articulate in New York

My friend Jan Valk is curating a series of events featuring young German-language writers at the Goethe Institut in New York, called "articulate". I'm not quite sure whether that's a verb or an adjective here. Anyway, instead of constructing some kind of artificial link between the writers - writers from the former East, writers with a background in physics, writers with Polish grandfathers, whatever - the series just presents people who are doing interesting stuff. I like the idea.

articulate—a series about new tendencies in contemporary German literature. The event series articulate spotlights the young German-language literature scene. By trying not to construct a generation consisting of these highly varied exponents, the series purposely focuses on its diversity. The guests of articulate traverse borders in the biographical and stylistic sense, and are connected only by the hybrid forms of their career paths and their joy in experimenting with different medial forms of expression. They are narrators, lyricists or dramatists, filmmakers, translators, journalists, and literary mediators. Above all, they always take on more than one role at once—sharing this polymorphism in their ways of life, work, and expression. On five nights in 2011, the authors will meet John Wray and—after a short reading—start a conversation with the host. They will talk about their diverse and multi-faceted involvement in the literary and artistic world as a principle career strategy, and their work and survival in the current cultural scene.

If you're quick and I'm not getting my time zones muddled, you can catch Peggy Mädler there tonight. Sadly, you may have missed Thomas Pletzinger and Daniela Dröscher, but you can still make it to Katharina Adler on November 8 and Milo Rau on December 8.

Glam.Lit

Berlin is famous for being a bit of a scruffy kind of place. A city where you can venture out to the shops with your pyjamas under your coat and no make-up on, and nobody will look askance. There's a good side to that - there are times when you just really need caffeine and there's no time to take a shower and wash and blow-dry and apply lip gloss. But then there's a bad side as well, which is that when you do want to dress up you tend to stand out like a sore thumb - an utterly gorgeous and glamorous sore thumb, but an injured digit nonetheless.

So I enjoy the occasional foray into distant territory - and on Thursday that was Hamburg! Home of the wondrous festival by the slightly embarrassing name of Ham.Lit. Or as they put it, a concentrated shot of the most exciting young German literature and music right now, on one night and under one roof. Fifteen "young" writers and two sets of music. What better opportunity, I asked myself, to get totally glammed up with my Hamburg girlfriends Isa and the West-Eastern Diva? So there we all were, the belles of the ballroom, only of course we'd forgotten that the place is completely underlit. So our pulchritude went unnoticed.

No matter. For in the dark cavern of a former WWII bunker, we saw some great readings. My personal line-up went like this: Mariana Leky (read beautifully despite a bad back and a rather strenuous moderator), Kathrin Seddig (my absolute highlight; I shall be reading her book Runterkommen), Peggy Mädler (who did very well for what was apparently her first reading, and did rather intrigue me), Hannes Köhler (distracting facial hair, nice piece of writing set in Berlin), and then a guy called Tino Hanekamp. Tino Hanekamp kindly stepped in at the last minute because someone else was ill. And he's also got a book coming out soon.
There are times when I say, "Believe the hype!" This is not one of them. But at least it gave us all something to bitch about afterwards. I'm told Thomas Pletzinger and Jochen Schmidt were excellent too.

Then there was music, of the listen carefully to the lyrics kind. Sadly, I don't like listening carefully to lyrics, so we went somewhere else where people appreciated our fabulous get-up.

Ham.Lit is a great little festival, very tightly organised and with an excellent selection of writers to choose from. If you're interested in emerging German writers, it's a perfect opportunity to get a taste of the latest stuff on offer. But don't worry about what you wear - pyjamas under your coat will do just fine.