Language, Money, Food By some miraculous linguistic convergence, the Hungarian farewell, Szia, and the American parting, "See ya" are not only homophonic, they are homonymic — they mean the same thing (More or less: Szia can also be used as a greeting, as can Hello. Hungarians say "hello" like Hawaiians say "aloha"). Imagine that the […]

A Little Blue Flag for Europe We spent May Day — a big holiday in Hungary, as in much of the rest of Europe — down in the southern city of Pécs. May Day was also the date of what has been rather awkwardly called the “EU Enlargement.” (Could another term have been devised? Does […]

The Duncan Coat Not long before we left Chicago, Margaret Sloan gave me a Harris Tweed blazer that had belonged to Robert Duncan. She had been keeping it for years, since the time Duncan had passed away in 1988. Larry Casalino, her husband, had been Duncan’s physician (& Jess’s too); but the jacket didn’t quite […]

Auf Wiedersehen Wien On April 1, we drove in a rented Skoda stationwagon (they call them “kombis” over here), packed to its rafters with all our suitcases, the fold-up stroller positioned between Rebecca’s legs, the only free space left, from Vienna to Budapest. Any move makes me anxious; traversing an international border in such a […]

The following passages, taken from my notebooks, were written while I was working on Columns and Powers, the second and third volumes of Track. I am grateful to Peter O’Leary, who convinced me that they might be of interest. I hope that Peter is right. # 10/7/99 Track is a series of controlled discontinuities, the […]

Last week, my folks & my brother Pat came into Vienna for a couple of days. We visited some of the museums — the amazing new Leopold Museum & the newly refurbished Albertina — scarfed down some käsekrainers, & got jittery on $4 cups of coffee (it’s the going rate these days, thanks to the […]

Bemerkungen The doors to the Streetcars & the U-Bahns have to be opened manually; that is, you have to pull a lever or push a button. They won’t open automatically at every stop. There’s a situation on public transportation in which older women, usually laden with bags of stuff, gruffly push their way to the […]

The tape was cued to a suite, the suite was skewed from a tremor in the ground, the ground was pried from a landfill near the quarry, the quarry hunted for a strand of species not in language, language is in advancement of itself, itself a loop but not tape that accrues meanings as it […]