Getting prepared & 'W__hat to Read!
It has been a tough few weeks at my job, recently, with too many hours and too frantic a pace to enjoy my work as a consultant to social workers as I usually do. Meanwhile, when I haven't been working, I've been worrying about encroaching fascism and the chaos created by our pathological asshole of a president and most corrupt and incompetent cabinet ever assembled.
But of course I survived, putting another three 12 hour days behind me, all of them too chock full of frantic efforts to help social workers around the state of New York stay, or get back to, work. But finally, at 5:15 yesterday evening I turned off my work computer, then this morning submitted my time sheet. So finally I'm officially on vacation. And now, as I start writing this short post, I just got a text that Horace the Uber driver will be here in 25 minutes for our early arrival at the airport. Yay! Tomorrow at 7am NY time, 1 pm Central Europe time, we'll arrive in Prague if all goes according to schedule.
So .. very quickly … last night I made what may be an irrelevant, or may be a momentous decision by deciding what I'm taking to read on the trip … or actually a couple things. First I'll dive into a book I haven't read by my favorite hack writer, Elmore Leonard. This one is called “Up In Honey's Room.” A follow up of Hot Kid, the depression era novel placed in Krebs, OK. There's nobody easier for me to read than Leonard. First class stuff. And second, I've got Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad … which won both the Best Book and the Pulitizer Awards.
Both are relatively light compared to what I've been reading, both of which were, by design, at least partly about Prague. First I read a travelogue of sorts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, about his long walk from Rotterdam to Budapest in 1933, when he was 18. Wonderful stories and memories about a Europe and world that no longer exists. He leaves Rotterdam on his walk a few days before Christmas, a few months after Hitler had won the election, so there's lots of commentary about that … all of which seems frightfully like what's going on in the US with Trump. Just too similar, in terms of the repression kicking into high gear, and the way that normal people feel about it and resist it … when they can.What led me to this book, though, was a chapter about Prague, where he spent a couple weeks or so of glorious exploration of early '30s Prague … the sites, a few of the people, and casual mention of a lot of beer-drinking a lot of beer with his young host and his various friends. Great to see a recap of the city at that era from the viewpoint of a thirsty young man at that particular time, as Hitler was already starting to bear down on Czechoslovakia.
And boy does that recap stand in contrast to the remarkable, sad, challenging and occasionally tiresome novel by Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” This is ostensibly a book about a damanged young (at the outset of the story) woman's relationship with a man who truly loves her, but is unfortunately also a philandering sex addict. But what led me to this book is that it takes place against the backdrop of Prague in 1968 and the harsh Russia reconquest of Czechoslovakia and especially Prague. And one kind of senses that the love and life story may in part be an contrivance to talk about what harsh oppression looks like. And it goes far to explain why Czech people have a reputation for being closed and unfriendly … because for so long it was very dangerous, and too often fatal, to attract the ire of authorities. Remarkable portrayal of that life.
And now, about 15 minutes later … the Horace the Uberman will be here in 5 minutes!