December 13. Another court hearing. Virtually present this time, and the defendant, once again, does not show up. An arrest warrant is issued, but it is unclear how such a warrant will be handled between two different counties. Defendant is not playing with a full deck, clearly. It is at the discretion of the judge how to deal with that. I never realized just how much power is concentrated in the person of the judge. The system of laws can only be mapped onto actual life in an extremely imperfect way. Everything that does not fit in this mapping has to be decided by the judge.

December 12. Submitted my application for naturalization. Expected processing time: about 7 months. I may be choosing to become a citizen of this country – and lose my citizenship of birth – in the very moment this country ceases to be a democracy. Well bring it on then.

December 11. How Eco and Carrière lament, gleefully, in 2009, that the floppy disk became obsolete, and then everybody believed the CD would be the eternal storage medium, and then that was replaced by the DVD, and even the DVD, they suspect, won’t last forever. Fifteen years later, and storage has turned abstract, the question what medium something is stored on does not make sense anymore. And maybe, in the future, everything will be woven into big language models, and we ask them to reproduce something for us, on the fly and precise to the last comma, but we don’t know how they do it.

December 10. I wrote a brief review of The Gutenberg Parenthesis, just to get it over with, but I feel I’ve neither done that book justice, nor have I come to terms with my own irritation with it. I am furious because the information that is buried in books is not allowed to be unleashed into the world – it is gate-kept by people who believe the only way to discover meaningful information is in the shelves of a well-run paper bookstore. And second, I am furious because the feudal structure of who gets to be an author and who doesn’t is still intact, being upheld by publishers, authors, and readers alike. And I am furious because both the first and the second statement are not really true. Me being this furious is what deserves further investigation.

A woman works her way through the door between the subway cars, the door you’re not supposed to use. She is gaunt, dirty, starts her litany asking for money, which in the noise, even after the door has closed behind her, only those very close to her can even hear. I usually have no cash on me, but tonight I do, a tattered ten dollar bill in the zipper pocket in the strap of my backpack. Ten dollars is enough to make her face shine just a little, she had the briefest spell of good luck in this subway car.

As I get off the subway at 96th street, there is another woman, or more like a haunted spirit in the guise of a woman, jumping frantically through the station. She wears only a wet sweater above bare legs and feet. Her murmurs and shouts are unintelligible, except some utterances that sound like “help me”. I ignore her and walk home through the rain.

December 9. Christmas concert in Newburgh. The Jewish conductor from Australia says, solemnly, that he had considered taking the Hanukkah part out of the program, but then decided to leave it in, and when the audience applauds, he asks them to applaud a second time, for themselves. Between two pieces, while the orchestra continues to play, he then delivers a Jew joke, as he does every year.

December 8. And again: What should be an easy text takes me hours and hours and hours, and what I leave behind is a wasteland I’d rather not visit again anytime soon.

December 7. Train to Newburgh in the afternoon. As usual, I try to get a seat facing forward and on the left, the side where the river is, but actually, in the dark after 5pm, there will be nothing for me to look at anyway. J and I ought to reach a state in which, when traveling to each other’s homes, we do not need to take anything with us, since it’s all already there.

December 6. Ran six two-minute sprints by the riverside. Afraid of the effort, afraid of running up against my limit, afraid of the pain that is the only way to get back into shape. And it’s always “back into shape”. You’re always in a state of having lost something that you presumably already had. It’s never “continue to be in shape”. Moderate wind from northeast, causing a drag of about 15 seconds per mile when going up against it, and a similar push downwind. Two minutes is a strange sprint interval. It is long enough that you forget it will soon be over, and then it suddenly is.

It is not just about making maximum use of the time in a day by strict commitments. You also need the elasticity that allows you to be creative in the first place. I’m careening through this at this point, but that’s okay.

December 5. Stages of bilingualism: I’ve had the German version and the English version of this blog open in separate tabs next to each other for quite a while now, with the DeepL translation engine in a tab between them. I used to write in German first, then use DeepL to give me a rough cut of an English translation which I would hand-polish before publishing. Now I’m increasingly drawn to the English tab first. I can write simpler, more direct, with less heavy words in that tab. But I won’t use DeepL to give me a first cut of German. That’s just unbearable. I will copy over the English entry into the German file, and then do the German translation below it, from scratch. That sounds at least somewhat like me.

December 4. Before I go out to CVS to buy toilet paper, I spend half an hour deciding what to wear for the occasion. As I step out onto the street, I feel strangely exalted in my dress clothes, displaying a persona I most certainly am not, a shell that feels weird and stupidly attached to me, and yet I am seeking it out persistently, over decades. I am vulnerable as that display persona, much like someone who can’t run because of impractical heels, and yet chooses, fully knowing what will happen, to be just that.