Books read:

April
The Outsiders (Hinton)
To Sir, With Love (Braithwaite)
Changing Places (Lodge)
Oresteia (Aeschylus)
Education and Economic Decline in Britain (Sanderson)

May
Purgatorio (Dante)
University to Uni: The politics of higher education in England since 1944 (Stevens)
Electra (Sophocles)
Electra (Euripides)
Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides)

June
Things Fall Apart (Achebe)
Iliad (Homer)

July
The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster)
From that Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947 (Dawidowicz)
Twilight Sleep (Wharton)
Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Calasso)

It's a relief to be in a city where cars are kept in their place, where car lanes in the ring road are even being eliminated to make way for more trolley tracks. Of course no car lanes would be the ideal, and the other day I read that in the 18th century the city's "ancient walls were torn down to make way for a promenade." There's an idea! (The train station, which is across the ring road (former promenade, former wall) from the old inner city, bills itself as a "promenade" but they mean "mall" — although, come to think of it, that's what "mall" used to mean.)

I can't stop thinking about my students. Once I handed out the Indo-European family tree to my Saturday fifth graders. "Hey look, Anisha! There's Gujarati!" said Viren, whose family is from Gujarat. He and Anisha are the only Indian-American students in the class. All the other students are Korean-American, and I suppose felt a bit left out. Patrick suggested, "The Korean word for bread is pan. Do you think there's a connection?" I had to tell him that Korean is almost universally considered a language isolate (unless it has some relation to Japanese, but even that is disputed). But bless him for suggesting the word for bread and not, say, computer, or satellite. (I can't believe I didn't ask them for one, two, three, mother, father in Korean and Gujarati. I'll do that in the fall.)

A spectacular storm the other day. I was taking the train straight across Germany, and for the last three hours of the trip lightning flashed large on the horizon every few minutes, but there was no thunder, and it didn't seem to be raining. When I arrived the lightning was still flashing, but still no thunder, and no rain. I settled down and had dinner. "When thunder does come, it'll be ear-splitting, and last minutes, to make up for these hours of silence," I thought. It was warm & people were sitting at outdoor tables. Around midnight, within the space of one minute, the wind rose and the heavens opened. People barely had time to save their drinks. I raced two blocks and got soaked. My room faced onto an airshaft, and when I opened the window the noise was so loud it was like being under a waterfall.
The next morning, a harvest of tree branches, and even a couple of trees.
(I suspect this is the sort of thing that's really not that interesting to read, but I wrote it anyway because I like remembering it — it was so dramatic.)

I'm staying in the room of my dear friend Amber, who's out of town. If you want to see what Amber looks like, take a look at John Eliot Gardner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists' recording of Bach's Ascension Cantatas. There's Amber, smack in the middle of the CD cover, next to Bach. She did not pose for the picture, and she didn't even know it existed til she saw the CD in a store. It has to be her — it's small, but it looks like no one else, and she was spending a lot of time in the Thomaskirche the year before the CD came out. We were all astonished. (It so happens that she plays the baroque violin!)
The Thomaskirche is Bach's church — where he worked, where he's buried — at the altar, no less. I sang there once, & thought, "I can't believe I'm singing Bach's music in the presence of Bach's bones!" At moments like those relics & ancestor-worship make perfect sense.

Funny scene in a food shop: (my German is not so good, so I tuned in and out)

Cast of characters: shopkeeper, customer, and me, looking at pastas and occasionally eavesdropping.
The customer was telling the shopkeeper about his love life; he's apparently scheming to win someone over, and was looking for the right cheese for the occasion. The shopkeeper gave him a sliver of Manchego to taste and held up the huge wheel, declaring, "Women love this cheese!" I tuned out for a while, until I heard the customer say, "Maybe I think about things too much." When he left, the shopkeeper wished him good luck. I wish I had paid more attention to their whole long conversation.

Three blocks away from where I'm staying in Leipzig you will find, on three adjacent blocks, the once and future courthouse (a museum under the DDR); the university library; the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy School for Music and Theatre; and behind that, the Institute for the Art of the Book. (Leipzig was once home to most of Germany's publishing houses.) It's intense. All these were built in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Leipzig's glory days; they all have impressive façades with columns and pediments and grand staircases. The courthouse is nearly as broad as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and much taller, with a one large and three small cupolas. The 1907 trial for high treason of Karl Liebknecht was held in it, as was the show trial of those accused of setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933. Karl Liebknecht grew up on an important boulevard (now named after him) just a block away. The university library is exquisite; its lobby is a bit like the lobby of the New York Public Library, but smaller and not so white or severe.
These grand buildings mark the entrance to the "Musikviertel," the music neighborhood, where most streets are named after composers. This used to be the neighborhood not only of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, but also of the Gewandhaus, which stood in front of the university library. When I first came to Leipzig that spot was a parking lot; now there's a totally nondescript university building. I'd been told that the Gewandhaus was completely destroyed in WWII, but a plaque on the new building says otherwise: "the ruins of the old Gewandhaus lay here until March, 1968, when they were dynamited." That's the same year the grand old university building, damaged but still functional, was dynamited, along with the sixteenth-century chapel that stood next to it. (See www.paulinerkirche.de for information on efforts to rebuild it.) The plaque listed famous conductors who had given concerts in the old Gewandhaus, and spoke of its legendary acoustics. It also showed a picture of the building with its admirable motto: RES SEVERA VERUM GAUDIUM. "True joy is a serious thing." (At first I thought it meant, "A difficult thing is the true joy," which would have been even more appropriate.) Apparently the architect was one "Martin Gropius." "Gropius" is not a common name, and some professions run in families: could Martin be related to Walter, who's responsible for the Pan Am building? How depressing.
—> Apparently Martin was Walter's great-uncle. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gropius has a picture of the old Gewandhaus (with the University Library on the right).
I've looked at rental prices in Leipzig, and no apartment is as expensive as my measly two rooms in Brooklyn. No price was listed for one five bedroom apartment with a dining room and two balconies; maybe that could compare. And these buildings are nothing to sniff at; they're as fine as anything on Riverside Drive, but smaller — 6 or 7 stories instead of 10 or 15; their façades have more detail; and they often come with bay windows, turrets, even caryatids, as well as access to a garden, or at least a view of one.