So as of a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to spend one year in New York City, doing research on sentence generation at Columbia University with a post-doctoral fellowship from Germany. There is so much cool stuff going on here that I want to share with people that I thought I’d try my hand at a blog once more. Who knows, perhaps I’ll read my blog entries again in ten years and reminisce nostalgically about this time. Unlike paper mementoes, I can keep it around digitally without ever having to throw it away.
What a shame that I’m only starting to blog now. It would have been worthwhile to blog the German-American Steuben Parade last weekend, which was this huge procession of clubs of old Americans with remote German ancestry, and high-school classes, and the car of a New Jersey retirement home that had an 80-year-old lady with a saxophone on top, and the Bergmannsverein (miners’ club) Recklinghausen, and various Scottish bagpipe bands, and a gaggle of Freemasons in it. (That was the moment when I realised you can simply not leave the house in this city without bringing a camera.) Or to blog the Anglican Evensong service at a church on Fifth Avenue that I accidentally attended on Sunday afternoon, mistaking it for a choir concert (the service did involve a pretty good boys’ and men’s choir, though). Or my battle against the bedbugs. Or my first barbershop choir rehearsal with spontaneous quartet singing during the break and afterwards. Or, above all, the utterly wonderful free Mozart Requiem concert in Carnegie Hall on 9/11, in which the audience was given scores and encouraged to sing along.
But it’s just not feasible to blog authentically about things that happened that long ago. So I’ll just start now and see where it goes.
As a consequence, I’ll blog that I just discovered a couple of days ago that my old friend Jakob, in the weirdest coincidence, is spending this same academic year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. This has been a kind of low-intensity friendship that we’ve managed to somehow keep up for over ten years, while not hearing from each other for extended periods of time in between: I only learned today that he’s been married for two years now and they had a baby this summer. (Congratulations!) But then, we did have to go to America to live within a one-hour radius of each other for the first time. His office adress is “Einstein Drive”, which is incomparably cooler than my “1214 Amsterdam Avenue”; whether it is cooler to live in the geeky “Von Neumann Drive” or in the more metropolitan West 49th Street is more debatable. Once they get settled in, he’ll have to come visit the city, and perhaps we’ll also get around to Einstein and Gödel walks in the Princeton countryside.
(This has nothing to do with New York, but the picture of the two is just so charming. Einstein looks as if he’s just been working in the garden, except that he’s holding a folder with notes. They were such geeks.)
