Animalated Leipzig
Leipzig was so great! Marco and I were really happy to meet the novelist Kevin Vennemann (our German translator), to whom
I had mentioned an abbreviated version of the Krautgarden Loft banana incident, and who subsequently suggested that we meet for a pre-reading dinner in Auerbachs Keller, the basement tavern where Mephistopheles took Faust, and where the sixteenth-century prototypical Dr. Faustus supposedly once transported himself from the basement up to street level, by riding on a diabolically possessed wine barrel. “Terrible place,” Vennemann wrote, “but very… hearty food [original ellipses] made for tourists and probably the best way to keep you from starving once again. They might be serving a lot of kraut as well.”
To be totally honest, my caloric intake isn’t actually anything out of the ordinary, but I was of course delighted to have acquired the reputation of an insatiable devourer of hearty tourist food. Verily my friends, it is better to be feared than loved!
After eating some really substantial Saxonian specialties (at a different place, actually—we were afraid Auerbachs would be too noisy), we reported to the abandoned cotton factory for our reading. I was paired with this great deconstructionist Alpine nature poet called Ron Winkler, whose poems I particularly enjoyed because I am so fond of animals. For example, here is an excerpt from “Animalated Poem” (translated from the German by Andrea Scott):
…in a flight of Bambisophy
we surmised the hulls of deer—or something like
countryside trash. in the end we were too participal
for integration into these topic clouds. it was also
pretty cold here at Lake Constance—about ten Derrida.
It was fun to hear him read in German, although I didn’t understand as well as if the poems had consisted of, you know, a list of his family members, or maybe directions for how to get to the post office.
Another nice thing about Winkler is that he attracted a remarkably large and cheerful audience, almost none of whose members walked out during my reading. (In general, the people of Leipzig seem to have a truly remarkable thirst and tolerance for literary readings. The Krautgarden event was part of a week-long festival called Leipzig Liest (Leipzig Reads), involving 1,500+ readings: approx. 1 reading per 300 citizens of Leipzig.) They nodded encouragingly when I told them about Ein Schritt weiter, and laughed at all the jokes—tentatively, at first, but when I said, “Thank you for laughing, it’s supposed to be funny,” well, then one guy was just like, “Hahahaha!” and kept laughing for the entire story, all the way to the end. Afterwards he even bought a copy of n+1! I hope he found it as funny as he envisioned.
He wasn’t even the only one to buy an n+1! I think I sold like 4 copies! One of them was purchased by the really nice undergraduate intern—a major in book marketing at the University of Leipzig—who was in charge of the cash box. She was so nice that, after charging herself 10 euros for the n+1 (she said it was a 40th birthday present for her boyfriend… he is a lucky guy!), she actually offered me half a ham sandwich! That’s what Leipzig is like: if you come there with a reputation for eating everything in sight, they don’t try to fight it.
The readings were followed by a concert by the German musician PeterLicht [sic.], who doesn’t allow himself to be photographed, so nobody knows what he looks like. “He is reckoned to be polite and talented and lives in Cologne,” reads his Krautgarden bio, to which I am unable to contribute any personal impressions, because by the time I found the right building, it was too crowded to get in.
Later that night, Marco and I ended up at a dance party which was somehow affiliated with the Leipzig Book Fair, and which took place in a building identified to us as a Baroque palace. We really danced, a lot, especially me, because there was a 5-euro cover, and one likes to see some return from one’s investments.
Dear readers, would that I could go on all day and all night writing about all the wonderful things about Leipzig! But I will leave you here with one last example: the Leipzig Zoo. It is really a fantastic zoo. Although I didn’t surmise the hulls of any deer, I did surmise some actual deer, as well as the world’s smallest buffalo (kleinster Büffel der Welt). It was called: der Anoa.
At first I feared that the world’s smallest buffalo was too small to be visible to the naked eye…
…but then I realized he was just standing on the other side of his little house.
