The Answer

As I said at the end of my entry from May 17th, the title of that post was taken from a line in a novel. No one got it, but a few people (one anonymous person - who was this? and a couple by email) have asked which novel it was. The answer is 'Money' by Martin Amis.

More soon!

Looka looka yonder! Looka looka yonder! A big black cloud comes!

As compensation for my now destroyed plans to visit Berlin and Prague over the Summer, I've spent this evening planning an altogether different trip to take after my Summer German classes end in mid-August. Trying to plan a trip around the United States is mind-boggling: there are simply so many places to visit, and so many different ways of getting from one place to another, and there can be such huge discrepancies in cost depending on where you want to go. As a graduate student of vaguely poor means (cue violins), I've let my budget largely dictate where I go. It is actually good to be restricted in one way or another, otherwise I'd never be able to narrow anything down.

My original plan was to head to Chicago, Minneapolis (the first place my feet ever touched American soil), and various other places around that area: Milwaukee, the comically-monikered Normal, Illinois, Toledo, Columbus, Kansas City. However, after this itinerary - and especially Toledo - caused James to collapse into hysterics (he said it was like him running up to me and happily declaring a plan to spend the Summer in Blackpool, Hull, and Preston), I've had a rethink. The biggest casualty is, unfortunately, Minneapolis; I still really want to go back, but no matter how I tried to work it, I couldn't make it affordable on this trip. I am, instead, planning a trip around the South. My new and very tentative route - I should add that this might seem like a rather eccentric route to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the geography of America, but, to reiterate, I am guided by my budget - is as follows:

New York-Chicago; Chicago-Memphis, Tennessee; Memphis-Tupelo, Mississippi; Tupelo-Birmingham, Alabama; Birmingham-Nashville, TN; Nashville-Athens, Georgia; Athens-Atlanta, GA; Atlanta-Savannah, GA; Savannah-New York.

Without having a map to hand, it is kind of hard to explain this route. Which is why I've provided one! According to Google maps, my journey will be just over 2850 miles. Here is the link. Unfortunately, for some reason I can't get it to hyperlink, so you'll need to copy and paste it into your browser:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=109593592121057696411.00044dc958703ca375e85&ll=37.439974,-79.101562&spn=16.653772,29.707031&z=5

I aim to take this trip for under $500, which will be no mean feat. I haven't entirely decided on the method of transport between every city - I can, for example, either fly from Savannah to NY, or take the (16 hour) train for the same amount of money. I can also either fly from Atlanta to Savannah or take a bus for pretty much the same amount - but it shouldn't cost more than $300. Chicago-Memphis, for example, will be $10 by bus; Birmingham-Nashville is $29 by aeroplane. If needs be I can sacrifice a couple of places (Tupelo, Athens), but hopefully I won't have to. I plan to take as many overnight buses as possible because a) they are much, much cheaper, and b) it means I have somewhere to spend the night. Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do about accomodation - just find places as and where I end up. It might sound crazy, but I'm really not worried about it - if worse comes to worse I can sleep in a bus or train station (I can hear my Mum's eyes popping from here), but I'm sure I'll find somewhere. One thing's for sure: I'm not going to freeze in Mississippi and Georgia in August.

So, this is the plan. I am already excited. In my research I found out that Tupelo - the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and the inspiration for two quite brilliant songs - has had a Jewish community since the C19th, and even has its own synagogue, which is remarkable for a Southern town of just over 32,000. There are 20 Jews left in the town - I just emailed the synagogue asking for advice. Hopefully they will take me into the warm bosom of their little community. Any and all suggestions and comments are very welcome.

Any thoughts?

The foes of my body are legion, and far more vicious than my sins

Well, that's it. My first year at Columbia is officially finished. This is good. I won't indulge in a sentimental retrospective because, well, I don't want to. It's over and done with and that's all there is to say. More interestingly, I celebrated the end of the year by seeing Los Campesinos! at the Music Hall of Williamsburg with Adam and James. They were excellent, so accomplished and confident given how young they are. Although their singer does bear a disturbing resemblance to Wayne Rooney...Last night I went to see Iron Man which was equally excellent, and much needed mental relief after a quite horrendous day. Despite my reservations after seeing the trailer, Robert Downey Jr. was completely convincing and the special effects were also excellent. It was, unsurprisingly, remarkably orientalist, but still lots of fun. And, even better, Loews had a HUGE poster for The Dark Knight. July 18th. I cannot wait.

A 20% off sale (off of everything! Even remainder books! Even second-hand books!) at Labyrinth Books has been wreaking havoc with my finances over the past two days. But I can't be blamed...I live on top of the shop! Amongst other things, I acquired a ludicrously large German dictionary; a book of German grammar; a biography of Michael Oakeshott which, to quote my old supervisor Jon Parkin, "isn't very good, but something is better than nothing;" a very nice and interesting old edition of a history of ethics by (Prince) Kropotkin; Knut Hamsun's Hunger (recommended by Mark Anderson, my Kafka teacher, and Tom); Ted Hughes's Collected Poems (because people all over England failed to return my copies of the individual collections before I left for NY - you are all thieves); and various other bits and pieces.

Now I have a few days off before beginning my Summer extravanganza of German. For the next three months I will be eating, sleeping, and breathing the German language until, finally, I become a hardened translation machine, more German than man. I'll also be starting my job for Professor Ira Katznelson around the same time, researching the history of C13th toleration in England.

Finally, yesterday I found out that next semester I will be TA-ing (teaching, for those back home) for Professor Volker Berghahn's course 'The European Catastrophe, 1914-1945'. This pleases me greatly. I can't wait to begin teaching, especially for such an esteemed historian.

Songs for the Deaf: 'Numbskull' - Ash; 'Far Away' - Cut Copy (again); 'The Weight' - The Band.

Quote of the Day: the real quote of the day was said to me and Adam by a random guy down near the Christopher Street 1 stop on Wednesday night, but it's rather unrepeatable. Instead, here's a happy nugget I dug up researching my undergraduate dissertation: "In the final analysis, the joy that beauty brings in its train when it arrives upon the scene is not equal to the sorrow it evokes when it departs." - Petrarch, 'On the Remedies of Good or Bad Fortune', Dialogue 2.

10 points for anyone who can place the quotation which forms the title of this post. Clue? It's from a 1980s novel by the most talented British writer of his generation. But, oh! how he squanders his talent!

Maths and English

Earlier this evening I returned home from a trip down to the Village with James, Adam, Toby, etc. and decided that I wanted some ice cream. The ice cream I was buying came to $3.99. The cashier rang it up, and I handed over a $10 bill. "Do you have 1 cent?" he asked (apologies to any Americans out there - my English keyboard doesn't have the cent sign). Now, it doesn't take an Alan Turing to realize that, in this situation, me handing over $10.01 is not going to help anyone. I am, however, exhausted and feeling pretty sick, so I didn't argue. Moreover, I was quite intrigued as to what exactly the cashier was going to do with my extraneous cent. Just as he handed over my change - after much brow-furrowing resulting, of course, from his realization that he was simply handing back to me the penny I'd given him, plus another one - I ran into a Butler 504 buddy who'd just passed his orals. Hearty congratulations were exchanged, and then off I went. As I got home I discovered that I'd been given $7.02 change. Quite, quite bizarre.

Essays: one down, one to go. Kafka ended up being a whopping 8000 words, but I'm pretty happy with it. Historiography is two-thirds done and, at the moment, consists of little more than a bunch of quotations strung together by a vague narrative. But when you get to quote Quintilian, Kafka, Machiavelli, Koselleck, Cicero, Erasmus, and Benjamin in the same essay, it's hard to complain.

Songs for the Deaf: 'Limb by Limb' - Sebadoh; 'Sofa King' - The Roots; 'Far Away' - Cut Copy

Quote of the Day (new, semi-permanent feature): "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." - Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (Schocken Books, 1965) p. 13.

Random Rules

Today I gave a paper at an academic conference entitled 'New Approaches: Home, Nation, and Landedness in Modern Jewish Identity'. The conference is being held at Harvard, which is, I must admit, a rather intimidating place to deliver one's first ever conference paper. My talk was entitled 'Between Fidelity and Redlichkeit: Leo Strauss's Zionist Synthesis'. It went quite well, although I was put on a very eccentric panel; the two papers before mine were concerned with medical examinations in 1920s Palestine and suicide in Palestine in the 1910s. My paper had absolutely nothing to do with these kinds of empirical questions, and I think that the audience found it rather confusing. Half of them were only interested in the two papers on Palestine and didn't care at all about my paper on Strauss, whilst for the other half the situation was reversed. Anyway, the best thing about these kinds of events isn't so much the papers as meeting other students and academics.

After delivering my paper I received an invite from Professor Ronald Zweig to come and deliver a paper at his Israel Study Group at NYU. More than this, however, it was just nice to talk to other people interested in similar things to me. One of the things I found very difficult about being in England was the sense of (intellectual) isolation, the knowledge that I was completely alone in my intellectual interests. As absurd as it might sound, sometimes it felt as though I was the only person in the world, at least of my age, working on these particular topics and thinkers. Coming to a conference like this is both unnerving and exhilerating: unnerving because it just serves to highlight the huge gaps in my (almost entirely self-taught) knowledge of modern Jewish philosophy and intellectual thought, but exhilerating because it underlines just how many people are doing interesting and intelligent work in areas similar to my own. I've met a lot of very nice and friendly people, some of whom I'm sure I'll see around in the future (quite a few of them are also Columbia students, so that's pretty much guaranteed).

The other great thing about this conference is that it's given me an excuse to get out of New York and come back to Cambridge. The last time I was here was September 2005, when I came for some interviews at the Harvard Government Department. It rained three inches in an hour and was, to say the least, specrtacularly miserable. I distinctly remember opening my rucksack to find my notepad reduced to a watery pulp, before taking my socks off and wringing them out in the toilets. Good times! I shudder to think how bad an impression I must have made, squelching water through the offices of the Kennedy School of Government. Happily, however, the weather this weekend has been glorious, and not even a 3 hour delay to my train (on the first annual US National Train Day, no less) could dampen my mood. Last night I met some friends for dinner, before going to see the world premiere of Stephen Greenblatt's new play based on the recently rediscovered plot of a (probable) lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio. It was so terrible that we left halfway through and instead went to drink in Charlie's, a famous local bar with an excellent jukebox (Pixies, Velvet Underground, Clash).

Cambridge really is a beautiful place, and Harvard itself has an understated majesty. This evening, after the conference dinner, I took a walk through the campus, ending up outside the chapel. For some reason I really love colonial-era US architecture - there's a certain type of American house design which just sings to my English heart; not, I hasten to add, because it reminds me of home, but rather for precisely the opposite reason: there is simply nothing like that in England. Buildings like the Harvard chapel just seem so quintessentially American, and it still gives me a thrill to be amongst them.

Tomorrow night I head back to New York. I return to what I left: 14 hour work days, Kafka, a historiography paper on the futuricity of history, not enough sleep, and almost certainly not enough food. But come Thursday, one way or the other, it'll all be over. Relaxation! Normal eating patterns! A retreat from the onset of alcoholism (the graduate vice, apparently)! Resident Evil 4! Barring weather-related disasters, come Friday I will be donning shorts and a t-shirt and heading into Central Park with my headphones, a strawberry smoothie, and a some kind of non-work related book (maybe even a novel!) in tow.

Songs for the Deaf: today I visited the ever-brilliant Newbury Comics, a fantastic and fantastically cheap comic, music, and movie store. I picked up the new Cut Copy album (for $9!), Danger Doom's 'The Mouse and the Mask', and the 2CD version of Sebadoh's early '90s classic 'III'. Beyond these new purchases, I've listened to the song 'Random Rules' by the Silver Jews at least three times a day for the last ten days. The lyrics are quite, quite brilliant, mixing profundity and genuine pathos. I don't know, maybe it's just my mood right now, but the end of a relationship never sounded as true as it does on that song.