Day One Hundred Thirty, in Which the Narrator Attains a Room of One's Own

I've been in the new apartment a week.

It is a clean, well-lighted place and I have been productive in it, averaging somewhere north of 1300 words per diem.

The neighborhood is fantastic. I'm reminded most strongly of Brooklyn's Park Slope, with perhaps less affluence (manifest in brownstones &c) and more youth, which sounds like Williamsburg 'should sound,' maybe, if neighborhoods have prerecorded sonic ambiances that're somehow not impossibly protean, but it's not really the same wavelength, I promise. It's just cool, on its own, over here.

Also I found out where I'm going to be teaching English in July and August--maps ahoy.

The first town is in Hungary and is called Vasvár.


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The second is in Slovakia and is called Trhová Hradská.


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EXCITEMENT.

Day One Hundred Twenty-one, in Which the Narrator Transitions

Everyone is gone.

The program is over, and the saner of its number have left, flying west over the Atlantic, deplaning in Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York (city & upstate), Georgia, Colorado, Washington, California. Other places, too: as many as there are people.

I am here, still. I ride the tired tram routes (hi, 17) we made sweaty arteries of youth and Americanism that sometimes embarrassed us, yeah, they did. Sometimes. Anyway. They're dry now, just sere veins of Czechs who somehow look more foreign to me than they did in January.

I'll stay here for another month, reading and writing (maybe in this space!), and then I'll travel to Slovakia and Hungary to teach English. I will return to Los Angeles in August, possibly on a cargo ship.

Tomorrow I am moving to an apartment in a different part of Prague, a little rougher, maybe, but 'cheap' and 'different,' a combination I chase almost as much as 'smart' and 'into Virgina Woolf.' It's on--I just turned my head right, looking for the map of Prague that's hung there all semester, but it's packed--Slezská Street, which is sort of on the border between the districts of Žižkov (used to be rough, gentrifying) and Vinohrady (young, gay, haunted by starving literati and other walking tropes). East Prague.


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I'm sitting here, reading Too Loud a Solitude (Hrabal, 1976). I haven't read it since I was eighteen. People ask me why I come to Prague and if I don't make a joke (what this is Prague goddamn that hot-air balloon conductor, etc.) I say something about how I Was 'Really Into' Czech Literature a Few Years Ago and So That Piqued My Interest How About You? The book that I have in mind when I say this is Too Loud a Solitude.

It's this shimmering slim slice of literary magic that 'brought' me here, if anything did, which I sort doubt that anything did, but. It is a rarity in that it's just as good as the first time I read it--and so rich, so newly textured by four months in Prague, the only city that could have produced this book, bleeding its own oracular mystery out in ink.

So, like any good protagonist, I've reached back into the prologue and drawn out a neat, golden thread of continuity and sewn everything up, right at the end.

I like that. It's a nice way of ending a story. A very nice way.

Day One Hundred Thirteen, in Which Things (Soon) Fall Apart

I've been part of social groups a hair away from dissolution before: the end of elementary school; the end of summer camp; the end of high school; a friend group (or five) held together by a set of relationships become newly tenuous.

But: I've never been in social group so aware of its own impending disintegration. We're no longer sufficiently callow, maybe. So, this, this: this fairly homogeneous group of 94 (give, take) students from 30 or so different colleges. Our social graph has a strange destiny: mesa. A sharp uptick four months ago, a plateau in which the only undulations are slight, those of formulaic social recalibration, and then a searing plunge, hardly tempered by faint promises of reconciliation and quixotic Facebooking. The precipice doesn't come until next week, but there's a palpable sensation of cessation, punctuated like the tick, tick, tick of an ascending roller-coaster. It slips beneath the pregamed dancing and smeary conversation the way dark matter pirouettes behind regular matter, changing the way galaxies rotate and bending light from distant stars. Or, to shift cosmological metaphors, background radiation: It's not something anyone thinks or talks about on the daily, but turn your rabbit ears between the channels and try to tell me there's no static. I imagine it sort of like a group of houseguests who can see that, yeah, the house is on fire, sure, but the drapes haven't even caught yet so here's another Gaga track. That's not to suggest we should all run out of the house, sooty and hysterical, and stand on the lawn and watch it burn and go home and listen to The Shins: I'm not Paul Revere, here. To go out in my tricorne and cry "THE END IS COMING" is about as prophetic as shouting "THIS IS THE OLDEST WE'VE EVER BEEN" or "IN FOUR YEARS, A MAJORITY OF US WILL BE MARRIED."

We know. Don't remind us. The carpet's barely smoldering, anyway.