30 MINUTES WITH Sarah Silverman / 'I've been punched in the face three times'

Sarah Silverman

30 MINUTES WITH SARAH SILVERMAN

Interview

Sarah Silverman: 'I've been punched in the face three times'

The stand-up comedian and star of Wreck-It Ralph on teenage bed-wetting and defending men dressed as chickens from street hoodlums


Tiffany Rose
7 Feb 2013

Hello Sarah. You've done voiceovers before (1), but none for a Disney production (2).

My show (3) was very adult in many ways but kids loved it because it was very colourful and it had music. I love it when kids approach me; much more than creepy 50-year-old men – no offence to any creepy 50-year-old men who may be reading this.

What's the creepiest thing a 50-year-old man has said to you?

It's the 50-year-old men who live with their mums who have stacks of pictures for me to sign. I just think: "What are you doing with your life?" They sell them on eBay. I don't know what you can get for a signed copy of my picture, but I can't imagine it's anything over five dollars. You can work at McDonald's for more.

Sarah Silverman

Is it true you were once punched in the face at Comic-Con?

Yes. I've been punched in the face three times. You don't do what I do and have zero consequences. There are risks involved.

Who gave the hardest punch?

I used to pass out flyers on the corner of 3rd and MacDougal in New York City for a comedy club from 4pm to 2am. I was sharing the corner with the Pluck U Chicken, who was this young, Asian student in a chicken suit. He was a sweetheart. The scariest people in New York City are the bridge and tunnel beer-drinking teens, and one night they started pushing him around and I got in between them, not out of heroism, it just didn't occur to me in a million years one would hurt precious me. Some guy punched me square in the temple and knocked me unconscious. That was the first time.

The second time was an accident and I do believe it was my fault. I was shooting a fight sequence with Ryan Phillippe (4) and I leaned in when I shouldn't have leaned in. He knocked me right off my feet, leaving me with a huge egg on my jaw.

But the most memorable was at Comic-Con?

Yes, but this was heartbreaking. There was a line of people to take pictures with me and this one guy wearing a hulk fist, as The Thing had just come out. Let's say he was nervous about meeting me and a bit socially inept. I said: "Hi," but I don't think he knew what to do with his feelings and he punched me in the face. When I regained my balance, I saw three giant security guys dragging him away and he had this remorseful look on his face. I will never forget that look.

What was the best thing about meeting the Muppets?

Kermit is like my personal Jesus. I just love him so much. If you really listen to Rainbow Connection or It's not Easy being Green, those lyrics are so unbelievably profound, heartbreaking and beautiful.

What do you remember of the 80s?

I remember driving into Boston and seeing a huge billboard which read: "Year of the Woman," and thinking: "Wow…a whole year?" I had a pair of grey, corduroy pedal pushers which I was obsessed with. I would wear them with a pink sweater and I had these kind of Dutch clogs and I remember telling my mum one day. "Mum take a picture of me because this is the outfit I'm going to wear to my first New York audition when I grow up." You don't realise that things will change.

At what age did you know you were funny?

Three. My dad taught me swears and so I would say them and adults would be shocked, but they would laugh and it felt like approval. I became addicted to that feeling.

When did the bedwetting stop? (5)

About 15 or 16.

What was the worst incident?

When I had to go to sleepaway camp, which was humiliating. I peed in my cot every night in front of my peers. All anxiety related. After that, stand-up comedy is not daunting.

What's the worst experience you've had on stage?

Casino gigs can be tough. They pay well so sometimes I need to take them. I did one recently where I had this woman front-row centre who just heckled me from the beginning to the end. She forced me to eviscerate her and so the whole show became about this woman and I couldn't do any of my routine.

Is it true that you don't drink?

No I don't.

You never have? And yet you're a comedian.

Well, depression and alcohol … it's all the same at the end of the day.

Whenever I say I don't drink, people just assume I'm in the programme. But I have a Jewish stomach or something. I just don't like the taste of alcohol. My boyfriend will open up a bottle of wine and I will take a sip and pull a face. It tastes like poison. There was a short period of time when I would drink a Seabreeze, which is like the oldest lady drink. I'm more of a pot girl … (6) I love to bake using pots and pans and go and see Wreck-It Ralph.

Wreck-It Ralph is released in the UK on 8 February

Footnotes

(1) Bob's Burgers (2012),The Simpsons, Crank Yankers, Robot Chicken.

(2) Wreck-It Ralph, Oscar-nominated arcade game animation targeted at the under-10s.

(3) The Sarah Silverman Program ran for three years on Comedy Central.

(4) In The Way of the Gun (2000).

(5) Silverman's memoir is titled The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee.

(6) A studio publicist walks into the room.

THE GUARDIAN

30 MINUTES WITH

2012
The Rock / 'THAT is what I'm cooking'
30 minutes with Fiona Shaw / 'I prepared for True Blood by going to witches' meetings'
Chris Isaak / 'My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck!'
Stellan Skarsgård / 'I'm a castrated bull'
Willie Nelson: 'If we made marijuana legal, we'd save a whole lotta money and lives'
Jada Pinkett Smith / 'I'm scared of clowns'

2013
Sarah Silverman / 'I've been punched in the face three times'

2014

Christopher Plummer / 'Who the hell wants to be happy all the time?'

Michael Douglas / ‘It’s more fun to be bad!’

2016
Jennifer Jason Leigh / 'Until Tarantino, I had forgotten who I was as an actress'
Rebecca Hall at Sundance / Hollywood is scared of 'ugly' female characters
Gene Simmons / ‘I still fly up to the top of the rafters and spit fire’
Natalie Portman / 'The less I’m in a movie, the more I like it'

2017

Noomi Rapace: ‘Amy Winehouse was like an angel when I wasn’t in a good place’

Mariko Mori / Rebirth at the Royal Academy

Mariko Mori

THE LIGHTS ARE ON

BUT NOBODY'S HOME

Burlington Gardens has currently been taken over with a solo exhibition by Mariko Mori, the first museum exhibition of her work in London in nearly 15 years.  It’s nice to have the RA back in the Burlington Gardens’ space.  They will be using this building in a regular exhibition programme over the next six years before David Chipperfield excitingly joins this with the main building on Piccadilly.

Mariko Mori aims to inspire people in a new consciousness that celebrates our existing balance with nature, and reflects on universal themes of life, death and rebirth.  Fittingly entitled Rebirth the exhibition will start and end with the death and birth of a star, raising questions about the cycle of life.  Poignantly, the show opened when the Ancient Mayans had predicted the world was coming to an end.  So, the exhibition was aptly timed to mark either the end of the world or the birth of a new era.

Mariko Mori’s Rebirth at the Royal Academy.  Image via www.bbc.co.uk. 

This exhibition certainly makes an initial impact.  Popping in late one afternoon, I was guided by an attendant with a torch into the first room where I was confronted by an amazing globule of light – a five-metre high glass monolith, standing in isolation in a simple white space (I believe the colour of the light changes).  Another visitor was interacting with the object, moving closer and then edging back, seemingly unsure as to how the light was working.  He seemed convinced that he was activating it as he pranced around the room.

But, Tom Na H-iu is lit from within by hundreds of LED lights and is operated in response to real-time data from an observatory at the University of Tokyo.  Now I’m not really up with the scientific lingo but apparently the observatory detects neutrinos emitted by the sun, the earth’s atmosphere and, during a supernova, the work reflects these, in constantly changing light patterns.  As my fellow visitor showed you can still enjoy this work without any understanding of Mori’s principles.  The pieces are mesmerising and the fading light captivates us but we can make our own decisions and assumptions about rebirth and the universe.   This powerful start raised the bar for the remainder of the exhibition.  Then nothing quite matched up to my expectations.

Mariko Mori, Tom Na H-iu. Image via www.thetimes.co.uk. 

The exhibition was practically deserted and my stilettos reverberated on the wooden floors.  I think the silence and lack of people helped to create a mysterious atmosphere and the dim lighting enhanced the supernatural feel.

The paintings and drawings fall short throughout; it is the installations that are fairly impressive.  Transcircle is Mori’s own Stonehenge with nine totemic objects arranged in a circle.  The glowing colours of the stone are seen at varying levels of brightness and the colours change depending on the position of the planets in the course of the year.  We’re meant to be made to feel something, to have an experience; other artists have been much more successful in moving me though.  There’s not enough power here.  Let’s be honest, people like this kind of art because it’s aesthetically pleasing and a bit twee.  In terms of comparing it to things I’ve seen recently, it’s not quite there.

Mariko Mori, Transcircle 1.1.  Image via www.ultravie.co.uk.  

There’s an optimistic feel to the spiritual reasoning behind the exhibition.  The RA hopes this exhibition will make people slow down and contemplate our responsibilities.  Mori wants us to stop and think.  We’re Londoners – are we really going to slow down and give these sculptures the time they deserve?  Probably not.  I know I wasn’t able to spend more than a few minutes with the light sculptures.

Mariko Mori, White Hole.  Image via www.u.tv/ 

For me, Mori’s works and this exhibition are lacking.  The works are aesthetically beautiful but they do not have the roughness and awe that I get from seeing the real Stonehenge.  There’s no sense that I’m viewing something truly incredible.  This exhibition is a bit too neat and clinical.  The works are pretty and leave us smiling; I did enjoy it but possibly not for the right reasons considering how serious Mori wishes to be.

We leave the exhibition past Ring, a Lucite circle which hangs above an artificial waterfall.  The work has a meditative feel and maybe we do slow down and walk back into the madness of Mayfair a little bit calmer.  However, maybe that feeling was down to knowing it was time for a Friday evening glass of champagne.

Mariko Mori: Rebirth is at The Royal Academy until 17^th February 2013,www.royalacademy.org.uk.

http://chloenelkin.wordpress.com/category/art/

Luisa Valenzuela / Tango

Tango

by Luisa Valenzuela

Translated by FTS

I was told:

in this dance hall you have to sit close to the bar, on the left near the cash register; order a glass of wine, nothing stronger because it's not becoming for women, don't drink beer because beer makes you want to piss and pissing isn't for ladies either. They talk about a kid from this neighborhood who ditched his girlfriend when he caught her leaving the ladies room: I thought she was pure spirit, a fairy, it seems the kid said. The girlfriend was left flat, which in this neighborhood still has connotations of loneliness and spinsterhood, something frowned upon. For women, that is. So I was told.

I'm alone and during the week I don't care, but Saturdays I like to be with someone and be held tight. That's why I dance the tango.

I learned with much dedication and effort, in high-heeled shoes and a tight skirt slit up the side. Now I go around with the classic elastic straps in my bag, equivalent to always having my racquet with me if I were a tennis player, but less bother. I carry the straps in my bag and sometimes, when waiting on line at the bank or in front of some window when they make me wait, I fondle them, carelessly, without thinking and maybe, I don't know, I console myself with the idea that at that very moment I could be dancing the tango instead of waiting for some inconsiderate flunky to attend to me.

I know that somewhere in the city, no matter what time it is, there will be a salon where they're dancing in the shadows. You can't know whether it's night or day there, nobody cares whether it's night or day, and the elastics straps can be wrapped around the instep of your street shoes, stretched as they are from so much tramping around looking for work.

Saturday nights you're looking for anything except work. So sitting at a table close to the bar, as recommended, I wait. The key spot in this salon is the bar, I was insistently told, that way the men can give you the once-over on their way to the men's room. They can allow themselves that luxury. They push open the swinging doors bloated ready to burst, we're blasted by a gust of ammonia, and they come out much relieved and ready to dance again.

I know now when I'm going to dance with one of them. And which one. I detect that very slight head movement which indicates that I am the chosen one, I recognize the invitation and if I want to accept I smile very slightly, meaning that I accept but I don't move; he will come to me, will offer his hand, we will stand facing each other on the edge of the dance floor waiting for the tension to build, for the sound of the bandoneon to swell until we're ready to explode and then, on some unforeseen chord, he'll put his arm around my waist and we'll cast off.

We navigate at full sail if it's a milonga, for the tango we list. And our feet don't get tangled because he's wise and signals the maneuvers by strumming on my back. If there's some new step or figure I don't know, I improvise and sometimes I come up smelling like roses. I let fly a foot, list to starboard, don't separate my legs more than necessary, he steps along with elegance and I follow. At times I stop when his middle finger lightly touches my spine. Put yourself in neutral, woman, the maestro had told me -- and you should stay frozen in mid-step so he can do his gyrations.

I really learned it, I was suckled on it, so to speak. All the posturing by the men that alludes to something else. That's the tango. And it's so beautiful that you end up accepting.

My name is Sandra but in these places I like to be called Sonia, so as to endure beyond waking. Here, however, very few ask or give names, few speak. Some do smile to themselves though, listening to that inner music they are dancing to and which isn't always a product of nostalgia. We, the women, also laugh and smile. I laugh when they ask me to dance an encore (and we stand silently, sometimes smiling, on the dance floor waiting for the next number), I laugh because this tango music oozes out of the floor and penetrates the soles of our feet and makes us vibrate and drags us with it.

I love it. The tango. And eventually the man who, transmitting the keys of the movements with his fingers, dances with me.

I don't mind walking the thirty-odd blocks to get back home. Some Saturdays I even spend my bus fare on the milonga and I don't care. Some Saturdays a sound of celestial trumpets runs through the bandoneons and I elevate. I fly. Some Saturdays I'm in my shoes without needing the elastic straps, they stay on by themselves. It's worth it. The week passes banally by and I hear the idiotic street flirtations, those direct phrases, so petty when compared to the obliquity of the tango.

Here and now, almost glued to the bar in order to master the view, I gaze somewhat fixedly at some handsome mature guys and smile. They're the best dancers. Let's see which one decides to move. The nod comes from the one on the left, half hidden behind the column. A tilting nod so delicate that he could be trying to listen to his own shoulder. I like it. I like the man. I smile openly and only then does he stand up and approach. You can't expect reckless haste. No one here would risk being rejected face to face, none is prepared to return fuming to his seat under the mocking gaze of the others. This one knows that he has me and he moves in striding quickly, and I don't like him as much close up with his years and his air of indifference.

The ruling ethics don't allow me to play innocent. I stand up, he leads me to a somewhat distant part of the dance floor and there -- he speaks to me! And not like that one a while back who only spoke to excuse himself for not answering me, because I come here to dance and not to chat, he told me, and that was the last time he opened his mouth. No. This one is conversing, and it's exciting. He says do you see, doña, what the crisis is like, and I say yes, I see, I damn well do see although I don't say it in those words, I become refined, I am Sonia: Sí, señor, how frightful, I say, but he doesn't let me elaborate the idea because he's already holding me tight, ready to cast off at the next beat. This one won't let me drown, I console myself, surrendering, silenced.

It turns out to be a tango of pure concentration, of cosmic comprehension. I can do the steps as I saw the one in the crochet dress do them, the plump lady who enjoys herself so much, who wields her shapely calves so well that one forgets the rest of her opulent anatomy. I dance thinking of the plump lady, in her green crochet dress -- the color of hope, they say--, in the pleasure she takes in dancing, replica or maybe a reflection of the pleasure she must feel while knitting; a vast dress for her vast body and the happiness to dream of the moment when she can show it off, dancing. I don't knit, nor do I dance as well as the plump lady, although at this moment I do, because the miracle has happened.

And when the number ends and my companion comments on the crisis again, I listen unctuously, I don't answer him, I give him time to add:

"And did you see the prices they're charging for hotel rooms? I'm a widower and live with my two sons. Before I could invite a lady to a restaurant and foot the bill and take her later to a hotel. Now I can only ask a lady if she has an apartment downtown. Because a chicken and a bottle of wine is about the limit for me."

I remember those flying feet --mine--, the filigreed steps. I think of the plump lady so happy with her happy man, I even sense a sincere vocation for knitting.

"I don't have an apartment," I explain, "but I do have a room in a well situated pensión, that's clean. And I have plates, knives and forks, and two green glasses, those tall thin ones."

"Green? They're for white wine."

"White, yes."

"Sorry, but I never touch white wine."

And we separate without even one more dance.

---

Luisa Valenzuela is one of Argentina's foremost writers. She was born and resides now in Buenos Aires, after many years abroad. From 1979 to 1989 she lived in New York, where she was Writer in Residence at Columbia and New York Universities. She received a Guggenheim scholarship and was a Fullbright Fellow (International Writers Workshop), Iowa. She has published six novels and eight short story collections, which have been translated into various languages -- all into English. Her work is studied in universities in the United States, England and Australia. She has just completed her latest novel, entitled "La Travesía".

http://southerncrossreview.org/1/tango2eng.html

Robert Walser / Half mad

HALF MAD

by Robert Walser

One is always half mad when one is shy of people.

Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

Robert Walser / In the sanitarium

Robert Walser

IN TE SANITARIUM

I am not here to write, but to be mad.

Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing

ROBERT WALSER

ON EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

The New Yorker

March 28, 2012

Posted by Mary Hawthorne

W. G. Sebald, in his essay “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” offers the following biographical information concerning the Swiss writer Robert Walser: “Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so…. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written.” Sebald goes on to ask, “How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows … who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke.”

It is one of those perverse ironies of history that this most delicate, self-effacing, and marginal of writers (his books were critically well received and admired by Kafka and Walter Benjamin, among others, but they did not sell), who as a young man enrolled in a school for servants and as an old one dropped dead on Christmas Day during one of his long, solitary walks in a snowy field near the mental hospital he had for more than twenty years been confined to, attracts more readers with every passing year. His completely original voice and sensibility—a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt—remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.

As an antidote to the crassness of mainstream culture, Walser is, in fact, the perfect writer for our times, and since the nineteen-eighties he’s experienced a slow resuscitation. Most recently, New Directions and New York Review Books have alternated bringing out volumes of Walser’s work every couple of years, and readings, academic conferences, and celebrations have proliferated.

“Berlin Stories,” the most recent offering from NYRB, contains mostly new translations of early stories—selected and organized by Jochen Greven, Walser’s German editor, and elegantly translated by Susan Bernovsky—all of them set in the German capital, where Walser lived for seven years before returning permanently to Switzerland, in 1913, “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author” (his own assessment). Greven has broken up the stories into four “symphonic” parts—“The City Streets,” “The Theatre,” “Berlin Life,” “Looking Back”—but this feels arbitrary and counterintuitive even, for these meditative “prose pieces” (part story, part essay) are really the random, associative musings of the flâneur meandering through the city or pondering the puzzles of life in a dismal furnished room on the outskirts of town. A great part of their appeal resides in the ephemeral quality that Sebald speaks of.

Walser made a couple of forays to Berlin but didn’t feel ready to make a more sustained leap until 1905, at the age of twenty-seven, after the publication of his first book, “Fritz Kochers Aufsätze,” which Benjamin Kunkel describes in his 2007 essay on Walser for the magazine as “a collection of essays on everything and nothing.”

The description applies to the present volume as well, as it does to a great deal of Walser’s work; again, therein lies the appeal. These stories, more than revealing the texture of Berlin life at the turn of the century, allow us a window into Walser’s states of mind and into the mechanics of his thought process (he wrote quickly and claimed he never corrected a single line of his writing). Whether he is observing an Abyssinian lion in the zoo, or complaining about pompous, self-important people, or thinking about a park, or observing a play, or assessing the character of the city street, it is always the quality of mind that holds us rapt.

Among the most compelling in the collection are a small cluster of stories at the end that are devoted to women (with whom Walser is said never to have been intimate; nor was he with men, apparently): “Frau Bähni,” “Horse and Woman,” “Frau Scheer,” “The Millionairess,” and above all the masterly “Frau Wilke” (translated here by Christopher Middleton), which shows a frank and unironic tenderness. It is about the relationship between a poor young poet and an older woman who lets him a furnished room and shortly afterward falls ill. The woman is completely alone, with nothing to eat, and no one to care for her. The narrator comes to realize that he is her only link to humankind. Very little happens. Then she dies:

One afternoon soon after her death, I entered her empty room, into which the good evening sun was shining, gladdening it with rose-bright, gay and soft colors. There I saw on the bed the things which the poor lady had till recently worn, her dress, her hat, her sunshade, and her umbrella, and, on the floor, her small delicate boots. The strange sight of them made me unspeakably sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it seem to me almost that I had died myself…. For a long time I looked at Frau Wilke’s possessions, which now had lost their mistress and lost all purpose, and at the golden room, glorified by the smile of the evening sun….

Yet, after standing there dumbly for a time, I was gratified and grew calm. Life took me by the shoulder and its wonderful gaze rested on mine. The world was as living as ever and beautiful as at the most beautiful time. I quietly left the room and went out into the street.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/robert-walser-on-everything-and-nothing.html

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser / Review

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 

Review

Simple things, simply brilliant

• • Nicholas Lezard
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 February 2012 
  • 
    

'A delightful and timesless collection' … Walser's Berlin Stories
Photograph: Imagno/Max von Missmann/Getty Images

Those of you compelled to take public transport might find some wisdom in this piece of advice on what to do if the journey goes past the half-hour mark, and is getting tedious: "You look straight ahead. To show by one's ways and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn't that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead."

Berlin Stories
1. by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky
2. 
3. 
   

You may wonder: is the writer of these words perhaps having us on? On the contrary: this is what he's like, pretty much all the time. I think it was Herman Hesse who said that if you can stomach Robert Walser's prose, you can't help but fall in love with it, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly. He's guileless but not stupid, an admiring observer of the inconsequential. "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary," he once wrote, "we already see so much." Susan Sontag, in a brief but very worthwhile introduction to a collection of his stories published 30-odd years ago, noticed how easy it was to come up with points of comparison: "a Paul Klee in prose ... a cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett ... the missing link between Kleist and Kafka". In fact, as she points out, it was Kafka who was first compared to Walser, rather than the other way round (this is the humorous Kafka, who has disappeared in the contemporary imagination, to be replaced by the Kafka of bad dreams).

Walser was from Switzerland; he followed his brother Karl, a well-known painter and stage designer, to Berlin, tried to stick it a couple of times and on the third attempt, with what I suspect was the realisation that he needn't try so hard, nailed it. He became a chronicler of the ordinary (interestingly, at around the same time Joyce, on the other side of Europe, was doing the same). He was a master flâneur, and if Baudelaire had been driven almost to mania by his cité fourmillante, the swarming anthill, pretty much all Walser had to say on the subject was "isn't that nice?" And the blandness of the question covers up some interesting thoughts. (It's no surprise to learn that Walter Benjamin, who knew a thing or two about walking around cities and writing them up, was an admirer of Walser's – as, indeed, was Kafka.)

You might remember that last week I compared islands to novels. It occurs to me that cities are, by a similar token, collections of short stories, or feuilletons like this. From Walser's "What Became of Me", after a very brief description of his childhood: "After this, harsh Life flung me upon the path of a practising feuilletonist. Oh, if only I had never written a feuilleton."

This modesty is not an affectation. He was, by all accounts, a natural, in both the sense of being able to write at great speed without ever needing to correct himself; and in the old-fashioned sense of being, or appearing to be, a bit simple. He saw himself as a kind of servant, not just in the sense of serving the city by describing it, but literally, too: he went to a college where they taught you how to be a butler. (He was, apparently, unable to master the competencies needed for polishing silver or tending top hats.)

Happily, though, he stayed at his true profession, that of writer. How artless or artful he is is a judgment that each reader can make for him- or herself, and I suspect that much depends on the serenity of one's own disposition. Sontag called him an "anti-gravity" writer, both in that he is against seriousness as well as being unbound to the ground. And in this unbelievably delightful and timeless collection of short pieces, we can recover the delight of ordinary, uncondescending appreciation, places where the vacant-minded stroller can take "peculiar pleasure". The tram, the theatre, the train station, the park ... ("Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park," is how he ends "The Park".) One thing and then another. Isn't that nice?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/14/berlin-stories-robert-walser-review

Robert Walser / In the Electric Tram

Berlin, 1920

In the Electric Tram

by Robert Walser

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

Riding the “electric” is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.

Meanwhile you have rolled yourself a cigarette, say, and inserted it with great care between your well-practiced lips. With such an apparatus in your mouth, it is impossible to feel utterly without cheer, even if your soul happens to be torn in twain by sufferings. But is this the case? Most certainly not. Just wanted to give a quick description of the magic that a smoking white object of this sort is capable of working, year in and year out, on the human psyche. And what next?

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the “electric.”

People do, after all, tend to get somewhat bored on such trips, which often require twenty or thirty minutes or even more, and what do you do to provide yourself with some modicum of entertainment? You look straight ahead. To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with a quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn’t that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.

It is prohibited for the conductor to converse with the esteemed passengers. But what if prohibitions are sidestepped, laws violated, admonitions of so refined and humane a nature disregarded? This happens fairly often. Chatting with the conductor offers prospects of the most charming recreation, and I am particularly adept at seizing opportunities to engage in the most amusing and profitable conversations with this tramway employee. It pays to ignore certain regulations, and summoning one’s powers to render uniforms loquacious helps create a convivial mood.

From time to time you do nonetheless look straight ahead again. After completing this straightforward exercise, you may permit your eyes a modest excursion. Your gaze sweeps through the interior of the car, crossing fat, drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl, until you’ve had your fill of these studies in the quotidian and gradually begin to observe your own footgear, which could use proper mending. And always new stations are arriving, new streets, and the journey takes you past squares and bridges, past the war ministry and the department store, and all this while it is continuing to rain, and you continue to behave as if you were a tad bored, and you continue to find this conduct the most suitable.

But it might also be that while you were riding along like that, you heard or saw something beautiful, gay, or sad, something you will never forget.

1908

Robert Walser

Berlin Stories

http://translationista.blogspot.com
Writer and translator Susan Bernofsky loves to blog about all things translation and the magical city of Berlin.


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