Lance Olsen: There

About 75 million cubic yards of what once upon a time had been a place.

:::: Learning to travel is another way of saying learning to read.

:::: The second definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. — careful attention to detail, scrupulousness, exactness, accuracy —also obsolete.

:::: Watching a clip of Bush speaking on the German news, I notice the person creating the German subtitles is quietly correcting the President’s bad grammar and providing him with coherent thoughts.

:::: One of the fellows at the Academy notes in passing that, instead of washing his clothes, he has simply kept buying more t-shirts, underwear, and socks in order to hold off the inevitable.

:::: Learning to read is another way of saying learning to travel.

:::: Look up the third definition of curiosity in the O.E.D. — proficiency attained by careful application; skill, cleverness, ingenuity —and ditto.

:::: My first public reading in Berlin takes place in the little Las Vegas in Potsdamer Platz called the Sony Center. Before the war, this was the city’s iconic central hive, its Piccadilly Circus. Allied bombing destroyed most of it and, when the Wall went up, any structures left standing were razed to make room for the death strip’s barbed wire, electric fences, trenches, vehicle barriers, landmines, spring guns, and watchtowers.

Now Potsdamer Platz is all ecstatic economy again, Helmut Jahn’s energetic architectural hyperventilation: a revivalist confusion of industrial inside/outside, cinemas, restaurants, a conference center, hotel rooms, condos, malls, offices, a miniature Legoland, museums, a fountain, pink lights fading into blue and back again on the vast tent-like roof, and a huge television screen looping images of tropical fish drifting among rocks on the very white floor of some very blue, very distant ocean.

A nearby office building has bragging rights to Europe’s fastest elevator.

:::: Clever people master life; the wise create fresh difficulties.

Concluded Emil Nolde, who was an ardent supporter of the Nazi party for more than a decade — until 1052 of his works were removed from German museums, more than any other artist.

:::: What I mean to say is this: culture is an investment in an aesthetics of absentmindedness.

:::: Three yurts set up surreally by Potsdamer Platz’s fountain constitute the Wintersalon. One sells authors’ books. The other two host readings by 35 writers in half-hour segments over the course of four days. I’m the sole American on the roster.

Outside it’s shrilly cold, but duck through the decorated yurt door and it’s all crowded warmth and coziness. Two rows of cushioned benches along the perimeter. Colorful pillows piled in the center.

I take my seat behind a modest table outfitted with a boom mic. The host lowers the lights, and, just like that, it’s storytelling a thousand years ago: this magic expanse outside time.

What surprises me most is the raptness on the listeners’ faces, how I’ve never seen the same look back in the States — the one that tells you words still matter insanely, novels can still do things other art forms will never be capable of even trying to imagine, still celebrate language’s strangeness and human consciousness’s impossibilities for page after page after page.

:::: Otto and Elise Hampel were a working-class couple who during the war handwrote over 200 postcards denouncing Hitler and slipped them into strangers’ mailboxes in and around Wedding, their Berlin neighborhood.

They evaded the Gestapo for two years. Discovered, they were tried and beheaded in the Plötzensee Prison.

Along with 3000 others.

:::: In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

Remarked Nietzsche.

:::: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Werner Henze: Vielen Dank.

:::: For 10 days each year Berlin hosts Ultraschall, a festival of avant-garde music. At funky venues scattered throughout the city (a nineteenth-century waste-pumping station, an old train depot), you pay recklessly reasonable prices to gather with fewer than 200 aficionados to hear Schönberg, Luciano Berio, Emmanuel Nunes, Vito Zuraj.

On the second night, you begin to recognize faces in the audience, realize you accidentally stumbled upon a secret handshake.

:::: Serious travel — the kind that doesn’t involve air-conditioned buses, fanny packs, and American buffets in Cairo or Beirut Best Westerns — is accompanied by an element of play: the same sort that takes place in readers when discovering their ways through what Roland Barthes referred to as writerly texts — those which, by short-circuiting literary codes, fling the reader out of his or her subject position, put everything up for grabs, announce bliss’s entrance to the banquet.

:::: What if I turn right instead of left? What’s that over there? What does this taste like? Where will I stay? What’s that statue, this rash, that rotunda, this bazaar, that café?

When does the next train leave, the next bus arrive?

:::: If required, we can live without a heart, Joseph Beuys observed.

:::: Serious travel is also accompanied by an element of calamity that can run the gamut from mild discomfort to affliction, depending on who you are, when you are, where, with whom.

Why, I wonder, hasn’t more been written about reading as a mode of pain?

:::: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.

Felt Foucault.

:::: The fifth definition: desire to know or learn in a blamable sense; the disposition to inquire too minutely into anything; undue inquisitive desire to know or learn.

Videlicet: curiosity killed the traveler?

:::: Tell me how you interpret the adrenaline rush you’re experiencing, and I will tell you who you are.

Ortega y Gasset didn’t say, but could have.

:::: The steady rain unfreezing the lake minute by minute.

:::: Those all-you-can-eat buffets offering up the same blah food you can find at your local Chuck-A-Rama, Applebee’s, reminding you of those corporate novels offering up the same blah fiction you can find at your local John Grisham, Inc., Tom Clancy, Ltd.

:::: When André the Giant turned 12 , e.g., he was already more than six feet tall and 240 pounds. He was so big, in fact, that he couldn’t fit on the local school bus, and his family couldn’t afford a car to transport him.

André’s father was a Bulgarian farmer named Boris Rousimoff. Boris worked on a farm about 40 miles northeast of Paris. In 1953, a skinny guy with an eagle’s smile showed up and bought some land next to his. Boris helped him build a cottage.

The guy’s name was Samuel Beckett.

:::: In the early sixties, there were more than 100 publishing houses thriving in New York. They were responsible for bringing out what we think of as innovative writers, including Barthelme, Coover, Delany, Gass, Le Guin, Pynchon. The recession brought on by the 1973 oil crisis changed that. Editors were laid off. Publishers went under or were absorbed by bigger publishers. Attention recalibrated from aesthetic risk to bottom line.

Being a brief history of the McDonaldization of U.S. publishing.

:::: Boris Rousimoff befriended his new next-door neighbor. Sometimes they played cards together. When Beckett learned the young André the Giant was having trouble getting to school, he offered to drive the boy in his own truck.