Monthly Archives: February 2005

If you live in or near New York City, you should hasten to buy a ticket to next Tuesday evening’s WYSIWYG event:

I will be singing a song I’m writing (here, you should understand “writing” to mean “vaguely considering thinking about beginning to try to have an idea or two for”), and many other fine bloggers will be reading.

The name comes from the fact that this is the one-year anniversary of the WYSIWYG talent show. It’s been run thrillingly every month by the sexy triumvirate of Chris Hampton, Andy Horwitz, and Dan Rhatigan. The show has deservedly developed quite a following by presenting readings of consistently high quality.

And, hey, if I can figure out what the hell I’m going to write, it’s entirely possible I won’t ruin their track record.

The summer after my junior year of college, I spent a couple months in Berlin learning German at an intensive language-immersion program. When I arrived, I got myself into the intermediate class by faking my way through the placement test. Unfortunately, since I had done so by relying on the German I knew from Bach and Schumann songs, whenever I opened my mouth I sounded like a raving lunatic.

“Kind sir,” I’d ask the teacher, “hast thou a pencil? For, woe betide me, I have left mine own in the apartment of my landlord.”

“Faustus,” he would say, looking at me as if I might at any moment sprout a third arm, “it’s ‘in my landlord’s apartment,’ not ‘in the apartment of my landlord.'”

“But why should it not be as I spoke it?” I would insist. “One says rightfully ‘in the kingdom of my Father,’ does one not?”

The teacher would sigh. “Faustus, when are you going to start speaking normal German?”

“Nevermore.”

I honestly wasn’t trying to sound like I’d just stepped out of Werther; this was simply the only vocabulary I knew. In the end, my prediction turned out not to be completely accurate, as eventually I began to understand that patterns of twentieth century speech and of eighteenth century religious poetry were different. I also learned how to say things like like “cock” and “fuck,” and by the time I left my German actually wasn’t half bad.

Then I took a terrific German class fall semester of senior year, with a professor who gave us handouts like this.

Then I took another German class spring semester, with a professor who hated my guts. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until I got my first paper back with his scathing comments on it. That night I had dinner with my friend A.N., who told me that this man had been in the Hitler Youth as a child. She also told me that he had been on former President Bush’s committee to determine what to do when the flying saucers came.

Unfortunately, by this time it was too late to drop the class.

By the way, when I created a link in this post to what I called a “fabulous evite,” I wasn’t just linking to evite’s home page. I really was linking to an evite I’d spent hours crafting. Since no one commented on it, I’m going to assume no one followed the link because everybody thought I was posting to some lame evite page (because of course the other option is that no one commented on it because everybody followed the link and was so appalled that silence seemed like the best option, and that is a thought too horrible to contemplate).

In any case, please take a moment and look at the evite I created for the event that never happened.

Well, my birthday happened. Just not the party.