So...

...it's been embarrassingly long since I last posted. The time that has elapsed between NOW and THEN has shown itself to be vast enough as to prove virtually paralyzing, which is strange as I certainly haven't been suffering from writer's block in other respects. More like not-knowing-where-to-begin-block. Which I'm sure most bloggers (and I hesitate to call myself that) encounter at one point or another.
I'll start with something traditional, and then hope to get back into a groove!

Here are a few things that happened to me since I last wrote:
A place:
CANADA. That is all.

Two weeks of snow, tobogganing, appreciating the subtle differences between Canadian and American accents that become apparent upon hearing "Canadian" again, losing my luggage, losing my luggage again, meeting old friends and realising a better term might be "the friends that count", losing any ability to speak English or German as I adjusted back, hanging out with the fam and...well, a whole lot more. Highlights definitely included NYE in Toronto, a fantastic city, but also hanging out with a number of generations of lovely women in my family.
A film:
Soul Kitchen

Fatih Akin's latest is a Heimatfilm ("sentimental film with a regional background"...thanks, Wikipedia) set in Hamburg, a city known both for its icy Nordic charm and its seedy red-light district underbelly. This film embraces both. Unlike in most of Akin's films, there are virtually no Turkish characters in Soul Kitchen. Instead, the film tracks a Greek restaurant owner (Adam Bousdoukos) who transforms his restaurant "Soul Kitchen" into a four-star establishment, and his ex-con brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) who's using a job at the restaurant to maximize his time out of jail. Bonus: Awesome soundtrack, great script, main character who looks like Jim Morrison. AWESOME.
For: foodies, people who think a film is nothing without a kickass soundtrack, people from Hamburg.

An event:
Orhan Pamuk's lecture today at Humboldt University, "What Happens To Us When We Read Novels" (as part of the Mosse Lecture Series)

One of the things I really appreciate about living in one of the cultural centres of Europe - and I sometimes feel Berlin is a bit of a special case anyway because of its mix of cultures and historical faultlines and aesthetic sensibilities - is the mindboggling array of cultural and literary events at my fingertips. I was incredibly lucky to hear Amos Oz last year and today Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, whose novel "Museum of Innocence" I started reading over the break provided a worthy follow-up. Pamuk spoke of the desire to read literary novels for their "atmosphere", distinguished between "naive" and "sentimental" readers, and called Anna Karenina "the greatest novel of all time". He also suggested our desire to find secret meaning within novels is one and the same as our desire to find meaning in life (even if most literary critics would now suggest that novels, in fact, lack a secret "meaning" and are instead constantly shaped and reimagined by their readers). I loved his humour, his heavily accented English, and his attempts at pronouncing "Bildungsroman." A great evening all around.

That's all for now...off to go watch "Rules of Attraction."