Goodnight Dear
Got back yesterday from the Augsburg Brecht Connected festival with my brother. We were there four days, staying in a luxury/business hotel. The breakfasts were out of control: a giant buffet with all kinds of bread, cheeses, cold meats, cereals, fruit, eight kinds of tea, yoghurt, whatever. Then on top of that there was a hot food area with sausages and bacon, etc. You could ask this chef whose job it was to just cook eggs to order all morning. I finally learned the German word for “over easy”: Spiegeleier, beide Seiten. Next I need to figure out how to get them runny on the inside.
Beau played two incredible spots. The first one was live on German radio. He read “Deep” and “The Asians are Coming.” It was really wild, because at first you could tell people had to code-switch from German into English, but by the end of it he had them all nuts. For the next show he did “Deep” again and two others whose titles I didn’t know. He also did two short, completely improvised poems about girls in the audience that were incredibly funny and dead-on.
I gave a short introduction that we had worked on together for his last poem, in German. The poem’s basic idea is that countries bring immigrants in to do work that their citizens won’t, yet later are unable to deal with the consequences, i.e., that they are going to want to stay and settle and integrate. It was a huge hit. Later people were telling him how much they liked the poem, and how it would be like a “punch in the face” for some Germans about this issue. My brother was taken aback at the way seemingly average people thought the poem was meant to be a confrontational, almost violent, statement. I thought it was empassioned but even-handed.
We stayed at the venue for the after party. That night was great, spent making new friends and catching up on old ones. Jeff McDaniel, this poet who had stayed with me one night ten years ago when I lived at NYU was there. He read one of my favorites and another one that was pretty awesome, “The Foxhole Manifesto.” I have a pic of him sleeping on my dorm room floor from back then. Now he’s married with an infant daughter. I’m a tad bit envious. A drunken fifteen year-old was clearly sweet on me but too clumsy to show it. Ah, the miracle of alcohol. Would he interpret my feigned ignorance as respect for the young? Others were not so dignified . . . We danced and sang and walked back to the hotel together, me and Beau and Jeff, talking about writing and life and all of that.
On the night of the 14th we were an hour outside of Nüremberg; I was so tempted to stick out my hitchhiking thumb cause there was a show going on that I’d rather have been at. There was yet another party but I didn’t feel like dancing anymore. Now I’m back home and it’s 95 degrees out; I want to drink soup and tea and sleep. I’m sneezing and achy and sometimes chilly. The windows are open but the air is still; any air that blows in is hot and dry. There’s no hot water in the apartment for some reason. I don’t feel like calling anyone, don’t feel like speaking any German.
Beau played two incredible spots. The first one was live on German radio. He read “Deep” and “The Asians are Coming.” It was really wild, because at first you could tell people had to code-switch from German into English, but by the end of it he had them all nuts. For the next show he did “Deep” again and two others whose titles I didn’t know. He also did two short, completely improvised poems about girls in the audience that were incredibly funny and dead-on.
I gave a short introduction that we had worked on together for his last poem, in German. The poem’s basic idea is that countries bring immigrants in to do work that their citizens won’t, yet later are unable to deal with the consequences, i.e., that they are going to want to stay and settle and integrate. It was a huge hit. Later people were telling him how much they liked the poem, and how it would be like a “punch in the face” for some Germans about this issue. My brother was taken aback at the way seemingly average people thought the poem was meant to be a confrontational, almost violent, statement. I thought it was empassioned but even-handed.
We stayed at the venue for the after party. That night was great, spent making new friends and catching up on old ones. Jeff McDaniel, this poet who had stayed with me one night ten years ago when I lived at NYU was there. He read one of my favorites and another one that was pretty awesome, “The Foxhole Manifesto.” I have a pic of him sleeping on my dorm room floor from back then. Now he’s married with an infant daughter. I’m a tad bit envious. A drunken fifteen year-old was clearly sweet on me but too clumsy to show it. Ah, the miracle of alcohol. Would he interpret my feigned ignorance as respect for the young? Others were not so dignified . . . We danced and sang and walked back to the hotel together, me and Beau and Jeff, talking about writing and life and all of that.
On the night of the 14th we were an hour outside of Nüremberg; I was so tempted to stick out my hitchhiking thumb cause there was a show going on that I’d rather have been at. There was yet another party but I didn’t feel like dancing anymore. Now I’m back home and it’s 95 degrees out; I want to drink soup and tea and sleep. I’m sneezing and achy and sometimes chilly. The windows are open but the air is still; any air that blows in is hot and dry. There’s no hot water in the apartment for some reason. I don’t feel like calling anyone, don’t feel like speaking any German.