If you’re on Twitter at all, even once every other day would be more than I, you’ll see all kinds of new tweets from me. Only, they’re incorrect.
In the switching of platforms from Blogger to WordPress, my imported posts somehow became all smooshed: the text is cramped, the pictures are off to one side or another, and I am in the process of editing over 1,100 posts. When I click “update”, it sends a tweet out that I’ve posted something new when I haven’t.
So that’s been fun.
In other news, I’ve been preparing for German Literature Month this November. I have on my side table a slim volume of Thomas Mann’s book, Black Swan. It apparently “reveals his (Mann’s) mastery of psychological analysis and his profound perceptions into the mysterious realm where the physical and the spiritual meet.” I’m also reading Cornelia Funke’s book, Inkheart, to my class. It is a read-aloud in which they are fully absorbed.
But, what I really want to discover is Buddenbrooks.
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was twenty-five, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family–a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbors in his native Lubeck. As he charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence and madness, Mann ushers the reader into a world of rich vitality, pieces together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor. (Vintage back cover)
I’m wondering if any of you would care to read it with me? We could take all of November, and I would love to share the experience with reading friends.
So tomorrow, thanks to Christopher Columbus, will be a day off of work. A day to enjoy pumpkin pancakes and pork sausage with apples, a day to read by my front window ’til dark.
I am already relishing the time…
