Gethe and Goth

Order, order!

This right now is my first weekend after finishing my backload of stuff and getting it all done. (Finally!) I’ve been finishing things on the day of their deadline (or in some cases a bit after the deadline) for what seems like months and months – I let things slide in the last months of finishing the PhD, and then going away on holidays straight after my disputation was, while wonderful, not something that helped me with catching up on the things I hadn’t finished while still doing PhD things, since I got back and went straight into grading, and so didn’t catch up with things, and … . But I finally caught up with everything that was due late on Thursday, did most of next weeks’ class prep on Friday, and thus could take the weekend off from working (aside from some reading that I need to do for work, but that does not count as work, for me).

So what did I do with my free Saturday? Well, I did some of the non-work things that I’ve been neglecting, namely re-ordering and dusting the bookshelves that I’ve only dumped books into willy-nilly for the last months. (I don’t sort books alphabetically or anything like that, but I do try to keep subject areas together and separate from each other. As an example you can see the re-sorted and expanded shelves of my books connected to the Basileia Romaion* above (more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, these days), which was in a particularly sad state, as (partially due to the PhD) the books had well overflowed their alloted space and where anywhere from bunched into the American Literature shelves to piled up behind the TV. (I also might have re-sorted bits of my sand collection so that sand from beaches that were at some point part of the Empire are placed in front of the books. They all needed dusting anyway, so…).

I also put things on ebay, did a lot of washing, dusting, sorting, discarding, sorting of papers, cleaning of windows … the exciting times dans Casa Sibylle, let me show you them! But it needed doing, and it was just as well done today, when the weather was not really conducive to doing lots of things outside (if today had been sunny, different things would have happened, but at least the temperatures were finally high enough to keep the windows open and to give everything a good airing out). Unless it pours down tomorrow, doing things outside is firmly on the agenda! So that was my Saturday. How was yours?

PS: I did not only take a photo of a country road at night yesterday (while being stopped, folks! Drive savely!), but also spent some time on the way to the birthday party I was invited to driving around northern Germany’s countryside in the evening, so, uh, have a photo of a cow? Moo!

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* Yes, if you’re looking closely, some of those books have somewhat sensational titles (while actually being pretty sober content-wise). The Last Pagan was of course (and contrary to what the book’s title suggests), not the last pagan to ever live – merely the last pagan to also be Emperor of the Roman Empire (Emperor Julian). And Justinian’s Flea is not about a strange pet of the Emperor Justinian (alas?). (But since you’ll be able to find my name on a book called In the Ruins of Civilizations, who am I to say?)

And straight on ’til morning.

Gans und Gänseblümchen

(Canada Goose and Daisies)

Underwater camera, tufted duck

The plan was to photograph carp, but visibility was too bad for that to work. So I tried out some waterline shots instead, and like the effect the water film left on the lense had on this one.

Fly by update

This is a fly by update, in the sense that its been a while since I posted anything, but I also really don’t have any actual time to post anything profound, and I am stealing 5 minutes to do this while my late-lunch-early-dinner is cooking, which I shall consume as quickly as possible, and then head out to finish class preparation for tomorrow and go to the public library to speak about the end of the world in fiction and how the end of the world never really is one at that. Busy busy busy.

Headed home because I missed the window during which the university canteen is open and serving lunch, and finding gluten and dairy free food in the cafeteria is impossible … well, there’re apples (which I also ought not eat). Plus I needed to go pick up some things for my lecture anyway, so I just moved the timing around a bit.

On the right there you can see what is currently in my to-read-for-fun pile (different kinds of fun, but still fun), which I will need to pick something from to take on the train with me (I am going home for the weekend). I shall also be taking things to read-for-work and the second draft of an article I need to work on, but it’s going to be a lot of train-ing, and so I might get to read something besides work things, and be finished with the article before the train gets to Mannheim.

But now the rice has finished cooking, and I better go eat, and then it’s back ter work! Later, all y’all!

Ant transport

Noon in Flensburg

(Almost) the same place, 12 hours later. (I didn’t think I’d be coming by there again this soon, so I did not take not where I stood last night when taking that photo at all. Close enough.) Also, no more endive salad until autumn. (There’s only one place on the local market that carries it from time to time, and they’re out for the season and don’t expect it to come back until late autumn. So I bought some spinach to turn into a salad later on instead.) Until then – back to work. Work work work.

Midnight in Flensburg

As seen when making my way home from the impro theater rehearsal (yes, a bit of an oxymoron, I know). Now I need to sleep, and tomorrow I need to write, finish shortening and editing a lot of academic things. (And maybe go to the market and buy some asparagus. And some endive salad, if they still have any).

Pattern Recognition

Today the inaugural lecture by one of our new professors, Prof. Dr. Harald Welzer, took place at work, and he spoke well and eloquently about ‘the great transformation,’ about what can be done to transform societies into societies that can survive in the future, and what some of the problems with the whole scenario are (lots). The last time society was profoundly transformed was the first industrial revolution, and we’re arguably still struggling with that, and that was not a transformation that was implemented top-down, but rather that grew haphazardly out of a variety of confluences and circumstances. I’ve read about the dialectic of people being concerned about the environment on the one hand and not implementing any lifestyle changes in their own lives here and there (and everywhere), but a new perspective on it was interesting, especially since he mentioned some books and writers I’ve not yet read (second hand book places, here I come). I’ve also mostly been looking at it from an ecocritical perspective, not a socio-political one, given the nature of the book I recently finished writing. It’s all similar, though, from a variety of angles, and some points of his talk just made me think of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx & Crake, where the difficulty of stopping a destructive process once it has reached a certain momentum is also discussed. Everyone’s banging their head against the same wall, trying to stop what might well be inevitable, for reasons manifold and plenty and mostly indeed psychological and socio-political.

“Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate,” Crake used to say. “Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the same wall at ninety miles an hour, it’s red paint. We’re in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing.”

I listened, thought Jimmy, but I didn’t hear.

I, too, think we’re in a speed tunnel, or approaching it fast – even if not the same as the one in Oryx & Crake turns out to be. But we’re listening but not hearing, too. (Have you read Oryx & Crake? Read Oryx & Crake!)

Futures & Ruins

So, parts of what my PhD brought along with it was a lot of research into ruins and ruin theory, and especially into the first appearances of what I refer to as ‘anticipated ruins’ – depictions of isochronically whole buildings in a future state of ruin. Hubert Robert is one of the first painters of such anticipated ruins, although not the earliest (known) painter of them (that distinction goes to Victor Louis, and his 1759 painting of The Church of Sant’Andrea de Vignola, transformed into a Roman ruin). However, Robert’s Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines (1796) is really the most well-known early example.

So, when I found out that there’s a book about Hubert Robert’s works of anticipated ruination out there now, I could not resist investigating it, even though it was published too late to be integrated into my work. I ordered it on long-distance inter-library loan and what with one thing and another it arrived the day before I went adventuring, and had to be returned the day after I got back – so all I got to do was glance into it and see if it sounded interesting, or if the title had given me false hopes … and since it turned out looking like something I might enjoy reading at my leisure at some point in time I made a note of the title and publication details … and just now I gave in and ordered a copy for myself (rather than re-loaning it, which I have also pondered doing).

It took me a while to get around to ordering it, though – might this mean that my complete apathy towards academic writing connected to my PhD in particular and outside of essential to teaching-and-uni-work things in general is wearing off again? That’d be nice. Batteries, recharge! Still, six weeks of post-PhD-kind-of-apathy-towards-academia-pursued-only-for-myself … fair enough, huh. That was a bit of a mountain to scale after all, I guess, and as long as all it gave me was temporary exhaustion instead of permanent altitude sickness … I ain’t complaining.

I’ll post about what the book is like, once it gets here & I have time to read it. For now I gotta get back to finishing my musings about tomorrow’s classes (my class load has doubled this term, so it’s all kind of … intense right now) … we’ll be reading and discussing Edgar Allan Poe as well as founding our own fictive companies, it’s gonna be fun (one hopes) (Not in the same class, though)!