Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009.
The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around.
Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia.
Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there.
Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English.
Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do.
But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel.
It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Balkan Disease (part 1 of 2)
Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009.
The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around.
Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia.
Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there.
Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English.
Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do.
But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel.
It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Person who died
I never really bothered to have a strong opinion about Jim Carroll, the poet, diarist, and rock star who died suddenly last Friday at the age of 60. He swam in the same current as many of my favorite writers and musicians, so I've long known and admired much of his work. But I've never felt much more than that. He was in all the right places, knew the right people, but it always felt like he was opportunely a few steps behind.
Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.
His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).
The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.
Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.
Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.
Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.
His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).
The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.
Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.
Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Rumors of war, and no pronunciation guide
By sheer coincidence, I've been spending a lot time researching the lead-up to the start of the Second World War, 70 years ago this morning. Reading through the papers and magazines of the time, it is hard not to feel a chill reading about how the world marched into the abyss, while America was content to look on with what almost feels like bemused concern.
I came upon this thought from an editorial in The New York Times on Monday, August 21, 1939.
"Already we undergo a fresh baptism of consonants at news dispatches from Grunia, Lwow, and Bydgoszck, and worse may be yet to come. Any day now we may have to read of skirmishes at Mlawa and Piotrkow, turning movements at Wloclawek and Wlocklawa, and artillery duels at Bycloweszka and Czestowhowo. For all we know, there will even be retreats to Zgenz and Maciecjowice and a famous victory at Tecxynski, and by then the tongues of suffering millions will be tied in hard knots for life."
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