The other most stupid book you read as school reading/Das andere blödeste Buch, das du während der Schulzeit als Lektüre gelesen hast

Posted on by
1

I know this meme is getting really boring, and I should not go back and repeat an earlier entry, but I forgot I wanted to rant about a long poem, rather than a book, that I think we did for O Level. It was a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called The Wreck of the Deutschland.

I never really ‘got’ Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I understood we are suppose to venerate him and recognize his brilliant originality in devising stuff like sprung rhythm. I couldn’t even appreciate this much in short poems.

You can get an impression of this work on youtube nowadays. I must say this brings back all the negative feelings I felt then. Here is the text (beginning – it gets quite long):

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875

PART THE FIRST

1

THOU mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, 5
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

I didn’t know about the Leytonstone connection, though.

A book from which you would read to your children/Ein Buch, aus dem du deinen Kindern vorlesen würdest

Posted on by
Reply

Possibly something I liked myself, such as The Heroes of Asgard, by Annie Keary. You can get it as a book or see bits here.

[41] IN the beginning of ages there lived a cow, whose breath was sweet, and whose milk was bitter. This cow was called Audhumla, and she lived all by herself on a frosty, misty plain, where there was nothing to be seen but heaps of snow and ice piled strangely over one another. Far away to the north it was night, far away to the south it was day; but all around where Audhumla lay a cold, grey twilight reigned. By-and-by a giant came out of the dark north, and lay down upon the ice near [42] Audhumla. “You must let me drink of your milk,” said the giant to the cow; and though her milk was bitter, he liked it well, and for him it was certainly good enough.

Photos/Fotos

Posted on by
Reply

I have been slow to post recently, but I did spend two days attempting to update my weblog software, until fortunately the problem was solved and the work done by Garvin Hicking, who is the Serendipity developer, with the help of the user Timbalu, who first realized that the MySQL database on my provider’s site was extremely ancient and the mysterious feedback I was getting, e.g. suggesting I increase permissions on subdirectories I could not even see, resulted from MySQL being unable to cope with the data. My fault, no doubt, as I had not updated since 2007.

To make up for the silence, here is a photo taken in Fürth last week.

Although I haven’t heard mention of the royal wedding in my many phone calls with the UK, I gather from the German press that everyone in the UK is really excited about it. If so, you might consider the book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (amazon.de, Daily Telegraph).

Here is a picture of a bookstand at Erlangen station. Things were not like this twenty years ago:

Now an example of new German, in case you are out of touch:

And finally, taken this morning, part of a flea market outside the TV shop run by Ingomar Schnatzky:

Pictures/Bilder

Posted on by
Reply

I haven’t got much time to post at the moment, so here are some photos from the Black Forest.

This one is black and white because I pressed the wrong knob on the camera:

E-learning:

This is not water photographed at a slow speed, but ice photographed at a fast speed:

A view of the Alps:

This cathedral (apparently called Dom in the sense of dome) has the third largest dome in Europe, after St. Peter’s in Rome and Florence Cathedral:

The Guardian on Germany/Die Guardian zu Deutschland

Posted on by
3

A bit late this link, but this week the Guardian has started examining some European countries, starting with Germany – see neweurope. More detail here.

There seem to be more articles every day. I noted in particular some articles on German literature, with more suggestions in the comments (Join the new World literature tour to Germany). Then one on the life of a German family:

Back home, Gerrit opens some lovely Hassaröder Pils beer, while Katleen, in a rare lapse of taste, drinks Beck’s. They put on a CD by a German R&B singer called Joy Denalane. To my ears, it sounds as authentically uninteresting as its English-language counterpartsz. “For me, one of the great things about the past year is that German-language music is becoming popular,” says Gerrit. Fair enough, but the current German top 10 is all in English, even when the songs are sung by Germans.

On the kitchen shelves, there’s a nostalgic East German cookbook, teeming with pictures of men in feather cuts at the wheels of Trabants, and recipes so stolid that subsisting on them would make you look more like Helmut Kohl than a member of the DDR’s gymnastic team.

There’s a hisory of German cinema in clips (including a very long clip, nearly two hours long, from Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’ – presumably the whole film – Jesse Owens in first heat at just after 38 mins.), on the war against anglicisms
, on the piecing together of shredded Stasi documents in Zirndorf, and an at-a-glance guide to Germany. And a lot more.

Coming soon, for one week each: France, Spain and Poland.