Hmm, it is getting quite late

Scanning is an interesting art. People these days apparently don't copy books anymore, instead they scan. Which - admittedly - is much more convenient, if you need to lug the documents somewhere hundreds of kilometers away. Much more cost-efficient. So thanks to Vera and her well appreciated advice I have just spent a couple of hours scanning articles. Also peeking into other people's folders to see what they have scanned, because even though a beneficial art in other regards, scanning is bloody slow. Two scans per minute was the going rate today.

Earlier today I was alerted to the fact, that one was supposed to give ten days notice before departing the institute. I naturally had forgotten all about that, so today I hunted autographs to show that I had behaved properly in all imaginable regards. Autograph-hunting needs to be continued tomorrow, but I think I got to a pretty good start. I also rummaged through the book shelves and returned books to the library, since an important part of the autograph hunt was to prove that one hadn't made away with any of the institute's books.

Later I went to the Montagskolloquium, since today's presentation actually seemed rather interesting. Something of a Law and Literature -type of approach with the speaker analysing a book by Goethe. It was quite fascinating, because some of the same issues that I have been thinking about lately came up there too. What is law and to what extent the question at hand needs to lie within a juridical discourse in order to still concern law, to be legal history? It was pretty clear that there were those, who thought within a stricter legal framework and those who started from a more philosophical viewpoint and therefore judged the matter differently. It was stimulating; the kind of discussions that can evolve from analysing a fictional book and a character of a mediator in it... Of temporality and the place of the Third, of the importance of silence in mediation...

Sometimes law really is almost like poetry. You feel as if there is something out there that you can almost touch. Something about the essence of law, which reminds me again to check out some philosophers. One of these days I am actually going to do it, instead of just always talking about it. Just like with writing.

After the seminar I practiced the skill of making fast decisions and decided to go to the movies, even if I had less than thirty minutes to accomplish that. This time I was actually already busily striding towards the movie theater by the time the movie was starting instead of sitting in a U-Bahn seven stations away. What made me a little worried though, was the fact that this was a different movie theater and they were not in the habit of showing 25 minutes worth of adverts and trailers before they started with the movie. I was three minutes late, but the screen was still blank. I even had time to settle down and read a few pages of my book, before the lights went out and the music started. That is all that happened at first, because this wasn't precisely the most luxurious or high-tech of all the movie theaters. After two tries they managed to get something visual to accompany the auditory output for the enjoyment of myself and the other avid movie goer.

Beowulf was the choice of today. For the first ten or fifteen minutes I was annoyed by the fact that it was one of those animated motion capture films, when I had thought I was getting real actors. Of course you could recognise most everyone and the men for the better part even looked relatively "human". The women unfortunately were much more doll-faced plastic figures. Has to do with the skin, me thinks. After awhile it stopped bothering me, because the story was actually quite captivating. But hey, if you have Neil Gaiman as one of the writers, what else could you expect? He does know how to tell stories, he does.

Beowulf also goes to the list of books to read. I actually have some books of mythology back home, all of which I haven't yet got through. I am quite looking forward to getting my hands on those again.