“There’s too much good manner,” he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

“Well, I think that’s nice,” said Baby.

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what SHOULD be respected in them.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Tender is the Night”

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.

Winter hung around until summer, evidently. There hasn’t been a spring – temp-wise — while summer in May lets me leave the house before 7am with only a sport jacket.

The advantage of this is just that we get to be outside, finally. Playtime in the park, or walking among the flowering trees, even having the windows open early in the morning is a relief from the cold.

And … boy oh boy, not much else to say recently. Might as well honor the weather.

“Turns of speech,” said he, “conceal mediocre affections: as if the fullness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like an outworn, battered timbal upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.” – Nick Tosches, “In the Hand of Dante”

A thoroughly strange book, and highly unusual (though not unique) way of telling the story: different voices using divergent methods to bring off auras, effects, and manipulation.

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY (Voltaire and the French Enlightenment)
“Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and ‘men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ ” — Will Durant

Before the calendar rolls to double digits on the April chart, here’s what’s happening in Prague:

NOTHING!

however … in the house of the naughty rabbit & fox, we’re journal writing, vocabulary recording/learning, and watching movies on the weekend. Just how we like it, where the outside beasts are kept at bay.

This has been a roller coaster two-month stretch of reading. Two BIG books and one decidedly philosophical, though wholly a fiction. Last year was The Year of the BIG Book, yet so far in 2013 I’ve luxuriated in some whopper-length stories and just completed a long-but-oh-so-accessible survey of Western Philosophy (and for anybody who likes philosophy, it’s a winner; for the philo-phtoowee people, you could do a lot worse — and probably have, in which case has determined your aversion ratio).

TUNC by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell has fun with this “novel of science-ideas” in that he plays with language in a way that you wonder if your leg is being pulled from the get-go. This isn’t the case, although the footing which the reader stands upon is moving. Ostensibly, the story follows an applied engineering inventor, Charlock, and his relationship with a worldwide company, the ubiquitous Merlin. To work for Merlin is to be set for life: steady income that grows to real wealth, keeper of your own patents, prestige, freedom of thought and work. But Charlock is a skittish sort, and he wants to know Why? all this must be so wonderful. Thus begins the ride.

2666 by Robert Bolano

Bolano gave us five short novels as he prepared to die (look him up on Wikipedia). The estate-cum-publisher decided to sandwich them, thus presenting a massive tome. But there is not just one story, so that’s okay, too. Each section follows different people, though there is a loose connection between the stories, and sometimes the odd character (or main one) appears in another story. The last story, “The Part About Archimboldi”, was for me the most coherent. Where the others left of as if Bolano died before he typed the last page, the story of Archimboldi is as complete a picture of a human as a reader could hope to get. Really heartfelt stuff, in a world of uncompromising treachery, delivering himself from evil with no help from north or south, and living by his wits.

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

This classic survey of “the world’s greatest philosophers from Plato to John Dewey” is such a fascinating read because Durant brings reasoned thought, intellect, wisdom, and humor to a whole ship-full of good prose. I’ve always disliked reading (or slogging through) the actual texts of many philosophers (Niezsche is brutal; Russel is obscure; Kant is dense as twice-baked cheesecake) but I thoroughly enjoy having a mature philosopher to pull out the best (and readable) bits from all those guys. Durant does this so well that I wanted him to give me the delineation on all the included philos’ works; alas, such an undertaking is “voluminous.” Nevertheless, we learn about the men behind their works, which partly explains the reasons they came to their … um … reasoning. And what I came away with this time, at this point in my life, is that most of the major philos were lonely, had been pushed down by society (or gov’t), rejected in love, hounded by peers, and in this built a view of life that, amazingly, captured the attention of those same people and society and gov’t that dumped on them.

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.

Homemade nan bread, oven tandoori chicken, and curried lentels

Yeah, as winter stumbles along, we at the Chodska Palace flat are up to our eyes in good food … but still maintaining weight and proper nutritional intake.

Homemade fries w/teriaky burger … Mmmmmm

Yesterday we happened to be around for the Vatican’s declaration of the new pope, for which all good Catholics (don’t look my way) have had their eyes peeled. When Cardinal Bergoglio came onto the balcony, I did a quick Wiki-bio check. Looks like an alright guy, very down to earth, complete with the state-of-the-times gestures that should appeal to the pious young as well as the conservative-and-pious old  (just as long as he’s not from the Ratz category of shuffling American-priest pedophiles around Central and South America).

So in the Catholic Holy See’s honor, I made Pope Francis Garlic Toast. It’s a pretty simple recipe: your favorite garlic bread with a crucifix fashioned from your favorite vegetable. Green olives worked nicely this evening. Notice the bite taken out of the corner … in homage to the pope’s missing lung.

Make your own Pope Francis Garlic Bread!

Bonus photo: Asia with her new journal!

Asia shows me her new journal, in which thoughts and aspirations appear almost daily.

In one of those chance meetings between writers we hear about, this meeting taking place on the web, I learned of a poet named Cedar Rey who hails from a distant place and doesn’t quite stay in one place (by all accounts, which is only one—mine, via his voice). He has talent, and I asked him if he’d like to share a poem on this website. He happily agreed. And in the spirit of place, and re-place-ment, and also of origins, I give you …

Meeting in the Darkness

In the booming ballet of fireworks
she was a tiny spark
yet soaring over the heads
of the event-woven strangers
she fell in love with a star.

The star said: “Your body is brief
and close,

while mine is distant
and eternal—
our love is not possible in this world.”

“I am the other world,”
said the spark
and vanished.

– Cedar Rey

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.

On Feb 15th, Lucien Zell hosted his monthly poetry/prose & musical series, SECRET CORDS, at Přátelé Stepního vlka in Prague to an audience of 25 or so. I think the five writers and four musicians made everyone happy with good verbal and musical entertaining for that cold Friday night in the dead of Prague’s winter.

Lucien opened the performances with his trademarked harmonizing number, set to the sounds of box concertina. When he croons he looks like a lone wolf in the forest, or the midnight crier from a far-off village. The song is a wonderful lead-in to readings. A tone of seriousness has been delivered; a bell has been tolled.

Cal Rambler led off the reading with several of his poems, linked by the theme of love, anguish, lost friendship, the potential for lust.

Jan Bičovský played guitar and sang folk tunes with an energy symbolic of the street-musician.

Elise Klein entertained us all with a stirring accordion song, and later played an unbelievably temperamental piano.

We also had a poet from Canada, whose short poems captured couplet-ed themes.

And then there was yours truly reading from my first novel, THE VILLAGE WIT.

Lucien read a few poems as well, naturally. One strong poem I recall is a villanelle, whose linking lines are strong on light & darkness, and the desire to write. (he’ll have to comment on this post and treat us to the entire poem (if he dares) or those two scintillating lines)

What is unique about SECRET CORDS is the blending of music and the spoken word. Art comes at us in different places under various forms. To have two of those forms together, in one evening at a single venue, places us in a position not used so often these years. Actually, it reminds me of something one reads about in the diaries of a Bloomsbury Set, or Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, maybe NYC West Village in the ’50s (or the Bowery!).

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.

A couple weeks ago, thanks to Asia’s care, one of her orchids gave us a winter bloom. Our three plants sit in southern exposure, a gift for winter survival, and the light has kept them green, robust, and sprouting those weirdly digitus roots. Then one day a shoot pointed toward Ursa Major, and we knew that another flower pod was on its way.

One thing I’ve discovered about orchids is that when the bloom shoot (finally) shows itself, its growth is faster than watching paint dry (yeah, try that metaphor on for size!). The other beauty of orchids is that their blooms last for many weeks. We may have these beauties until the first day of spring!

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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.