Stella lent me season one of Türkisch für Anfänger (TfA), and when I played the beginning of the first episode this evening I immediately recognized a few Berlin locales.
Homesickness of sorts resulted.
I should be able to show episodes of it in class; there are 12 in the first season. They are short (24 minutes) and quite tame.
This evening was another episode of Heroes, and without spoiling much I can say, “Welcome, Mr. Malcolm McDowell, sir.”
The strawberry-rhubarb pie seemed to go over well; I can’t say that Morgenstern’s “Der Werwolf” went over as well with my students, but I’m there to teach, not to entertain.
I was writing an entry for another site this evening when Nate called, fresh from his trip to Berlin with his boyfriend and “in-laws” … alas, most of them got the flu (including Nate). I should see him at the end of April in California; we spoke for a while about the upcoming 10-year-reunion and a few people we’d likely see there. He still wants me to move out to Seattle and take a (non-academic) job there. Then again, he’s one of those people who always felt, it seems, that I should have stayed with math instead of (German) literature, but all these later, my best years behind me, a return to math is out of the question.
I’m made my bed, so they say, and I must lie in it. Alone.
I turned on iTunes a few minutes ago and have about an hour of Lo Fidelity Allstars and Lordi to listen to.
Between my time spent a Fair Trade, on the bus on the way home, and on my bed while meatloaf cooked in the oven, I finished Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four. It made beach-reading pseudo-literary waves a few years ago when it got good reviews and sold like hotcakes. These days you find it on sale in paperback. I just checked out a copy from the library instead. It’s one part Da Vinci Code, about one part The Historian (E. Kostova), a pinch of Special Topics in Calamity Physics (if you haven’t read it, you should — you’ll love it), with a bit of Dead Poets Society and similar tales of kids at school thrown in for good measure. It was a quick read and enjoyable, decently written, but mostly exposition. If anything it’s most admirable trait is that the “action” for the vast majority of the book takes places over the course of only a few days … chapter after chapter belong to different times during the same day, and much of the “exposition” is matter of “history,” “flashbacks” and the like. The film rights were sold some time ago, and it’s easy to imagine it as having been written with a movie in mind.
