I went off to Europe feeling, for the first time, “like a writer.” I took 12 tutorial hours of German a week, but to this day I can speak the language only haltingly; I can barely understand German, when I’m spoken to, and reading German only serves to remind me of my dyslexia—all those verbs lurking at the end of the sentence, waiting to be reattached to the clauses they came from. My favorite courses at the Institute for European Studies were taught by an Englishman named Edward Mowatt, with whom I studied (not necessarily in this order) Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein and Greek Moral Philosophy. I also studied the Victorian Novel with Herr Doktor Felix Korninger from the University of Vienna. Professor Korninger was an Austrian who’d once taught at the University of Texas; he spoke English with a most original Texan-Austrian accent—a kind of conflation of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Arnold Schwartzenegger. In Vienna, I shared an apartment on the Schwindgasse, next to the Polish Reading Room, with a fellow American named Eric Ross; he was from Chicago.
What do You think about The Imaginary Girlfriend (2013)?
