The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is the most exciting book I’ve read in quite a while. The book itself is very exciting, but what I really mean is that it gave me the visceral thrill of reading more than any book since maybe The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s stunningly gorgeous novel in verse. I can’t read Russian, but if the translation I read is anything to go by, I think Golden Gate is better, even, than its forerunner, Eugene Onegin. One of my favorite half-sonnets goes,

O loveliness, contrained and free!
Ah, Mozart, prince of music makers
Who (for the miracle you gave)
Lie buried in an unmarked grave!
Now the world movers and world shakers
–Archbisops, stewards, counts, and kings–
Rot voiceless, you still lend us wings.

Anyway, that has nothing at all to do with Bluebear. I just like to hype Golden Gate, which for some reason doesn’t get as much attention as Seth’s other books. From Heaven Lake is also too ignored - it’s a wonderful travelogue about hitchhiking from Nanjing to Calcutta through Tibet.

Getting back to the best children’s book since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: while waiting for my Indian visa, I was killing time at Green Apple Books, my current favorite bookstore, on Clement Street, one of my favorite streets in San Francisco. You know those little cards where stores tell you what’s good? Green Apple might as well be wallpapered in them, and as far as I can tell, every one of them is right on. Everyone who works there seems to have really good taste. Bluebear was one of these books, and boy, am I glad I took the gamble and got it on top of English, August (see below), which was the book I was actually looking for.

Apparently, Bluebear was some huge bestseller in Germany, a country with notably good instincts in the realm of children’s books, the land of Struwwelpeter and The Neverending Story, which, let me tell you, is an incredibly rad book, and probably 9 times better than the movie, which is also awesome. It’s by some dude named Walter Moers, who seems to have written a bunch of these types of books. I ordered another one, but messed up the shipping, so hopefully it’ll get to me before I leave for India on Sunday. Bluebear is, as you might expect, a blue bear. You may not know, though, that bluebears have 27 lives. This is the story of his first 13½, told as a memoir. Bluebear doesn’t know how he was born, but he showed up as a tiny baby bluebear, floating in a walnut shell, about to fall into the fearsome Malmstrom, a vast whirlpool. Luckily, the Minipirates rescued him, and he spent a happy youth singing pirate songs with them and futilely trying to attack ships that never heeded the tiny corsairs. Eventually, he grows too big, and the Minipirates tearfully set him ashore on an island with a stock of coconuts, but he eventually dies of thirst. The next 12½ lives, though, are considerably more eventful. The book’s very reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite children’s books, in that the hero visits all sorts of different lands and meets a lot of strange people, but Bluebear is probably even more inventive, plus it has more pictures and maps. It’s actually sort of odd to even call it a children’s book - it has a lot of hard vocabulary, and measures a satisfying 703 pages.

OK, I’ve had way too long a string of namby-pamby, nicely-nicely instrumental songs here recently. Here’s Nina Hagen, to change that with new wave beepy screechy (she belongs to the Neue Deutsche Welle, or German New Wave, but the name’s also a play on the German national radio station). According to my old German textbook and the German Wikipedia, she was born in 1955 to an actress and was partly raised by her composer stepfather, Wolf Biermann. She escaped from East to West Germany, via England, in 1976, when she was 21. She described herself as, “Nina Hagen, international punk star, UFO specialist, passionate mother, engaged protector of animals, dwelling: Berlin, Hamburg, Ibiza and the rest of the world.” You can hear the animal thing in “Don’t Kill the Animals,” a duet she did with Lene Lovich, who wrote “Lucky Number.”

Lucky for you, dear reader, Hagen’s cover of that song, “Wir Leben Immer…Noch” (”We Always Live… On”) doesn’t have lyrics like, “Animal testing is a dangerous game, / Our systems are different, we’re not the same.” Instead, it has crazy orgasmic screaming and possibly Lotte Lenya-inspired hammy vocal gymnastics.

Her children are named Cosma Shiva and Otis.

My German’s not so hot these days, but let’s see if I can give it a shot without risking an excessively accurate translation:

Wir wandern bloss und nackt in die Unendlichkeit,
We wander [something] and naked in the unendingness,
Wir schweben auf dem Pfade in die Ewigkeit,
We [something something] in eternity,
Wir glauben was wir wissen und wir fürchten uns,
We believe what we know and we fear ourselves,
Wohl weil wir sterben müssen das beängstigt uns,
It frightens us that we must die,
Wir sind die Lebenden,
We’re the living,
Nach Leben strebenden.
Striving after life.

Jeder neue Tag kann gut und böse sein,
Every new day can be good and bad,
Wir stellen unsere Viberationen selber ein,
We make our own vibrations,
Und wenn wir morgens früh an unser ende denken,
And when we think about our end in the early morning,
Dann kann uns dieses wissen durch die Tagzeit lenken,
Then we can [something] know this through the daytime,
Weil wir leben können,
Because we can live,
Und uns das Sterben gönnen.
And death [somethings] us.

Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit,
We vegetate and and we [dunno] through our lifetimes,
Wir verblassen und verpassen die gelegenheit,
We [no idea],
Wir haben keine Zeit, tun uns selber leid,
We have no time, to say sorry,
Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit.
We vegetate and we [something] through our lifetimes.

Wir verstecken unsere ängste in der Zwischenzeit,
We [mumble] our fears in the interim,
Wir zittern immer noch vor der Vergangenheit,
We always shiver before the past,
Wir entwickeln uns nicht weiter, weil Erwachsen sein,
We grow[?] broader, because we’re awake,
Uns einzwängt in die Zwänge der Gesellschaft,
[Something something] society,
Nein, so wollen wir nicht sein,
No, we don’t want to be like this,
Oh, nein dass muss nicht sein!
Oh no, it can’t be!

You want accuracy? Use Babelfish.

You can get the song as a bonus track on the bargain $10 ’80s bathhouse fave Nunsexmonkrock, or in its original context on the slightly more expensive Unbehagen.

Nina Hagen - Wir Leben Immer… Noch