Hello, readers!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on this blog. This is partly because I was very busy during the final weeks of my graduation from college, and also partly because Twitter (you can follow me @bryklaus, otherwise my account is private) absorbs some of my energy with respect to posting links and small comments here and there.

In case any of you are curious, the graduation ceremony went very well. Each of the graduating seniors who wrote honors theses prepared a (roughly) five minute speech that was given between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, which is very rustic and something of an illusion for parents to admire (“Wow, writing those theses must’ve been grandiose, surrounding by old books and people wearing bow-ties”). The graduation ceremony also happened to be held on May 1st, International Workers’ Day, so I made sure to point that out in my speech and was surprised to get some compliments for it (sign of the times?). Perhaps in the next few weeks I’ll post some excerpts or something from the thesis, but as of now I don’t plan on doing so.

Another thing you may have noticed is that the tone of this post is a bit more personal than previous ones. The reason being is that on June 5th I’m leaving to go to Berlin in order to improve my German-language abilities and will hopefully approach somewhere near fluency, and I’ll be flying back on July 18th. While in Berlin I’ll be taking a six-week intensive language course at the Freie Universität Berlin using the funds I was awarded for my thesis, and supposedly the class meets five days a week, leaving the weekend to roam about the urban center (I took a German class last semester on Berlin architecture, so I’m looking forward to finally seeing the actual city itself). And I was briefly considering using the Howler was one of those idiotically cliché “travelogues,” but then I thought of the opening line to Tristes Tropiques and felt guilty about doing so. Nevertheless, I’ll probably post photos and insights while abroad, and maybe even a little in German, at the very least for my own edification, but I hope to keep the majority of the posts limited to the type of content the Howler normally posts.

On a different matter, yesterday I finally finished reading Kant’s first critique in full (the end of the Transcendental Dialectic really dragged on for me, but then when I got to Part II on the Doctrine of Method it was a race to the finish), so I might post some thoughts on it that I had after I look back on all of my notation. At the advice of one of my professors, I’ll probably also be reading a lot more fiction this coming year, so look out for book reviews written in second-grader style.

Lastly, I’m going to try and figure out how to get this blog integrated a little more with Twitter. Mark and I post a lot of stuff on there now and it makes the links section a little bit superfluous—not to say that I won’t use it (I’m just being really lazy at the moment), but that it would be nice to have the blog links in addition to the links we post on Twitter (which sometimes make it back to the site, but only sometimes…). So be on the lookout for that. That’s all for now.