that someone has put on all sorts of walls.

Stealth blogging in the Staatsbibliothek

While I don't officially know that it's against the rules to use the library computers for things other than strictly academic pursuits, the gigantic list in German next to the computer -- though I understand basically none of it -- presumably declares it bad form. So in the spirit of not breaking the rules too much, I'll try to be brief.

Not understanding lists and notices and announcements -- not understanding much at all, really -- has been the order of the last few days. Tom and I have been in Berlin since Sunday, and we've settled in nicely. In general I've been able to get by on the Berliners' excellent English and my baby phrases like 'a coffee, please' and 'thank you!' I think I say 'please' much more when it's one of the fifteen words I know. Unfortunately the word for 'sorry' is really long, so I've had to keep practicing it. Walking around whispering it to myself makes me remember a similar moment when I'd just moved to Florence and Meredith and I were trying to figure out how in the world to pronounce 'spoon' in Italian. We were walking down the street saying the equivalent of 'spooooon' until we realized that we probably seemed like we had sufficiently limited capacities that we ought to be taken off the streets immediately, and possibly even spoon fed. That quieted us down, at least for a moment.

Other than my utter inability to speak or understand German, which makes certain everyday tasks more challenging than they otherwise would be, I have to say that I love Berlin. We're staying in a great big studio in Schoneberg which we've rented from a historian whose WWII books line an entire wall, floor to ceiling. The kitchen is tiled orange and the stovetop is on the windowsill -- just two burners. It's just right for the summer. There's a Turkish market up the street with more fruit and varieties of dried beans than I've ever seen: a good antidote to a city that's otherwise committed to meat and beer. About the latter, it really is good here: I had some pilsner in a ceramic mug with my dinner the other night, and I wasn't about to complain.

Even though I've been away from the states for only two weeks or so, it seems like longer, partly because I've been in London and Berlin since then, partly because so much has happened. We moved Tom out of his Cambridge flat (this involved renting a very, very big van), Tom passed his viva, we did some celebrating at Rules (London's oldest restaurant), we had a BBQ, complete with s'mores, in the garden. I explored London a bit more and got to see Queen Mary, where I'll be a visiting student next year. I also saw the production of Phedre that the National Theatre broadcast to 100 cinemas all over England. Helen Mirren was in it! She was really good -- the whole production was excellent, really. What an unrelenting play. When you see it, you think: 'This is tragedy; it just won't give up being doomed.'

On a lighter note, we're seeing Bruno tonight. I can only imagine...

London calling!

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but haven't had the chance: I'm moving to London in the fall! Tom got a job in the philosophy department at University College London and I'm going to go do my dissertation work at the British Library and Museum, where they have all of the things I work on in manuscript form. Sources tell me that the Science reading room is the place to work at the BL, rather than the Humanities room (apparently scientists practice better hygiene), so I'll probably be splitting my time between there and other study spots. And of course Borough Market, where I'll have to start wearing disguises so the vendors don't refuse me samples after my umpteenth return.

I'm really happy about the move -- well, okay, maybe not about the move itself, but happy about the reasons for it, and glad that I kept the boxes from last year. I guess this means that I'll have cause to keep up The Queen's English. I'll be sending dispatches from Berlin and Chicago this summer, and then from England in the fall.



There are many reasons I'm going, of course, but first among them is Tom. He's wonderful. For those of you who haven't had the chance to meet him yet, I hope you do soon. Come visit!

Reading

The other day I was reading a short piece in the London Review about Google Street view, which has just been put up for the UK as of this March. It's written by a journalist who isn't too keen on the idea of having these pictures up online, which is either ironic or entirely reasonable (take your pick) in light of the fact that there are more security cameras in the UK than anywhere else, I think, in the world. It turns out that wearing a hoodie is actually a practical measure if you're trying to avoid having your profile recorded on camera. I had no idea.

Anyhow, the piece begins with a reference to Stendhal: there's a memorable moment in The Red and the Black where Stendhal describes the novel as a mirror being carried down a road:

"Look here, sir, a novel is a mirror moving along a highway. One minute you see it reflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles of the road. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows the mud and you accuse the mirror!"

On Stendhal's account, the man photographed leaving the strip club on Google Street view doesn't have grounds to accuse Google, but this isn't exactly the author's point. I hadn't thought of this passage for six years at least, but it immediately made me remember reading Stendhal in college. I took this one class on nineteenth-century novels, and I was reading, reading, reading all quarter to keep up with it. I'm a remarkably slow reader, especially for a graduate student, and when I had to blaze through Lost Illusions in a week I neglected my other work to get through it. But I really loved those weeks.

Maybe it's something about the French, but I've been thinking about the pleasure of reading more generally of late anyhow because I've embarked on Proust. Proust, for all of his decadence -- it's sumptuous prose, and if you're in the mood for something spartan, it just won't suit -- really understands why we read, and this makes the experience of reading him all the more enjoyable. It's adolescent, I suppose, but how to resist?

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

Making jam

Last week, I found myself with another bunch of rhubarb; I have no willpower when it comes to the farmers' market, and the piles of rhubarb looked too pretty to pass up. Since it's not exactly something you can snack on, I needed to come up with something to do with it. I had half a mind to make it into a dessert for Kate's birthday, but I made Kate a chocolate cake instead, so I still had to use it up. This is where Tom's grandmother comes in. I've never actually met her (I take it that meeting Granny is sort of like being allowed into the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City; you've got to be a member, and suffice it to say that I'm not, at least not yet) but I've eaten many of her specialties. Cakes, jams, flapjacks, apple sauce, cabbage, soup, fish pie, entire canisters of chocolate: the whole lot. She seems to be someone who believes in expressing love by feeding everyone around her, to excess. Tom can't visit her without returning with a crate of things she's made. And she's the one who taught him to cook, too, so judging by her prodigious output and the quality of her students, I think she's got some serious culinary prowess.

So when I opened the fridge for the umpteenth time and saw that rhubarb staring at me, once again, I thought: I should make Granny's ginger rhubarb jam. I got the recipe (Tom has access to the temple, you see), and made it on Sunday morning. I haven't tasted the results yet, but I think they look pretty promising.



Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

2 1/2 lb. rhubarb, trimmed and chopped (prepared weight)
2 1/2 lb. sugar
Juice of 3-4 lemons (reserve peel from one lemon and seeds from all lemons)
1 oz. fresh root ginger
4 oz. preserved or crystallized ginger, chopped

Put the rhubarb in a large bowl in alternate layers with the sugar and the lemon juice. Cover and leave overnight.

Next day, crush or bruise the ginger root slightly with a rolling pin and tie in a muslin bag with the lemon peel, chopped, and the seeds.

Put the rhubarb mixture into a pan with the muslin bag, bring to a boil, and boil rapidly for 15 minutes. Remove the muslin bag, add the preserved or crystallized ginger, and boil for a further 5 minutes or until setting point is reached.

Remove any scum, then pot and cover in the usual way.