G is for German

dtv Atlas zur deutschen Sprache König, Werner ; Paul, Hans-Joachim (München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.)

Very possible the first German-language book I ever bought for my own use (rather than for class) and certainly the first one I ever paid full price for. "Full price", in this context, would mean substantially more than the German list price because of the punishing pricing model adopted by the local distributor who supplied the university book store: 1 DM = 1US$. IIRC, that was around $16 (in 1989 Poor Student Dollars, which in real terms is something $50 today).

I was in my first or second year of undergrad and finally studying German in earnest (I had no opportunity to take it in high school) when this little gem caught my eye. Many of you may be familiar with the handy little Anchor atlas of world history, with its format of a map or diagramme on every page faced with explanatory text. This is nothing more than an English translation of the dtv Atlas zur Weltgeschichte and their atlas of the German language has the same layout.

dtv stands for Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and their works are, in fact, pocket-sized. Yet they pack in an incredible amount of information. This petite volume covered the entire history of German--phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, sociolinguistics, etc.--from the Proto-Indo-European stage up to the present day and did it in a way I could readily grasp. Proto-Germanic sound shifts never quite made sense to me until I read König and Paul's treatment.

But what truly captivated me about the book was the substantial appendix of dialect maps showing the geographical distribution of various lexical items and morphosyntactic features. Want to know the various names for "red cabbage" and "carrot" throughout German-speaking Europe? It's all in there. Words for "boy", "girl", "Saturday" and "hurry"? Yup. Dialectal forms of verb endings, pronouns, noun declensions? Those, too.

For such a modest book, it's held up remarkably well: Nearly twenty years and there's almost no sign of wear. Looking at it makes me realise how smart it would be to acquire some more dtv publications, especially the yummy-looking dtv Atlas zur Namenkunde.

Let's talk about sex

So monshu and I finally got around to watching Shortbus and we mostly liked it, even if we didn't find it entirely successful or fully satisfying. I remember complaining more than once that I wish there were more movies like this, ones which plant a flag in that vast territory between porn and mainstream movies. It's immensely refreshing to see a sex scene where one participant politely asks another to change his hand position. This is the sort of thing that never appears in typical mainstream films or hardcore films because they only deal in sex fantasies and would only show up in a "serious" move as a sign of Something Wrong.

On the minus side, I was kind of taken aback to see such an "only in NYC" attitude from Texas boy John Cameron Mitchell, since there wasn't a hint of that in Hedwig. As I explained to monshu, it's annoying, but so common that over the years I've learned how to tune it out. And while there's nothing wrong with a celebratory ending, I was a bit more interested in what happens to these people when they leave the rarefied atmosphere of a sex club. That probably has something to do with the fact that my sex club days are behind me and now I'm more about integrating that experience into (pace Severin) my real life.