literary rhapsodies, emotional outbursts, bad puns and creative output from a slightly distracted and highly disturbed mind with a big heart and an occasionally dark sense of humour
From Wikipedia: Folie à deux (French for ‘madness of two’), also called shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are “transmitted” from one individual to another. Folie à deux is also the subtitle of one of the most anticipated movies in 2024: The Joker…
…on her side and was already on the point of falling asleep. Was she tired? Probably. Was that why? Nope. It was because she made the mistake of reading a book that sounded a m a z i n g in theory – yet was a complete fail in practice. Sandra Newman’s JULIA, based on…
Hand’s up one of the best Scandinavian crime novels I read in a long time. And I’m not saying this because of the cover. Okay, maybe, because I love puns. I am an avid reader of Henning Mankell and his Wallander novels, of Jo Nesbø‘s Harry Hole and of course I’ve read Miss Smilla’s Feeling…
I have a stupid cold and so I am in the bath tub with poison ivy green menthol and eucalyptus essence or chained to the bed (or rather couch, since I prefer to sit out my illnesses and diseases there) and furthermore so, I am incredibly bored. I tried being productive and read some of…
Mikhail Bulgakov, THE HEART OF A DOG, Harvill Press, 1999 I stumbled upon this beautiful edition outside an antique book store right across the street from the theatre and simply had to buy it. Look at the cover and the author-protagonist-correlation! To all the Nepper, Schlepper and Bauernfänger out there: I can easily be fooled…
A movie night with Leo and the Joker or: how a pun got lost in translation and has been bothering me ever since. It’s the hot topic of late 2019, the second fashionable clown after Pennywise and despite the title serious business no laughing matter: Todd Philipp’s [btw, if you read Todd, don’t you automatically…
Could be me, to be honest, but comes from non other than one of the greatest German composers: J O H A N N E S B R A H M S 1833-1897 Johannes Brahms. The all-time bachelor with a beard and belly so mighty even Santa Clause envies it. More than 200 songs, concert…
Last semester at FernUni Hagen was all about Großstadtliteratur (urban literature? Metropolitan literature? Eh, books about big city life. You get it.) and provided me with a huge collection of extracts and excerpts from the finest authors from the turn of the 19th/20th century. I’ve read some Rilke and some Raabe, the whole fivehundredsomething pages…
Fritz Zorn meets Arcade Fire meets The Intellectual Chaos. I’ve scribbled and drawn this during a time I felt really bad. The Jüngling had just dumped me (via text message while he was on a faculty party less than 10min away from me), I was heartbroken, I ate nothing but dark chocolate (Schwarze Herrenschokolade) and…
Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. Middlesex is Jeffrey Eugenide’s second novel. After the much promising The Virgin Suicides, it was not surprising that his…