On suspicion

Yeah, I know, academics are the least suspect people in the world, otherwise they wouldn't have a job - when they do become suspect, like the guy recently arrested for being the leader of a meth ring (he was a Hell's Angel biker outside of the lecture room - one of his students mentioned that he was nice, but often late for class - where was the bike? - and "spaced out") - then they lose the job. Academics are the ones who toed the line at school, toed the line at grad school, and toed the line to get a job, and keep it till tenure. But, it's noticeable that they often represent themselves or get represented as suspect, a sure sign that they're not and part of the toeing of the line. Dubravka Ugresic in her book of essays, Thank You For Not Reading, wonders why academics try so desperately (in their blogs amongst other things, no less) to be "hip, cool, mega" that "means frequently making references to mainstream mass culture, being mildly radical (i.e., performing false radicalism), being mildly subversive (i.e., performing false subversiveness), being an intellectual entertainer." The "intellectual entertainer" is damningly true, since the place of education is a market place with customers and consumers: "to be an intellectual today," she writes, "means above all to be a conformist, to adapt to the alleged laws of the market." The only way an academic can shock is not through their actual intellectual ideas (because they might not be popular, or they might lose them their job, or - most likely - no one's listening), but through their seemingly daring extra-curricular activities. The same day I read about the anthropology professor meth-ring guy, there was a review in the paper of an academic's memoir, which was actually about her heavy drinking and sex with grad students because she ended up in Nowheresville Edu. You know the meth ring guy will also write a memoir (post-addiction, post-prison), and neither one of them will ever talk about their ideas. "If he shocks," Ugresic writes, "he does so not through his opinions but by publishing naked photographs of himself in the tabloids." That, I promise not to do. The world can only take so much. But, in general, I'm interested in the absolute non-interest in ideas in the representation of the intellectual life. All the same, the blog, since I'm so crap at staying in touch, is going to start with my month-long research trip to Prague, but I'm hoping it'll not only be about the vagaries of the travel, but about why I'm here - which is to do research, to think about things, and to write. You know you're back in Europe, when you step off the plane in Frankfurt and the first thing you see at the airport are glass cubes, about 2 metres by 2, that are full of smokers. One guy - at 5 in the morning - maybe he's working on US time - is smoking a fully-fledged fat Cuban cigar and staring out at us, his eyes trying to fight off the doze. There are a number of these smoking cubes around the airport, most smaller. The second indication is that, when I arrive at the gate for the flight to Prague, there's a middle-class, middle-aged couple (European, they have those kind of square glasses) having steins of beer at 6am. I haven't been to Prague for six years and that time was only for three days - to do interviews with a Czech writer's two sons and to meet up with Michael (we were living on separate continents at the time). It has been almost ten years since we lived here; it's incredible how time skips and hops like that. I'll be catching up with my cousin when I'm here - her daughter was nine the last time I saw them, she's turning nineteen next week. It's like time travel, without the immortality. The Czech Institute of Literature has given me a grant to come over and do some research in their library. I've come across that library on the internet - they scanned some of their holdings - and I'd spent hours reading through the literary papers from the inter-war era. It's not my area but I'd become interested in a writer (the one whose sons I interviewed back in the ice age), who was also a painter and cartoonist, who had decided in the twenties to travel Europe and interview every famous writer and artist around, "a Baedeker of the living." I translated his interview with Joyce - Joyce had actually refused the interview - but Hoffmeister wrote up his experiences anyway and that included a "translation lesson" with Joyce. Hoffmeister had - somewhat madly - decided to translate Finnegans Wake into Czech (he got as far as the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" section, with two co-translators), and Joyce gave him some pointers, reported by Hoffmeister in a beautifully wry and funny way (he includes some cartoons of Joyce). Hoffmeister is a divisive figure in Czech literary history, because he totally sold out and was a big figure in post-war Communist culture, but his approach to these creative gods at that time was so funny and self-deprecating, presenting him and them as fallible un-gods, but with the passion about knowledge and what it might add to the post-WWI world. He drew George Bernard Shaw with impossibly long legs and no mouth - because he talked so much. When he sent Shaw the cartoons, Shaw sent them back with a mouth drawn on. The literary papers from that time are devastatingly passionate. Czechoslovakia was, for the first time after WWI, an independent country with its languages, long suppressed, now official. Czech and Slovak writers wanted to make those languages live up to the literatures of other European cultures, so it was a golden era of translation and interest in what was going on in other countries. But there was also a sense that literature could change the world by changing how the world was represented. This was also associated with a political leftism - why Shaw was such a god here, even without his mouth. Reading through the papers (which were read almost like daily newspapers), gives you some nostalgia about a time and place where literature and its experiments (rather than its market value) actually mattered. The Institute are putting me up in a residence on the outskirts of Prague, not too far from where my aunt last lived. I shared a taxi shuttle with an elderly American couple - we dropped them off outside their fancy hotel in the centre (right opposite the Institute) and drove up here. When we got to the residence, the taxi driver looked at me and laughed. It doesn't look much from the outside, a sixties "panelak" - a high rise made with cheap concrete panels, with a few weeds here and there sticking out. But it's surprisingly pleasant on the inside. I have a glorified dorm room, with a very swish bathroom included. But the best thing is the terrace. I'm up on the top floor and have a terrace which is about the size of the actual room and which has a gorgeous view over Prague. The centre of Prague is in a valley, surrounded by hills, and I'm up on one of those. I bought a beer - Gambrinus! - to have with the sunset, but I was so dehydrated from the plane ride, I drank 3 litres of water instead. So much for the naked pictures and the meth. Though I did notice there is a "shop" at the reception desk (with a very friendly receptionist) that sells: 1/ alcohol; 2/ chips and nuts; 3/ toothpaste. I'm here to do research on two separate projects. The Institute has a long-running project on censorship in Czechoslovakia in the sixties and seventies and I want to see what they have, and to talk to the project leader about it. I've just handed my manuscript to my editor for a book about Vaclav Havel, censorship and translation. The book was based on an archive at Columbia University in New York, an archive of Havel's translator, Vera Blackwell. What interested me about the archive was that it told a much more complex story about censorship than perhaps I'd considered before, both in Eastern Europe and the West. Censorship in the East was much more fluid than I'd expected and I want to double-check that my impressions from the archive are correct. The second thing I want to do here is to find the original publications of Milena Jesenska's translations of Kafka's stories for the next book. Jesenska was the first person in the world to translate Kafka's work; after approaching him about the translations, they fell in love, mainly via letters. A lot has been written about her - she was a great beauty who became a famous journalist - her bravery as a journalist after the Nazi invasion landed her in a concentration camp, where she died. But almost nothing - in fact, nothing in English (I want to see what's here in Czech) - has been written about her translations and their impact. She has had two songs written about her, I discovered. One by an avant-garde Austrian band (why does that make me smile?) that has a lot of high-pitched, angsty violin in it. It's fitting, because I have to spend my first weekend here in Prague finishing a conference paper for a conference in Vienna next week. The conference is about the fictionalization of translators - Jesenska has been the target of soppy romance novels, as well as Viennese crooners - but I'm also talking about another of Kafka's translators, Willa Muir. Muir and her husband are credited with making the first English translations of Kafka's work in the thirties, but, up to now, people assumed that Edwin Muir was really responsible for the translations, because he was the poet and had testicles. Really. Willa Muir, in her archive, admitted that she was the one who actually did the translations but thought that no one would believe her, because she was a woman. She was also, by the way, a writer, something totally ignored by Kafka scholars. One of her novels (unpublished) is about a woman translating Kafka in order to make money to allow her husband to write his poetry. So today - first full day in Prague involves: 1/ buying knives, forks, plates (self-catering kitchen, no utensils); 2/ buying my transit pass; 3/ writing conference paper and, hopefully, 4/ actually getting into the city.