NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

I know it’s Moscow, but this video of Gilbert Becaud’s Natalie,

recalled a very short story I wrote several years ago, which I here recall from a previous post:

Inside Prague by Nigel Beale

A PR executive in his forties goes to Prague with his 18 year old daughter to finalize a real estate transaction. Whilst there he takes a "Kafka" walking tour of the old city. He shows up at the allotted time and, to his surprise, finds himself alone with a beautiful young guide. They start walking. He feels everything felt on a first date. She talks about Kafka’s early life, pointing to the house at Karpfensgasse and Maiselgasse where he is said to have been born, mentioning that his mother died when he was very young.

This the executive knows to be untrue. Julie Lowy died in 1934, ten years after her Franz’s death.

They walk through narrow side streets together and stop at a small church. No one is near. It is quiet. His watery legs float in air that is skin temperature, unsure of where they end and it begins. She stares into his eyes and starts talking about herself. Her studies at Charles University, her childhood in the surrounding countryside, the corruption of local police and her desire to leave the country.

She says she has her own apartment. He observes her lips.

Why is she sharing these personal stories?

After a time they move on. She points out various buildings, architectural features, a fish. Given her error, the man isn’t sure he can believe anything she says.

They return to the Old Town Square where the tour began, to stand facing each other, closer perhaps than propriety warranted. She gazes again into his eyes and asks if he has anymore questions. He knows what he wants to say. He doesn’t want her to leave, but only shakes his head. She turns and slowly walks away. He watches her shapely back, her lithe movement. There is a black hole filled with friction inside him. Bleeding, he makes his way back to the restaurant where his daughter awaits.

Copyright Nigel Beale 2006

***

Here are a few apt quotes from Franz Kafka:

"Love is like a knife with which we explore ourselves."

"The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demonic or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner"

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us…We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"If I felt in love, I would be in a world in which I could not live."

This from Contemporary Writers: " Zoe Heller was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford University and Columbia University, New York.  She is a journalist who, after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature writer for The Independent.  She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph and earned the title ‘Columnist of the Year’ in 2002. She is the author of two novels: Everything You Know (2000), a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller, and Notes on a Scandal (2003) which tells the story of an affair between a high school teacher and her student through the eyes of the teacher’s supposed friend, Barbara Covett. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for fiction, and was recently released as a feature film, starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench."

We met recently in Ottawa to talk, ‘companionably’ about her latest novel The Believers.

Please listen here:

 

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Scott Esposito encourages us to read Alejo Carpentier.

From The Big Book of Canadian Trivia by Mark Kearney and Randy Ray (www.triviaguys.com) 

ET online

Not sure if this is the work of some Jackson family-hired spin-doctor cum hagiographer, but here from Carolyn Kellog in the L.A. Times:

 "When news broke in early 2009 of Michael Jackson’s return to Los Angeles, it was not via reports of him being spotted dining at the Ivy or dancing at the hottest new Hollywood club but book-shopping in Santa Monica.
"He was a longtime and valued customer," a store representative of art and architecture bookstore Hennessey + Ingalls said Thursday. "We’ll miss him."
"If Jackson’s bookstore appearance surprised his pop fans, it was nothing new for booksellers. A few years ago, Doug Dutton, proprietor of then-popular Dutton’s Books in Brentwood, was at a dinner with people from Book Soup, Skylight and other area bookstores.

"Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in their store," Dutton said by phone Thursday, "And everybody said he’d shopped in their store too…He loved the poetry section," Dave Dutton said as Dirk chimed in that Ralph Waldo Emerson was Jackson’s favorite. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics."

…I’ll play along for now with this account of how Emerson dealt with death, from Stephen Barnes (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.