Five Dogs, Ten Books and Me

With the financial crisis and its aftermath still haunting the people in Europe and the United States, staycations seem to have become very popular again. Enter the term into Google and you will get a dazzling amount of pages offering strategies to improve your holiday at home. Staying at home, however, has been en vogue for lesser reasons in the not-so-distant past. At least in Germany. I’m talking, of course, about the summer of 2003; then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder cancelled his summer vacation after the Italian state secretary for tourism insulted the scores of German tourists that flock to Italy every year. Not only was this incident widely debated in the German media (and not only in the yellow press, even Die Süddeutsche, one of the most respected German broadsheets, featured an article on the issue), it also inspired comedian Elmar Brandt to come up with a song called “Zuhause” that combined German lyrics fitted to the chancellor’s vacation-cancellation with the music for the song “Azzuro” (the song Germans associated with Italy). Soon, the discussion shifted to whether Germans should emulate their Chancellor and stay at home as well.

It is a truth universally acknowledged… that vacations are way better than staycations. Or not.

Admittedly, just as everybody else would if asked to decide which is better, vacation or staycation, I’d say “vacation”. At first. Because generally speaking, I really do prefer vacations to staycations. Just because I’m interested in getting to know new customs, new people, new cultures. There are instances, however, when all I crave for is a staycation – just staying at home and doing everything my heart desires. Right now, I’ve reached a point when a vacation seems like so much stress that I’ve made up my mind to take a staycation this summer – at least in July.

The Decline of the Novel in the Unipark Library

Having worked in the university library for almost two years now, – first only for the English Department, now for the whole of the Unipark – I’ve noticed that I’m getting strange. I start remembering and paying attention to weird things. Things like the exact shelf marks for nice or even not-so-nice books. Things like the general inability of art history students to find shelf marks A-D in their section of the library. Things like the belief inherent in library users that merely because there are currently no baskets available they can just walk in with their bags.

The most recent trend is much more shocking, though. It’s a notion that’s been steadily creeping into my consciousness for a few months, a notion that I’d been fiercely rejecting because of its absurdness.