Keeping it short

I still can't decide on my next English-language novel, though I have been cozying up lately to both Livaneli's Bliss (Mutluluk) and Barnás' The ninth (A kilencedik). Keeping me company in the meantime are a trio of short story compilations: Edward Jones' Lost in the city, Danticat's Krik? Krak!, and something called The Showa anthology. It's almost comical how I was flitting between them yesterday. If I could force myself to focus on any given one, I'd've finished it already.

With the Showa anthology, the problem is boredom. I remember encountering an essay recently which criticised the tendency of translators to promote a certain kind of Japanese literature in the West, and this compilation exemplifies the problem. Though I don't know how fair it is to blame Western Orientalism for that given that the majority of the pieces included have won the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, the Dazai Osamu Prize, or some other prestigious Japanese award for mainstream literary fiction. (Then again, it could well be that recognition abroad influences in turn which writers are considered for these awards.) Among all the meditative vignettes and semiautobiographical confessions, however, there have been some refreshing surprises. I never knew that Mishima was capable of writing comic fantasy, for instance, and I'd never read Abe Kōbō before, who turns out to be a modernist in the vein of Kafka or Hedayat.

With Jones, it's more due to the emotional intensity of many of the stories (which often deal with death and tragedy) and perhaps a certain reluctance to be finished with the collection too soon. Moreover, his tales take place in a world that is adjacent to my own--the Black inner city--and yet isn't really a part of it. The strain of crossing over weighs heavily on many of his characters, and it takes something out of me as well to go over to where they're at and try to meet them on their terms.

The difference being, of course, that I'm piercing the barrier for fun and they do it out of necessity. I remember shrugging off many of the specific privileges composing the Invisible Backpack when I first read McIntosh's essay, thinking them superficial or trivial. Among these was being able to live among people who look and act like me. I simply didn't appreciate at the time how fully I'd interalised mainstream White middle-class values, how different they are from other modes of behaviour, and how strictly and selectively they are enforced. It's too easy to set up a false equivalence based on the discomfort I've always felt in the ghetto. But avoiding the inner city is an easy task for most White people, much easier than the reverse. Jones' writing really brings this home for me. There's some of that in Danticat, but it's camouflaged by the familiar challenges of living in diaspora. I expect immigrants to feel alienated in this country and struggle to find a place in it.

Echt Berlinisch

On the flight to St Louis, I stumbled over this passage in Fontane, equal parts amusing and baffling:

[D]er richtige Berliner überhaupt nur drei Dinge brauche: eine Weiße, einen Gilka und Borré.

I correctly guessed that the first thing was Berliner Weiße. In hindsight, I should've recognised Gilka as well, since it's a brand of Kööm I've run into before, and not just at Gene's. But Borré really had me stumped, since all it brought to mind was French bourré, which didn't seem to fit the context in the least.

When I finally had a few moments to myself on BIL's machine, I was able to pull up this helpful page, which decoded not just this but all of the "Berolinisms" of Fontane's work. I guess I associate initial voicing so strongly with the South that it had never occurred to me to map Borré to Porree. And since when do Berliners have a special thing for leeks anyway? I guess since at least the late 19th century.

This is a vegetable I would've called Lauch anyway. At first, I thought that preference was due to cognatehood, but according to Wikipedia, that is actually the traditional designation "in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz, in Baden-Württemberg, Saarland, Rheinland-Pfalz, im südlichen Hessen und gestreut in Österreich und dem westlichen Bayern"--in other words, precisely and perversely those parts of the German Sprachraum where one expects to find French loanwords. Maybe Kluge can make some sense of that distribution, but I can't.

My Thuringian coworker natively says Borree, but today I found another term which left her scratching her head as well: Peden. It appears coupled with Nesseln and thus indicates some sort of weed, but damned if we can figure out which. Surely not a dialectal rearrangement of Beten, oder?