The Ball is Rolling

Woe is me, I’m about to leave the country for 12 days, and right now is the most exciting time ever to be right here in New York City. Every day since Occupy Wall Street started up has been an adventure. The learning curve for the Translation Working Group has been steep, but now we’ve learned some things, and our teams of translators are hard at work turning out the documentary literature of the revolution. We’re still getting the kinks worked out with regard to getting all these foreign-language materials posted on the brand-new OWS website, but this will be straightened out soon. I just wrote about our current work for the PEN American Center’s blog – where, among other things, I point out that we could still use more help, so if you’re reading this and can translate well from English into another language, you know what to do: let us sign you up!

Yesterday Judith Butler spoke at the satellite OWS meeting atWashington Square Park, and the General Assembly held there immediately thereafter decided that thrice-weekly GAs would be held at the park until further notice, i.e. until a subsequent GA makes a different plan – one of the principles of this movement being that everything is continually in flux.

I should also point out that woe is not exactly me. I’m about to spend some time in my beloved Berlin and then travel on to Kraków for the Conrad Festival, which is giving some particular love to Robert Walser this year. Since they’re flying me over, they’re putting me to work, having me speak three times, which should be exhausting but also stimulating and exciting. I love Poland, and haven’t been since February 1992, when I made a two-week trek through the country with a friend and, among other things, developed an appreciation for the custom of downing a flavored vodka at 11:00 a.m. Poland is pretty cold in February. The vodka doesn’t make it any less cold, but it does make you forget to monitor the progress of your frostbite.

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