At a beer festival today I drank a New England-style India Pale Ale called New Copenhagen IPA from a København brewery called Jacobsen. The brewer, whose name was Pjiake, which maybe I will one day name a boat, was very nice and smart but not interested in unpacking with me the myriad layers of globalism behind how this beer came to be and came to be so called. Every time I mentioned it I would pronounce it the Danish way, like København, I guess because I am perpetually trying really hard to fit in and pronounce things in the local parlance i.e. pretentious, and then he would say it back like Copenhagen, I guess because they are trying to do an American-style beer and part of that is the American pronunciation. What a stupid perpetual motion machine of othering and fetishism we were.
I’m in the back of a bus to Berlin, I told him, wondering how they get the yellow flowers to just stop all of a sudden.
What? he said, and I sent him a picture on the telephone of what I was looking at, Danish meadows dense with something that made them yellow, totally, until with a disorganized border that was obviously following its own orders the yellow thing stopped growing and a green thing began. Swirls of color. Waves washing on a shore.
I think that stuff is called “rapeseed,” he wrote back.
I said, Thank god.
He said, There must be a better name for it.
I said, How could there possibly be a better name for anything at all ever?
Brady, Cooper, Ferdinand <— name tags on some German actors posing as USAmerican soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie, so I suppose that’s how they suppose we are called, although unclear to me how I fit into this “we.”
I tried to tell Sigrid and Omiros about what happened with Christos, starting with the other people involved. They are brother and sister, I said, Constantinos and Sophia, and Sigrid said, That could be anyone.
