other audiobooks, and another literary discussion.

Speaking of audiobooks, I also recently finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, which was laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. The actor who read for the book did a really good job with it. I love Vonnegut's stuff. In Germany I finished reading Slaughterhouse 5 while sitting outside at McDonald's on Prager Strasse in Dresden, Germany. I read the last lines of the book then looked up at the still obvious smoke damage to the historic buildings on the skyline and shivered. I next read Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which was quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read in the English language, though the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams certainly comes close. Catch 22, along with Slaughterhouse 5, helped me re-define myself as an American, and made me able to move on to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States some years later. Catch 22 also reminded me of my favorite Czech novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, a satirical anti-war classic steming from the Eastern Front of the First World War. Hasek's own biography is no less outrageous and hilarious than that of his famous character(s). He was an irrepressible joker to the last. I don't know what it is about the Czechs, but they have more of the funniest, most irreverent novelists in their 20th century literature than any other European country, and I love them for it (though I suspect the reason for this is owing in part to the repeated tragedies in Czech history throughout the 20th century).

I'm less crazy about Polish writers, but I do have my favorites...among them the recently deceased Stanislaw Lem, probably the greatest (and most cantankerous) SF writer who ever lived, the journalist Ryszard Kapucinski, who tells poignant, sensitive stories from his travels all over the so-called Third World; I also admire the exile poet Czeslaw Milosz, especially his memoir of Poland under Stalinism, The Captive Mind. I am impressed with Witold Gombrowicz, though so far I haven't read him, only read about him. I also like the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.

...is it a little obvious by now that I have something of an affinity for Slavic literature & culture?

...it was this affinity that actually caused me a real crisis in graduate school, and made me quite disillusioned with cannonical Germanistik as it was being taught at Rice. I found Slavic literature, culture, and film suddenly much more appealing, that it drove my passions much higher than the dessicated German Studies program I was slogging through...not that there's not plenty I truly love in German Studies...but 1) I was prevented from focusing on those German authors who most appealed to me {anything after 1900, basically}, 2) made to focus on stuff that was of absolutely no interest {Buergerlicher Realismus, Medieval German Lit, etc.}, and even the stuff that did interest me, say 3) the cultural millieu of Vienna around 1900--the professors still managed to just suck the life out of it, ignore anything beyond narrowly defined Literature and bore me to tears. No wonder I did my Thesis all on works after 1945--and even that was a tough task. I was an (intellectual) historian by temperment, and LitCrit work never did come easy to me, no matter how much lit theory I read and tried to absorb.

I figured out that Germanistik as it is taught in Germany, and as Rice U. tried to replicate, is not at all the same as German Studies, properly taught, at other American universities. German Studies, as opposed to Germanistik, does not assume the students grew up in a German speaking country, and covers a lot more of the anthropological and meta-cultural analysis of German society that is just assumed to be intuitively known by natives studying traditional Germanistik. In other words, it's WAY MORE FUN, TOO. I actually had time to explore this side issue of Higher Ed during my first semester on campus at Library school, outside of class time. It was nice to see my own earlier grad school impressions vindicated by American professors of German in a scholarly book on German-language pedagogy.

Ironically at Rice U, I got to know several of the Slavic Studies professors rather well; Unfortunately for me, Rice U. only offers undergraduate degrees in Slavic Studies, and doesn't have any graduate degrees for Slavic Studies. One of the professors even nominated me for a scholarship to go study in St. Petersburg, Russia for a year. I would've won, too (there were, remarkably, no other interested candidates!!), but because the scholarship was actually designated for undergraduate students, my Department informed me that if I accepted the scholarship to Russia, I would lose my graduate fellowship and all my funding, and I didn't think that was an option. Turns out I lost all that anyway, owing to writer's block and an inability to get finished with my thesis within the expected 2 year mark (I was originally going to write on German SciFi, actually)...so maybe I should've thumbed my nose at the department and followed my passion and gone back to Russia for more intensive study. Hindsight's always 20x20, though. If I had been attending UT-Austin, it would've probably been considerably less difficult to switch graduate majors from German Studies to Slavic Studies--though of course the UT-Austin German Studies program probably didn't SUCK as bad as Rice's. But they were not willing to give me a graduate fellowship while Rice University WAS. Push came to shove, and I chose Rice over UT. UT did actually have the better grad program in my field, but the name recognition of Rice U. pays its own dividends, sometimes. And besides, I liked the whimsy of Rice University's campus culture, and I met all manner of truly brilliant people (not my professors) outside of the classroom who REALLY expanded my mind and my intellect many times over. Can't put a price on THAT, though it's something my parents will never understand and I'm unable to explain it to them.