BIBLIOGRIND
The Life of a Wordsmith — Read … Live … Write
Archive for September, 2009
September 28, 2009 at 8:35 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
I’m tired of THE NEWS.
Nothing, in fact, is NEW about the news: politicians don’t do anything for the people; war rages on … and on; the world is frying in its own oil. The same NEWS that I heard 30 years ago. So I’m done with the NEW and moving on to story. Fiction, that is. It’s safer, and more dynamic, and has all the parts of humanity that can make for change, if only people would listen, move, act.
And all the other arts, too. Old arts, middle-age arts, young art, but art all the same.
September 24, 2009 at 1:29 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Borcak (boar-chock) is young wine. It is fruity, bubbly, and “is very good for the body.” Yes, as most liquor cleans you out after a liter or so.
Wine is a huge Czech industry, but has a great history, too. The best wine is made from grapes grown in Moravia, in south-east CR. Back when I visited Prague in 1994, there were two types of Czech wine: red and white. It sucked, really.
But twenty years later, the industry has resurged, and the varieties available are very good. Some are even excellent.
The borcak season lasts hours, not days, in fact. There is a point in the vermentation process where the wine goes from very sweet and bubbly but without high alcohol content, to closer what we find as finished wine a few months later. Traditionally, vintners will literally keep townspeople posted hour by hour, and then by the minute, until he proclaims the young wine is ready to drink.
Borcak festivals celebrate wine, wine culture, food, and the harvest season. In Prague’s larger squares, festivals set up arts & crafts booths, BBQs and sweets vendors, and music stages. At Jiriho z Podebrad, near my flat, a big one-day shin-dig brought thousands out to party, eat, play games, and generally get Czeched up.
September 24, 2009 at 1:00 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
going to your house stash and finding seven different currencies:
Euros, US dollars, Czech koruna, Hungarian forints, British pounds, Ukranian hryvnia, and Croatian kuna. I ain’t rich, but I can buy beer immediately after crossing many borders.
Yahoooooo!
September 18, 2009 at 3:01 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Some days I feel like a gameshow contestant. Namely, the old show called The $20,000 Pyramid.
Students ask me questions like, “Can you tell me what a chair rail is?”
“This is a strip of wood that’s nailed across a wall about four feet above the floor. It separates the top half of the wall from the bottom half, so you can paint in different colors or wallpaper the top half.”
Another student asks, “What’s a sill?”
“This is a narrow shelf below a window.”
I find myself trying to use simple words that themselves need no definition when defining for the word under question. Yesterday some students came across the word “hessian” as it applies to some form of home decoration. They looked at me for help.
“I have no idea what that is,” I admitted. “Look it up in your dictionary.”
September 17, 2009 at 6:45 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Think quickly: Who was your favorite teacher? Don’t think about it, just answer.
A wonderful encomium on NPR by journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty speaks about her college professor, Dr Fred Stocking, at Williams College, in Massachusettes. An literature professor, Dr Stocking helped shape Hagerty’s mind as she was deciding to become a journalist. Years later, and through letters mostly, Hagerty kept in touch with her “old” professor. After retiring, Dr Stocking took up painting at age 80; at 91 he played the role of Gonzalo in The Tempest at the community theater. Dr Fred Stocking died at age 94 this past July.
Listen to or read the full story here.
September 14, 2009 at 9:09 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Most of my teaching schedule is set: I’ve got 80% upper-intermediate or advanced speakers, which has its own challenges (bringing in challenging material & exercises), but far preferable to groups of int or pre-int speakers, where drills and major-grammar are needed and the norm.
The hours have filled in nicely, and I’ve still got time to write. Of course, all this is happening in Prague, too. And … it’s vino branà month (wine festival). Everyone put on his drinking face!
Lastly, September is Jack’s birthday. So all you whiskey drinkers partake in some Lynchburg Lunch this month.
September 11, 2009 at 8:04 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
The following comes from Philip Roth, American novelist, essayist, and intellectual. I’ll let its precience speak for itself:
“Alienated in America, a stranger to its pleasures and preoccupations—that was how many young people like me saw their situation in the fifties. It was a perfectly honorable stance, I think, shaped by our literary aspirations and modernist enthusiasms, the high-minded of the second post-immigrant generation coming into conflict with the first great eruption of postwar media garbage. Little did we know that some twenty years later the philistine ignorance on which we would have liked to turn out backs would infect the country like Camus’s plague. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible. Adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, just where Orwell failed; he would have seen that the grotesquery to be visited upon the English-speaking world would not be an extension of the repressive Eastern totalitarian nightmare but a proliferation of the Western farce of media stupidity and cynical commercialism—American-style philistinism run amok. It wasn’t Big Brother who’d be watching us from the screen, but we who’d be watching a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap opera grandmother, the values of a civic-minded Beverly Hills Cadillac dealer, and the historical background and intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical.”
Philip Roth, “Paris Review interview, 1983″
September 11, 2009 at 2:01 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Shame will be put upon America if its “remembrance” of the Saudi Arabian-terrorist attacks in 2001 on two NYC buildings were to supplant the remembrance of December 7, 1941. When Japan audaciously attacked America’s military (not civilian) outposts that immediately brought the USA into WWII, the country in kind stood behind military mobilization against this world-wide aggressor.
By contrast, in 2001, George W. Bush, an unelected US president, used time and lies, scare tactics, and dictatorial pressure (a collusional coup equally perpetrated by the politically castrated Democratic party) to mobilize an American army (not international) to attack Iraq within 1.5 yrs. Saudi Arabia, whose citizens occupied the planes that flew into the twin towers (of course, no plane hit the Pentagon, as evidence shows), was not attacked. This is the equivalent of America turning its guns on Tahita on the morning of December 8, 1941.
While the bravery of soldiers called to battle by the criminal Bush administration will not be undermined by me, the true valor of those men and women serving on Oahu, Hawaii, likewise cannot be diminished, and should not be displaced by America’s penchant for short memory, or the typical political hoopla surrounding hot-button issues that cloud, deflect, and generally misinform half the electorate.
One thousand seven-hundred sailors went down on the USS Arizon Dec 7, 1941. All of those bodies remain entombed in that steel sarcophagus. Many hundreds more died during the harbor and inland attacks. The Pacific Theater of WWII operations eventually accumulated around 5 million casualties. Worldwide, WWII claimed between 40-90 million people. On Sept 11, 2001, the world saw through technicolor television 2,994 people die, composed of international identities. To date, some 250,000 Iraqis have been killed in retaliation.
Have a nice day.
September 9, 2009 at 6:35 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Not a lot of excitement on September 8, 2009 … I even forgot to write a blog post. But busy-ness from 6.45 to 5 sort’a cramps the style. I’m glad I have “hesky vikends.”
September 4, 2009 at 2:12 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton
The Untouchable, by John Banville
At the Same Time, by Susan Sontag
Lives of the Muses, by Francine Prose
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