The home-away-from-Home Stretch

Berlin experiences a magical transformation in April. When spring reaches the point of no return, the whole atmosphere comes alive: overflowing outdoor cafes, picnics, beer gardens, bicycles everywhere. Walking through Tempelhof on a Sunday feels like Woodstock without the music.

Or with the music! My Ohrwurm as I trot around sunny Berlin is usually 0:00 until 2:33 of Jussi Björling singing Beethoven's Adelaide. 

Gleisdreieck: train tracks through the woods. Another awesome Berlin park that mixes urban with nature with Woodstock. 

The Comenius Garden: a little slice of paradise tucked away in Neukölln.

Körnerpark in Neukölln. (And incidentally: right now I'm living in Franz Körner's house!) 

A large urban lake/fountain/marsh I recently discovered near the Kulturforum. 

Angular koi-pond on one end, natural marsh on the other.

And it's just as Berlin has started to wake up that I'm making my rounds and saying goodbyes. In less than 2 weeks I'm heading to Vienna. This is of course good news -- everyone says Vienna is awesome. Somehow, though, I feel a special kind of connection to Berlin and I'll be sorry to go.

...yes, that's right. I am the ONLY AMERICAN ever to want to stay in Berlin.

Siegessäuleselfie. Berlin, it's been real.

Meanwhile, I had a fun weekend at the Akademie der Künste for the DAAD-Treffen for musicians and musicologists. Someone at the DAAD made an executive decision that Musikwissenschaftler are first-cousins to musicians, second-cousins to other Wissenschaftler -- and though I'm not entirely sure that's the case, I'm so glad that I was invited to the music meeting rather than sitting through days of utopian quasi-TED lectures on the virtues of the humanities. I spent the weekend getting to know musicians from all over the world, observing masterclasses, and hearing some terrific presentations and performances -- all for the small price of a lecture.

Looking deer-in-the-headlights with a fun crowd. Schöne Zeit mit warmen Fuzzies.

Bravi!

The offshoot of hanging out with musicians: I've finally realized deep down that I ABSOLUTELY MUST play piano more seriously again. (And by "more seriously" I mean actually learning rep, rather than dicking around in a practice room on occasion.) I've been experiencing an alarming and depressing piano-decline since I started grad school. The more I immerse myself in books, the more my performer-self fades. I've felt for years like that expressive part of myself is missing, and I've wanted it back, but somehow I lost touch with my grit.

But not anymore. I'm now determined to rent a practice room in Vienna (urgh €€ but it's worth it) and start working on a recital program for next year. I spent three hours yesterday listening to music on Spotify, trying out different combinations of rep, envisioning the perfect program.

It's interesting how thoughtful programming can be like storytelling. I've decided to build my program around the Bach B-flat major Partita, a piece that just breathes spring and grass and unassuming sunrise. (Not a spectacular sunrise -- just the kind that is completely ordinary, but nonetheless perfect... at least that's how I interpret the Prelude. Sounds cheesy in words, feels lovely in feelings.) I wanted to put a Scarlatti sonata at the beginning and I'm infatuated with the B minor Sonata K. 27. (Why are harmonic sequences so captivating? How can composing by numbers be so magical?) But I realized that ending on B-minor just before a piece in B-flat major sounds like barf. So now I'm trying to find a Scarlatti Sonata in F major (don't roll your eyes, the dominant-tonic thing really works) that's whimsical but also lovely, with just enough oomph at the end to propel us into the Bach. And then after the final spritz of the Gigue, I envision a pivot: B-flat major to B-flat minor, Bach to Brahms. But not a honeyed or impassioned Brahms -- a tightly controlled, contrapunctal, mirror-image Brahms. A subtle pivot from Bach, rather than Brahms appearing out of nowhere. For the rest of the Brahms section, I'm pondering bringing back a couple pieces from way-back-when (partly strategically to shorten my learning time, partly because I love them): two items from Op. 118 re-ordered to form a pair, No. 5 followed by No. 3.

At this point, I'm stuck. This is around 45 minutes of music, perfect for a Tea Time at UChicago. If I add much more, I'll be spread too thin. But the final lingering shadow-chord of the Brahms Ballade just feels too somber and mysterious. It's not the springtime of Bach and Scarlatti. It's a bald-ruhest-du-auch kind of spring.

The Jewish cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg: peaceful, mysterious, haunting. 

Should my recital really end this way?

Or maybe just re-re-order the Brahms, ending on spring loveliness with Op. 118, No. 5? But isn't it a bit of a denouement?

BLARG.

Programming pickle aside: I've got my groove back! Unfortunately this newfound Feuer und Flamme comes at a time when I have NO PIANO. I tried practicing Bach on my desk, but it's just not the same. And I looked like an idiot doing it.

I'll keep it warm for you until you get back.

Whyyyyymar

Have you ever had a strong aversion to a place without really understanding why?

It's an odd feeling. Once the initial cuteness, newness, and springtime allure wore off, I found myself bizarrely uncomfortable in Weimar, where I spent a week looking at Liszt documents in the Goethe-Schiller Archiv.

I still haven't figured out why on earth I was so weirded out. All the ingredients for a fun experience were there:

• Weimar is cute
• Weimarians are friendly. A woman on the street actually offered to give me actual directions (which I suppose can be a pro or a con, depending on whether you want to be officiously helped / calmly ignored)
• Weimar is historic: home to important cultural figures like Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Liszt, Richard Strauss, the hotel Hitler always stayed at which remains eerily unchanged today, and Gropius's Bauhaus movement and the square where Hitler held horrible giant rallies but we're not talking about that, okay??? Geez
• Weimar has a beautiful park by the river with forests and fields and nature
• I stayed with an awesome lady who was a great conversationalist
• I met up with friends for a beer at one point, which counts as +2 hipness points and -3 researchhermit points

So why didn't I like Weimar? On the street level it is certainly attractive:

Goethe-Schiller Archiv, where I spent 8-9 hours every day

View from the archive

Walking along the Ilm to the library 

Caspardavidfriedrichism: whereby all German cities must contain a Gothic ruin

Russian cemetery?

Path from the city down to the Ilm park.

Historic cemetery

Giant tree root growing in a grave. Contemplation of mortality, etc.
I'm not a poet, help me out here!

Weimar's Coolest Texture, since 1889

Church around the corner from my apartment

For all this loveliness, the silent tumbleweed-emptiness felt oppressive to me after only a couple days. If you glance again at the street photos, you'll see that they are all empty. Evening in one of the main squares looks like this:

I count 5 people including myself.

Granted, Weimar was probably empty because it's too early for tourists and the students were on break. So the instant the students leave, the city falls into a deep sleep. And then there are the usual oddities that come with small-town life, which seem striking for someone 1) coming directly from Berlin and 2) accustomed to living in large cities. (... quoth the native Denverite. Lest it seem odd to call Denver a large city: Denver metro area population: 3,000,000. Denver city population: 650,500. Weimar population: 65,500.)

Among the oddities of the small city with stores primarily intended for tourists:

Engrish! This text is dollar-store bad... on a pair of shoes selling for 70€ in a fancy store.

Dead things! For all of Weimar's aspiring taxidermists.

Weimar is a city obsessed with heritage and museums: there are actually 16 different museums in a city so small you can walk from one end to the other in 40 minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I love going to museums. But occasionally the exhibitionary complex can go too far. In Weimar, even the depressing shopping mall put on a "fashion" "exhibit":

Let's take a closer look at that terrifying, melting face, shall we?

Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuuuuck

So in short: Weimar is a great city to visit if:

• You like museums
• The students are around to liven the place up
• You are only staying for a few days

OR

• You are less batshit crazy than I am?

Because in the end, my dislike of Weimar was probably just a special blend of missing Berlin + a delicate aroma of batshit crazy. (Featuring: real taxidermied bats!)

Schreib! Dein! Buch!

I'm back in Berlin, this time living in schicky-micky Prenzlauerberg. Even though P-Berg is supposedly not cool anymore, walking along sidewalks that are not littered with trash is surprisingly refreshing.

I live 5 minutes away from this.

And this.

And this chill dude.

And while I'm enjoying the delicious spring weather, I can't help but feel disappointed that I'm most definitely not on the southwestern beaches of Turkey right now. My adventurous Groupon purchase, a 1-week trip to Antalya and Cappadocia, was unexpectedly and inexplicably canceled 4 days prior to the departure day. Boo. So instead of exploring ancient Greek ruins and a desert of rocks shaped like penises, I'm spending an extra week in the StaBi, banging my head agaiwriting my first chapter.

I had a productive month in Bonn at the Beethoven archive -- although technically I was living in Bornheim, a small town/suburb of Bonn that is 5 minutes away from both Pink Wagner and a herd of starving sheep:

Mounted on the side of someone's house. I was surprised to encounter exactly the same pink Wagner in my surrogate-advisor's living room.

Going jogging in Bornheim is a real treat:

German cows go: mööö

And meanwhile, in Bonn, I discovered a ton of great archival material... which, instead of reading about here, you can read in my dissertation in 2017! Or maybe the book my dissertation will (hopefully) eventually become in 2020.

.... at which point eggplants around the world will be raised in triumph.

Sneak peek: dissertation will feature a mini-case study about a lady who wrote 5 devotional (and at times somewhat sensual) poems to Beethoven in the museum guestbook from 1903-1912. I finally tracked down a pilgrim from amidst the faceless nameless masses!

But for now, I'm getting down to business and trying desperately to get words on e-paper. This ad from the Deutsche Bahn magazine was designed specially to taunt me:

I'm trying, I'm trying!

The thing I find most bizarre: imagine spending years of your life (and €€ on bogus writing tuition and self-publication) to produce a book. Finally you receive your first exemplar in the mail. You stroke it lovingly, smell it, hug it to your chest. You open the cover to find your name printed in crisp ink. And, tears welling in your eyes, you... wear it on your head.

So THAT'S what books are for!

But in all fairness, I feel like this ↑ about 80% of the time.

There is something about this idea that's been nagging at me. When you spend days on end sitting at a cubicle, in a long row of hipstery grad students all typing into their computers, cranking out pages and pages of text that almost no one will read... at a certain point it starts to feel like the whole enterprise is just a vanity project.

And whether our research strives to make a genuine contribution, or whether it's a fancy pretty hat to wear on our own heads, is actually a serious methodological question. Let's say I encounter some poems in a museum guestbook that were written by the central demographic of my dissertation (i.e., raging weirdos of the 19th century). I could approach this material in three ways:

[commence Scrubs-like voiceover]

1) "Oooh, another juicy morsel! I think I'm seeing a pattern emerging in these guestbook entries, but not quite sure yet... I'll need to collect more examples, read a book or two on amateur lyric in nineteenth-century Germany, figure out which poetic language was standard at the time and which is specific to Beethoven... maybe over the course of the next year or so I'll figure out whether this can be made into a broader argument about raging weirdos! Cool!"

2) "Oooh, another juicy morsel! Let's see... how can I connect this to the argument I already have? raging weirdos(19th century) = cosθ + Beethoven.* I feel like I should bring in some historical anthropology to show that I'm well-read... Also need to find a way to include that kickass analogy I came up with the other day. And it would be nice to recycle that paragraph I cut out of the previous chapter, it made me sound like a philosopher for a second. Cool!"

3) "Goddamn handwriting. What does it saaaaaaay?!?"


Any historian can see that #2 is a big fat methodological no-no. But I have a suspicion that even the best historians lapse into this kind of thinking, imagining the finished project like a trophy while we're still elbow-deep in material. And ultimately, fantasizing about the end-goal -- though enticing and occasionally motivating -- leads to a feeling of emptiness. I have to feel like what I'm doing, or finding, is real, not just some arts&crafts project I'm selling on Etsy.

Something my advisor said in a recent conversation was encouraging. I asked, "is my dissertation marketable?" He started rubbing his temples like ermagerd no I hate this question and then said, "Well... first it has to be good."

______________________
*Ok ok, for all you readers who actually understand the maths, please hide your chuckles behind your hand. Is theta even a math thing?  Is that thing I wrote even a function? Is 2 a number?