One day a month

Christa Wolf wrote a book called Ein Tag im Jahr, in which she recounted what she did on the 27th of September each year. In honor or Christa Wolf, and for lack of any better intellectual structure for this blog now that events in Berlin no longer seem new, I am going to try to record more or less what I did one day each month. Obviously it will be in less detail that Christa Wolf's diary of the day, but perhaps more substantial than the famous Mark Twain example, which, if memory serves, went something like "Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to bed. ... Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to bed. ..."

One problem is whether to write on the day as it is happening, all beautifully fresh and detailed, or a day later when it can be summarized. The Christa Wolf descriptions of the actual day were always more vivid, so I will try to do the actual day.

At the moment I am sitting on the blue sofa in our living room. Joan is beside me, working on an answer to a new question from a doctoral student. Our cat is sleeping on the red chair near us, curled up on the project "Michael" bag that Leah, one of my doctoral students, gave me. The new Harry Potter book is on the chair too, perilously near the edge. I have read slightly more than half, partly to ration myself, partly because I have so much other work to do.

This is the vorlesungsfreie Zeit, a period when there are no classes and none scheduled until mid-October. Nonetheless I go to the office every day, partly from habit, partly because as director I need to be there. Today I met with Nancy from the US Embassy about a) a joint digital library project and b) a visitor from the US. Then I met with a student intern from the US, who is working on the project. And finally I met with the surprisingly young man who heads Humboldt Innovation, a limited liability company (GMBH) wholly owned by the University, but with vastly greater flexibility for handling soft-money projects than the usual research department bureaucracy. We talked in particular about how funding could work for a collaboration with the group trying to establish a Library Development Agency. He makes it all much simpler.

Nancy and I lunched at the Suppenbörse, which is one of my favorite lunchtime haunts: it is a soup restaurant with stand-up only tables and with 6 or so soups that change each week, all with interesting and exotic spices. I had a chili con carne today that was light and fresh and unlike any chili I had ever had in the US. ... It is now time for me to make supper, which will be simple: eggs, bread, creamed spinach (which I adore). Tomorrow Elke and Thomas are coming over to show me how to make the German noodles called Spätzle. That will be a lot more complex.