I'm been feeling pretty down in my current sharehouse. In fact its so bad that its beginning to convince me that I hate it here and really ought to have gone to Berlin (p.s. I really ought to have gone to Berlin). The Germans have a good term for the arrangement, its a "ZweckWG", a sharehouse of convenience if you like, there's no passion or fire. Also, its a bit pricey, loud and generally unaesthetic. Although I have installed a light fitting here shaped like an plane (the bulb is the little pilot and the propellors spin!) - its still no reason to stay.

So yesterday I called up a place advertising a room available at the end of january, expecting a curt "none of your type" reply. Instead, the lovely girl informed me that she was going to Australia for the year herself which was why the space had opened up, and I should come by in the next 20 minutes. My my. A gorgeous tree lined street near all the better places to go out in Freiburg, almost every house with a turret and a " Herr Professor lives here" notice - Spießig as hell. Goethestraße- no less. I climbed the glossy wooden staircase and she showed showed me the 28 m 2, furnished room of light and rapture. With a window looking out to trees and the promise of utter quiet. She also had awesome band posters on her walls and great bookcases full of literary delights. Then her flatmates came in, a couple of whom I recognised from Merleau Ponty as being too intimidating to approach. We sat around in the day couches in the girl's room and they grilled me on philosophy and 80s children's TV in Australia. The ABC passed with flying colours. They called 5 minutes after I left to offer me the great, significantly-cheaper-than-this-shit-hole quarters. Hopefuly this will be a turn in my fortunes.


Do you think I can ask for my light back? I painted it with stripes.

The courses I am taking:

Philosophie der Kunst: A philosophy of art lecture series in which the lecturer, Prof. Figal is undertaking an impressively learned excusion through the historical greats in order to firm up with his own theory that art is a particular brand of "Erkenntnis" (knowledge or cognition) and thus a launch pad for philsophy itself. We are very much in the middle of things, now transcending Kant and moving to Schiller, but I'm rapt.

Hannah Arendt: A course on the Origins of Totalitarianism. The haphazard seminar structure does little to put the massive book in the lucid context that it deserves. We jump around reading Aristotle and Heidegger to nudge out key terms and I do feel overwhelmed as every explanation seems to reveal itself only with a dissection of the finer points of the ancient greek entomology.

Merleau Ponty Das Auge und der Geist (the eye and mind). I'm just sitting in, but I cant help but do all the reading, as his writing is so deceptively fluid and it gels so wonderfully with the philosophy of art lectures. I'm not utterly convinced by his emphasis on the Body as the key to a phenemological bridging of subject and object, it seems to smack of the kind of one-sided fixation that I found with Levinas's Other. Nonetheless, its a fascinating seminar and an excuse to go see the Cezanne drawings in Basel as soon as I can.

Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (fin de siècle german literature). I was forced to do this course by the german department at sydney and despite a wonderful array of books to read (I loved Hofmannsthal) I resent it awfully.

French: A class full of germans who've learned french 3 years apiece, yet class themselves beginners, and me. Oh, and forestry students who try and get me to do their english homework for them. Bitter agony.


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Also, I went to an anarcho leftist theory reading group yesterday about Herbert Marcuse. Intimidating. At our huge local squat. A room full of men with screen-printed hoodies and berets, getting Adorno wrong (she says smugly). I barely said a word, everytime I formulated my thoughts into comprehensible Deutsch the tack has changed. I possibly learned more about my own cowardice than I did about post-1968 futures.

Naja...

Karl and Jack are coming to visit me for Christmas.

This is amazingly wonderful news for several reasons.

We will day-trip the fuck out of this place. France, Switzerland, Heidelberg and the black forest are hit list agenda items.

They are know to be very tolerant of my Romanticising tendencies - poetry readings and painting en plein air - if its not too cold. The philsopher's trail even if it is too cold, I say.

I will try to organising sledding. It shall be red and we shall all bring bells and spurs (Brokeback style for Lark).

I will feel loved and surrounded by companions- in a place that I'm increasingly, despairingly associating with solitary reading.

We will then fly to Paris to party New Year's Eve away metropolis style. There I shall meet up with Ness, Hannah and maybe even Bek!

Then, in the new year Bologna (and Venice) is up on the cards.

I have prophesied it thusly.

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Tonight I'm going to a public reading about Bob Dylan accompanied by his tunes. I shall be drinking mulled wine with Amaretto.


edit: ha. Germanic pronunciation of Dylan lyrics was unduly amusing given my own bumbling Deutsch. He made 'Blood on the Tracks' sound like a promise.