Ken > Recent Status Updates

“But the theater will stay in business. The theater is always going to interest people, whatever else happens in Germany.”

Love her hate speech dedicated to Thomas Mann so far

„Die Menschen müssen das Geheimnis mit ihren Vorstellungen beleben, […] sie bilden sich Wesen ein, ihnen ähnlich, aber doch unverwundbar, mit einer Tarnkappe ausgerüstet, mit einem Zaubermittel.“

Über die Bürokratie wird gesagt, dass es um Zahlen ginge, um Nummern, dass der Mensch in den Hintergrund gerate, dass Bürokratie rational und nicht emotional sei. Für Aras würde sich herausstellen, dass Bürokratie ganz und gar nicht rational war, sondern immer vom Wohlwollen der Sachbearbeiter abhing. [...] Das Spiel, das diese Behörde spielte, hieß "Ene, mene, muh, du wirst gerettet und nicht du."

"Natürlichkeit" ist immer ja Propaganda. Eigentliches Vorbild für die Gärten war nämlich nicht die sogenannte Natur, sondern die Landschaftsmalerei, also die schon vermittelte und gestaltete und imaginierte und gemalte Wildnis.

Just read the first 50 pages and have a feeling it's gonna be my most favourite book of this year. Never seen intersectionality so explicitly discussed in a novel before, especially in a German novel.

"Eine Vergangenheit ist an sich eine dritte Person, besonders, wenn man versucht, in der Gegenwart die erste Person zu spielen." (65)

"Das Gegenteil von gut ist gut gemeint!"

"Wenn der liebe Gott bezahlt, gut. Aber wenn er nicht bezahlt, nicht gut. Wenn der liebe Gott seine Miete nicht bezahlt, muss er ausziehn, und zwar am Samstag abend..."

Die Gegenwart von Bücher gab ihm Sicherheit. ... Ein Regal mit Büchern vermittelte ihm ein Gefühl des Ankommens. ... Wenn er einen Raum betrat, in dem es keine Bücher gab, fühlte er sich unsicherer als in einem Raum mit Büchern. Mit so vielen Büchern wie möglich.

Reading diasporic texts as translations may seem to run the risk of reifying the binary between copy and original; it risks stabilizing the ‘‘nation’’ as the original locus that diaspora merely attempts to replicate. Just as the nation and the diaspora are mutually constitutive categories, by extension so too do the ‘‘original’’ national text and its diasporic translation gain meaning only in relation to one another.

Misery and self-loathing is the essence of rock & roll. When stuff like this happens you just want to turn the music up really loud.

They would indeed laugh at any man who, from the principles of reason, would prefer an unmarried state to a married, or a life of labour to an easy life: but they reverence and admire such as do it from the motives of religion. [...] The men that lead those severe lives are [...] those we call Religious Orders.

One rule observed in their council is, never to debate a thing on the same day in which it is first proposed [...], instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead letter nowadays? It's because they have severed
themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand in hand with life; so that the artist's life itself was already a poetic realization, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy. Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere

Curse the system because your father has died at the hands of the police. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.

"There was, for a moment, an intense pain, somewhere about the root of the penis - or rather, within the very core and center of the veins, after which the sap of his began to move slowly, slowly, from within the seminal glands; it mounted up the bulb of the urethra, and up the narrow columns [...] - or rather, like the scalding and scathing lava within the crater of a volcano."

"There was, for a moment, an intense pain, somewhere about the root of the penis - or rather, within the very core and center of the veins, after which the sap of his began to move slowly, slowly, from within the seminal glands; it mounted up the bulb of the urethra, and up the narrow columns [...] - or rather, like the scalding and scathing lava within the crater of a volcano."

The use of English in Vietnamese popular music can be interpreted as a mild form of protest.
“Where the lyrics were concerned, the authorities grumbled, in the early stages, because the songs were generally performed in English—which some of them could not understand and which, besides, was the language of the West.”