other writers' Slovaks

And, finally, near the end of Journey, Celine arrives at his Slovak beauty, a far cry from the meth-infested psychotic "no-neck Slovak" of Robert Stone's "Helping":

Quite a few fine-looking girls applied for the job. In fact, so many strapping young women of all nationalities flocked to Vigny as soon as our ad appeared that we were hard put to it to choose among them. In the end we picked a Slovak by the name of Sophie whose complexion, energetic yet gentle bearing, and divine good health struck us, I have to admit, as irresistible.

In my imagined, or real, life of a Czech Kudera passing as a Slovak Soska (my father's father's true last name), my first literary sighting of any characters from the old country was late in high school and concerned the Czech girls on the American plains of Willa Cather's My Antonia, a book I remember enjoying very much. And, of course, Stone's "Helping" remains a favorite story nevertheless or because of its Slovak grace and wit.

As is our habit at L.U.S.K., we'll leave it to the next blogger to deconstruct the false binarism between the essential Slovak and constructed Czech in every man, neck or no.

portrait of celine with frozen penny

Celine on people from our past

"He went on talking to me in the darkness, while I retraced the steps of my past with the sound of his voice as a charm with which to open the doors of the years and months and finally of my days, wondering where I could have run into this man. But I found nothing. No answer. You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelopes them all."

~~ Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

Two from Celine

Both of these are from Journey to the End of the Night:

"The sadness of this world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time."

and

"A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war."

Christmas Trees

I enjoyed reading Patrick Wensink's article in Men's Health on Christmas tree salesmen, and it also reminded me of the short, spare piece I wrote about my father searching for an affordable tree in the late seventies.

My Father's Great Recession, Part 2

Part 1 of "My Father's Great Recession" was included in the July-August 2014 issue of Contemporary Literary Horizon, and now Part 2 of the story will be included in the November-December 2014 issue.

Dad's selfie from the 1970s with his college copy of The Sun Also Rises