go where all the boys are

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

This quote from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin is of course very famous. I've been re-reading the collection while in Berlin this week and then took a lovely tour of the neighborhood where he lived, Schöneberg. As luck would have it, the Saturday of the tour was also the weekend of the 51st Easter Berlin Leather Fetish Week which made the neighborhood truly come alive in all its queer glory. My favorite part of the tour was hearing about the cabaret clubs in the neighborhood. Isherwood frequented one called the El Dorado and the guide told a whole story about the owners and their run from Nazi authorities. It ended with a kind of queer archive conundrum: a grandson who wanted the ephemera from this club to be on display for all to see and a mother whose generational fear and trauma has solidified her solidarity to the names and people listed in the documents, even though they are all surely dead by now. The tour guide also mentioned a lesbian bar around the corner, La Garçon, that was for the rich and high class lesbians and was often frequented by Anita Berber who I am now thoroughly obsessed with. I want to read her biography if I can somehow find a copy; she sounds like an icon of the truly chaotic variety. 

Returning to Isherwood's quote, the biggest takeaway from the tour was Isherwood's prolific eye for details and commitment to documenting his life. His diaries make up some five or six volumes and that's not even including the ones he burned from the early thirties out of fear that they would incriminate his circle of queer friends to the Nazis. The day after the tour I felt so inspired by this idea of observing the world around you, writing down everything you hear and see, mining all your experiences for stories later. I took intense notes on a group of teenagers at the park and started writing down the idiosyncrasies of my travel partner. A few days later, though, my romantic brain and my practical brain are at war with each other. It's one thing to call yourself a camera, Christopher, but what about the kind of self-archiving and editing it takes to make something of your recordings. What did he do with those diaries? How did they become stories? Did he have an impressive memory and those observations would just return to him? Did he sit down and re-read his diaries in preparation for writing? Though I am not quite a passive, recording camera, I am a bit of a note taker. I like to collect ideas, I feel connected to these scraps and bits of thoughts and references and want to come back to them. But I find that I rarely do. If I am going to cultivate an ethos of observation then I also need one of synthesis and recollection. At some point it becomes so much information and data that needs to be parsed and remembered and returned to. But I guess it's just more romantic to proclaim oneself "a camera with its shutter open" rather than an archivist of your own experiences since that might require a lot of re-reading and organizing and systematizing. 

In Heroines Kate Zambreno talks a lot about the journals and diaries of the modernist women writers and their insistence on delving into the personal as a sort of feminist act. It's interesting that Isherwood sees himself as mining the outside for his stories while all these women writers are turning inward. Though really, I think both approaches involve a kind of mixture of outward and inward. While visiting the cutest queer and feminist bookstore, Love Story of Berlin, I spotted this book Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries, which struck me as such the perfect devotional given all my thoughts lately about writing for oneself, documenting, indulging passion projects, etc. The book was quite large and I'm living a suitcase life this year, but I kind of wish I had been less rational and indulged my excitement at discovering this book in this exact place. The tour guide joked that Isherwood came to Berlin because that's where all the boys were and I wish I were better at embracing the "recording, not thinking" part of Isherwood's camera philosophy. What would it look like to follow my desires, to go where all the boys are?