Lee Konstantinou
Summer fun is coming to an end here. Tomorrow evening we go to Prague; on the 19th, I fly to England; on the 20th I’m back to NYC; on the 25th, Palo Alto–ah, home sweet home. I am actually quite eager to get back to work and to my ordinary life. These long European trips … Continue reading The Next Week
I offer a dialogue from the book angličtina, a book that Ema’s mother used to learn English when she was in high school during the communist era of Czechoslovakia: Mrs. Černá: I hear you are leaving Czechoslovakia, Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson: Yes, I am leaving tomorrow. Mrs. Černá: And how did you like life in … Continue reading Mrs. Watson in Prague
Was watching VH1 today, and they had a program in which the New Wave band Berlin was reunited for a one-night-only concert. Very amusing, esp. tsince he band had mostly morphed into middle aged, middle class, and kind of overweight folk–nothing edgy or hip about them anymore. They’re the group, if you recall, that brought … Continue reading Berlin
I’m writing from the Czech Republic. Came back here after the going-home-at-the-beginning-of-September thing proved too expensive; Ema’s parents have been nice enough to offer to host me again. I’ve been somewhat obsessively reading news on Katrina on the internet today. What an awful, Biblical-scale disaster: no food and drinking water, overflowing toilets at the Superdome, … Continue reading Katrina
A couple days ago, at around 11 pm, Ema and I were waiting at a bus stop in downtown London. When we sat down on the bench a sketchy-looking man sitting to Ema’s left turned to us rubbed his fingers together and mumbled something that indicated that he probably would have liked it if we … Continue reading Prick
So has anyone over on the other side of the Atlantic heard of “Soduku” this Japanese puzzle game which involves creating rows and columns of numbers ranging from 1-9 in a 9×9 grid? It’s everywhere in London–every book store has cheap pulp booklets full of the puzzles–and I’ve started to get somewhat enthralled with the … Continue reading Soduku
A couple days ago I saw both. The first at a cemetary near Hampstead Heath, a giant bronze statue of Marx’s head on his grave site, which if life-sized would have made Marx 30 feet tall. The second at a theater above a pub in the same neighborhood. Granted, in the play I saw, said … Continue reading Marx’s Head and Kafka’s Dick
I am quite surpised at my own lack of blogging during this trip, but I suppose it is a testiment to my limited internet access, although it hasn’t quite been that limited. Mostly, I think, my summer has turned out to be less exciting and exotic than one might expect. My dorm at the Metropolitan … Continue reading Long Time No Blog
Hope this doesn’t become a pattern, my feeling compelled to blog only when bombs go off here, but I’m still A-OK. Heard about the incident while reading Alex Shakar’s cool novel, The Savage Girl, here at the British Library. I will post more, and more general ruminations on these bombings, as time allows. Continue reading Still OK
Hi from London. All right over here. Ema and I decided to take the bus today from our dorm to near King’s Cross where the British Library is located. We hopped on, and climbed to the top of the double-decker–actually, my first time on the top of one of these buses. It seemed strangely magical … Continue reading Double Decker