Verbindung

In which we take a break from Trek to talk about language and time.

Paramount Plus abandoned me this week, so I thought instead of musing about how Kirk and Spock are quintessentially a married couple, I’d update you, dear reader, on the progress of my language studies. I know many thousands of you out there are on tenterhooks over how this is going. I imagine you, marching with florid excogitation into a hardware store, demanding tenterhooks in a booming, battlefield-ready voice, dropping a handful of cowrie shells on the counter before the stunned clerk, carrying said tenterhooks laboriously home in a trailer attached to your car, and now you’re “on” them, whatever that means. Fear not. I have news.

I’m still reading Der nasse fisch.¹ If you haven’t read my ravings on the topic before, or if I have failed to call you at one in the morning on a weeknight to explain, this is a detective novel by Volker Kutscher, set in Berlin in 1929 amidst the dying breaths of the Weimar Republic. So a fecund time to be a detective I reckon. When I started this book in October of last year, my intention was to jot down every single word I did not know, along with a definition. I wrote down over 3,000 words.² 

One morning in late May I found myself with a craving to read but without a dictionary handy. I decided I’d just do the best I could and come back to look up all the outliers later. To my great surprise I was able to read with much greater fluency than I’d expected. I often have dreams where I can breathe underwater or read a foreign language fluently. Both types of dreams produce the same strange sensation of surprise and body-deep satisfaction. The reality, it turns out, feels very similar. 

There was no way I was going to return to the painstaking understand-every-word approach. This was real reading, and although I had enjoyed the book to that point I began to be carried along by the story in a way I hadn’t been before. Der nasse fisch became a page-turner. In the six weeks since my epiphany I’ve read about as many pages as I had the eight months prior. This past Saturday I vowed to read a whole chapter, and with the application of a healthy dose of effort and three cups of coffee I did so. Sunday I read a whole chapter out of pure fascination with what was going to happen next, unable to set the book aside until I’d reached the end and then even tempted to continue by the ever mounting intensity of fictitious events. 

Bucket lists are a thing. I suppose I have a vague sort of bucket list stored in memory somewhere—more like just a bucket than a list—consisting mostly of things like “solo a bicycle-powered boat across the Atlantic” and other crap I definitely will never do. “Become fluent in a language other than English” has been bouncing around in there for a long while. What I’ve learned is that there are many kinds of fluency. I know I won’t wake up one day and realize I’ve reached native fluency, but there are moments while reading when I feel like I’m ice skating. The words flow past my eyes and I don’t even need to translate them—the meaning of the sentence simply arrives unbidden in my brain, with nary an English word in sight. German has begun to look familiar in a general sense as well; even if I may struggle with sentences or paragraphs or sometimes whole pages (particularly if the subject entails a lot of specialized vocabulary), many of the words on the page are friendly and welcoming, like an acquaintance spotted in a crowd. 

If you’re also a language learner you might be interested in my method. I like to think of it as bathtub immersion. Obviously I can’t do full immersion—my family are already annoyed enough with my constant German muttering. But there’s plenty one can do. Aside from the aforementioned novel I also have several books that combine German and English texts—either side by side or alternating lines. I generally read a little bit from one of these at night, just a few pages to ensure that I’m getting a variety of flavor in my reading and not just learning the words for cocaine and murder. I also read Der Stern most evenings, or Der Spiegel if I’m feeling lazy (think Forbes versus Maxim). Reddit is full of useful communities; My favorite is WriteStreakGerman, in which participants are encouraged to write a tweet-sized passage every day, to be corrected by native speakers. I’m approaching 80 straight days.

Aside from reading and writing I also listen to podcasts—Easy German is a great one. It’s the companion to a Youtube channel dedicated to German learning, though the podcast is not easy. It’s more like a director’s commentary, and consists mostly of conversation—full speed, no holds barred—between two or three native German speakers. It requires a great deal of concentration just to keep a handle on the topic. I recently came to the end of Slow German, which is considerably easier to comprehend but whose 250 episodes I could definitely stand to revisit. And at least one day a week I listen to Bayern Rundfunk Radio for a couple hours, though I don’t usually pay a great deal of attention; It’s more about just having the sound in my ears. 

Youtube is, of course, a godsend. Aside from the Easy German channel, which is terrific, I occasionally watch German news or documentaries. The best way to find these is to do your searching in the language. That is to say, don’t search “German news,” but rather “Deutsche Nachrichten.” Youtube (and Google works the same way) will assume you are German and will give you the real stuff. 

There are plenty of ways to watch German language movies and television shows as well. There are several very good ones on Netflix. (I can recommend How to Sell Drugs Online Fast to anyone, German speaking or otherwise; It’s a hoot.) Youtube contains playlists filled with literally thousands of trashy old movies dubbed into German.

I’ve even changed my phone’s language to German, though not my desktop computer, as it behaves weirdly when I switch. Ultimately the point is to be in contact with the language as much as possible. The only thing I really miss is conversation, but I’ve got a couple ideas about that—there’s a weekly kaffeeklatch at Georgia Tech which I’ll attend in the fall, and there’s a great app called iTalki which connects you to language teachers for hour-long conversational classes without contracts and at cheap rates. 

Naturally all of this takes up time—a resource whose scarcity I feel acutely, possessed as I am of too many pursuits for one person, and not getting any younger. Between German and just reading ordinary non-German books, as well as writing—of which the essay before you is just one small part, I also pour a lot of time into music, maintaining at least passable chops on two instruments and learning how to effectively mix the weekly multitrack recordings my band makes en route presumably to another album.³ Then there’s all the myriad household projects, not least the ongoing bathroom remodel, the transformation of our basement from trash pit to two usable shops—one for wood, one for electronics and other dust-sensitive pursuits, a slew of furniture orders, and the ongoing maintenance of the family automobile. And of course, none of this would be worth a plug nickel without spending time with friends and family. How do I do it?

Well, I like to think of all of my various interests as like meat being pressed through a grinder. Ideally no single cable of ground flesh gets squeezed out any faster than any other; the whole matrix of beef hawsers should emerge slowly but relentlessly. That’s the theory. In practice, for me it’s more like flinging sirloin tips out of a car window on the interstate. Everything is always either rushed or completely stationary. Dormant projects hover on the edge of my consciousness like circling sharks, ensuring that no matter what I wind up doing I’ll feel anxiety over it. 

The circle of life

Eventually, and this usually happens on Sundays and Mondays before this missive is due, I get mad. Occasionally at my job, which takes up an unconscionably large chunk of my life and which is itself a whole snake pit of time-juggling madness. Occasionally at whichever people are within reach. Anyone who read to the end of my last RCB got a little taste of that, for which I submit my humble apologies. I wasn’t mad at you. If anything I was mad at Substack, and Twitter, and the whole business of writing, which to me is largely a smooth titanium surface lacking anything like an entryway or indeed even a handhold. The literati are on the inside, and I’m outside feeling around like a blind man in search of the slightest cleft.

Here’s what I mean: when I started this blog (and Substack’s marketing notwithstanding, that’s what it is), I swallowed the whole Substack line: start writing, grow your subscriber base, quit your job. I followed all the advice. I gained something like a thousand Twitter followers. I submitted my crap to all of the Substack Recommends posts, etc. etc. When Substack recently introduced Notes, which I guess is its answer to Twitter, I ran across a post by a writer exclaiming ecstatically that he was getting 1,500 new subscribers a day through the feature.

Like a carefully staged photo of a fast food meal, there was no connection between his experience and mine. I started with around 199 subscribers. I grew my readership, over a year and a half, to a robust 206. Last I looked, it was at 196. 

Recently I stumbled across a series of zines I created while I was in college. I was the proud publisher of both Sweat Potato and Bandersnatch Press. Both were laid out by hand, gluing photocopied or hand-drawn images and blocks of typewritten text to card stock covered with light blue registration marks. I had sheets of rub-on lettering transfers for headlines. I would solicit writing and art from friends. Everything was deeply marked with potty humor, and I could write literally any goddamn thing that popped into my head. The pursuit of success was not in the least a part of it. I sent them to Factsheet Five, a great trading market for zines like mine, and occasionally I would get a request for a copy of one, along with a buck and a self-addressed stamped envelope, but whether I wound up mailing out two or twenty mattered not in the least. The goal was complete freedom of expression and, at my most gregarious, a sort of pre-Internet trolling. When some ROTC guy got ahold of a copy of Sweat Potato and told me it was “worse than his dog’s burrito farts,” I dedicated a sizable percentage of the next issue to mocking him in the most incendiary terms I could conjure.

In short, I didn’t give a fuck. 

God I miss that. The modern world of likes and follows and comments is… well, honestly I’m not sure what it is, but it sure as hell isn’t writing. And the thing is, I’m a professional technologist. I write computer code for a living. But it’s not that either. It’s marketing and business. I suck at it, I hate it, and I hate that everything is built around it. 

My friend and erstwhile bandmate Adam mentioned recently that I need to know what I’m writing for, and to be quite honest I’m not sure it’s a question I can answer. It would be nice to be paid to write, but only if it facilitated time to write—a $200 payday is just going to vanish in the welter of bills. As things stand, trying to make a buck has taken up more of my time, with precious little to show for it—usually I wind up losing money. At the rate things are going I’ll never see a fraction of the amount I’d need offset my the velvet handcuffs of my programming salary, and so chasing after writing as an alternate career is like trying to eat a blue whale with a crab fork.

I suppose it would be nice to write for a large audience, though I often view anonymous comments on my work using a scale ranging between suspicion and hostility. I’m torn over whether connection is a thing I’m seeking. On the one hand, I’m learning a foreign language. On the other hand, making conversation is the one thing I haven’t really done with it. Making connections always seems to me the first step on a road that leads to joining, and joining is not really something I do. I feel habitually like an outsider in any group larger than my fantasy baseball league. I’m not saying I’m averse to the idea of making a friend or two, but a large readership is not really that. I honestly don’t know what it is. I’ve played a lot of gigs for five or six drunks and I’ve played at least one for five or six hundred drunks. It’s all the same once you walk off the stage—just a guy carrying a bunch of heavy-ass crap back to the car.

George Carlin was on the money here. “People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose.’ ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am.”

In the past I wrote to make myself laugh. I would say these days I spend about four-fifths of my writing time seething and the other fifth emitting chuckles. Not a great ratio.

What’s the solution? I have no idea. I’m definitely pretty unhappy with the state of things, but I seem to lack the organizational capacity to fix it. Not to discount the help I’ve gotten from people, but what I really need is someone to stand next to my desk and say, “now write a query to the New Yorker.” Absent that I reckon I’ll just keep on keeping on. I’ll subdivide my time into segments too small to effectively accomplish squat and the things I do complete will all be missing some essential component. That’s my brand.

What I will also do is to keep writing down words—not in the order I encounter them or with accompanying definitions, but rather in pleasing sequences, for my entertainment perhaps and, if only glancingly, for the entertainment of anyone out there in the dark blue world at the other end of this wire. That’s my compulsion.

1. Germans do not use title capitalization.

2. Many more than once.

3. You should listen to the first one: Decades.