ritas kleine welt

youtube is a great thing. it's a treasure trove for rare interviews, such as lita grey talking about her life and her marriage to charles chaplin. their relationship always fascinated me. they were such a completely different pair that their marriage always appeared as doomed from the start. especially, since she was twenty years younger and just short of 16 years old when she got pregnant for the first time. a shotgun wedding and two children later, the pair were throwing muck at each other and the world was left to wonder whatever they had seen in each other. whatever it was, there must have been love, too.

last week, i attended a block seminar in the institute for eastern europe studies. our group consisted largely of students from the german department, a handful of students of eastern europe studies -- and me as the representative for the english department. the seminar was great; i learned a lot -- and in nine out of ten cases i had not a single clue what the others were talking about. talk of the whooshing sound of a topic going right over your head. they were a nice but scary bunch of phd-students. bouncing off cultural theories off each other as if they hadn't done anything else during the last ten years of their lives. scaaaaary!!!