(no subject)
The man who makes me cry most these days is my old landlord, from the flat I moved out of over a month ago. Today on the phone he told me I'm not getting my 700 Euro deposit back until August, in a voice that was all, "I'm keeping your money and you can't do a thing about it". I hate that man. I've never been talked down to in this way since, well, high school. Damn. And I won't even be in the country in August. What money am I going to buy my plane ticket with?
Poetry Slam in Würzburg yesterday, drove there with Syke, Frank and Saadi, so I was the only non-slamming person in the car. This much change soon. There's a slam in Ansbach tonight, but neither Syke nor I can face another couple of hours in the car and the long night and drinking that would inevitably follow.
The slam was crowded but only five people signed to read - good thing we had Saadi and Falk reading out o competition, too. It was still a decent slam, and I got to sit on the side of the stage and take pictures.
Got talking to Saadi at the slam - Saadi Safavi, 34-year-old writer and reciter of modern Persian poetry, left Iran seven years ago and has been in Bamberg ever since. I've seen him on stage before but never talked to him. I love his performance, he recites his poetry in Persian and then has a translator read it in German. The Persian sounds beautiful, and he somehow manages to get all the emotions through to the audience. Slam audiences usually are pretty impatient, but they were listening in complete silence. Not so much during the translation, even, because when it's just read off a page it's not the same. We ended up talking about traveling and Germany and Islamic countries, and he asked for my email adress so he could send me more poetry.
Got home at midnight, started making spaghetti, and waited for Christian, whom I knew from uni before he started organizing the Würzburg Slam, and Falk, travelling slammer from Berlin, whom Syke and I invited to stay at our place for a night so he wouldn't have to take the train at three in the night. He's 33 and quit uni several times just before completing a degree, has spent a year in Seattle and six months in China, and is now slamming and performing "full-time", which doesn't pay well and takes the fun out of it, he says. I could hear he wasn't originally from Berlin, and when he told us he's originally from Gelsenkirchen I laughed, because Gelsenkirchen is just a ten minute drive from Recklinghausen where I grew up. We talked about how ugly but comforting the Ruhrgebiet is, how the tall industrial chimneys make me feel at home, about suicide-uni Bochum, about having to get out and wanting to go back, and then wanting to get out again.
Went to bed around six a.m., Syke in my room and Falk in hers, and when we woke up at three in the afternoon he was already gone. Syke looked a bit disappointed, I think she's developing a slight crush.
In other news, my Toefl results are good, Ben unexpectedly passed his German test (with rather impressive results), and my oral literature exam was a 1.7, which is also rather good but still annoying, because I new everything about the German enlightenment comedies, and about German expressionism, and if he hadn't asked me about the one Kafka topic I wasn't 100% prepared for it would have been a 1.0. ut who am I to complain. I'm done, and this was the last exam in Bamberg that counted for anything. This semester is all voluntary, I'll write a papre or two, but when I leave for th States no one will care about them anyway. Oh, and I still need to write that Auster paper for last semester. Not because I have to, but because a) it's Auster and b) I want to impress my professor. Slightly pathetic, but true.
And visual aids:
Slammaster Christian. Gotta love him.
Christian and my lovely flatmate Syke.
Falk. Which I think is a pretty cool name.
Poetry Slam in Würzburg yesterday, drove there with Syke, Frank and Saadi, so I was the only non-slamming person in the car. This much change soon. There's a slam in Ansbach tonight, but neither Syke nor I can face another couple of hours in the car and the long night and drinking that would inevitably follow.
The slam was crowded but only five people signed to read - good thing we had Saadi and Falk reading out o competition, too. It was still a decent slam, and I got to sit on the side of the stage and take pictures.
Got talking to Saadi at the slam - Saadi Safavi, 34-year-old writer and reciter of modern Persian poetry, left Iran seven years ago and has been in Bamberg ever since. I've seen him on stage before but never talked to him. I love his performance, he recites his poetry in Persian and then has a translator read it in German. The Persian sounds beautiful, and he somehow manages to get all the emotions through to the audience. Slam audiences usually are pretty impatient, but they were listening in complete silence. Not so much during the translation, even, because when it's just read off a page it's not the same. We ended up talking about traveling and Germany and Islamic countries, and he asked for my email adress so he could send me more poetry.
Got home at midnight, started making spaghetti, and waited for Christian, whom I knew from uni before he started organizing the Würzburg Slam, and Falk, travelling slammer from Berlin, whom Syke and I invited to stay at our place for a night so he wouldn't have to take the train at three in the night. He's 33 and quit uni several times just before completing a degree, has spent a year in Seattle and six months in China, and is now slamming and performing "full-time", which doesn't pay well and takes the fun out of it, he says. I could hear he wasn't originally from Berlin, and when he told us he's originally from Gelsenkirchen I laughed, because Gelsenkirchen is just a ten minute drive from Recklinghausen where I grew up. We talked about how ugly but comforting the Ruhrgebiet is, how the tall industrial chimneys make me feel at home, about suicide-uni Bochum, about having to get out and wanting to go back, and then wanting to get out again.
Went to bed around six a.m., Syke in my room and Falk in hers, and when we woke up at three in the afternoon he was already gone. Syke looked a bit disappointed, I think she's developing a slight crush.
In other news, my Toefl results are good, Ben unexpectedly passed his German test (with rather impressive results), and my oral literature exam was a 1.7, which is also rather good but still annoying, because I new everything about the German enlightenment comedies, and about German expressionism, and if he hadn't asked me about the one Kafka topic I wasn't 100% prepared for it would have been a 1.0. ut who am I to complain. I'm done, and this was the last exam in Bamberg that counted for anything. This semester is all voluntary, I'll write a papre or two, but when I leave for th States no one will care about them anyway. Oh, and I still need to write that Auster paper for last semester. Not because I have to, but because a) it's Auster and b) I want to impress my professor. Slightly pathetic, but true.
And visual aids:
Slammaster Christian. Gotta love him.
Christian and my lovely flatmate Syke.
Falk. Which I think is a pretty cool name.