Ms. Kuehne's essays, poetry, and music writings have been published in a myriad of journals and blogs. The Sporting Life, an apologia for Experimental Music in NYC, published by The Deli Magazine, March 2012; and the opening sequence of a novel she expects to complete by the end of 2013. Ms. Kuehne will compose a review, description, critique of your project on a case by case basis. See: Contact.

1.

On account of the strike, the conference suffered a two day delay.

In response, the 4 students - (spectral and polite and trailing 14 paces behind the renowned Biolinguist; sharing beds two floors above his room which they imagined must smell like god only knows what, scribbling furiously at loafer-level as he lectured with the veracity of one who compulsively seeks to conquer a childhood stutter, leaving his audiences uncomfortably poised between the wonders of pure wit and pure, machine-driven repetition) - well, they decided to take an overnight train into Weimar, which they had been warned enough about in undergrad to approach with the assurance of both physical and metaphysical tourism.

Metaphysical tourism: The necessity for an academic narrative while traveling, i.e.. a self-inflicted cognitive distance which shoves into the forefront not one's historical origin, as a point if comparison, but one's own self-annihilating impulse in the sphere of logic, as a point of sanity, is an anomaly, to say the least, in the world of day-trippers and backpackers. Such a wandering, bound by the peripatetic fixations of a gone and practically imaginary era, all but makes travel impossible, really. Because think about it, seriously. It is taxing and perplexing enough to be presented with the more pedestrian proposition of self trapped in the feedback loop of home of recent history and peculiar alien destination of today's excursion. Throw in this gaping, meta-spatial plane of time-cancelling-logical-navigation-as means to reassure yourself of your own existence in any and all environments, and you'll quickly see that the question: where am i? immediately overwhelms any distance spent between here and there, disorienting one to the point of disbelieving themselves anywhere at all. Not so conducive to a bon voyage-buy a solid backpack with a detachable smaller backpack-reading time on the plane and such.

Hence, for example, the stacks and stacks and stacks of trays designating the Biolinguist's room in the stucco-infested Swiss motel, a certain desperation follows these types around, no matter where they journey. A desperation faintly audible to most, ear-splitting to they themselves, and just plain squeamish in the face of room service.

Thus, these types surrender quickly in transit. Even the most defiant and courageous of the best and brightest peter out over the prospect.

Because eventually, the odds must be weighed. So it is mainly the question of youth we must remember when considering these 4 students, intellectual sherpas to America's most esteemed Biolinguist. They are young enough to not know any better, and supple enough to embrace the cascade of academic associations coating cattle with a verbal shellac. They are, as it were, young enough to still doubt their own doubt. Their experience still agile enough to consider before maniacally chucking life into the philosophical stash-closet: If these words have no real meaning it's because no words do.

These 4 students, they are living out the epilogue of time still marginally open to travel, yet preserved from that final, fatal plunge into the self-effacing terrain of no longer doubting one's own doubt, or sense for lack of meaning. (This is morbidly decisive terrain for all of us - but remember, for these academic types, such conclusions are more vivid than the surf, enlivened and prolonged by logic, so it's never really obvious that self-cancellation is in fact what they are doing. They instead believe themselves to be championing the missing pieces of the absolutely positively most relevant puzzle ever, deluding themselves into thinking that they're deluding everyone around them - which they are not; the world at best doesn't give a fuck, and at worst desires to destroy their term paper skin with gift wrap-shove you into a file closet.)

I think there is some shot they give these students, who stoically surrender the luxury of travel for masturbating with the spine of a book, fibers and splinters in the cock, it's the result of some shot. A childhood vaccine that kicks in around 24, for almost all sentient graduate students.

Which is why, once boarding the overnight train, all but one of the students retired to the bunks almost immediately, portable lights attached moronically to pillows, then other books, comfy sleeping attire brought with to bathroom to change-brush teeth-sample commode just like any other night around 11 except for colloquiums and finals week, pep only audible under extreme, extraordinary resignation.

So I am of course fascinated with this lone student, given the stolid, meaty permanence of academic types in transit. There is something different about him even if only to say worse, as he gracefully fingers the architecture of the trains' interior, shielding his vision from the periphery, rubbing his temples with the sheer exhaustion of one who has truly spent their days wandering, something rapt, a defiant magnetism setting him apart from the other students in thought and action. If one was unaware of his alma mater and traveling companions, one might even conclude that he was searching the train with the serendipitous potential of a lively, full blooded male, challenged by convention to stick his cock in something delightful and European.

Something distinguished and healthy about this one, surely. But we must ask ourselves, then, what the hell he is doing in our story. He, like his other 3 bunkmates, is playing scholarly secretary to a lingual disaster of a human being. He has, without a doubt, fully committed himself to a life of classrooms and coddled bureaucracy and tasteless dinners in a study over Kant. Don't fool yourselves, this lone grad student does indeed identify with the grad student inside himself. So when the drunken frenchman totters out of his non-sleeper seat into him, making his rounds through the cars, he, like any full blooded academic, is clear about his position.

"My friend -" he begins, arms half out to balance the situation in general relative to the situation itself.

And as the frenchman roars and ostensibly pins him to the back row of the car, from which the seats have been removed to accommodate oversized luggage, wheelchairs, et. al, he transitions with the narrow obstinacy of a professor in training whose moustache's been quaffed, and the viable surprise of any animal, plant, or fungus uprooted, but something else as well. It's a kind of almost imperceptible, fundamentally contradictory and contrapuntal calm, a calm that belies all degree of experience, be it physical or metaphysical, human or oh so pedagogically full of shit. If encouraged, one might define it as uncomfortably zen, and as the frenchman proceeds to implore his lapels desperately in french, to plead for his namesake and the fate of the world for the next 4 hours, in french - which he, somewhat embarrassingly, doesn't actually know, a coins toss away from the requisite german and ancient greek - the car, the cushions, the frenchman and the student, do appear to ease into a manageable working heart-rate, a hovering between focus and transition.

There is something uncertain, though, about the student's eyes, a certain je ne sais quoi as his face responds and urges on, in fact radically encourages this exchange. And this encouragement increases even, almost to comic proportions as the four hours of intense nose-to-nose rhetorical french monologue draws to a close, his posture faintly gyrating in the dim train light, little guttural punctuation's of understanding accelerating to the point of dialogue. He is learning french! This drunken bebop suited soul has taught him french bad breath into ears and all! He understands he understands. And in this understanding the years of university and spiritual flagellation channel into a buttery mess of child-like joy, an unwavering sympathy overcomes his cause. I see in him the sum of all endangered species, ruptured cantaloupe and hardened nipple over time.

There is something about his eyes though. Though his body and demeanor track the experience with all the painstaking precision exuberance offers, his eyes could not be more distant. They are the mineral blue of bird blood. Of defunct course manuals. One might go so far as to say that upon lengthy observation, it's like they are not fucking attached at the retina. He doesn't have any fucking retinas but the bastard can still see. He sees it all anyway. He sees better than I fucking do. A blue that cancels out color for YOU, if you look long enough. And there is something about his shoulders as well, the same sort of rigid non-movement, lack of confluence, an extra-mammalian appendage fucking WRONG. And the slightly odd choice of clothing...

He did not play any games in his childhood.

Il s'appelle, He Who Did Not Play Enough Games In His Childhood.