Back in December, I flew to my hometown Solingen and not only played a show with my old band Stuck in a place called Cobra, I also introduced my little book to a German audience in the very same place. And to cater for my mom, who does not speak English (and all the other lovely people who showed up in droves and bought my book and showered me with affection), I decided to read a few pieces in German. My favourite encore or ‘cover’ when doing a reading is Neil Gaiman’s poem ‘The Day the Saucers Came’, but as all poems from ‘Fragile Things’ are sadly missing from the German translation of the book, I decided to translate it myself and see how it goes.
Here’s a little video from that night – see for yourself how it went down:
Phew. So I made it. Crisscrossed Europe in a small and overloaded Japanese car, with the constant fear of getting crushed by my complete household whenever I brake too hard. Thankfully there was no snow and all ferries were running on schedule. Right now I’m sitting in my new apartment in a 1920s building in the Berlin district of Wedding, a former communist stronghold in the 1930s and the place where Erich Mielke was born. These days, it’s one of the poorest districts of Berlin, which means I can get a kebab for 3 Euros and a beer for 1.50 if I dodge the street gangs and drug addicts. Just kidding. The food is cheap here, though.
I’ll catch up with my writing soon, in general and about Berlin – for the beginning I already scored a few writing gigs. Watch out for a guide to renting in Berlin and more coming on Slow Travel Berlin this week. More soon.
I am currently sitting in my messy apartment, filled with half-empty packing cases, plastic bags with clothes for charity shops and dismantled bookshelves and again curse myself for moving in winter. But it seems I have to stick to it – next week I’m getting a car, will pack all my belongings, board a ferry and will say goodbye to Ireland for good. Here’s a short text I wrote about aforementioned apartment, one of the best places I lived in, so far.
I live behind the workshop. To get there, I have to unlock the front door that was set unto its hinges in the year when the French started guillotining aristocratic heads, with the lower part of the brass letter box flap almost completely erased by 219 years of letters slipping through. I walk through the corridor, past the fin-de-siecle pantry where the tenants collect the post and past the 1930s bust, either a relative of the landlord or a find in a bric-a-brac shop on the quays. Descending three steps, I open the door to the workshop, a longish room filled with old wooden tiles, metal shelves filled with boxes full of screws, nails and bolts, disused fans and hairdryers, mirrors, wooden wine crates, paint-splattered paint pots and dusty cutlery. There’s a small path through this cemetery of DYI, which I follow to another door that leads to my yard. On three sides are the rising grey backsides of Georgian Dublin, and in front of me a gate leads to the small lane behind my house. To my right, there’s a yellow wall, covered with overgrowth from the neighbours hedge and with flowerpots in different colours in front of it. Some days, there are some stray cats from the empty house down the lane lurking through the leaves and flowers. On the left is my home, an apartment that has once been the servant kitchen and the coal shed at a time there were still servants around. It’s a nice place with wooden flooring and a low ceiling with roof-lights, so I can hear the rain and the footsteps of the cats when I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes, there’s also the crunching sound of the black cat devouring a pigeon behind the flowers.
I haven’t blogged for a while, and this time it has nothing to do with not having enough time. I know that blogging will inevitably need to deal with my loooming departure from the emerald isle in less than two weeks. I’m not yet ready to write about this, so I’ll post my favourite Dublin videos as a start to my long goodbye.
We kick off with the video for Mark Knight vs. Underworlds’s Downpipe, filmed with the help of Liberty Hall a.k.a. Playhouse.
Then we’ve got a full Dublin timelapse, kicking off at the airport:
Approaching Paris from the air on a clear day, you can make out the Montparnasse tower, Sacre Coeur and the Eiffel Tower; like giant toys knocked about on a playing carpet of white and grey rooftops.
I often forget that terminal one at Charles-de-Gaulle-airport is one of the ugliest airport terminals in the world. With the building sitting there on the tarmac, round and grey and illuminated by a band of red neon lights on its equator, I expect a squadron of Tie-fighters to accompany my airbus when it lands, protecting this French outpost of the Galactic Empire.
Taxiing towards the terminal, I see the decommissioned Concorde on her stand, on guard duty like so many old Spitfires at the gates of Royal Airforce airfields. But this machine only reminds me of another Concorde, also frozen in time, ascending on a tail of flames on its way to inevitable doom. Maybe Air France should have chosen another make of plane to guard their airport.
The last time I landed in CDG was in 2008. Then, there was a dead pigeon lying on the safety nets covering the open inner courtyard of the terminal. Three years later, there’s another dead pigeon lying in the exact same spot. Traveling on the escalator, I wonder if it’s the same.
I know, I know. I’m quite sure I already annoyed some of you out there, but I just realised that I have not written a blogpost about my – ta-daaa! – first book. It’s a wee self-published thing called Stop Coming to My House (which is the title of my favourite Mogwai song), has 100 incredible pages, contains 26 stories and poems from this blog here and Sonic Iceland and many magazines and newspapers where I published these last three years. You’ll find all important info on my BUY THE BOOK page, and I will eternal love you if you buy one. It comes as a printed version and as an e-book for all sorts of reader.
Image: Kai Mueller
But the main focus of this post is the drinking of wine. Especially the drinking of wine at my launch night in Dublin this Tuesday. There will be a get-together of sorts in the holy halls of the Loft Bookshop in the Twister Pepper-building, I will read a few stories and you can buy the book and have me draw a picture of my penis on the first page. If you’re into that kind of small thing.
I would also like to kindly ask you to become a friend on Facebook – I have a Smashwords-e-book promotion running at the moment, so if you live in Kazakhstan and want to buy my e-book extra cheap, that’s the place to go.
Last week, a kind train driver drove me through the brown and red-leafed centre of Germany while I was eating Swedish meatballs; met Hitler-impersonator Bruno Ganz sitting on a bench in a subway station, looking like a bum; dined on Ramen soup in place that looked like the set of Blade Runner complete with Japanese pop music playing in the background; drove 200 kilometres with public transport to look at house built by the German Kaiser, the Nazis and the Socialist Party and ended up being an extra for the videoshoot of German trobadour Olli Schulz, impersonating a drunk guy hitting on my friend Lisa during an imagined and ever-repeating new year’s party in an old bar in Kreuzberg; and had another train driver drive me back through still brown and red-leafed Germany, in a compartement that looked like an outdated sci-fi set from the 80s.
I really love Halloween, especially here in Ireland. I can imagine the dead spirits intermingling with the living, dancing around the Samhain-bonfires, and the Tuatha Dé Danann leaving their hills and riding across the land in a wild, unwordly hunt. Therefore I am bit sad that this year I’ll be in Germany for Halloween. But the good thing is: I can buy scary stuff for niece and nephew (and other people). And what better scary stuff to give away than books! So i’ve decided to follow Neil Gaiman’s example and celebrate All Hallow’s Read.
So what is All Hallow’s Read?
All Hallow’s Read is a Hallowe’en tradition. It’s simply that in the week of Hallowe’en, or on the night itself, you give someone a scary book.
Scholars have traced its origins as far back as this blog post.
Here’s Neil explaining the idea, with people getting murdered in the background:
