Prague Pictures II

Hobby Centrum-Praha 4 (Krc[h]). This is the community center that S. originally was assigned to teach at, English classes being one of the hobbies offered to the neighborhood. Though she did not continue in that position the second year, due to the connections and warm feelings she developed for this part of town we continued to reside there--our apartment block was directly to the left of the photographer in this picture--and take part in various Hobby Centrum field trips. Visible parked inside the fence is the Hobby Centrum van, which (augmented by whatever private cars could be rounded up) served on many of these trips to the countryside, usually after several hours of preparatory tinkering on Friday afternoon before departing, after which a capable mechanic was still required to accompany it wherever it went, much as Mortimer Adler in his later years working the lecture circuit had to have a doctor waiting backstage in the not improbable event of emergency. For the annual trip to Austria, they chartered, or at least got, a more modern bus, the Hobby Centrum-mobile being one of those oddities that is endearing within the national family but would be a bit of an embarrassment if taken abroad. Besides that it would have been highly unlikely to make it up the side of the first Alp it came to.

English Teacher's Bedroom at Hobby Centrum. Hey, the German teacher had to procure his own accomodation off site.

This place was an excellent example of why workplace/institutional novels offer greater possibilities to authors in other countries than they seem to here. For one thing it seemed to employ about thirty people at taxpayer expense, albeit at very modest, even borderline subsistence, wages, though at the time this still enabled one to live within ten minutes of the center of Prague and within the context of a society where almost no one was remotely wealthy by the standards of New York or London. Such people as were succeeding somewhat in the capitalist system were not yet plentiful enough to have cordoned off large areas of both physical and economic territory within the society to themselves, though my impression is that this has taken place since then. The director, who had one of those European degrees which translates to a master's degree in this country but allows one to be addressed as 'Herr Doktor' or 'Pany Doktor' over there, could regularly be spotted staggering around the neighborhood raging drunk and spouting unpleasant greetings at strangers and people he recognized alike, on weekends always but frequently at three in the afternoon as well. Because of his qualification and title he was the highest paid employee, of course. He didn't seem to have to do much work. His wife I remember was not well and may have been institutionalized. Her daughter by a previous marriage worked at Hobby Centrum as well, I forget in what capacity, though she and her stepfather/boss were not on speaking terms during the two years we were there. This lady, whom I somewhat liked in spite of the fact that she had a lot of bad personal qualities, such as nastiness, duplicity, haughtiness, vast areas of ignorance about which she was so oblivious that pointing them out had no effect on her ego whatsoever, was also given the dubious assignment of being my personal instructrice in the Czech language. In addition to the English teacher, there was also in residence in an apartment on the ground floor an old lady whose function was a mishmash of sidewalk-sweeping, gate-locking and light-extinguishing. There was a very lesbian-looking older gym teacher straight out of the Sputnik era who ran the bicycling trips and generally spent her time screaming and ordering people around. She was one of those old school Communists/natural Europeans who, when it was time to change after a hike would strip right down in the center of a crowded room, mixed company or no. She's probably dead by now.

In Czech the "J" is pronounced as "y". 'Ahoy' has managed to become the standard informal greeting among Czech people despite the well-known circumstance that the country is landlocked and has no navy or substantial maritime culture or history. Legend has it that some Bohemian youths at one point in the not so distant past--the 1800s perhaps--ran off to Germany or somewhere and ended up as sailors for a time, bringing the expression back to Prague when they returned home, where, for whatever reason, it caught on in a big way.
While driving was not a foreign concept, even people who had cars tended to use them only for specific occasions, almost never on a daily basis. One of the things that struck me especially at the time was that gas stations were still so relatively infrequent that every one in the country, including within the city of Prague, was still denoted on road maps.

Right now we are in Slovakia. I could never figure out if the frog crossing sign was supposed to be serious or was one of those inside jokes of a place undesirable to and therefore largely excluded by the cool and powerful currents of modern life.

Slovakia was to the Austrian Empire approximately what West Virginia is to the rest of the United States, to Czechoslovakia what northern Maine is to the rest of New England--or at least to southern Maine. At this time its president was a former boxer who was given to favoring politically incorrect initiatives directed against Gypsies, Hungarians and other undesirable/threatening minorities within the Slovakian territories (something like 11% of the population of Slovakia is actually Hungarian). It was an embattled little place with a terrible inferiority complex towards the Czechs and Prague, let alone the rest of Europe. Very interesting to pass through, to walk about in, however, because it was about 50, sometimes even 80 years out of date in terms of its living arrangements, economic activity, etc.

This jaunt to Slovakia took place over Easter Weekend. Slovakians are Catholics, though apart from very old people no one appeared to be especially devout. On Saturday night there was a girl at the pub who was something of a good time girl, I guess you could say, leather and black eyeliner and signaling availabity to certain of the men--some might use an expression such as slutting it up, but that would not be my choice of words. Anyway, the next morning, Easter, at mass, guess who should come into the church side by side with her babushka-like grandmother (probably mother, for all that), still decked out in the leather jacket and black eyeliner, walk straight to the altar, cross herself and drop into a completely submissive, prostrate kneel before the altar cross and remain in this very intense state of total devotion for about five minutes before slowly rising as if in a trance and wandering back to take her seat in one of the pews. Extraordinary.

This is back at Prague, the church at Vyshehrad, which I mentioned in the previous post. This castle/park was a very beautiful and peaceful, though still urban spot--you had a good view of the river and some of the iconic sights downtown--and as before mentioned was quite close to our part of town, so we hung out there a good deal.

The Grand Hotel Europa was still actually kind of seedy at this time, the bar had video gambling machines and such, though there were plans to restore it to its former elegance. I'm not sure now why I included this picture over several other ones taken that same day on the same jaunt around town.

Statue of Jan Huss (formerly known in English as John Huss) in the Old Town Square, Prague. Huss was famously burned at the stake for heresy in 1415 on the spot where his monument now stands. He and his followers were (less fortunate) forerunners of Luther who were in rebellion against the hypocrisy, luxury and general decadence and organization of the established church as well as differing in various points of doctrine. The square is quite beautiful and dynamic and as such is a popular tourist attraction, and it was already mainly given over to them even at this time. In the Christmas season though there was still a pleasant but fairly modest fair or market set up which seemed to cater primarily to local people, at least at the food and beer stalls, and the St Nicholas Day festivity (December 6) was a big event that drew lots of families and such into the square.

One of the Statues on the Famous Charles Bridge. Gratuitous, but not to have any pictures of the more famous sights also makes it seem a little incomplete. Even in the books of the avant garde photographer Josef Sudek he slips in a few pictures of the most famous attractions of the city, albeit from unique angles, with odd lighting, etc, etc.

Venice Overview

As the next musty book I am going to pay homage to is The Stones of Venice, I am going to take the opportunity to indulge in some of my own reminiscence of that city, having been there for four days once. As I was still relatively young then too, young, and hopeful, enough to be able to say that I was once these things in Venice, which I will certainly never be again, even if by some chance I should ever get back there.

This visit ocurred in 1997, which did not seem all that long ago to me until fairly recently, but is now decidedly starting to take on the character of yet another lost, faraway age with which I never had anything to do. This is when we, meaning my future wife and I--this lady needs a name for the purposes of this blog, so henceforth she will be referred to as Sabrina--were in Prague, even to the extent of having an apartment there and transit passes and all of that. In short the schools closed down the first week in March just as they do in the Northern U.S. and one of us had recently come into a bequest of $1,000--in 1997 this was still real enough money for two people to take a nine day vacation on and maintain at least a 1950s middle class standard of dining and accomodation in most of Europe. My great idea had been to go to Russia; Prague being a popular stop-in point for people easing their way back to the convenient, standardized, bloodless West from business and adventures in more arduous territories--the conflict in Yugoslavia especially, though in a lull, was still simmering at that time--I was under the influence of thinking that we ought to exert ourselves a little more, and that maybe I especially might be improved in the same worldly way as the dynamic people I was meeting (and who were outshining me in company) were. However, there was a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting a visa to Russia. One was supposed to present an itinerary and show evidence of room reservations and have an invitation from some reputable person or organization in Russia, (which of course could be purchased easily enough if one had a few extra hundred dollars to throw around, but we are talking about me)--this was all still before most people, and certainly I, and definitely most of the Russian diplomatic and tourism workforce (this is still when Yeltsin was president) were on the Internet. Then also Sabrina was having no part of a 48-hour train trip each way to Moscow which involved dealing with the Russian border patrol and likely corrupt railway personnel (the Hungarians were bad enough) so that necessitated flying, which was expensive. In short the real travellers of the world won a great victory, for all these difficulties forced me to abandon the Russian idea, and accede to the plan of the wily and beautiful Sabrina, which she had doubtless been secretly harboring all along, to go to Italy. I had never been to Italy, and of course I had always wanted to go to Italy, so it is not as if I was shattered by this turn of events; however in the milieu of that particular time and place I was not sure that it was really going to be of any value to me to go to Italy--the most vital people, if they even bothered going there, seemed to consider it to be as nothing, that there was nothing left there for a serious person to master. Now obviously this seems like a ridiculous mindset to have had, but most people tend to be susceptible to the influence of the Great Men in their immediate environment if they do not seem to be one of them and begin to doubt the validity of their own ideas if these Titans do not appear to share them. So we went to Italy on a Czech bus, which was however completely modern and as comfortable as a bus should reasonably be, quite unlike the domestic intercity buses of that nation were at the time. Going on at length about the details of a bus ride is always a risky maneuver; but as I am one of those people who is greatly affected by sudden emergence in a new locale, and as this is besides surely one of the most romantic bus routes in the world, especially to anyone who has been even a cursory student of European history, I am going to recount it. We departed from Florenc (Prague) station about 7p. Everything was gray and cold and smoky, which I like, actually--the climate and culture of Italy would I think eventually become oppressive to me if I had to live in it for any length of time--but for a brief trip the prospect of going somewhere warm and sunny was exciting. After we got out of the city there was no highway--at that time at least, I don't know if one has since been built--south towards Austria. The bus thus meandered along the ancient roads of the Hapsburg Empire, and perhaps even the Holy Roman one, through the villages and towns of South Bohemia, most still and dark and silent under the cold purple night and a thin layer of gray snow, others with a few solitary lights on and movements of people visible in the windows of apartments or taverns along the sides of the road, which were no more than a few feet from the windows of the bus. We reached the border of Austria around midnight and immediately got on a modern highway. Having besides partaken of several pilsener beers that were vended on the bus (wouldn't you like to see that experiment tried on Greyhound? especially the New York-Baltimore 10pm run) I soon fell asleep, awakening briefly around 3 or 4am as the bus had slowed nearly to a stop due to a blizzard we had encountered crossing the Alps. However I fell back asleep rather quickly until the beating of the sun in my face awakened me in the midst of some much browner looking mountains and terrain, and shortly thereafter we were at the border of Italy. The bus made stops in a couple of the Alpine cities--Bolzano, which was part of Austria until 1918 and still has a significant German-speaking population, and then Trentino, and then, around 10 am, slowly descended into a decidedly Mediterranean-looking territory of plane trees and vine-terraced hills and ricketty power lines stretching as far as could be seen over a mostly treeless landscape and finally deposited us in the grimy depot in a modern, concrete section of the ancient city of Verona. It was sunny and about 55 degrees, and it was immediately invigorating to be there even though I hadn't much of a concrete idea what I was going to do. I had seen enough movies and read enough books to vaguely know that when one landed somewhere old in Italy if he just headed towards the main square things would turn up--pizzerias and cafe-bars, Roman ruins, vespas, affluent, beautiful American or German girls on holiday, baroque churches, faded palazzos and hotels with peeling paint and picture windows the size of doors, beggars and kiosk workers in designer sweaters and good shoes, fountains, statues of Dante, 500-year old bridges, rivers associated with almost the earliest recorded days of man. None of these things disappoint either. They are all--at least in March, when the weather is mild and it is not at the height of the tourist season--exactly as one would have them be.

Now I have already written far more words than most people will willingly endure and we have not even gotten to Venice yet, although at this point we are only about fifty miles away. After poking around Verona for a few hours, we took a short and surprisingly uncrowded train ride out to the islands around dinnertime. As this is how most people arrive in Venice I will not go on at length about the impression made when you come out of the station right on the Grand Canal, right into the very same spectacle made famous by a million paintings and postcards. There are I think a number of impressions which are more or less common among various classes of people--one of the better ones to have, which unfortunately eluded me, is to recognize that most of the people and activity right around the station are lame, and to vigorously seek out direction and transport to where some glimmer of real vitality might be found. My impression was a cross between the frisson of excitement dull people who lead dull lives feel whenever they find themselves in some place that has ever won the approval and patronage of dynamic, sexual, and creative people, and the earnestness of the nice but insignificant boy who wants to demonstrate that he deserves to be in this exalted place and have his merit acknowledged. In short, I was fairly pleased with myself for several minutes for having made it to Venice.

Because we arrived rather late in the day the first night, and as in those days we never thought to reserve ahead for hotels (or restaurants; to this day I have never made a reservation for a restaurant, which I will have to remember if anyone ever tags me for one of those blog surveys where you are supposed to reveal something you've never done) I felt we had better take any room we find the first night that was not outrageously expensive, and we got one near the station for $45, which was real extravagance for me. So much so that the next day we removed to a less central quarter of town where the room was actually nicer but only cost $30, or 60,000 lira--the lamented lira being in those days the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of western currencies. I only make all this mention of price because I have been reading recently that there are no hotels anywhere in Venice nowadays that are less than $150-$175 a night depending on the exchange rate. This seems incredible to me. How can any sensitive young people with ordinary incomes go there? (And yes, I know there are billions of equally and much more worthy and intelligent and sensitive people all over the globe who are too impoverished ever to take a vacation anywhere. For the moment I am going to sympathize exclusively with the people most like myself, for it is their pain I am feeling most acutely).

To be in Venice at this point of history, as many people have noted, is to experience something which I would not say is unreal, but which one is continually conscious of its being temporary, and I think one would feel that way even if he were to stay there for a number of years. There is not a sense of a grand or even a miniature scheme of life there which one can readily imagine being sucked into; the islands, far from being worlds onto themselves, are wholly oriented to the world outside, and have been overwhelmed by it. This aspect of it can make it somewhat sad to contemplate, especially if one is not able to share/join in the conviviality of the tourist scene (because one is socially inept, not because one is too superior for it). I liked it, I was certainly very beautiful, and I would like to go back, but after 4 days there I was ready to go somewhere else and get back in contact with real life again (such as Bologna! I say this because a beautiful girl smiled at me a couple of times on the train out of Venice--I was 27 and probably at my peak of whatever handsomeness I once had then--Sabrina could not see her, we were sitting opposite and this other girl was behind her--and she got off at Bologna--she looked intelligent and well-read, and I have always fancied that she went to the University there).

I will say that I wish I had read Ruskin before I went, even if it happens that all his ideas are wrong, because he gives the English-language reader by far the grandest conception of what "Venice" is, and what it signifies both in history and art. Several of the sites he considers, and argues quite convincingly, to be among the most sacred and important on earth, especially the island of Torcello and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco which has all of the unseen Tintoretto paintings he regards as manifestations of the rarest kind of human genius, were completely absent from my consciousness before I read this book. While these two places are noted in most modern guidebooks, it is usually just a mention at the end of the chapter as something passable to possibly do if one has exhausted all of the major sites. When I was there I only remembering visiting St Mark's Basilica (although as I was going in a guy from Texas exhorted me not to throw away my $3 I held my ground and went in anyway), which of course I liked, and the major art museum, the Accademia. I did not even visit the Doge's Palace, which Ruskin seemed to consider the most important building in the city; at least he devoted about half a volume to it, including dozens of pages going around the whole structure and analyzing the carving of every single capital. I think the rest of the time was mostly spent walking around soaking in the atmosphere. That's what I mainly did when I was younger.

Sabrina had some squid in ink sauce in a restaurant there--I have no idea what it was called or even where it was relative to anything else--that she still remembers, and she is not a woman who is prone to obsessing about meals past. I am sure I mostly ate pasta and pizza and carafes of the house wine, which is pretty much all I eat when I am in Italy. In dining I find simplicity to be the surest route to happiness.

The Game of Art, Part 4

People who have had some humanisitic education but are still poor at traveling, or writing, or discussing ideas in cafes, or arousing erotic desire in members of the opposite sex often console themselves with the thought that their minds are for whatever reason not attuned to the age in which they happen to live, its politics and economics and geography, but properly belong to other, better times and places, wherein they would have made real figures. I have determined that my own mind, as far as aesthetic taste, cultural comfort level, pace of life, compatibility with women, preferences in food and drink and transportation and hotel accomodation seems to measure on the magnetic scale of ages and places somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on an ocean liner, equidistant from New York, Paris and London--or, to be more precise, probably Utica, Nottingham and Le Havre, around the winter of 1947-1948, which unfortunately was several decades before I actually happened to be born. Almost all the developments that have taken place since this time--increased specialization of knowledge, globalization, feminism, drugs, computers, exercising, bourgeois luxury (whatever happened to the good old simple but self-respecting middle class hotel that cost $45 but managed to keep the riffraff out anyway?), the reassessment of the Western and more particulary the Anglocentric tradition--have only left me, who remain stubbornly rooted in the mindset of 1948, further and further behind.

People with this unfortunate affliction only become worse when they attempt to go abroad to some country they may have had read a little about. In England I have reached the point where I am able to persuade myself it is just about any time between 1700 and 1960 depending on whatever monument, gritty alley, arrangement of furniture in a tavern or boiled beef dinner happens to present itself before me. I am not able to channel the middle ages or the Elizabethans so directly; however I think I can at least approach the idea of the middle ages with a suitably Romantic mindset or that of Shakespeare with enough of a Victorian sensibility to salvage something of the experience. The modern Britain full of snide people go around calling each other wankers and snogging and easy girls who vomit on the street I obviously have nothing to do with, nor it with me, however much I might wish it otherwise; so it by necessity fades away. France I have taught myself to regard as essentially medeval, which is the only way for me to combat the cult of epicurianism that has consumed the tourist industry of that "fantastic nation", but which besides is still present and haunting in the layout of towns, roads, and the landscape, though I also at times can acknowledge a cinematic France (1930-1970) and an interesting expat France (1850s-1950s). The art, music, literature of the bourgeois France of the post-Waterloo era through the Dreyfus affair interests me greatly also, but as a tourist its spirit has remained surprising inaccessible. The peninsula of Italy is also many things, almost never the current upstanding member of the EU with its standard 21st century problems. I am not deeply intimate with either the glories of the Roman empire nor the lives of the Catholic Saints but I am conscious of being within the pages of those books and the aura that only empires and religions of antiquity can suggest to the mind from the instant of descending the foot of the last Alp, and I know not enough to wish to escape from them for the duration of my holiday.

One of my favorite countries to experience in this vein is the late and sometimes lamented empire of Austria-Hungary, the pleasure of being in which was not the conscious work of my imagination but which came upon me over the course of being in that part of the world for some months. It is not merely that the old routes and railroads of this formerly single state remain largely intact though they now spread across many borders, nor is it exactly a similarly of diet, of religious custom, of musical heritage, of cafe and restaurant customs, of the geography of towns or those haunting empty roads crowded with lines of trees along either side of it throughout the region, that force this impression on one. This is a large area in the middle of Europe that, while maintained beautifully in certain crucial aesthetic points and functioning as a modern society, is loaded with pockets of which the only comparison I can make that captures the deadness, the unrealness, the displacement in time and persepctive, is the atmosphere of Kafka's The Castle. I have experienced on numerous occasions in these lands--walking across a field cleared of trees in a snowstorm in the dead of night in Spindleruv Mlyn (where, I later found out, Kafka actually started writing the book I have referred to); peering through the shuttered windows and wandering around the porch of the doomed Empress Elizabeth's little cottage at the emperor's hunting lodge at Bad Ischl (an unbelievably modest and accessible accomodation--no gates, walking distance to the shops in town, etc--for the potentate of a major power who lived within a century of my writing this, and thousands of whose former subjects must still survive) on a brilliantly but cold afternoon with snow patches over the immaculately kept but apparently unsupervised grounds; walking several miles from any of a number of antiquated train stations in rural Bohemia along similarly antiquated dusty paths or through planted forests devoid of undergrowth with no town or castle or other people in evidence until some natural obstacle can be cleared--the conviction that this must resemble death in some way, which idea I have never felt any place else, though my wife claims to have had the same sensation when she was in the panhandle of Texas. I however, have not been there.

In the Game of Art for the mass consumers of higher culture, this is where Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele--who is promoted heavily in Prague and especially Cesky Krumlov to the tourists that are desperately looking for an historical name or two to identify with these towns full of people who, as Neville Chamberlain pointed out in another context, are about as well known to the general population of the Anglosphere as the Incas--come in. Klimt's Kuss of course is, or at least was in my time, on the short list of college girls' favorite artistic icons (the rest of the list that comes immediately to mind is Doisneau's other Kiss, Prufrock, Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Billie Holliday's greatest hits). The adoration of this painting however, while striking even when seen on a poster, like much else from the time and nation it comes from, is enigmatic in its origin. Compared to the other items on that list it springs from apparently nowhere and doesn't seem to lead anywhere particularly, for its modern admirers, either. My freshman roommate had the poster strategically placed so as to attract art-minded girls passing by our room (and indeed, it lured a quite amazing number in momentarily, though upon seeing us most retreated hastily). Before this time I had been entirely unfamiliar with it. I observed that people who struck me as more than worthy of all the delights of a good education and a proper introduction to the manifold delights of European culture were often eager to praise and identify with this picture, the idea and composition contained in which seemed to cast a spell over some of the sharpest and most realized people I ever encountered, as if it were their unattainable image of ideal life. What it was about it that made it so, however, I am afraid I was never able to discover.

The Austrian artists therefore have a rather high status in the game, with me personally almost the very highest, because the girls who like these painters are the ones I tended in my youth to feel the most passionate about with the least chance of "getting" however one wishes to define that term. The level of education and humanistic culture attained even by failures in the society that was Vienna 1850s-1930s makes me, I will confess, ashamed of my own mind, and if it doesn't make most modern-day Americans so for whatever reason, should at least make them blush to refer to themselves as learned or possessed of an artistic sensibility or even sophisticated about food (surely you read the article in the NYT about the Viennese steakhouse where the patrons could be counted on to understand what part of the cow each dish on the menu originated from and what it ought properly to taste like. Sadly, these patrons are nearly all dead now). I do not write these words because I hate my own nation or even its positive contributions to world culture, which I believe are not negligible. It must be understood, however, that I have always been a poor American, and I don't think I will ever be a good one. I did not fully understand this until I went to Europe of course. Foreigners did not wish to hear my opinions about opera, or opera houses, or literature, or wine or whatever even if it were their own interest. Such things are not, and never will be, the proper provinces of Americans, especially white ones. Even among Communists and the staunchest anti-modern media cultural conservative types, a real American worthy of their respect is financially successful, even a little ruthless, and is a master, completely free from any torments brought upon by philosophy or liberal education, of the sort of technology and attitudes toward marketing and globalization that are likely to crush smaller and more localized enterprises and cultures. These people may despise the system almost so as to define their being, but as an American and therefore assumed to have privileged entry into as well as no substantial intellectual misgivings against it, to be visibly unconnected to it without establishing a notably vibrant alternative following such as tempts the great system to partially co-opt you, marks one as a failure within the terms of one's one culture, and therefore hardly a serious person.

In brief, my point is that it is perceived to be natural, and not terribly difficult, for a American of ordinary mental abilities to become by global standards fairly wealthy and knowledgeable about markets and technology compared to those of other nationalities but virtually impossible for him (our hypothetical American) to become highly cultured and deeply learned about anything compared to the same; and that this is very painful for the American who was hoping to escape the sense of failure life in his hometown must inevtiably confront him with or find a community of minds more sympathetic to his own abroad. Unless one can demonstrate a very unique and pleasing superiority to those abandoned he will always be measured first by their standards before he will be assessed on any other terms.