ONE MAGAZINE: Seeking Dada in Prague

29 May. Press conference. I slide my chair a few inches to the right, to get a better glimpse of the speaker. How dare I? Quiet. Speakers. Speaking. The press. With the slide comes the toppling of my glass bottle of sparkling spring water, which clanks, clinks, clunks against the base of the chrome 70s style chair next to mine. The water audibly sparkles and makes its fizzy way across the carpet of Hotel Josef. The room stops for a second. No one runs over with a towel, thank God. I set the bottle upright and continue my notes. The Czechs aren’t fazed. No shame. Mr. Michael March, President of the Prague Writers’ Festival continues to address roomful of journalists: “Literature is a way of thinking, art lets the truth originate – that’s what we do at our festival.” Looking around the room, he says, “I hope you’re taking notes...” DADA begins.

The morning progresses. I start to feel like I’m being infused with a spiritual heroin. Alert, relaxed, engaged. Mr. March and his wife, along with the translators, start building the festival story: DADA. They speak of Samuel Rosenstock and Tristan Tzara and thought that begins in the mouth. Of millions in arts funding that go to film, tiny percentages that make it to literature, and the reserves that don’t make it anywhere because of a lack of bureaucrats to distribute it. They speak in two languages. The translators switch back and forth. I understand the English, create images in my mind with the Czech. The discussion moves to the lost art of Czech Dada, and how it wasn’t written about after 1968; then onto the roots of Dada, which reach into the rituals of Romanian Judaism.

Mr. March endeavors to distinguish business culture from real culture, and how “the world has too much money, and war is its greatest consumer.” I am captivated, but notice only one woman, in the chair ahead of me taking good notes until March suddenly remarks, “Anybody who writes about the festival gets paid a thousand dollars”. Two chuckles follow from the statues filling the room, one after the statement, another after the Czech translation.

I look around the room that sits only a few blocks from the Jewish ghetto where most souls end in 1944. In the middle of a city crushed by an iron fist until 1989, now doing battle with open markets, golden arches and the ongoing invasion of bourgeoisie tourists. I am in heaven. DADA.

3 June. Afternoon. Galerie Sme!ky. Official opening exhibition. Old Dada, new dada, m’dada. Mr. Tzara’s premeditation describes the scene: “Then came the great Ambassadors of sentiment and exclaimed historically in chorus, psychology psychology heehee, Science Science Science...” I inch through the crowded showroom, intimidated by a news crew that seems to be following me. I watch curious faces scroll the walls of printed pieces and video clips of text superimposed over speaking actors — Dialogue with Comrade Ceaucescu.

The room is dense with people and I am unable to stand still, so I make my way down to the lower floor where there is an autographed copy of a book entitled Dada displayed in a tall glass case. Ludvík Kundera’s Dada. I notice a single strand of hair caught in the pages and hanging down the back of the stand holding the book. I take a photograph or two. There is an anxious anticipation in the air — something needs to happen. The mayor of Prague is scheduled to speak. Is that to be the official happen? Isn’t it already happening? I’m not sure.

I finally become overwhelmed and make an escape to the safety of the humid afternoon street. A small crowd is gathered on Wenceslas Square, just near the spot where Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest the brutal communist regime in 1969, when I was 3. He was 21. The gathering is of Chinese immigrants protesting the brutal communist regime in China. A Czech man is reading a manifesto in English. A woman hands me a flyer that points out that it is the 18th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. To my left, I notice tourists flocking under the golden arches. A further pivot to the left reveals more imported fast foods, electronics, gadgets and gifts. The Chinese protestors politely penetrate the traffic with their flyers. Dada.

3 June. Evening. Theatre Minor. Standing room only. Non-violence versus Terrorism. The stage is set with red roses and a long, curving line of books, stood up by their spines, that wind around the entire stage in front of two stands of computers. A wooden tree stump with a hand axe to the left, computers to the right. The animated credits start to roll on a giant screen to music preceding an animated Hans Arp and his discus eye moving through a black and white Prague while Bowie sings about being heroes. Then a man comes out with a long, wooden 19th century fishing rod and pushes the first book and one by one they become dominoes of pulp, knocking each other down. Jumbled lyrics resonate in my head ...nothing, can keep us together, heroes, just for one day... Another man comes out with a Voltairian Tin Man outfit and retrieves the hand axe, begins chopping a book and joins the cabaret...just for one day. A female dancer enters and commands the entirety of the stage. Two men in black activate the computers and suddenly the dancers movements are awash with color – vibrant reds, virile purples, pungent greens - and projected, in delay behind on the screen.

Enter E. L. Doctorow, Aleksandar Hemon, Gary Snyder, A.B. Yehoshua and Michael March. The Art of Conversation. The audience seems as anxious as I am. Perhaps the audience is also feeling a tinge of Jacques Barzun – “The finest achievement of human society and its rarest pleasure is conversation.” We’re ready. Will there be, in the words of Hugo Ball, some “utter nonsense aimed at a public all too complacent about a senseless war?” Will Mr. March get his conversation?

Mr. Hemon questions the topic — “what do a group of writers know, in the context of literature, about terrorism?” Mr. Yehoshua discusses the definition of terrorism and a terrorist — a secret operation and operator in contrast to an organized military operation — and even in this light he adds that even Hezbollah was not a terrorist group. I begin to ponder why corporations aren’t on the international terrorism lists. Mr. Doctorow argues that literature today does not have followers, but the literature of the Bronze Age — the Bible, Quoran, Torah — has followers. Mr. Snyder offers that “non-violence has lost a lot of its luster, it doesn’t have the utilitarian effect it once did.” I pay attention to the two pending reactions, first English, then Czech. I keep an open mind, although my brain is sizzling from the hot weather, the Czech phrases I am trying to learn, my sore feet and something I desperately wanted to hear. At this point I am feeling the vibe of Emmy Hennings, and waiting for a ‘final adventure’. As the conversation draws to a natural conclusion, I’m not sure if I got it.

As I step outside and toward a street named Vodi!kova, I decide to go to a late-night performance of a play over the river in Malá Strana to clear my head. Brecht’s The Exception and The Rule. I’d seen it once before, and had been delighted with a young Czech actor named Jakub Albrecht who carried the show. The play was part of a festival sponsored by expat Brits and Americans, and to my knowledge, Jakub was the only Czech participating as an actor.

Final performance. I get there just in time and take a seat in the third row. I notice two well-dressed ladies in the front row, one in a gold pantsuit and the other in black dress trousers, and a black and white print jacket. They’re easily fifty something years old. As the play gets underway, the two women begin to chatter. After a while the audience gets annoyed, as do the actors, visibly. One man in the row just behind taps them on the shoulder and asks them to quiet. After a while I get annoyed and involuntarily let out a blood curling ssssh! A few minutes later I want to crawl under my chair when I realize that the women were Czech — probably the only two to attend the entire expat festival — and were talking because one was translating for the other.

Afterwards, the audience aggressively attacks them with how dare you’s. One man launches into a boisterous etiquette lecture, and looks around the room for support. He doesn’t seem to realize that only one of the ladies understands the slurry of superiority emanating from his soapbox. The ladies leave shouting back, clutching each other for support.

Outside the theatre, I decide to break through any lingering angry expats, and apologize for my ‘shush’. I don’t know why I felt the need — they could’ve easily sat in back and spared the room a lot of hassle. For me, it has something to do with the earlier conversation and terrorism and the fact that George Bush was on his way to Prague to try to strong arm the Czech people into supporting his war machine. The ladies and I have a conversation. Dada.

4 June. Morning. Hotel Josef. A conversation with Aleksandar Hemon. I’d requested an interview at a press conference and hurriedly read the guts of two of his books, and a literary supplement. I figured this man from Sarajevo who’d been everything from a door-to-door canvasser for Greenpeace to author would either enlighten or attempt to eat me alive. Some light began shining as we spoke of the preceding evening’s conversation. What I find is a man who readily presents a differentiation between his concerns, like global warming, and his abilities to speak on the subjects. He has my attention.

Hemon is a very solid man in stature, and I’ve only seen him in black or darker colors. He sits properly in his chair, and I ask him about the art of the conversation from the preceding night. “Well, you have authors, who are somehow automatically people of authority, on everything—I can talk about freedom all fucking night.” With this I am reassured he is not going to dine on my naiveté, and I am confident to lean in closer to absorb each detail more accurately, and minimize the background noise from the busy hotel lobby.

“There is a hyper-inflation of opinions today—anyone who can put together a blog prints and writes opinions—there’s no shortage of opinions, and opinions are non-binding, and they have no impact—they sort of float on the surface of things—if anything I say or do can have an impact, it’s probably in a book.” He continues to articulate how, unfortunately art, in contemporary terms, has to be a commodity, and how anything considered subversive or avant-garde is the easiest to commodify. He respects people who self-publish, but he wants to reach the widest possible audience, and doesn’t know how to solve the conundrum. Neither do I.

Susan Sontag tried to tackle some of this in one of her last essays. “On the one hand, we have...the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities...is designed to render obsolete the novelist’s prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.” Dada.

4 June. Afternoon. Talk. Dada-East; Czech Dada. I arrive late for Tom Sanqvist’s part, only to hear him explain that ‘Tzara’, chosen name of Samuel Rosenstock, means ‘misery’ in Yiddish. Michael March encourages everyone to approach Tom with questions for the remainder of the festival — everyone is approachable at this festival. I consider this directness an act of civil disobedience in a world of anonymous corporate structures.

Ludvík Kundera and Miloslav Topinka take the stage, then Mr. Kundera literally takes the stage. At this point I don’t know that Mr. Kundera was locked out of Charles University by the Nazis and forced to work in the regime; or that he has written 30 plays. He is, however, the author of the book I found under glass with the single strand of hair draping from it at Galerie Sme!ky exhibition.

What I witness is an old-school, precisely prepared lecture and a man determined to see it through. At eighty-seven, he no longer needs permission. In festivals and conferences, even the audience eventually becomes attuned to the time constraints involved — but not Mr. Kundera. He launches into a written lecture that lasts well beyond whatever time allotment he was given. The English translations echo through my headset and in an undercurrent across the room. He speaks, it is spoken.

I stop taking notes. I have become entranced with this man, sitting at the end of a table, reading page after page of his preparation through yesterday’s horn-rimmed glasses. In his tenacity he is either unaware or unconcerned that his fellow panelist is sitting just opposite, shuffling through his papers, with nothing to do but whisper to the host, who has now come onstage to acknowledge the overrun of at least thirty minutes. The vibrational consensus of the entire theatre is that we, someone, all of us are, about to give birth.

I don’t remember anything, except the determined sound of his baritone voice, and my imagining him a great survivor of communism. Perhaps this is his intent, a channeling of Hugo Ball: “Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself.” The words take on an abstract color and spatial significance; I am lost. Thank God.

4 June. Evening. Thought begins in the mouth. A clerical error has credited Susan Sontag with Tzara’s statement on the projection behind the writers. Doctorow, Grunberg, Stefoi and Jungk. Dada.

I imagine a spirited conversation, one that Mr. March, the moderator, has been hinting at since the first press conference event. Business culture versus real culture. How about some of that rage against an empty bourgeois that has sanctioned a destructive war? The panel convenes, the audience – younger than the previous night – is ready, the conversation begins. March: “If thought begins in the mouth, where does it end?”

Mr. Doctorow makes some observations on his idea of consensual reality. Mr. Jungk speaks about the solitary act of writing, and whether or not a novel should have a purpose. Mr. March offers an Orwell quote to further stimulate the conversation. Mr. Grunberg describes his process of getting up around 9:30 in the morning, writing until lunch, having a nap, and then continuing through a given day. I begin to squirm with anticipation that someone will soon speak Dada. The audience begins getting fidgety, impatient; almost brimming over the fourth wall, when Elena Stefoi reads from Tristan Tzara’s first manifesto, and speaks of the origination of the word – in the mouth of her mother, her first book, in her Romanian village among Judaism, where “the loneliness is similar to happiness”. Mr. Doctorow ventures into an idea of “stage-managed individualism”. Mr. March suggests the idea of a generation gap. The audience sighs, some of the panelists attack the question. But...that’s as far as we get. I want to crawl out of my skin and smear some of the roses across the carpet beneath their feet. But not tonight. No Dada.

When an allowance is made for questions, a hostile English accent from a short blonde woman, dressed in denim trousers and cotton shirt, sitting up in the high seats, admonishes March for using quotations. Another very tall young man further up behind me with a dark complexion and long Afro hair suggests that the panel is “the enemy of Dada.” No one responds except Stefoi, to offer, “Dada has no friends or enemies.” I leave with a certain, incomplete feeling.

5 June. 11AM. I have an appointment to speak with Michael March after the regular press conference. I am acquainted with him through my mentor in New York, academic Mary Folliet, so I hope for a conversation rather than interview. I am required to wait as Michael finishes chats with press and authors who linger from the conference — which I certainly do not mind because uniquely, he has encouraged interaction at all levels throughout the festival. This is the town that said no to Madonna and Luis Vuitton after all — no ivory towers or celebrities here.

Finally, March and I are alone, and don’t even get properly seated before simultaneously issuing the word frustrated. He asks me why I am frustrated. I skirt the question. I ask him why he’s frustrated. “The audiences are on top of the conversation rather than inside the conversation...the idea is to bring them inside... for the space of the conversation; for the metabolism, for the philosophy, for the history — the historical references of the conversation and for the expression as a literary expression...for the literary expression to be a very natural human expression and for it to be recognized, absorbed and then acted upon. Of course none of those things happened.”

I ask about his struggle to bring the audience inside the conversation — “Kafka’s first short story, unpublished in his lifetime, was a description of the struggle...an emotional struggle to actually face, not only the past, but...very, very directly the present.” I am captivated for the next half hour. Our conversation takes many turns, March’s reflections inspirit the details.

Culture: “...business culture, business disguised as culture... the eclipse of culture by business so that it’s a way of thinking that culture becomes the business of thinking, a way of thinking, a way of marketing, and this was, ironically used by the Dadaists against the war, against this ancient, feudal way of thinking... profits are now the prophets. And we must attack this way of thinking and return to an individual way of thinking, a mismanaged thinking, a mismanaged individualism, in order to stop the intrusion of business culture on our lives.”

Younger audience: “Each generation has a way of thinking, a process of thinking, we were attacking the present process of thinking... perhaps they feel I have no right to criticize, but I have every right to criticize, a parental right to criticize ... a younger generation, who in 1968 in a commercial sense, defeated the older generation, and the commercial processors understood this, and said Ah, lets make ...them indentured servants, servants through making them indebted to us through the educational systems in America...we try to point this out and also point out the question of nationalism, the Dadaists are against nationalism, nationalism has destroyed Europe and it’s on the verge of infecting America.”

Creative freedom: “Poetry is the act of becoming free as well as literature...but with that is the recognition of any work and the absorption of the work in society has a social reality, now the totalitarian regimes took the books and burned them, destroyed the culture and afterwards, human beings.”

Elena Stefoi as Dadaist: “Elena would talk about it, not because she’s Romanian in the sense of sympathizing with Dada, she understood what I was saying because she lived in the totalitarian regime and doesn’t have the naiveté of the others with the exception of Doctorow...”

On the night before: “Orwell stated, by the year 2050 there would be no word for freedom. The writers last night, the audience last night didn’t wish to face this reality. They believe that they are perpetually free.”

5 June. Afternoon. I decide to skip the festival event because a few days earlier, I met a teaching assistant who invited me to observe an international class of young, 8 to 12 year old writers. I chose to make the trip, well outside the city centre, to see what the future of writing might look like. Dada, perhaps? I meet all kinds of kids: Czech, British, South African and others, who dress like kids dress, wiggle like kids wiggle and chatter endlessly. One girl presents colorful drawings of monsters, while another shares a notebook of carefully penciled prose. The South African boy shows me his piece for the day, as well as a sneak peek into his almost finished novel.

I prepare myself for the possibility that one of these young writers might offer me a business card or mention his agent. Two boys from Holland, sitting together, inform me that they’ll not be doing any work because they don’t want me to see what they might do. Dada alive, dada well.

6 June. Hotel Josef. I have lunch with Adrian Notz, a director at the original Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. We’re chatting about the current state of the house of Dada, sponsorship, money, art. A friend comes in and says the food we’re having looks better than what they’d just had at one of the embassies.

A plump couple comes through the front door with a plump child. I’m sure they’re British. They look much the same as they did two days before, when I watched a hotel manager intercept them at the door, swiftly explain that there’d been an overbooking, and that they’d been transferred to a partner hotel. They didn’t really fit in with all of us with our laptop computers and notepads and topics. The plump child starts screaming and running around. The mother chases him. I imagine what they could possibly want in this kind of place. The mother looks at me as if to say who are you people?

6 June. Afternoon talk, The Lost Art of Czech Dada – another one with Mr. Kundera except that this time, his fellow panelists enjoy an equal participation, except when Mr. Kundera begins reading some Hans Arp poems. The translators come over the earphones and explain they cannot translate the poems, as they had no notice of them. I enjoy the shape of the words. At the end, Notz comments, “we didn’t talk about the lost art of Czech Dada, we got lost in the art of Czech Dada.” I’ve taken a liking to Kundera. Outside the Municipal Library, I help Mr. March’s wife, Vlasta, take down the large festival posters.

6 June. Last evening of the festival. Stefoi, Hemon and Doctorow read from their work. I’m invigorated and tired. Luminal. A young dancer dressed in a white feathery hat, knee-boots and vest takes the stage holding a metal wind-up clock and declares: “TRI MINUTA!” She begins turning in place, round and round, as two other dancers wearing dark leotards leap, run and kick back and forth across the stage which is washed in forest green light. Václav, one of Mr. March’s administrators, enters wearing a business suit and brown shoes, and proceeds to move, deter, and place the dancers around the stage. The alarm clock goes off and all action stops. “Tri Minuta,” the feathered dancer announces one final, softer time. Everyone leaves the stage.

Vlasta March, Vice-President of the festival appears from the side with a microphone, thanks everyone and says in Czech, “`The seventeenth Prague Writers’ Festival is now in the past.” I see Mr. March in the foyer, we chat a moment, then he hands me three business cards and tells me to come by the office on Friday.

Friday. 8 June. Just as Vlasta is on her way out, I arrive at Mr. March’s office. There, inside the street-level entranceway of Národní 37, I’d accidentally stepped in freshly poured cement. Gingerly, I enter the reception area trying to make sure I’ve properly cleaned my shoes. The office smells of fresh carpet and the sun reflects from its fresh white walls. A bright blue sofa and wooden bookshelves, strategically placed desks and a coffee table holding the remnants of the 17th Prague Writers’ Festival fill the space. Vlasta gives me a plastic bottle of sparkling mineral water, some expensive art books on Dada and shows me to a seat on the couch, where I sit and read, waiting for Michael to arrive.

A while later he comes in, says hello, meticulously rearranges some picture frames on a windowsill into a certain order and takes a chair to my right. We begin what will be another lengthy conversation and rare pleasure. He expresses frustration with members of the press, whom he’d carefully attended to every morning of the festival. As it turned out, some journalists only focused on trivial details, such as a writer being fifteen minutes late to an event, instead of writing about the content of the event itself — all of which reminds me of a Brecht quote March mentioned in our initial conversation: “Whoever’s laughing hasn’t heard the latest news.”

I suggest completely ignoring the press next year, and perhaps they would become hungry for the whole story, like the young people at the talk a few nights before. Perhaps, like a line in one of March’s poems, things might work creatively, differently, if and when the reverse is true. But on the other hand, there’s the Tzara assertion that Dada is a state if mind, and if this is so, comes the question: can Dada ever be reported?

Yes, of course.

No.

Dada.