Lance Olsen: There

:::: Heinrich von Kleist shot his lover through the heart as well, as they stood on the shores of Lake Wannsee, but he chose to shoot himself in the head, careful to place the bullet so as not to disturb his elaborate hairdo.

:::: The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

Pointed out Francis Picabia.

:::: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Advised Beckett.

:::: Otto Dix fled to the countryside and began painting unpeopled landscapes that offended precisely no one.

:::: Some not-news that often feels like news if we don’t think about it too long or hard: We live in shards.

Why would we choose to write otherwise?

:::: Nolde, whom the Reichskulturkammer banned from buying art supplies, chose to carry on secretly with watercolors because they wouldn’t give him away through their telltale oil pong.

:::: Apfeltorte. Mandelhörnchen. Schwedische marzipan .

:::: Restless Berlin: its urban planning guide the one for the book you’re holding, the architecture its architecture.

:::: Because here is Beckett again, whose work seems empty of politics, and yet who functioned as a courier for the French Resistance after the 1940 German occupation, and yet who referred to those efforts as boy scout stuff , and yet who received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance from the government for them:

Habit is the great deadener.

:::: What I mean to say is this: culture makes believe it is all about remembering, when remembering is pretty much the last thing culture is ever about.

:::: Outside your window today, sparse snowflakes agitate gauzy air.

:::: More not-news, this time from Donna Haraway: Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

:::: Or Koestenbaum, redux: One way to be an I is to lose the I .

:::: J.F.K.’s assertion about being a jelly donut has been memed by media ever since: the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times . This novel. That monograph. It became a communal recollection of an adorable malapropism.

The problem is that Kennedy didn’t actually make a grammatical mistake. To a German ear, nothing sounds amiss. In fact, the gaff would have clanked had he said Ich bin Berliner , meaning I am a person from Berlin , as echt Berliners can and do.

By adding the indefinite article ein before the noun, however, Kennedy cast his sentence into the figurative: he was claiming he felt like a person living in Berlin rather than claiming residence. He was declaring solidarity with the German people in perfect German.

During the speech, he used the phrase twice. He had it carefully written out in English phonetics before him because he knew not a word of the language he was speaking:

Ish bin ein Bear lee ner.

:::: Here is Debord, back from the country of theory ghosts: The new towns of the technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest of indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded; their motto might well be:

On this spot nothing will ever happen — and nothing ever has.

:::: The fellow fellow living in the apartment above yours at the Academy enigmatically rearranges his or her furniture every night, beginning around 11:00 p.m. You can hear chairs and maybe a desk dragged back and forth. Maybe a small sofa.

:::: In Berlin everything can and has happened.

:::: Early each spring, I am told, Germans develop a fetish for white asparagus.

:::: Pockmarks on the facades, columns, walls throughout the city: the war still going on everywhere.

All you have to do is look.

:::: The American Academy provides a bus tour of the city. Unnervingly well-informed, our guide, a freelance art historian named Billie, tells us a version, I imagine, of what all guides here tell all tourists.

At the end, in private, I hear one of the fellows complain to another that Billie has done no more than perpetuate the clichéd Western narrative about the great triumph of democratic goodness over East Germany’s shabby authoritarianism.

Does the fellow mean to imply the East somehow wasn’t dingy and despotic?

The Stasi wasn’t known as the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agency in the world; didn’t boast half a million informers, 10,000 younger than 18; didn’t infiltrate all industrial plants, schools, universities, hospitals; didn’t drill holes through hotel-room and apartment walls to spy on its own citizens; didn’t employ psychological intimidation as well as physical torture (including the use of cold, damp, overcrowded, filthy, airless cells; sleep deprivation; standing upright until unconsciousness ensued; proto-waterboarding); didn’t thereby plant regiments of Foucault’s invisible police behind its people’s foreheads?

:::: According to the O.E.D. , the word avant-garde initially referred to an army’s shock troops.

And was first used in English by Malory.

Sometime between 1470 and 1485.

:::: The gray lake freezes overnight and you find yourself standing at the window, thinking: All this seeing. All this taking in.

:::: One morning in a hotel in Mandalay I tried to check the news on a public computer. The sites for the BBC, CNN, The New York Times were blocked by the government. So I looked up a private proxy with an IP address in London and used that. By the time I was done skimming headlines, three boxy men in bromidic military uniforms and aviator sunglasses were standing behind me, asking, in Burmese, from what I could gather from their cheerlessness, what I thought I was doing.

:::: Etiolation : the process of causing a plant to grow pale by depriving it of light; hence the genesis of said white asparagus, in whose case dirt is kept mounded around the emerging stalks.

Likewise, naturally, innovative writing practices.

:::: Look up the first definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. and you will find carefulness, application of care and attention .

Both now obsolete.

:::: Not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Observed Donald Barthelme, winner of the 1972 National Book Award.

In the category of Children’s Books.

:::: Because all mobile phones are collected by customs agents upon your arrival at the Rangoon airport.

You can reclaim them upon your departure from the country.

:::: How a week into O.’s stay, a photographer appears to take portraits of each fellow. She seats O. in a leather chair in the lush library in front of a built-in bookcase, asks him to look into the camera, steps back a few feet to take the shot.

Except then she starts squinting into her viewfinder as if having difficulty making something out.

Puzzled, O. waits for instructions.

A minute, and the photographer lowers her camera, steps forward, reaches around him, removes a book from the shelf, lays it off to the side, out of range of the lens: George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points.

He isn’t a friend to the artist, the photographer says, backs up, raises her camera, and carries on.

:::: In German passport photos, the rule is never to show your teeth.

:::: Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.

Dared Ortega y Gasset.

:::: Teufelsberg means Devil’s Mountain , although it wasn’t made by the devil and isn’t a mountain. Rather, it’s a manmade hill rising about 260 feet above sea level in what used to be West Berlin.

It took 20 years to build out of war rubble.