BIBLIOGRIND
The Life of a Wordsmith — Read … Live … Write
Archive for July, 2009
July 30, 2009 at 7:55 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Had dinner with Patty McNair last night at ClearHead (great veg rest … best marsala chai in town). I was Patty’s student at CCC in Fiction Writing, then later her colleague when I taught for 3 yrs there. She has come to Prague for several summers, conducting a writing program with CCC students; a five-week stay and lots of out-of-town trips.
The other night she invited me to the group’s final reading and farewell party. We stayed out till 3a.m. partying. Great young people with sharp, creative minds. I miss being around students, watching their writing grow, listening to them look into the future.
So Patty and I had this night’s dinner alone to catch up (tens years since I was last in Chicago). We’re both yet writing, of course, and always working toward that great american novel (more or less). She told me how CCC has changed into a more “white kid” school, drawing many more suburban kids these days than in the past, when I schooled/taught there. That’s a shame, I think, because the diversity of experience (black/white/ Latin/etc/ youner-older/foreign/etc) had made classes far richer than the all-too-common lives that suburban kids live.
Anyway, Patty looks great, is enjoying life, and we’re planning on meeting next year when she’s about Prague. She suggested the program could have me as a guest speaker, along the lines of “career night” (living & working abroad with those great Fiction Writing skills learned lo those many years ago at CCC). Perhaps I’ll have my novel in print by then, which could open all sorts of speaking possibilities.
Funnily enough, Patty and her husband now own a little cottage in Mt Carroll, in Northwest Illinois. Mt Carroll is a smaller version of Apple Canyon Lake, where the Beyer clan has been retreating from Chicago on weekends since 1969. Patty uses her cabin as that same getaway, and writer’s colony. It was great to see her, and in Prague of all places, and was easy to fall in talking, reminiscing, bitching about US politics, and of course dancing about the writing game. Cheers, Patty.
July 28, 2009 at 10:27 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Ten days on the road was a great diversion from Prague’s usual (though never uninteresting) sights sounds smells and food. (to see many more pics, visit flickr) In Prague, Mom & Dad liked the food & wine, loved the castle sights and street sounds. Old Town Square was a fantabulous cacophany of peoplesound. But then we lighted out.
First stop, Vienna … which I thought I’d seen most of last time. Wrong. The city palace of the Hapsburgs is enormous, with lots and lots to see; which means I need to return, especially for its pastries, which this time we sort’a missed.
In the pocket of the Adriatic sits a pile of villages climbing up the mountainside of Croatia. We stayed in Opatija, on the sea. The wine was good, the food decent, and a morning swim in the blue sea was both cool and finally exhiliarating. This salty sea is nearly drown proof.
Next down the coast came Sibenik, a small fishing village with fabulous food, good wine, lively people swimming boating sunbathing gabbing. Played Scrabble on the beach front and drank good Croatian beer, Ozujsko and Karlovacko. The “town” was a mere cross street among crowded lanes of house/apt rentals, but a small Konzum grocery gave up beer, fruit, meat & bread.
Along the way to Dubrovnik we passed through long-long LONG tunnels: one 5,790 meters, another 5,940 meters. You get inside these and the temperature drops 15 degrees. Just amazing.
In Dubrovnik the Hotel Neptune sang loudly above the rocky coast, where beach lounge-chairs spread alongside the waterfront. I’d punished my knee in a previous day’s workout, so swimming was not on the ticket for me. But beer was.
Dubrovnik’s walled city looms like a coastal citadel because … well, because that’s exactly what it was. For a few dollars you get to walk the circumpherence of the wall, getting sights unique to travelers and tourists alike. The seafood in the harbor restaurant was excellent, and so was the house wine.
As we walked the old city streets, we each of us realized that this walled city was much like Valletta, Malta’s walled city: long wide streets running to the sea and land; narrow cross streets that climbed stairways towards the walls. Nowadays these streets are crowded with restaurants, bars, and shops, but one can still imagine life as the 16th century citizens might have felt.
Zagreb was in fact a short stop after a long drive toward Budapest, but this small old town with a delightful square gave up the best restaurant on the trip: the Vinodol, hidden in a courtyard and serving traditional Croatian dishes — fish soup, sausages, veal, seafood … all to stuff us enough so that we couldn’t imagine ordering the chocolate-filled pancake dessert. And the wine was fabulous.
Budapest is a hot, dusty, loud city in the summertime, but it has its pleasures, including side-street cafés under shady trees, used English-language bookstores with cheaply priced titles, and stunning Danube views and hilltop overlooks of the famed Parliament palace.
What made Budapest well worth the trip was spending half a day at the Gellert (hotel) baths and spa. The palatial main thermal baths hold all the grandeur people expect of Old Europe-kept-alive. While outside the main pool was alive with beauties, and the sauna was steamy-hot-hot with a coldCOLD bath outside. Loved it all. And there was a nice little tree-shaded café serving fresh salads, German beer, and some decent house wine.
Yes, always the wine.
July 11, 2009 at 9:41 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Around the block from Slezska ulice (street) is a billiards club. It has 24 tables; twelve pocket and 12 billiard, with one tournament-size billiard table. The space used to be a cinema, which by its size might have held 200, but probably less. And with Jack Daniels served (on ice, if you ask), where can a guy go wrong? And, as the sign (above) says, Happy Birthday Jack! (Jack’s birthday is September, in which you’ll find the tradition of Mash’a Claus, when a Tennessee redneck dressed as a Tennessee redneck comes to small towns with a black bag filled with liquortoys for all adults who’ve been good throughout the year).
I played pool with Jiri (YER zhee; George), my new landlord. I was asked the other day if I liked to become friends with my landlords, to which I thought, before replying, that I hadn’t thought about the different between “landlord” and “friend” (or at least friendly), but whatever the case, the answer is “Sure, why not?” George lived in the USA for more than 10 years, and speaks fluent English.
While I’m sure he wouldn’t mind correcting my spatny cestinu, playing pool and drinking draft beer was neither the place nor the time. So I racked up the balls on a genuine Brunswick table and George cracked the 15-rack into 15 singles. From then on we pretty much sucked as players, but for some bright moments of clarity and streaky easy shots.
This hall charges by the hour, about 65Kc per during the 2 – 7 afternoon “early bird” special. The price jumps only to 110Kc after 7, which is still a deal when your having fun, pulling a draught or two, and whiling away sunlight on a summer afternoon. Hell, with table-side bar service at 32Kc per half liter, there’re’nt many places cheaper in all of “the Prague” (as my students would incorrectly say).
I believe George and me split the games in the two hours we played and chatted. Lots of poor pool was played, but there were shining moments as well. Now that I’ve gotten some practice, I think I’ll have a better go of it next time around.
July 8, 2009 at 11:05 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Okay, so I have lots more to talk about, but after a good night at the pivnice U Hrocha (the Hippopotamus), found at the base of Prague Castle in an old room of an old building (each being, of course, part of the atmosphere), within which you can find a colorful assortment of middle-aged men drinking to their prolonged health, young men drinking to their virility, hot-pants young women drinking to their stunning Czech beauty (and you know that they know it), all to which surrounded two American middle aged men talking about books and writing while drinking good pilsner beer and eating lousing pub food, and slipping in talk of possibly hooking up with one of these fine young Czech babes, you understand that what I have to talk about is the weather: the rains have swept through, bringing cooler weather that looks to hold for the next week or so.
Dobre. Tak. Tak tam. Diky moc v cti.
July 4, 2009 at 10:42 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Um, I didn’t realize it was July 4th until about 3pm, at which point I once again realized that America’s history is not forefront on people’s minds in the CR. Of course, Czechs take their own independence day pretty smoothly: “it’s a day off from work” is the usual sentiment.So quickly they understand the importance of freedom.
Dobry den, America!
July 3, 2009 at 10:12 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Held in an old water processing plant along the Vltava River, the Labyrint Svetla (labyrinths of Light) is an interactive art exhibit that used light/color/darkness/sound to entertain, intrigue, and perhaps educate. I went there with Cal, a fellow teacher and citizen of the world. Cal has that wonderful efficiency of all-together joy of daily life, catching with the net of his five senses whatever can be grabbed.
Very kid friendly were most of the pieces in the Labyrint Svetla, and Cal and me acted like kids that day: you looked through windows to see colors and shadows; played with grates to shift light; pedaled a bicycle to make organ music; moved objects around a glass surface that reflected light from beneath to cast shadows onto a wall.
What was most intriguing was the art space itself. The building, is brickwork, and its design and craftsmanship have made an art piece itself. In one room you can see the aged pipes and pumping machineworks that made the place operate. In another room floor-mounted glass let you look into the bowels of this great structure.
The basement levels were the most exciting, though. Down here, the air was a steady 50 degrees, dank damp & dungeon-like. The chambers where sluice gates operated water intake had high ceilings, shadowy sightlines, and rounded archways. The main lower chamber is something out of a gothic novel (or at least Victorian): a long pool over which grating stood the floor; chains and ropes and wires hung from the blacked-out ceiling; a lifting girter hung imposingly over the pool; and the water’s surface was mirrorlike in the near dark.
Then light played along one end of this grand fetid pool: a turning wheel, letters shining white into the water, the lights power sending word shadows deep into the pool, so you saw echoes of light reaching down, like a school of fish, each lower tier a little less colorful, a little more translucent.
Here too was a great echo chamber of sound, and Cal hooted through the room, getting quick answers from activated kids.
Outside, with the light a gray haze that stunded sight, warmth returned after many minutes below. Outside stood an old English double-decker bus, now (or just for the day) a tea & snack stand. Along one side stood great steel spheres, its surface cut through with designs that produces surprisingly tinny sounds when wacked with an umbrella point, or a rock, or keys, sending the sound down through air shafts into yet another subterranean chamber.
Cal and I discussed points where the curators missed: darker rooms to get better rendition of the light machines; music in the basement chambers, perhaps Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” or something strangly otherworldy, maybe whale sounds during a cow’s calving. A final exchange of thoughts brought the idea of buying such a place, establishing an art colony within, and sticking all the writers in the dungeon-like basement.
July 3, 2009 at 8:26 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Art is the key to life, I think. There should never be boredom in one’s world: if you feel bored, you’re not using your imagination. But when you are on the verge of such harmful feeling, the antidote is music, literature, poetry, art; or simply looking out your window and finding color and texture and play of light, and taking a walk around the block to see what you can see within the shapes on the street, in the sky, or reflected off a window.
At the Slezska flat, my room has architectural features that are perfect for variations on art display. The walls on two sides indent (sorry I don’t know the correct term: Google search is not helping this a.m.), which leave an overhang; on the window side this gives a sense of a “pillar” with two sides for use (not just an indented corner).
What I’ve done is load in with photographs of my own creation, taken over the course of 3.5 years of travel, living abroad, idealistic movement-thought-design-life. Basically the idea of quitting your day job to experience what the world has in its many streets, alleyways, parks, and just maybe looking through a Baroque window. While lots of these pics can be found at my flickr page, some are coming to the surface for the first time, out of the confines of my computer.
Signs & signposts direct me toward the never-bored possibilities of travel (both mental and physical). Statues the creative urge of humans. People-in-places the everyday of the everyday. I work in color, B & W, sepia; architecture, nature, weather; friendship, society, aloneness. Without the everything, there leaves only one thing.
