like a cow that makes water
It's the first day of class and, as Marlowe remarked, we all feel like seniors. All through the organizational meeting this morning I had the uncanny sense that we were enacting the first scene from Varsity Blues or Grease or something, where all of us wiser upperclassmen greet each other with high-fives: "Man, this is going to be the greatest year ever!" Eerie. If the analogy holds, then all of us will undergo interesting romantic and academic crises in the next half hour.
All about Besitzstandswahrung, the desire of Germans to protect the generous provisions of their welfare state in the face of a slowing economy.
On a visit to the UK, [German dotcommer Suzana] Sucic ventured into a Kent hospital after a friend broke her leg. She vowed never to return. 'The hospital was positively Victorian: rundown and grubby, with poor facilities like you might have found in Germany 100 years ago. The British still retained their air of superiority, while I was saying to myself: "Don't ever get sick in Britain".'
Toni Morrison on the Guinean author Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King: but her treatment of the book is more an excuse to discuss the history of Africa in the white literary imagination. It's interesting reading, and especially appropriate for any of us who might hypothetically, ahem, be writing fiction set abroad.
