Loose End

I'M AT A VERY LOOSE END. Feeling depressed. I don't get the buzz out of things that I expect to get. Example: I went into town and bought Chinese books and Paris Match and Stern magazines in French and German. I got all this stuff home and felt distinctly flat. Not depressed. Not angry. Nothing negative; just nothing very positive.

My life goals are to speak and write German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese to as near mother tongue standard as possible. To this end I am using every language course I can get my hands on. It's good to have one in German, even if it is "too easy". Really I need a teacher to correct my writing, because I know it's unidiomatic. Someone once asked in all seriousness whether my German blog was the product of Google Translate ~ which just about says everything about my writing. My vocabulary is pretty good now ~ though nowhere near as good as someone's who has put proper effort in. The Perfect Your German CDs and book promises an active vocab of 5000 words. Using a dictionary and multiplying the number of words familiar with per page by the number of pages I calculated I had a passive vocabulary (that is, I read a word and understand it) of eight to ten thousand words.

I've started my book in ernest. I'm only after a name for my central character but I think I've found one. I googled it and it's not been used. That is the big high jump for all children's characters' names. The more unique they are the less allowable it is for them to have featured in previous books, films, cartoons etc. Mine seemed to check out OK.

I've only written about a page of story but it's a children's book. Not a picture book, as my mother assumed, but a children's book like the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter are children's books. Totally unreliant on illustrations. A tale spun in spellbinding language. I know I'm not the best writer alive. But I'm unique: I do believe I'm best at being me. I am not writing in the style or genre of anybody else. I hope to bring a breath of mountain-fresh air to the fetid wizard and lesbian-single-parent-obsessed world of children's publishing. Apart from this I'll say nothing until my book is done. I wouldn't say my story is so much amazingly unique as something that's magical for the way it's told. We see the world through the eyes of our little character, who is an amazing character. So it's a magical world to see. And that's all I'm saying about it.

It's my parents I credit for kicking me up the backside and saying YOU CAN WRITE, WRITE THIS TALE. So I am doing. I'm not entirely convinced self-publishing is the way to go forward. Considering half a billion people in the world speak English well enough to enjoy a novel and many of these hundreds of millions have children. How can I hope to market my production to them. I know nothing about promoting children's literature. The way I see it, writing is an art; publishing is a business. Experience as well as everything I have read about my mental situation has told me stress is bad for me. True I find it exhilarating. But that exhilaration can trip into mania very easily. I've told myself I was being hypochondriac so many times before. Only to look back and see I really was manic. When you're up at four in the morning, TV and stereo blaring at top volume, bouncing balls on the floor you're not just "a bit excited" you're manic. Mania has left me in a real mess every time it's come. It's not that mania itself is so terrible; it's the disinhibition, the feiriness of spirit (ie uninhibited agression), and hyperkinetic distractability that cause problems. Ratchet it up a notch or two and agression turns into outright paranoia, the beautiful enhanced sensory pereception trips into hallucinations. When I was truly manic I saw spirals on the walls and ceiling. I heard voices speaking to and about me. I could not tell what was and was not real. Then of course there's the depression. Less than a month ago I felt my life was so useless that lying down in front of an express train was the best favour I could do my family and friends. I was intensely paranoid and very depressed. Then I started popping my pills again and literally by the next morning two thirds of my depression and half the paranoia had dissipated. Isn't life strange.

This is why I seek a career in writing. Not only is it exceedingly trendy to be bipolar and artistic but I know from experience that rare extremes aside, I'm capable of writing almost no matter how high or low or sideways I go.

I intend to take these languges of mine far enough to qualify as a translator at least in German to English. If you calculate languges as GDP and number of speakers; German is number two in the world after English. Chinese is number three. Japanese is number four. So if you wonder why my German obsession: that's it. German is by far the biggest business language in the European Union after English. I phoned around some agecies specializing in placing bilingual temps and headhunting bilingual administrators, secretaries etc. What language had the most openings? I asked. German German German I was told. Every time.

So that's what I'm doing. Writing my intellectual story book, improving my German. Chinese is quite frankly doing my head in at the moment but I'm still slogging away. I'd like to apply my talents to Spanish if I can.

So here's the news. I hope this isn't too much of a tangle. I'm not lost but I'm trying to break free of the inertia and lassitude and apathy that has hemmed me in like a dancer frozen in a paperweight for years and years and years. Like a cage-nibbling hamster I desire escape. I'd like to go on a City Break to Berlin. And I can't wait to finish my Amazing Tale of Adventure and Wonder!

And how was YOUR weekend?

Stabbed with a pear in the house of the dead ...

I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!

I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.

Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.

I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)



I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...

The only sample offences I could come up with were:

Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.

Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...

I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?

COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?

Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...

PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!

Fairytale: The Fisherman And His Wife...

I WAS LEAFING through my German Grimms' Fairytales when I suddenly came across this one: The Fisherman And His Wife, in an odd Low German dialect.
So I looked it up, and here's the start of the tale in English...
You can clickonit to get the full text...

BROTHERS GRIMM
The Fisherman and his Wife

There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a pigsty, close by the seaside. The fisherman used to go out all day long a-fishing; and one day, as he sat on the shore with his rod, looking at the sparkling waves and watching his line, all on a sudden his float was dragged away deep into the water: and in drawing it up he pulled out a great fish. But the fish said, 'Pray let me live! I am not a real fish; I am an enchanted prince: put me in the water again, and let me go!' 'Oh, ho!' said the man, 'you need not make so many words about the matter; I will have nothing to do with a fish that can talk: so swim away, sir, as soon as you please!' Then he put him back into the water, and the fish darted straight down to the bottom, and left a long streak of blood behind him on the wave.

When the fisherman went home to his wife in the pigsty, he told her how he had caught a great fish, and how it had told him it was an enchanted prince, and how, on hearing it speak, he had let it go again. 'Did not you ask it for anything?' said the wife, 'we live very wretchedly here, in this nasty dirty pigsty; do go back and tell the fish we want a snug little cottage.'

And it goes on and on... You can read the rest of this text here.

Here's a kiddies' TV version starring Rick Mayall:



Now for some comparative linguistics: here are the opening words in English, Dutch, the Low German original and standard High German which is the official language of Germany today... Apart from English of course, these languages form a dialect-continuum from town-to-town across Northern Europe. At no point does the spoken language suddenly change just because a national frontier has been passed...
Low German is sometimes referred to as Low Saxon and if you look closely you will see how familiar the vocabulary is: Fischer (fisherman) angeld (fished) blanke Water (clear water) deep (deep)... and so on.
Incidentally, the original does not appear to say they lived in a pigsty or a hovel but a PISSPOT!!

The Fisherman and His Wife
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Kidoons quaint online turnypage storybook version...

Once upon a time there were a fisherman and his wife who lived together in a filthy shack near the sea. Every day the fisherman went out fishing, and he fished, and he fished.
Once he was sitting there fishing and looking into the clear water, and he sat, and he sat.
Then his hook went to the bottom, deep down, and when he pulled it out, he had caught a large flounder.


DUTCH:
Van de visser en zijn vrouw
Grimm 019 - Van de visser en zijn vrouw, Piggelmee

Er was eens een visser en z’n vrouw, die zo arm waren, dat ze alleen maar in een pot konden wonen, vlak aan zee. De visser ging elke dag hengelen; en dan hengelde hij en hengelde hij maar.
Zo zat hij ook eens bij zijn hengel en keek steeds in ‘t blanke water, en hij keek en keek.
Daar dook de dobber diep onder, en toen hij ‘m ophaalde, had hij een grote bot.


LOW GERMAN (ORIGINAL TEXT)
Gebrüder Grimm
Von dem Fischer un syner Fru

Dar wöör maal eens en Fischer un syne Fru, de waanden tosamen in'n Pißputt, dicht an der See, un de Fischer güng alle Dage hen un angeld: un he angeld un angeld.
So seet he ook eens by de Angel und seeg jümmer in das blanke Water henin: un he seet un seet.
Do güng de Angel to Grund, deep ünner, un as he se heruphaald, so haald he enen grooten Butt heruut.

STANDARD (HIGH) GERMAN
Gebrüder Grimm
Von dem Fischer und seiner Frau

Es war einmal ein Fischer und seine Frau, die wohnten zusammen in einem alten Pott dicht an der See, und der Fischer ging alle Tage hin und angelte, und er angelte und angelte.
So saß er auch einmal mit seiner Angel und schaute immer in das klare Wasser hinein, und er saß und saß.
Da ging die Angel auf den Grund, tief, tief hinab, und wie er sie heraufholte, da zog er einen großen Butt heraus.

VOM FISCHER UND SEINER FRAU
Radio performance in German



Last part:



PS I've finally found a university course where you can study BA German and translation for the entire length of a 3-year course in Germany, at Gutenberg University, Mainz (which is a beautiful town on the Rhine)...

PPS: news from Germany ~ OAP plunges 15ft down lift shaft in wheelchair x

HERE is Plattdeutsch/Low German being spoken...
Notice how similar it sounds to Dutch and Afrikaans...
I did German for years and years and I can't understand a bloody word of this.



Learn Plattdeutsch online at plattmaster.de ~ lessons in English

HERE's something really hilarious I found ~ and yes it is for real ~ it's the Scottish Parliament's website in the "Scots language" (which looks like dreadfully spelt English to me)... Scots would be the nearest thing we have to Plattdeutsch here in the UK

Scottish Parliament's website in PROPER Scottish ~ ie Gaelic

A Rivetting Read

I GOT A BOOK out the library and stayed up all night reading it. The author is a kind of friend of a friend of mine... hopefully soon to be Conservative MP for Corby and East Northamptonshire at the next General Election. I have watched her career with interest and wish her all the very best. Louise Bagshawe "the Judith Krantz de nos jours" Her novel Glitz: four ditzy heiresses get in trouble when their evil uncle cuts them off. The resulting fight with Thai prostitute Bai-Ling takes them into all manner of adventures ~~ how I love a good read about rich people who hate each other!

The plot reminds me of another British pop novel that had me rivetted: The Moneymakers by Harry Bingham ~ in that book the owner of a cement mixture (or something unexciting) empire dies and leaves his would-be heirs a challenge: whoever can make the most money in the space of something like five years inherits his £20 million fortune. There was a strong religious undertone in that one, e.g. the baddie's name was James Belial ~ Belial rang a bell... isn't it a demonic name? ... And when they met in a London bar named Apollyon ~ I knew for sure. Apollyon is the name of the Angel of the Abyss in Revelation ... very scary!

I just looked up Belial and it is indeed a demonic name... written up in the Bible as "the sons of the uncircumcized"... but a big character in traditional demonology (where I suspect my knowledge came from)... Wikipedia says Belial is a demonic name mentioned in II Corinthians 6:15 "can Christ and Belial agree?"... but I don't think that's where I know the name from... which is kind of spooky? I've read some weird books in my time... but where on earth would I first come across a name like that?

Well I did have a fascination in the "new age" (ie occultism and the "dark arts" for quite some years... and was drawn to read some quite eerie tomes in years past, that's all I can say on the matter...

Maybe I have sleep deprivation: it's too much cotton-rich socks, or my brains are frazzled... I'd better go and "retire" for now...!



PS Here's a photo of Louise Bagshawe: with looks like that (remember I said she was a friend of a friend ~ I've never met her ~ why on earth her publishers didn't make an inside-cover of that lovely face I've no idea...!

Illustrated: Louise Bagshawe's Glitz; Harry Bingham's The Moneymakers; Belial's mouth propped open in a demonic donkey-derby; The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic "as revealed by Israel Regardie"... which used to be my bedtime reading in one long-lost era... the beautiful Louise Bagshawe...

English Haiku

THAT HAIKU I posted yesterday, by the way, should have begun ON a withered branch ... bloody computer chopped it off.

Here are a couple of good ones I know in English. I got them out of an old creative writing manual. (I only ever read two good ones, both by Dianne Doubtfire.)







The delight I feel
goes stamping up the road
in this little boy's coat.








This blank page
glares at me ~
white with rage!



.

German Writer Wins Nobel Prize...

OK: she's Rumanian-born, but Herta Müller grew up in a German-speaking village on the old East German frontier. Now resident in Berlin, she is famous for her tales of the Ceauşescu-era Communist East... Although translated into 20 languages, her books have never been especially popular in Germany. A situation that will surely change with the glare of attention a Nobel laureateship inevitably brings ...



... and as for Barrack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace... have the judges gone off their heads?!?

Sad

I STARTED READING THROUGH various university prospectuses re: language studies and wish I hadn't done it because now I feel this longing building up and I don't trust myself ever to apply and successfully complete any university course. Ever.

The one that got me the most was Cambridge (why apply anywhere crap?). Two stipulations I have about a course in German are that 1: the department should also teach Dutch. Because if you speak French, German and Dutch you an almighty swathe of Europe becomes "yours". Dutch is very similar to German so learning it is a process of conversion rather than discovery anew... The last place I studied didn't even offer Dutch (though they specialized in Scandinavian languages ~ more people speak Dutch than ALL Scandinavian languages together!) And Oxford, by the way doesn't do Dutch. And point 2: they MUST give details of modules or "papers" and reading lists in advance. Which Cambridge do, and perusing down them only increased this sad longing. And Cambridge is such a beautiful town (much nicer than Oxford). In the end I just wanted to cry.

I'm going to leave it there before I have a pathetic breakdown ...

Illustrated: King's College Cambridge (the one with the most spectacular buildings). Cambridge University is split into 20 or so colleges peppered about the town (ie there is no "campus" as such). And as you can see it's a gorgeous place ...

PS: talking of SAD, someone at my old house, what I now look back on as a bourgeois paradise, the house I first moved to in London, once remarked how bizarre it should be that I, by far the most "academic" person in the house, should be just about the ONLY one there without a degree ...

Yorkshire Trotettes in Oven

MY YORKSHIRE TROTETTES are in the oven, I am on page 75 of my book, meaning I have now have over 1050 words listed in my notebook (though my vocabulary is so retarted I had to look up many of them 5 or more times ...) I had a good flick through the medium wave band last night and was surprised to find half the stations broadcasting in German and Dutch (Brits don't listen to AM radio any more). A station called NDR has been reading me the news etc.

Things are going from bad to worse with Maple Syrup my druggieworker. She still appears to believe I can be bullied into doing things. I deal with her by saying yes yes and agreeing to whatever she's banging on about ~ so I can get out of there as quickly as possible. Then doing absolutely nothing about it. I really want to change worker.

And that's about it. I'm sending off for the Free University Berlin prospectus. Surely the EU has funds for waster old drug addict would-be international students like me..? Well you gotta have some goal, even if it is totally half-baked ...

Illustrated: Yorkshire (batter) puddings. Stuffed, these are turned into my own special "Yorkshire Trotettes" ...

Here's the link for students wishing to "major" in German language and literature in German at Berlin Free Uni (wouldn't want to be outside Berlin, would you??)

Japanese Studies ("Japanologie") at the same institution ...

PS re "philology"/Philologie I stand corrected. Philology does indeed mean the study of language and literature in English as well as German. I had believed "philology" was just an oldfashioned word for linguistics, having been thrown off course by a fascinating tome on comparative linguistics entitled Comparative Philology ~ that I found on the shelves of a Welsh holiday cottage in Amroth, of all places ...

460 New Words

Ich habe nun viel mehr Flüssigkeit auf Deutsch aufgebaut. (If you can "build up" something as swooshy and pouring as fluency, that statement has to be true.)~ And did I make a mistake in that sentence? I wouldn't dare post up anything longer because I surely would. I did German A-level nearly 20 years ago, so I think I can be forgiven for having to look up such elementary terms as "suddenly" and even "actually" in the dictionary. Having said that, I worked out that I have a 93% comprehension rate of the German I am reading. That is: (after flying through the entire book without dictionary) I have ploughed through 25 pages at approx. 360 words per page, ie about 5400 words and looked up and listed 20 pages full at 23 lines to the notebook page of definitions. Ie there were 460 out of 5400 no! 9000 words! I did not understand. Giving me a comprehension rate of about 95%.

The book in question, in case you have not been reading is called Christiane F: story of a child prostitute and heroin addict. I found it very depressing first time round. The book is made up of tape recordings by two Stern journalists who found out about the then-15-year-old heroin addict after she was prosecuted for three cases of drug-possession. "We the children of Berlin Zoo" (the main railway station and hence a meeting place for junkies) was such a successful series of articles in 1977 that a full version, published in book form became a popular bestseller. The centre pages are full of pictures of very young kids, most of whom say they started fixing between 13 and 15 (younger for girls). Page 186, next to a picture of a girl who resembles a tall china doll, says: Livia S began using at 15 and died aged 18 in the public toilets in Hansaplatz. In her pocket was a letter to the Social Welfare Office pleading for a place in rehab. "Could you please find me a place as soon as possible. One extra day out here could cost me my life. With your help I could turn into a healthy, employable person again." And page 187 shows her dead body, laid out in the toilet cubicle with what appears to be a drugs works and a packet of something beside the corpse.

The bit I'm still on is about an idealized childhood of a country girl who couldn't understand why in Berlin you weren't allowed to play on the grass. Now I know all the words for metal grille, barbed wire, giant sign, concrete bunker and so on ... It takes such a long time looking all these up and writing them down (I have to write them down: otherwise I can't read the book back with a list of every word I don't know in order of appearance). I started starring every word I've consulted in the dictionary. My memory is so bad there are some I end up looking up five or six times ...

Well I have to go. Time is vanishing quickly. Hope y'all had a nice weekend ...

Illustrations: Langenscheid and Oxford-Duden, 2 of best German dictionaries; "works" ~ when I first moved to London I used to think people had dropped very narrow number-decorated pencils on the road; Gropiusstadt ~ Berlin suburb by Neuköln, where Christiane F grew up (and you're surprised she ended up on heroin~??..)

Christiane F

FINALLY THE BOOK I'VE WANTED FOR AGES CAME TODAY!

Christiane F: Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo.

real name Christiane Felscherinow.

It is the story of a girl from a middle-class house who likes to sneak out to discos at night time. There among the bright lights she discovers heroin and life takes a downward slide. She finds herself leading a double life: going to school by day and sneaking out at night to Bahnhof Zoo (Berlin's equivalent of Kings Cross station) and prostituting herself for heroin money. And it takes her mother two years to realize what is wrong!

The book was a big bestseller in Germany. I heard it is (or was) a set text in German schools.

It WAS translated into English, published by Transworld in the UK but is now out of print. I doubt it has ever gone out of print in German.

In the English-speaking world the film Christiane F (with soundtrack by David Bowie) is of course far more famous. What's remarkable (for a film) is that the on-screen Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef really do look like the real-life pair.

Not much is known about what became of the real Christiane F. She gave an interview in her early 20s (link below) ~ when she had just been busted for heroin possession again. I heard that she has died ...

This was Christiane Felscherinow towards the end:





Christiane F age 23 ~ interview

Amazon Review:

I borrowed this book from one of my German school-exchange partners & although had just taken my GCSE at the time, I found I could understand the vast majority of the book, as it was written by a teenager and therefore doesn't contain many complicated words!
I have tried to buy this book several times in the *cough* 13 years *cough* since I read it, but always found it was out of print. So when I found out a couple of years ago that this book had come back into print I just had to buy it.

Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo really is one of the most powerful books I have ever read, if you are a parent of German speaking children I would thoroughly reccommend you give them this to read when they are about 14 or 15. I'm sure it will definately make them think twice about taking drugs!

Like all the best books I have ever read the 'characters' in the book really do leep out at you, you can just imagine being in 1970's Berlin alongside these teenagers.

I think that this book is so powerful that if it were ever translated into English (& why I ask hasn't it been already???) it should be taught in our schools.

Here's the Christiane F filmclip formerly on my sidebar:

Christiane F
("Wir Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo")
Berlin has long been a centre of "alternative" living, attracting the artistic and dejected. And of course heroin rushes into such a void:



You can see the film in its entirety on my random blog by clicking HERE.

Legless

YES THERE IS INDEED NO REST FOR THE WICKED. I am run off my feet with ... what to do? Just pointless little tasks. When I actually "want" to stay at home and properly actuate this "Spring Clean" (because so far it's got only a quarter done, twice) ... I never get anywhere. Come here. Go there. Do this. No! Stop and do that ... and what was I meant to do? It's all like this.

On a totally discordant "note" hey ~ I had another idea. For children's stories. I don't know why, but I always wanted to be a writer of children's adventure stories since I was a child.

I don't remember standing up in class assembly (when we all, one by one, had to declare our ambitions to the entire school) ... standing up and saying "I want to be an author!" It's only because an evil girl in a higher year (and I was so tiny back then that she towered over me like a monster) came up that afternoon and mocked me: "Author! Author! I want to be an author!" that I remember the fact. And that little event has spurred me on ever since.

And no it's not about wizards.

Yesterday I remarked on how many ideas I have (and how many come to fruition?) And was reminded it's far better to have ideas that have yet to bloom than no ideas at all! Too true!

When I was very young someone much older than me told me this. And I've had a penchant for mentally collecting proverbs ever since... That if you don't send some boats out, "your boat" will never come in ...

And that's extremely true also!

The illustrations are (in case you have a crap monitor, or don't know the books): No Rest For The Wicked ~ Ozzy Osbourne album; Enid Blyton's Five Run Away Together ~ she is the world's biggest selling children's author with sales of over 600 million (though seemingly virtually unknown in America!); R L Stein's Goosebumps ~ huge number of titles with aggregate sales said to be in excess of 250 million ...

Vorsprung Durch Technik!

I AM READING, or rather ploughing painstakingly slowly, through a mercifully short German novel I got from the public library called Evas ungewaschene Kinder by Sonja Ruf. In English the title means Eva's Unwashed Children but there isn't an English translation and I'm wading through it ever so slowly with a notebook and a dictionary, looking up an average of one word in ten (on a bad page) to one in twenty (on a good page). Everything I look up I carefully note down, complete with page number. And of course the translation. Here's my amateur translation of the blurb:

ONE DAY God came to visit and when Eva showed him her children, he felt full of hope. But some of the children she kept hidden because they hadn't yet washed and she was ashamed of showing God her unwashed children. God knew this and said, "What is hidden from me shall be hidden from humankind also." So ever since, these children have been invisible and live in cliffs and rocks, in hills and stones. Only when they wish it, can they be seen.

Here's what Google translate makes of it:
God once came to visit, and Eva showed him their children, he was quite hopeful. But some of the children kept them hidden because they were not washed, and she was ashamed to God their unwashed children to show. What did God, and he said, "What I should remain bent, will also remain hidden from the people." Since these children for their siblings, the people, invisible and live in cliffs and rocks in the hills and rocks. Only if they wish, they can be seen.

And the original text:
Einmal kam Gott zu Besuch, und Eva zeigte ihm ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand. Aber einige der Kinder hielt sie versteckt, denn sie waren noch nicht gewaschen, und sie schämte sich, Gott ihre ungewaschene Kinder zu zeigen. Das wußte Gott, und er sagte, "Was mir verbogen bleiben soll, soll auch vor den Menschen verborgen bleiben." Seither sind diese Kinder für ihre Geschwister, die Menschen, unsichtbar und wohnen in Klippen und Felsen, in Hügeln und Steinen. Nur wenn sie selbst es wünschen, können sie gesehen werden.


I don't get the phrase, "ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand" and had to follow Google's idea because translated literally that would say, "her children, who he found full of hope" which doesn't really make sense. Can of you Deutsch-ssprechender readers enlighten me here please?

The German language is closely related to English. In fact, 2000 years ago, so I read, there was only one Teutonic language named proto-Germanic. But this doesn't make German anywhere nearly as easy to learn as you might expect. The grammar is very complicated (far more so than English's. E.g. adjectives don't take inflexional endings in English...). It has fewer idiomatic expressions than English and far far fewer than French, which is strewn with them. Perhaps its biggest Verwirrungspunk or confusion point, as you might say, is its vast number of words that are so very similar to one another and yet widely divergent in meaning. E.g. Käfer means "beetle" but a Käfig is a cage. Fahren means "to drive", vor means before: but a Vorfahr is an ancestor! But vorfahren means to drive ahead and a Vorfahrt is a right of way! There are gerzillions of seperable verbs, even more than our "phrasal verbs" in English (e.g. to pick up: aufheben) and those can portray confusing shades of meaning. Plus you have to remember to look for the separated bit (e.g. the auf)before you search for it in a dictionary, else you'll get totally lost.

On the plus side, many German words echo English ones and have a lovely onomatopoeic quality, e.g. schmutzig = "dirty", die Verschmutzung is pollution. Others, like Geduld/geduldig (patience/patient) just sound to me like they mean what they do even though they're nothing like any word in English ~ and that I can't explain.

When I was little I thought German was incredibly funky for its pageoverspilling portmanteau nouns e.g. Unterbewusstseinstrauma = subconscious trauma, mysteriously dotted vowels and that weird blobberous ß-thing you find splurged in the middle of the linguistic entertainment.

Though most English people call it an "umlaut" the two-dotted vowelly thing, as it appears in English is usually actually a diaeresis ~ a vowel-separator in words like "naïve". The German umlaut marks a change of vowel that hit the langauge in a famous late-medieaval sound shift. It only ever appears over the letters A, O and U. Ä is pronounced exactly the same as E; Ö and Ü are oo-ey sounds English-speakers must work at to get right.

English, incidentally, underwent a comparable vowel-shift a couple of hundred years later; it was then that the so-called "magic E" appeared in English spelling, so "bake", which had been pronounced something like "bakkeh" became pronounced as it is today.

The blobberous ß-thing is called "ess-tset" ("SZ") after the appearance of a ligatured long S and Z in blackletter type, though it actually represents a double S. It used to appear in many words, but a still-unpopular 1996 Official Spelling Treaty signed by the German, Austrian and Swiss governments abolished this, the German language's funkiest feature from more than half of them, rendering the language vandalized and forever dullened. My very favourite word, "bloß" which means "naked" or "nearly" (such a German combination!) is now boringly rendered "bloss". The only gains in funkiness were the addition of treble consonants in compound nouns such as Balletttanzer, but that hardly makes up for the lost blobberiness. The disblobberation was challenged in a German court of law, which ruled that no government could tell anybody how to spell, except in school ~ though government departments were allowed to specify their own styles of spelling for official documents.

Anyway my German is still so retarted it's taken me ten hours over three days to muddle through eighteen pages of Eva's Unwashed Children. I shall let you know when I finish!

I'm Rich!

... RICH IN INFORMATION, that is. For today I joined the library! And because this is a new borough, where I don't owe massive fines from ten years ago, the application went straight through! I wandered about like a lottery winner in a department store thinking: Any of these books could be mine!

Little things little minds ~ yes.

Also I get free internet time ~ wahey!!

VIDEOS OF THE DAY ~ UK ANTIBINGEDRINKING CAMPAIGN
"YOU WOULDN'T START OUT A NIGHT THIS WAY SO WHY END IT LIKE THIS..?"

BINGE-DRINKING BOY:



BINGE-DRINKING GIRL:

My Favourite Poem

... (IN GERMAN!!)

Wanderers Nachtlied II (Wanderer's Night Song II) by JW Goethe Germany's "national poet" who has been deified more perhaps than any other poet who ever lived. He wrote it on the evening of September 6, 1780. "A moment preserved in history" (you could say...)...

Here goes:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

An internet-found translation:

Above, all the summits
are still.
In all the tree-tops
you will
feel but the dew.
The birds in the forest ceased talking.
Wait: after walking
you shall rest, too.

I'd translate it (prosically) thus:

Over all the peaks
is peace.
Over all the treetops
you feel
barely a breath.
The birds silent in the forest;
just wait
... soon
you
are calm too ...

Isn't that excellent?

Prior to my Central European escapade, I'm reading all the German I can ...

Desirous of Some Detecting

I WAS IN THE LIBRARY, ABSENTLY leafing through a biography of Queen Victoria when I stumbled across the following screamingly funny passage about the deaf Duke of Wellington at Windsor Castle dinner parties.

Has anyone seen that film The Young Victoria? It's about her romance with Prince Albert. I love a good costume drama but our local multiplex cinema specializes in the sort of bland, loud, slap-bang schlock that just makes me fall asleep and doesn't appear to have screened it at all...

IT COULD BE especially tiresome when the Duke of Wellington was one of the guests since he was so fearfully deaf and shouted so. "Very good looking man," he once bawled in Lady Lyttleton's ear, referring to the Tsar, Nicholas I, who sat immediately opposite and understood English perfectly. "Always was so ~ scarcely altered since I saw him last ~ rather browner ~ no other change ~ very handsome man now. Don't you think so?" Lady Lyttleton felt compelled to shout an answer, "Yes, very handsome indeed." On occasions the Duke would talk "as loud as thunder" about some matter of delicate state importance which should have been mentioned only in Cabinet, and the Queen would blush "over and over" and at last succeed in interrupting him by "screaming out upon some other subject".
Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria A Personal History p144

Now do any of yous know The Number One Ladies Detective Agency novels by Alexander McCall Smith. They're hilariously funny. He's a white man but Zimbabwe-born and educated and purveys his grasp of African English extraordinarily well. BBC World Service Radio turned them into plays and they're now on BBC1 television, Sunday nights.

The following extract is from the one volume I have; it happens to be the very story they're showing this weekend:(decade old disappearance of an American on the edge of the Kalahari and Mama Precious Ramotswe of course cracks the case...)

MR J. L. B. MATEKONI, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, found it difficult to believe that Mma Ramotswe, the accomplished founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, had agreed to marry him. It was at the second time of asking; the first posing of the question, which had required immense courage on his part, had brought forth a refusal ~ gentle, and regretful ~ but a refusal nonetheless. After that, he had assumed that Mma Ramotswe would never remarry; that her brief and disastrous marriage to Note Mokoti, trumpeter and jazz aficionado, had persuaded her that marriage was nothing but a recipe for sorrow and suffering. After all, she was an independent-minded woman, with a business to run, and a comfortable house of her own in Zebra Drive. Why, he wondered, should a woman like that take on a man, when a man could prove to be difficult to manage once vows were exchanged and he had settled himself in her house? No, if he were in Mma Ramotswe's shoes, then he might well decline an offer of marriage, even from somebody as eminently reasonable and respectable as himself.
Tears of the Giraffe, Alexander McCall Smith p1

Illustrations, top down: Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, TV adaptation; old Queen Victoria; young Queen Victoria; Princess Beatrice (the Queen's granddaughter, child of Prince Andrew and Fergie (Duchess of York)(a more than passing resemblance to the young Victoria, don't you think?)); No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency L-R Mma
Makutsi (secretary), Mma Ramotswe (detective) Mr JLB Matekoni (Mma Ramotswe's husband-to-be).

YOUNG VICTORIA trailer
It's directed by Martin Scorsese, by the way...



THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY
It's on HBO in America, by the way...



GOA TRANCE
I was surprised, on my Googling, to learn the "vibe's still alive"...
I "leafed" through loads of footage till settling on this, which has the best soundtrack.

THIS IS ONE VIBED-UP PARTY. JAPANESE GIRLS ON EEEEEEE ARE THE BEST!

To see more trancetasticality, click here...

Wish I Could Find a Good Book To Read

LIFE'S NOW FLOWING thanks to the exciting new pen I bought this morning. It's called a UniBall Vision Needle in black, fine point, "waterproof/fadeproof" by the Mitsubishi Pencil Company, I love UniBall rollerball pens, I wrote an entire first draft of a novel in one... hang on what am I saying "one"? It was "only" about 70,000 words (ie would have filled out 200-250 pages as printed) and yet I got through at least twelve of these Mitsubishi rollerballs! The waterproof ink is a must, because in the great tradition of Hemingway and Steven King I'm constantly "tippling" as I write (even if it is just tea these days ~ though it always used to be white cyder...)

Hang on who am I trying to kid? I still drink white cyder, just considerably less of it. When it got to the point when I was imbibing an entire week's alcoholic "units" every day of that week and having alcoholic blackouts and I came to realize that, for months on end, I had drunk nothing but alcohol ~ not a single soft drink apart from the very occasional chocolate milk. I used to gaze longingly at the chocolate milk and Coca Cola as I queued at the till with my cyder ~ but no way was I about to waste my money on them... I used to quite like coffee. Tea, once a constant companion and punctuator of every day became a distant memory. I didn't have the tea, nor did I have any sugar (and I've tried and tried to resort to sugarless tea, as I used to drink it years back but simply cannot abide it). I never bought milk (never had any cause to ~ unless it was a rare week when I'd indulged in a tub of chocolate Nesquick so I'd have chocolate milk galore... In the end I didn't even own a kettle.

Sometimes, in the very thick of all this drink drink drink Id find myself drinking straight from the tap (often semi-conscious in the early hours) in sheer desperation for some rehydration...

I wasn't the "worst alcoholic" by any means and the period of relatively heavy drinking was quite short. What lasted longer was my rather ditzy attitude to soft drinks, which seemed a waste of money compared to alcoholic ones... All this tea drinking I do now, complete with chocolate cream hobnobs dunking seems awfully civilized in comparison!

Yeah so this new pen of mine has made life complete. OK seriously though it did impress me in that I spat out an entire paragraph of my novel without feeling it. I gazed back at it, all spidery scrawl and tiny letters and thought: wow! Perhaps the magic's in the pen and not me...

On a further inspirational note I went out just now and randomly bought four books of liberating fascination from a local charity shop. Liberating fascination? I mean they open (well hopefully open my) mind... These are: Agatha Christie Curtain: Poirot's Last Case; James Lasdun
The Horned Man, a thriller set in the alienating mysteriousness of Manhattan. It's the sort of book that might be brought out by Albert Knopf in the United States edition. Next I got a tome entitled How To Draw Anything by Mark Linley. The slightly over-eager lady behind the till informed me she had bought this one new. "It's quite good, really it is. But I still can't draw anything. Anything at all. No, I can't draw for toffee!" And she flung back her head and cackled unnervingly... The last volume is called Give Me Ten Seconds and it's the autobiography of John Sergeant, the BBC's top political correspondent until he retired in the early 1990s. His most famous episodes were an on spec interview live with Margaret Thatcher live during the Nine O'Clock News. He caught her as she exited a meeting in Paris during the leadership challenge that marked the end of her days in power... and being labelled "Winnie the Poo set to music" for his efforts at the passa doblay and other cha-cha type inconveniences during his stint on celebrity Strictly Come Dancing.

I'm hoping one of these tomes might inspire me if the pen doesn't. Well the pen's meant to capture my inspirational flow of words for this great novel I'm penning slowly... very slowly... as we speak. Hey that's a lie. Not as we speak. About one paragraph a week at the moment. So I did a week's writing in my kitchen on unpackaging that UniBall pen this afternoon...

All Righty I'd better go. Carrot-Nose Roborovski says hello to yous all. (Oh the indignity of being a rodent and having to bear such names!) She's working (or being worked on) a trick where she'll grasp savagely hold of the chopstick and get lifted about 300 robo-feet pawdangling into the great blue yonder...

(Why does that make me think of Tiscali Broadband?)

Oh I know, because before Virgin Media took them over, cable tv's broadband was, I do believe, named "Blueyonder"...

Righty ho, in the words of my childhood letter-writing days, I "must run and catch the post"~!!

STOP PRESS
My blog hop's taking me to waters hitherto unchartered, ie blogs about finance either to do with clearing debt or (more interestingly to me) making pin money.
Here's some
Debt Chronicles http://chroniclesofdebt.blogspot.com
Fabulously Broke http://fabulouslybrokeinthecity.blogspot.com
Debt Free Kid http://debtfreekid.com
2 Nickels Making a Dollar http://2-nickels-making-a-dollar.blogspot.com
and
True Adventures In Money-Hacking http://trueadventuresinmoneyhacking.blogspot.com
and
Budgets Are Sexy http://budgetsaresexy.com
and
Wide Open Wallet http://wideopenwallet.com

Writer's Block

THE NOVELIST IN ME IS THWARTED. I have a first-rate idea. (Honestly Jeffrey Archer and maybe even Dan Brown would kill for this idea.) But I didn't originally know where to go with it. I know the vague outline of the story and precisely where it goes and how it finishes. (It is based upon a real historical person.) I don't actually need to do that much research as the facts surrounding this person's life are so very sketchy (and even then in dispute) that I have pretty much a blank canvas upon which to build a book of my own.... Only the first chapter (which to my credit (as it never felt like it would get done) I did actually finish after a fashion really is like something written by a 13 year old with literacy problems (it almost degrades into shopping-list language in parts: talk about "1st draft taken to extremes"...) then I got stumped over how I was going to tell the story. Originally I wanted to narrate in the 3rd person but solely from the viewpoint of my main character. Now I'm thinking I'll need to rotate viewpoints among everyone surrounding this person to get the tale told right. This stuff is crucially important because you have to start as you mean to go on. A novel that broke the rule (ie was single viewpoint to half way through, then went into constant rotation would (unless you were really arty about it and had some specific reason why) probably get rejected on that fact alone. Because it's artistically unsatisfactory.... Then I kept telling myself I had to have the entire thing plotted out before I could really make a start. I have written novels before (unpublished, obviously otherwise I would hopefully not be a glorified gutter junkie living in emergency accommodation...) anyhow I'd forgotten what I did, which was actually to plan out between four and ten chapters in advance and write the book in small sections like that. I have to know what I'm trying to say so I can say it. I hate flying by the seat of my pants. Not that inpiration doesn't strike and I won't run with it. But I need to know what I'm supposed to be saying otherwise I just can't work. So what I do next is plan out each chapter blow-by-blow, shopping-list style. There is a certain way of slotting a page of novel-writing together in that you weave narrative with dialogue, description and introspection. Once you get used to doing this it comes as easily as writing a note to the milkman. I know I can do this... it just is not happening for me. One thing I used to tell myself, realizing I was afraid most of all of trying but failing was to "fail in style" ~ meaning take the risk, be extra-funky, don't hold back and if you fail you fail. But that unfortunate wording became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm trying to rephrase my maxim but again words won't fit (call myself a writer and cannot pick out the apt words ~ duhhhhr!). Something more like something ventured; everything gained would be a better one but it's still not spot on....

So that's me. That's where I'm "at". I got places to go and I'm itching to go there. So wish me bon voyage!...

MUSIC
hey do you remember this one? the music from FAME as sung by Irene Cara...

Inspiration Strikes (again!)

A THUNDERBOLT OF INSPIRATION has struck me yet again.

Another book!

The story hasn't come in its entirety, yet much of the set-up has. And this one's a children's novel. Highly ideal on the wearied hands for typing as it's only going to be 15-25,000 words.

All enthusiasm for works describing (a) my own life, or (b) drug use or addiction of any kind has deserted me.

This one's a comedy that I can write utterly naturally in a style all my own ~ on my own level (ooer!) ~ without dumbing down.

I feel I can speak to children pretty much on my own level. This is for the absolute classic age of children's fiction: the 8-12s. Practically all the classics of children's literature were written for children in this age range. The tale, as currently conceived, is in the tradition of Spike Milligan's Bad Jelly the Witch (click here to read its entirety) and most of Roald Dahl...

So now I've two books on my hands and I am indeed going for both of them.

So wish me luck, please, as this amounts to nearly 200,000 words of keyboard clattering plus two great slabs of A4 500s per copy of both!

No delay! I'm starting today.

Please wish me luck because I'll need it.

PS I'm being sued for nonpayment of poll tax. Council tax whatever the merchant bankers at the council call it now...

PPS Have a nice weekend, see yous all Monday. No more computer time till then!

Here's a video from Seaworld Helsinki, purloined from the Ailema4ever blog