--to start our series this fall with Richard Katrovas.
He's the author of four books of poetry--
Green Dragons, Snug Harbor, The Public Mirror,
and The Book of Complaints.
He has a new book that will be coming out
from Carnegie Mellon within the year,
or in about a year, which I believe is called Dithyrambs.
Richard went as a Fulbright fellow to Yugoslavia
a few years ago, and through convoluted circumstances
became--
he'll probably tell you about it--
became what he calls "a tourist of a gentle revolution"
in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Those were experiences which shape a good portion
of his last book.
The Book of Complaints is one of those books in which a poet
reinvents himself artistically.
I don't mean that it's a book of subjective individualism.
Rather, he's taken the gritty tensions and formal elegance
of his earlier work and turned them into more public concerns--
revolution in Central Europe, the passionate troubles--
collectively speaking-- between men and women,
and between men and men.
Someone in my class yesterday, when
we were talking about this book and its emotional intensity,
says--
this is kind of a workshop thing people say, right?--
how does he get away with this?
As if the poet was a thief.
And I think a poet is a thief, if he or she robs us
of the guardedness that keeps us living
at a distance from our own experience.
Katrovas commits such a crime--
and gets away with it, because of his masterful prosody.
His blank verse is both street smart and elegant.
And most impressively, in his new form, the dithyramb,
he takes a form from classical Greek theater
and makes it stunningly new.
Please welcome Richard Katrovas.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for having me.
I'm very happy to be here.
This is one of the more respected venues
in all of America, and I'm honored to be here.
Thank you.
I'm going to read for about 43 and 1/2 minutes,
and then I'm going to open it up to Q & A. And I mean that.
I'm going to be reading about a particular historical event,
and you may have questions, you may have comments,
and I welcome discourse.
I'll begin with "The Bridge of Intellectuals."
There is indeed a bridge in Prague
that was built by intellectuals and poets,
and this poem speaks to that.
They were forced, of course, to build it.
The reference in the first line of the poem to Crane is,
of course, Hart Crane, who wrote the great poem "The Bridge."
The elegant coup in '48 was indeed an elegant coup.
Nobody died, and it was when the Communists took over.
"If Crane had been a Czech and deigned to live till 53,
he might have more than praised the bridge.
For in that year of Stalin's death, artists and intellectuals
of Prague--
but only those the party had to fix after an elegant coup
in '48--
finished their bridge across the Vltava.
Each morning, did they bring their lunch in bags?
Did they bitch and curse and clown around
behind the foremen's backs?
Were there foremen?
Or did each man, or their women, pull his weight un-prodded
by the ethos of his class?
Of 11 bridges down the spine of Prague,
it stands the shabbiest and least necessary.
From the road leaving town, one sees the tufts of grass
and weeds muscling through the rusted transoms
that trains, some say, must rarely cross,
and notes the webbed faults in the dark concrete of columns
lifting from the water like wet khaki
pant-legs of old fisherman.
To those whose ambitions for bourgeois fame
got them torn from their tasks to labor
here, is their ironic consolation that, as work is
a matter of identity, so many praised workers remain unnamed?
Anonymous bones of generations lie the snaking length
of China's ancient shyness.
Unknown apprentices applied the strokes
that smeared celestial radiance onto cheeks of lesser angels
in the masterworks.
Such petty, silly little men who snapped
the blossom of a generation from its living vine
have watched their own bridge crumble.
And even as this bad joke stands unused,
dilapidated on the edge of town, perhaps its rehabilitated
builders-- most dead by now, though some no doubt at work,
scattered throughout Prague in little flats, alone--
feel vindicated in their bitterness,
if bitterness survives absurdity.
I'd like to know that once or twice a year, an old man,
whose hands are soft from idle thought,
comes by tram or car to gaze a while and simply marvel that
the thing still stands."
"St. Vitus."
"In the great Gothic cathedral of Prague, designed, of course,
to scare shit out of peasants and so
parlay a huge and abstract doom into incontrovertible power,
I strolled, nine months after the gentle purge.
A god who dices with the universe surely
will not care for such drab splendor, but there it stands--
dank, crusted with relics, neither museum nor sanctuary.
The Holy Roman Empire once murmured there,
and Charles IV is kept in the huge cellar.
I bought a ticket and slumped down the steps
with the other tourists, mostly Germans.
Raised in a nation obsessed with beginnings.
I could not stipulate resolution as the measure
of gross identity.
In the foundation of St. Vitus, large, dirty walls of granite
shoulder death, and I imagined kids
through the centuries screwing in the hollow pockets of rock--
sneaking down, wicked, sweet, full of guilt,
yet drawn inexorably to the cool places near the crypts of kings
and bishops, as though passion justifies what passion hastens."
This is called "An Apology," but it's just an anecdote.
"I was so surprised to see a Black face.
I smiled and nodded as I passed.
But you took this as salutation, and wheeled around
and stopped me.
Where was I going?
When would I return?
What was I doing in Prague?
Did I live in that building?
How did I get a flat in the heart of town?
What kind of writer was I?
Did I speak Czech, or French, or German?
You were little and wiry and well-dressed.
You were a student from West Africa.
All I'd wanted to do was buy some beers from that funky Gypsy
joint around the block.
You said you'd wait for me on the corner,
and I could not believe you were still there
when I returned with bottles filling my arms.
You asked if I wanted company--
which, at home, may have signaled you were gay.
But I'm certain that you were not gay,
that you were just a cheerful, lonely fellow looking
to practice one of your several languages,
seeking perspectives on Prague and all
of its marvelous convolutions.
Wasn't it wonderful what was happening?
Had I gone each day to Wenceslas Square?
Did I believe they could ever change back?
Was I familiar with Havel's dramas?
I could barely hold on to all those beers.
I was in a hurry, and you annoyed me.
I was sorry, but I had to go in.
No, I did not need company.
A friend was awaiting my return.
She and I would eat dinner, then go out.
I was sorry, very sorry.
I wished you well, and you said maybe another day you'd return,
and we could talk.
But all I wanted was to get away from your unrelenting
friendliness, your intolerable goodness and sincerity,
your huge, toothsome smile.
But in the foyer, I was troubled by your voice,
so put the bottles down, almost shattering one,
and ran back out.
But the street was empty, and the sky was wringing out
the last few drops of sunlight, and where
there had been shadows, an even sheen from street lamps
now prevailed.
It is not that you were too good for me,
or that a god wears one mask for you and one for me,
but that excess of sweetness seems,
even in the fading mists of hopeful change,
a mortal mystery in such a world as ours."
During this remarkable event referred to as the Velvet
Revolution, one of the things I recall quite vividly seeing
was young mothers with their young children,
with their infants in trams, getting into the act--
indeed, putting slogans and placards on the trams
and forming their own little protest
rally in Old Town Square.
And this poem responds to that.
Jan Hus, of course, was the Czech
who is best known for having been burned at the stake.
Another one, of course, is Jan Palach,
who set himself on fire in protest of the '68 invasion,
the Soviet invasion.
The rest should be self-explanatory.
"In Old Town Square, stoic Jan Hus and his mangle of acolytes
pose art nouveau, blackstone emblem of Czech resolve.
But no Bohemian I had met took seriously the image--
indeed, Palach notwithstanding, no noble conflagration
for these sighing people, no action without irony.
Citizen of a loud country, nation of manic hope and shrill
despair, I envy Czechs their Svejk,
their implicit affirmation of all that is un-heroic.
Laughing beasts, a Nazi governor had called them.
I thought them wholly sane.
But the cost of such sanity seemed trivial, dull, quotidian.
'Light laughter on the face, heavy sorrow in the heart,' one
poet said, though by pervasive irony,
the equation often got reversed.
So on that day, the mothers of Prague
circled Hus with their infants' trams.
The scrawled bright signs of protest and the elemental colors
of the canvas trams and mothers' coats appeared for all the world
like gentle flames."
I've been warned to drink a lot of water here.
Many of you will recall that the slogan, if you will,
of the Prague Spring was "socialism with a human face--"
if not coined, certainly popularized by Dubček,
the president at the time.
This is called "Socialism With a Human Face."
"Several times those dizzying weeks,
I wondered aloud if socialism with a human face
was not still more than the sentiment of Dubček's wounded
generation.
One young Czech laughed, 'socialism doesn't work.
Our lives are proof.'
How could I-- fed Adorno and Marcuse, where
a fair mind and a sunny disposition
may buy the good life unto death,
preach socialism to the best minds, where
Lenin had had the final word on sex in lyric poetry?
They wanted markets, sleek markets, and membership
in Europe's club.
They harkened back to Masaryk's first republic
when, before the confiscations, Bohemia
was prosperous and proud.
The days after Martin Smid got martyred,
only to reappear beaten but alive,
no one knew the tanks and troops would not roll in.
Obcanske Forum, Havel as its heart,
was coalescing in the chants of the disenfranchised masses.
In the streets after rallies, a calm mulling
persisted into night, and the square
flickered where students kept their vigil.
I watched them gathered close, wrapped in blankets,
sipping hot drinks brought by friends,
their faces sweetened by 10,000 candles,
and considered that their lives will never be so pure again."
One of the first major visits that President Havel had after
becoming president--
let's recall that he had been a prisoner of the state
just seven or eight months earlier--
was from Frank Zappa.
Now, Frank Zappa, indeed, was received as
though he were a head of state.
It was in all the papers, on television,
and it was quite amazing.
And this happened about the same time
that I found out that one of the first things
that Havel wanted to do when he became president was redesign
the uniform of his color guard.
So these two things came together,
and this poem is a response to that.
For Frank Zappa aficionados, you'll
hear a couple of not so subtle allusions.
"One may imagine him saying to Zappa,
'I've been a fan since 'Weasels Rip my Flesh.'
Yet to know he loves his beer and music
or that years ago, he soldered a crazy Pirandello
to his own Bohemian heart, does not
prepare the credulous outsider for Havel,
designer of chic uniforms.
Less than one year out of prison,
newly ascended to the bloodless seat of power,
it seems he looked upon his color guard and was,
if not offended, deeply bothered by the cut and colors
of what they wore, and so sat down with pen and drafting paper
and sketched out how the uniform should
drape the smart, svelte soldier and in what hues of blue.
Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks
have rarely marshaled martial acumen.
To see them marching on the castle
grounds, ceremoniously grave, one
might affirm, though, the prerogative of small nations
to strut absurdly through the rituals of masculine identity
and pride.
There is a quiet courage of irony
which visits the great lovers in a world
antithetical to their dreams of peace, and no matter his crimes,
every prisoner must know his world by walls and uniforms.
It's not unlikely a troop of sea scouts
from Bangor, Maine or Fresno, California
would whip the Czechoslovak color guard.
Yet what mother of invention would not squeal to see her boy
decked out by a president?"
Stepan was the party boss of Prague
who indeed ordered the attack on the kids, the students, who
were peacefully demonstrating.
And that event led to what we call the Velvet Revolution.
It's important to note, I referred to an earlier poem
to a student, to a Martin Smid, who was a wonderfully, typically
Czech, ironic martyr in that it was thought that he
was killed during that attack.
And it so enraged the people, the general public,
that they got behind the students
and marched with them to Wenceslas Square the next day,
and the whole thing got started that way.
As it turned out, he just got beaten up.
The next day, the authorities showed two Martin Smids on TV--
one in color, who said, I am Martin Smid, I'm a math student,
and I'm not dead, and another one in black and white
who was really messed up, who said, I am Martin Smid,
and I am not dead either.
But it was too late.
It was too late.
It had already started.
And so he was a wonderful instrument of a revolution.
"Stepan From a Balcony."
"As clerkish Nazis got plugged into ruins of post-war Germany,
so a club of thugs and thieves who
fancied the state their exclusive enterprise must grease
the wheels that turn the wheels of daily life in Czechoslovakia.
Still vexing the people, these petty functionaries stamp
the forms that move the forms from cubicle
to cubicle in a great false economy of winks and bribes.
And when their eyes get dreamy, and when they sigh and stare,
one may imagine they drift beyond the fictions of lesser
ideologies, becoming generic angels full of wishes and good
intentions, so gentle in their reveries they are almost
innocent, almost pitiably silly for their self-consumption
and the glossy essence of their dreams--
indeed, almost American, and therefore
lovable, and therefore dangerous beyond their functions.
From a balcony, Stepan ranted over a shrieking PA to the crowd
of pissed-off faces that he, party boss of Prague,
would not be cowed by 15-year-old children.
'We are not children,' the crowd chanted back to him.
And stocky, dog-faced Stepan stuttered
to take back his boast, 'of course I don't mean you.
I mean those students.'
But the crowd wouldn't stop.
The chant swelled from the narrow street,
and swarmed over the elegant arc of the city.
'We are not children.'"
This is for Ludvik Vaculik.
It's called "Vaculik's Garden."
A wonderful, wonderful writer.
A great deal of his work is available in English.
The work of his which I was first aware of
was called A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator.
And I had the honor of doing the first interview with him
after the Velvet Revolution, and it was published
in New England Review.
And this is Vaculik's garden, where the interview occurred.
"Throughout his garden, things edible and not
flourish mingled in benign disorder.
Full-blown blushing roses nod among trees that bring forth
fruit or blooms, and everywhere within the barbed-wired beige
walls, there is bounty beyond order--
such profusion of growth, by design without design,
randomly touched and tended by Ludvik Vaculik.
His feuilletons so vexed authorities,
for 20 years they bugged his life
and hauled him in repeatedly, leveled the same tired charges,
posed the same petty questions, until it
became a quaint occasion for coffee with his interrogators--
a peripheral recurring obligation to set one weary
smile against another.
Others have testified to brutalities
which, by virtue simply of having happened,
changed all comely concepts of humanity
to so much fuming compost of the heart.
In the garden of Ludvik Vaculik, life riots against
the strictures of garden, and the endless enterprise
of gardening is a humbling to whatever it requires."
This is called "Weekend."
"A broad zone from southern Poland
through central south Moravia is dying of chemical blight,
and no randy hope of revolutions nor common markets
will make it once more lush and vital.
Eight months after the people's triumph,
I'd returned to see my child be born.
Swollen to her eighth month, my child's strong mother hiked with
me five K's to the Polish border, all the while quizzing:
strom...kyticka...zeleny...
Our child, she insisted, will speak Czech,
will have a Czech identity.
She paused often to pluck berries,
and spoke with humor of her parents,
divorced for years, still hunting mushrooms
in the same frail woods outside Prague, quoting,
'they live the same lives, do the same things.
One wonders why they separated.'
Blight is a matter of degree, of course,
and that ancient forest of her country was still attractive.
Indeed, the sick rains that so thinned it out,
it appeared more lovely for all the delicate angles of fallen
trunks, and for patches of clearing where stunted shrubs
carpeted to the ground."
My brother-in-law and two of his friends--
they were 25 at the time--
just maybe six weeks after the Velvet Revolution,
decided it'd be really swell if they'd get the Rolling
Stones to come to Prague.
And so they made a few phone calls,
they got through to the Rolling Stones management,
and indeed, they set it up.
They did it.
They told somebody in Havel's government
that they had this contact, and they gave him
they gave them an office a few doors down from Havel
in the castle.
You have to understand, there were no laws.
There was no there was no infrastructure
by which something like this could truly be managed.
And yet, like American cowboys, they
galloped off and, because of their youth and persistence
and just divine ignorance, were able to make this happen.
And indeed, 300,000 people saw the Rolling Stones in Prague
just a few months after the Velvet Revolution.
And I was there.
And this is called "The Stones, Prague, August 8, 1990."
No, August 18, it was.
"On the tram with a smattering of others who'd left early,
I heard the pyrotechnics signaling finale,
and thought the urban jungle set to have been the one true star,
then wondered if middle age, now fluttering at my back,
would mean for me the need of such a gaudy stage
on which to strut and preen.
Probably.
But of course, I'd settle for a considerably smaller one--
or, bitterly, no stage at all.
They'd been brilliant and boring, the audience huge
and uncomfortable in an all-night fuzzy drizzle,
yet it was a smashing success.
From the packed field of Strahov, the communists' largest
stadium in the world, Havel was seen
dancing behind bulletproof plastic in the bleachers.
And everyone marveled at the logistical complexity-- how
hundreds had been required to erect that set,
and hundreds more for security.
Everyone, of course, knew the songs by heart, and though a bit
sniffly in the chilly rain, executed his or her part
in this new ritual of commerce and joy.
We creaked a mile or more along the spangled Vltava
before I noticed the gorgeous girl across the aisle
was chattering in English.
Maybe 16, her clothes and jewelry
were conspicuously fashionable.
She jangled and glittered as she spoke
to a rumpled Czech girl of seeing Poison
in 'Frisco and The Cure in LA.
She was stunning in profile, and I
shuddered at the childish sentences spilling
from her woman's body, the self-referential effervescence
implicit in her speech, and the sexual power she
possessed but will not comprehend
until it explodes in her face.
I observed it first with a twinge of desire,
then sentimental tenderness.
But then, as the tram hushed nearer to Charles Bridge,
sparkling two stops away through hulking shadows
of saints and kings, I looked on with mild disgust.
For I recalled how seven months earlier the students of Prague
had reclaimed their lives, and I recalled their humility and wit
as they faced that miraculous withering of power.
I recalled as well how gently they controlled the crowds,
then cleaned the broad boulevards in the winter morning
dark after the rallies, and how subtly
tender they were towards one another,
even as the moment they empowered
seemed ripe for histrionics.
They marched.
They chanted.
They laughed, they took back everything worth having.
Yet a vague conception of this girl's life in some measure
defined what so many wanted.
She spoke too fast for her Czech acquaintance, who nonetheless
strained to follow the litany of groups and the cities
they'd enchanted--
Bon Jovi in Phoenix, INXS in San Diego, New Kids in Vegas.
And even as I noticed the huge Rolling Stones banner
now visible from the windows, floodlighted and stretched
across the marble base where Stalin's statue once
loomed on a hill above the city, and remembered
how the spirit of this ancient place
had been chastened by its young--
whose dreams are no less corrupted than those
of our own American beauties--
even as I wallowed a moment in nostalgia,
fully aware that eternal forms blink on and off at intervals
determined by the same codes clicking and snapping in all
human loins, I knew that even as the music swells, envelops,
thrives, here and now, rock and roll is dead."
This is for my baby, who's four years old and is brilliant.
And this is her when she was two in the Jewish cemetery
in Prague.
And this is something which she'll
hate me for when she's older, because it will embarrass her,
but that's my job.
I'm her father.
"A Brief History of Your Conception."
[LAUGHTER]
I recall the commercial for Radio Free Czechoslovakia
when I was 10.
Residing in public housing in Norfolk, Virginia,
Checkosowhatchamacallit sounded like a terrible place to live.
Worse even than public housing in Newport News.
The world looked like a disease and being
behind the Iron Curtain had to resemble being in an iron lung.
When I was 15, I heard on Armed Forces Radio
that Russia had invaded it.
My stepfather was sweeping mines off the coast of Vietnam
and I was a pain in the ass of Sasebo, Japan.
Cherry blossoms littered my path to the bars downtown.
The summer of '89, I met your mother.
She was beautiful and funny and very bright.
So I contrived to go to the country whose name looked
like a disease to the city Russia had quieted that autumn.
I stood in crowds at crowds of people
taking themselves just seriously enough.
There are no pure motives except unto death.
My beckoning you forth from ignorance
was that I may pardon myself, but you are
more potent than forgiveness.
The day preceding the night you were conceived,
I passed through a gauntlet of saints, kings, and angels
on Charles Bridge.
Their stone eyes seemed curious or malicious.
And their heroic postures but propaganda for Paradise.
Tourist of a gentle revolution, I was as taken with the dashed
off slogans taped to subway columns
as with such permanent emblems of national identity.
That night, between the sheets of energy and artifice,
you were conceived.
My darling.
My tiny Bohemian.
Someday we will toss gray Czech bread
to the filthy swans of the Vtlava,
and you will laugh at my bad Czech grammar.
Or 1,000 sorrows will darken the sky with slow wings,
and I will write your name in salt. Ema,
the world is enormous.
Pity it.
And love accordingly.
And I'll end with this.
The Book of Complaints was indeed
a book that appeared in pre-revolution establishments,
restaurants, stores of all kinds.
Anywhere where service was an issue.
And the idea was that if you had a complaint, you would go
and you would put your complaint in the book
and of course everything would be taken care of.
Well, it was a joke and everybody knew it.
And I remember opening up one and I couldn't read it.
But Dominika translated and it was just graffiti
some kid had written in there.
But I thought that the idea of a book of complaints of course,
was rather compelling.
And it becomes a metaphor in this title poem
with which I shall end this ordeal.
This is for Pavel Schrute, a wonderful poet
who is good friends with Havel and just a wonderful man.
I was told that most establishments kept
a book of complaints for the sour stories of the poorly
served, the principle being familiar to patrons here
in the rich West.
The customer is right always.
And as such may stride like a God
through a world of aisles, touching and choosing.
But the customer was more precisely a mere citizen.
A consuming unit suffering to shuffle through too many lines
towards barely stocked shelves.
And when she complained, it was to her shoes
as she queued for fruit.
Or to the wall by the kitchen sink as she emptied of cans
the plastic bag she'd kept stashed in her purse.
Then to the cold grade sky of sumptuous Prague
as she stood at the window in autumn,
a righteous restraint withering within her.
I stood among them, dumb emissary of good intentions,
and listened to their chants and studied their faces.
The autumn sky would turn to ash each afternoon in Wenceslas
Square as the bold crowd swelled,
and the peeved old men in the castle got grimmer.
Dominika, what is he saying now?
I would ask again and again.
My patient friend would pause to translate the blared complaints
of that hour's representative, explaining nuance and brief
history.
"Richard, you just don't know what it's like to live under
such liars," she said, applauding another sentiment
of rage--
public sentiment of rage--
applauding her youth and socialism
with a human face, at least the idea if not the practice.
The night that Jakes shuffled from power, a fine rain
drizzled and kids piled into cars
and hammered horns and squished Czech flags
and the faces on trams even of the old and that gold light
shined with contentedness.
The book of complaints seemed for a moment closed.
But it is never finished.
It lengthens after death as head skin
shrinks and turns to leather.
Dominika, dear one, beautiful and bright,
everywhere sour heads, having spent youth,
seeking a cure for fear of death,
find in the death of passion a bitter solace.
Benevolent, some would save the whole world by dint of dry will
from the body's will, that half remembered
dance of the fetus whose dazzling
finish is each body's first wailing entry
in the book of complaints.
The privileging of mediocrity is a sin far
worse than the fracture.
It always inspires dull fathers pull long faces for the young
who are not amused.
Though learning to laugh with one's whole body
is the first stage of a ritual killing.
Where before people laughed bitterly
into themselves or in small muted clutches sucking
cigarettes and coughing rich beer,
from mid-November to mid-December
they laughed openly and infectiously.
It is wonderful to hear such laughter.
A revolution of laughter often it seemed.
And Kafka squinting up from his own book of complaints
in a cramped chamber in a gray heaven surely
felt the bliss of vindication.
When poor Martin Smid, the revolution's martyr for a day--
his purple, swollen face a flag of harm--
was thrust on TV to prove that he lived,
that the Red Beret had not quite killed him,
as though the thousands flocking his shrine of 10,000 candles
might casually scatter at proof that he lived,
fact withered beneath the putrid fictions of 21 years.
And though it no doubt hurt his face to laugh,
one can only hope Smid saw the noble purpose of his death
and smiled.
From the Charles Bridge at night the castle
shines in golden floodlights of ambiguous glory.
Bohemians stroll the quiet dark, to my eyes
passive, sighing, pliant.
Yet I am humbled by the memory of a dour people
opening their lives to the world and to themselves
and chanting the essential truths inscribed there in blood.
To the Old Town Square the tourists
will flock and yawn up stiff necked and still
beneath the Astronomical Clock, waiting for little carved saints
and Jesus to spin in their slots,
pirouetting robots chiming the hour.
Each time I return, a tablet of Czech dissolving on my tongue,
I'll stand in the Jewish cemetery
among the shuffled, tilting, gray, smooth, weathered slabs--
Jews buried ten deep signified by mounds--
and think of Levi placing the clay pill on his golem's tongue.
On most ragged slabs are pebbles.
Each speck a token a prayer, a petrified flower
for the laughing dead.
The revelation at first seems simple.
A state is only the page on which
one inscribes her most bitter, consistent complaints,
a page filled with ire scribbled in various hands,
signed boldly or left anonymous.
We are the mounting tallies of each our discontentedness,
and desire, the uninscribable, gets
confounded in the act of complaining.
I regard a world that is beautiful and rank,
and couch what I see in language that
is palpable and rude, for nothing marked
in the cool light of managerial regard
survives its last bitter affront to the gaseous sky
or sooty windows.
And my heart's complaints I mean to survive
unto the sweet eyes of those I have loved
and would wish to love.
Amid the almost funny tilting slabs--
that crammed packed ghetto of Prague's lost lovers
tilting as a field of flowers is ruffled unevenly
by a randy, swirling, dark autumnal breeze--
I will bitch a prayer for Levi's loveless automaton,
and for each hovering soul among the muted, rain smoothed,
pebble crowned slate headstones, and bitch prayers
for the new life of Prague.
Pristine page onto which real lives will be written,
one complaint at a time.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Levi, I should have explained is of course
the Rabbi Levi, who as legend has it,
gave us the first robot: the golem, which as legend has
it was activated by virtue of his putting
by some accounts a parchment with prayers on it
by others a tablet with a prayer on it in his mouth.
Then the golem became kind of a protector of the Jewish ghetto.
Any questions or comments or complaints?
Please feel free.
Yeah please.
[INAUDIBLE] the young American girl [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, just a wonderful vivacious,
American middle class, upper middle class girl full of life
and as vacuous as a bag.
And she was discoursing with this kid.
This Czech girl who for one thing was bilingual.
And who really saw this American girl as a model.
It's something she aspires to.
I love that about American girl.
I have her in my class every semester.
And she's wonderful.
She's full of life and spirit but I like that Czech girl.
I'd rather have a conversation with the Czech girl.
That's all.
[INAUDIBLE] how do you [INAUDIBLE]?
Well, for one thing I don't condescend to her
as I do as I'm talking about her now.
And I show her the respect in the human being deserved.
And also realize that sometimes she has as much to teach me,
as I have to teach her in her own way.
So I listen to it.
And sometimes listening to her, I
will learn what I need to say to her to make
her a little less vacuous.
But that's not to be cute my saying it.
[INAUDIBLE]
Has shaped her.
Just mass culture.
This mass culture, the fact that she--
she worships it.
She believes in it and she has an unshakable faith in.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm not mad at anybody.
It's not my place to--
I'm just your emissary.
I'm just this dumb American.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh--
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, actually that's a good point.
And this work takes me up to about 1992.
Some time has passed, and it's--
Czecho and Prague in particular is just a remarkable place
right now.
It's a very vital and vibrant place
and it's going through lots of changes
and it's a very large remarkably vibrant American community.
It's been called the Left Bank of the '90s.
A lot of young writers, Generation X type
writers who think they're going to be
the next Hemingway or whatever.
Maybe they will.
But the Czechs are going through phases.
They still love America and all about America represents.
But they're also the best among them
are beginning to feel colonized, as they are.
I hope that wonderful Czech irony gets them
through this phase of their national life.
I really do.
And that they have a love hate relationship with America.
Because God knows there's a lot about us
that they would do very well to avoid.
Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]
Could you do another one?
It's very kind of you, but I feel like I've already
read too much.
It's so sweet of you but I don't know
anybody who can really listen to more than 50 minutes
of [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, though.
Thank you so much [INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Just that it was in that part of it,
of course, that I don't know what you saw, but it does--
it's pretty-- no, it's an ecological disaster,
a part of that area that-- through Poland
as I described it.
And it doesn't mean that it's not aesthetically pleasing.
It is quite beautiful.
It's just that you realize that the beauty of it
is partly its death.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, I mean they're obviously repulsive course,
but there are also some very important differences I'm not
really qualified to talk about.
I could talk off the top of my head about it.
But there are folks who make it their
it's to make this fine distinction,
hopeful distinction.
What little I know is that, a Czech
from out of the co-composed.
But they know there's a lady, there's
the language is a very similar.
And I can see Polish on the page and recognize
they [INAUDIBLE] Oh, they're obviously historical, but
[INAUDIBLE]
They're doing very well over there.
There's a genius by the name of Klaus who's the real power.
Havel more and more is a figurehead, but a very important
figurehead, especially in terms of how Czecho
is being regarded from without.
He's a moral leader and he's respected, very
highly respected in the West.
But really the genius that's kind of keeping it all going
is Václav Klaus and--
that's-- yeah.
The Czech writer, well, I'll make it without going
to a written [INAUDIBLE] Let me give you kind of general
question about--
Their [INAUDIBLE] was-- ours of between high culture
and popular culture.
Theirs was between official and unofficial.
The unofficial, of course, by our way of seeing things
had the moral high ground, and they are the ones
who taken over, obviously.
But they don't have the [INAUDIBLE] They are now we are,
where [INAUDIBLE] comes out [INAUDIBLE] really focused
on [INAUDIBLE]
What's more interesting [INAUDIBLE]
than fiction or poetry is the analysis of what's
going on in the culture [INAUDIBLE]
So talking [INAUDIBLE] There is that ironical hearkening back
to the good old days [INAUDIBLE] But at the same time,
I have not spoken to [INAUDIBLE] who's not absolutely overjoyed
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm not that familiar with the revolution here.
[INAUDIBLE] might think the--
he's cleaning up after their [INAUDIBLE] that would not
happen--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
No, it wouldn't happen here.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] was it a totally different thing?
I mean, was there--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Listen, yes, I think there was.
I remember-- You have to understand or recall
that Tiananmen Square had not been that long ago.
And so that was very fresh in people's minds.
And we weren't getting any news.
We didn't know what the hell was going on.
I was getting some news because I'd go by the embassy
and I'd hear things.
But basically, like we said, the second and third day
in Wenceslas Square, people pretty much thought that it was
a 50-50.
And what has not come through very clearly
in the Western analysis of all this
is that there was a point at which the powers that be,
Jakes and those guys, were very close to make--
to bringing in the tanks and having something
like a Tiananmen Square happen.
But I don't want to minimize the courage of the kids.
it wasn't-- they had tremendous courage.
And one of the most striking and memorable sights during one
of the first days of the Velvet Revolution,
Wenceslas Square when the gatherings were happening,
hundreds of thousands of people, was a sign that-- at the time,
I couldn't read and I probably couldn't read it
very well now either.
But Dominika translated it for me and it said,
we who were students in '68 are proud of our children.
And I think it's so important to understand that it really
was something the students made happen.
The children made it happen, much more--
it wasn't the dissidents of '68, wasn't even Havel.
Havel was empowered by the kids.
Anybody else?
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
The moment his career began writing, even though in Polish
to be translated into English.
And I don't--
I'm not saying that's bad.
I'm just saying it's very interesting.
And there are--
Holub, for example, the Czech poet Holub,
whom I know and very much respect in him why [INAUDIBLE],
he too--
But what I like about Holub is he admits it.
There's the point at which he--
fairly early on in his career, he was writing to be translated.
Now, that's kind of a very complicated matter.
But I think it has--
it's very interesting.
I mean, I'm not addressing what you're bringing up.
But when I think of Holub as a poet, that's what I think of.
He writes in Polish, and it's been translated.
So he assists in translating it.
And he writes in Polish to be translated into English.
[INAUDIBLE]
Absolutely, because I was very aware early on
of being accused of appropriating.
I just happened to be there.
I didn't go there to be in the midst of the fray.
I just happened to be there.
And I was just swept up by--
also in my personal relationship--
and was just-- just had this privilege,
just had this tremendous gift given to me by virtue of--
it was chance.
And I could have chosen not to write about it.
But I kind of tried to figure out the best way to do it.
And for me, I'm not that smart, so I
thought I'll do it directly.
I'm not going to be cute about this.
I'll try to tell the truth and for better or worse.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, it comes from getting rolled over every couple
of generations.
[LAUGHTER]
It comes from being a part of an empire for a long time
and really only defining themselves as a nation--
I mean, it was in the 20th century.
And there's no tradition of heroism,
unless you go way back to the Bohemian kings.
Otherwise, what you've got are these people who-- they
get rolled over by the Germans.
They get rolled over by the Russians.
What are you going to do.
You either learn to laugh or you die.
And they lived, and they lived by virtue of their wicked irony
[INAUDIBLE] irony about themselves.
Indeed, a Nazi governor said of them,
he called them laughing beasts.
But this is not to say there have not been heroes.
Of course, there were.
During World War II, there were heroes.
And there were-- and through the Russian invasion.
It's just they've never had this more dramatic tradition, shall
we say, of martial competence.
And so when you're surrounded by folks who have that,
I suppose you get ironical.
[LAUGHS] Yes, ma'am.
[INAUDIBLE]
I don't want to overgeneralize by the way--
You know how it is.
It's much more complicated than that.
I'm just beginning to hear from the younger [INAUDIBLE]
intelligentsia.
They're starting to say, well, maybe we're [INAUDIBLE] America.
But at the same time, there seems
to be a fairly pervasive love of things American.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, that's a good question actually.
Those folks who were around '68, who went through that, fall in--
Well, it's maybe a lot more complicated than this.
But you have those who kept the faith [INAUDIBLE] who
were dissidents, who wouldn't allow themselves to live lives.
Then you had the rest of the folks who are like us.
That is to say, I don't think I would have had the courage.
I don't know if I would have the courage to be a [? dissident. ?]
If my child's life in on the line, the quality of her life
anyway.
I would have been a lot of--
I would've been in what has been called that gray area.
The Czechs themselves talk about that gray area
that so many good Czechs went through.
They wouldn't join the Party, but nor would they
do or say anything that would hurt their careers
or the chances that their children to have a decent life
[INAUDIBLE] Yes, ma'am.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, Klaus, I hate to say this, but Klaus
is using some version of the old supply-side model.
And it just happens for now to be working there.
I'm not an economist, obviously.
And I can't go into much more detail than that.
But there--
One has to remember that the Czechs during the first Republic
had at least one of the most vital economies in all
of Europe.
And so when the elegant coup happened in '47,
it wasn't something which came from the grassroots.
I mean, it wasn't something that people
were necessarily dissatisfied.
Those of you who are better historians
than I am about that period might
want to take issue with that.
But my sense of it was they had a thriving bourgeoisie,
and the people were not starving.
So I mean, it's not like some peasant revolution or something.
It was purely political.
And it was in global political terms that it happened.
Yes, ma'am.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, I am.
I am, because out of respect for those
who are Slovak, who have defined themselves as another nation.
Within the Czech Republic you have, of course,
Moravians and Bohemians who collectively
call themselves Czechs.
I don't want to make these folks out of the society
be better than they really are.
I mean, I'm appalled at, for example,
the racism against Gypsies.
I'm a little troubled that women's issues are not
being advanced more vigorously than they are, though it's
beginning to happen.
I was telling a friend of mine earlier that part of that
may have to do with the fact that the old party
rhetoric certain respects sounded
like a feminist rhetoric, at least to the ear,
at least to the ear of someone who grew up in that system.
But of course, what women explained to me, they said,
look, my mother worked because all women work.
And she was equal with my father in that respect.
But she didn't get paid as well.
And then she'd come home, and she took over the house.
And so I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to work.
I'm going to stat home, take care of the house.
And so that looks as though she's
buying into some sort of traditional model.
But at least for the moment, it just means that--
really, it's kind of a statement of protest.
[INAUDIBLE] terribly conflicted about this, but [INAUDIBLE]
all I can do in this forum.
Yes, ma'am.
[INAUDIBLE]
I've got a book of short stories that [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, this
is just one of the [INAUDIBLE] Anybody else?
You guys have been terrific.
And like I told you, I mean, this
is one of the really wonderful things in America,
and I'm very proud to be reading here.
And have a good evening.
[APPLAUSE]