> Open Letter Series
> Croatian author
> essays
> "A Global view of the World" - "It is true that we all mull over the same images, information and virtuality, but each of us runs our own little life in our own way. There may be relief in those moments of exhaustion, melancholy, or passing dullness, when there is a brief lapse of the future projection or a refusal to think about it. Perhaps the unadapted heart of the world has been worn down by speed. The heart of the world is very old, while speed is new and young. Herein may lie the answer to the momentary global reluctance to be seen."
> "Flea Market" - "The flea market is a powerful metaphor for a world with no borders. People rub shoulders at flea markets who would have no occasion, otherwise to meet."
"The flea market is a place of disillusion, but also of solace, much like a cemetery."
"Our things earn the right to an anonymous ironic immortality."
> "A Suitcase" - "The only way exiles are able to leave trauma behind is not to leave it at all, but to live it as a permanent state, to turn their waiting room into a cheery ideology oaf life, to live the schizophrenia of exile as the norm of normalcy and to revere only one a God: the Suitcase! "
> "The Basement" - his friends spent most of their time in their bed, an " up yours to America, to the ideology of the system, although the system was oblivious of their revolt."' then they built a basement to loll on....underground, still subversive
> "A Right to Misery" - discusses various cultural norms for socialization....the Yugoslavs, her people, want the right to complain, pay keeners to wail at funerals,they are "cuttlefish in human form: you have only to touch them, and they emit a black cloud."
> "Stereotypes" - "the most tenacious type of mental weed"
> "Ostalgia" - the craving for all things Eastern Bloc........
> "The Tamils" - a metaphor of the more things change the more they stay the same
> this book reminds me of Pessoa' book.....there is so much in every line....I started writing them down but cannot keep up without losing the rhythm of the essays.....brilliant! Funny, smart, insightful.
> each section has an epigraph consisting of quotes from "The Golden Calf"......need to bump it up on my TBR pile!
> "Birdhouse"......."Never buy a birdhouse if you have no tree to hang it from".......metaphor for the permanent home she does not have
> "Gardening" - "A garden is like a fingerprint, like the palm of a hand from which the soul of its owner can be divined."....... Homelessness theme again
> "My Hometown".....likens it in the 1950s to America....kids being, teens being teens....big difference....she did not look back after leaving
> "aging - The New Craze"...........cosmetic denial v. Suicide from despair....America v. Croatia
>"Ah, That Rhetoric!......."....we live in a market-based world, there is nothing left which exists for itself alone, not even at the private level of life."
> "Little Dog, Big Bite".........."I have observed a distinct preference among Americans for tall elected officials. As soon as they stray and choose someone shorter, the troubles begin."
"Little nations make noise, while large nations make sense."
> "Time and Space"...."The inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia were wanderers, vagabonds, tourists, and seafarers......Something, however, is out of kilter when it comes to their sense of time. Besides time there is another thing which bugs my fellow countrymen: their place in the world."
> What must it be like to call your home "the former" anything?
> "Food is both a mute language of love, and a gesture of personal freedom."
> "History and Culture"....."Tings would be simpler if the people who did all this (killing) we willing to agree that they had been killing for the sake of killing, destroying for the sake of destroying, torching for the sake of torching. That , of course, will not happen. History and culture are the most reliable 'banks' for laundering a dirty conscience.........part and parcel of what is known as the national collective identity.....only figments of the collective imagination."
> "Shit"..."A normal person cannot help but wonder how - with all the cards stacked against them - mys countrymen have survived at all. Yet, survive they do. The only way this specimen of humankind manages is by turning its every defeat into a victory. My countrymen do that
Time and time again. They have no choice.
> "Sobs"...the neighborhood madwoman...I have been thinking that maybe this woman has. Een condemned to serve as the accountant for wold pain. Maybe every night she registers in an invisible ledger all the pain that has happened in the world, and in the morning she publishes aloud all that she had written down. Maybe she is a crazy woman, nothing more, so she was able to take upon herself a job no one else would do."
> "The Heart"...This, it seems, is the source of the problem...a reversal of concepts. Without even realizing that the notion of old-fashioned justice has vanished from the stage of mass culture, and from everyday life, yet aware that something key is missing, people have replaced the more exacting and complex concept of justice with the easier, softer, and more elastic concept of the heart."
> "Identity"...For the first time it occurred to me why people hold on to this
identity of theirs so fiercely...precisely because they know that identities can be changed. That is why a new word should be circulated: integrity."
> "Happiness"..."Happy people do not look at their watches."
> "That iconography--the petrol station and the mosque--precisely encapsulates the essence of life in the gray urban ring that encircles the museum heart of Amsterdam."
> "Subversion flourishes in those places where the bans are the strongest."
> "Lomanstraat is my favorite street. Whenever I look at that green vault, so much like the vaulted arch of a cathedral, my back begins itching, right between my shoulder blades, and I raise both my arms slowly like wings. And then, with my arms raised, I lift my gaze up to the green heavens. And I am not alone. Once I saw a man, his arms raised and his head flung back, his gaze fixed upwards, staggering awkwardly towards me."
> Rabbit Park - "...If the visitor trots after the rabbit, she'll journey into another, parallel Amsterdam, into a city within a city, which is reflected like a hologram on the face of the first Amsterdam. No one knows for sure how many parallel cities there are hidden inside Amsterdam. No one, apparently, has counted."
> "In other words, what places of worship are for many people, the marketplace is for me."
> "I hardly know, sir, at present, at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then...".
> "What is European about European Literature?"....commentary on literary identity and the three audiences for every writer.....1) local audience 2)
> does having a Dutch passport change author from Croat to Dutch author?
> "Globalization (another word for American cultural imperialization)worries the culture of the EU."
> So, in answer to the question of what would be "European" in the European literatures, I say: it is Mr. Bhattacharya, an Indian man born in Calcutta, who lives in New York and writes about Europe."
> new literary zone......"transnational literature"
> "The writers who are writing the new literatures have mostly been dislocated from their original environments. They do not feel "at home" in the countries where they live, nor do they dream of returning to the countries from which they have fled......they are building their own place, a third cultural zone, a 'third geography'."
> Themes of transnational literature: "archiving ethnic, linguistic, and national memory; dislocation and displacement; cultural shifts and translation and transplantation of culture; the narratives of remembrance, bilingualism or multilingualism, exile,etc - constantly mutate, change, multiply, and overlay their meanings in an uninterrupted process of interaction."
> "So, fellow writers, let us rise to the challenges of capital and -- physics! Because the only ones who rely today on metaphysics, as an alibi for what they do, are - criminals."
> "In the zones of transition it is the mental landscape, the people, who have changed the most. The accelerated dynamic of change, adaptation, positioning, denial of the past, and much more - defy the imagination."
> on forced relocation....."Though they keep repeating that they are finally masters on their own land, their insistence on repeating this phrase signals that with each repetition they have to persuade themselves of it anew."
> "All God's creatures are potential microphones for God, but if God were to use everyone as a microphone, things would end up like that children's game of 'telephone'. That is why God chooses only the best microphones."....on prophets
> Vocab:
> three requirements of a prophet's message: 1) simple & coherent 2) truthful 3)compilatory, in line with accumulated wisdom of humanity
> author cites Paulo Coelho as qualifying for "a saint, a prophet, a writer, a missionary, a benefactor, a statesman without a state, and a global guru
> "At a symbolic level, memoirs are also a kind of purchase of indulgences."
> Vocab: syncretism: the combination of different forms of belief or practice, the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms
>Vocab: hadit ? not in dictionary.....Croatian word?
> Author talks about "democritatorships".....she has to "fight for the rights I had enjoyed freely in the communist dictatorship"....gender equality, reproductive choice, not to attend religious instruction classes, not to wear a cross around my neck, not to declare my nationality, not to hate my neighbour, the right to say out loud that thous I may not have been living in the glow of democratic fireworks, life was not so gloomy either
> young people, the "sated children of democracy...are emptied of all ideology but the ideology of success."......from them "an obedient army may one day emerge, an army that will place itself in the service of a future manipulator. And just an ordinary manipulator will suffice. There will be no need for a dictator."
> on her own culture....."It was a fact that the finest part of that culture was born of its defiance of communism, split into the 'official' and the 'underground' sides."
> "Home for me, is where I am allowed to be a foreigner."
> author may not know the works of the local author, but "when push comes to shove I'll know, and I'll know what to do." political upheaval
>Title: author quotes Emily Dickinson..."I am a nobody, Who are you?".........clearly the author sees self as a nobody, hence this collection is a treatise on the form and function of a nobody's home.....
> "And you, locals, be kind to foreigners, because without them you wouldn't know that you are -- locals."
> LibraryThing Review: This is a collection of essays from an author who considers herself to be a "nobody", and the collection is a treatise on what a nobody's home is like. Ugresic, from the former Yugoslavia writes intelligently, with healthy doses of humor, cynicism, and poignancy. I am left with a powerful feeling of sorrow. Sorrow for what? I am not entirely certain. Perhaps I feel sorrow for: exiles, locals, foreigners, people whose birthplace is now referred to starting with the word, "former". Major themes: exile, ethnic identity, cultural identity, being a foreigner, the new "transnational" literature.....and so much more.
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