For those who listen to books more than read them, the version of the Ballad of the Whiskey Robber on Audible is performed by an ensemble cast including Eric Bogosian, Dmitri Martin, and Tommy Ramone.
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Matt Welch
You mentioned Tom Stoppard. I saw his play "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead" at the Young Vic in London in 1974. I was 10. And it was a fantastic play.
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Matt Welch
There's a big biography of Stoppard I'm working through. He's living such a rich and artistic life. I believe the story goes that he approached Hermione Lee at a party! Last summer, I saw Rough Crossing at American Players Theater in rural Wisconsin. It was brilliant!
My first exposure to Stoppard: seeing R&C performed in oral interp competitions circa 1992 in rural South Dakota. That movie reached EVERYWHERE! Second exposure: Shakespeare in Love, which I didn't get at the time, but now I think I'd love.
This is a subject that fascinates me and there's a few books I love:
1. Between East and West by Anne Applebaum, a brilliant travelogue through Eastern Europe from the early Nineties.
2. Revolution 1989: the Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebesteyn is a very readable journalistic history
And for a much broader travelogue/history of Poland, I can't recommend strongly enough A Country in the Moon by Michael Moran, an Australian who moved to Poland in the early Nineties and brilliantly captures the strangeness of those early years after communism. But it's also a sweeping, fascinating history of the country. I have read it at least three times.
It's a long (and super fascinating) story, but he -- like a lot of Czechs! -- was initially an enthusiastic commie after WW2. And, like a lot of Czechs, this enthusiasm faded. But he had pretty much a lifelong feud with Havel, in part over having been previously gullible, in part over being successful abroad after 1968 while Havel & the Chartists suffered at home, in part because he eventually abandoned writing in Czech. It is also very complicated, all the moreso since Unbearable Lightness of Being is arguably the most important international fiction that memorialized the Czechs' plight at the hands of the Communists.
I imagine there's a strongly autobiographical element to Kundera's novel Life is Elsewhere, about a self-absorbed poet who becomes a party loyalist. Brilliant book.
According to the state-funded Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ratted out an anti-communist spy working against the Soviet-backed government in Czechoslovakia. As the New York Times reports, the agent was arrested, "narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine."Kundera denied the charges. (Perhaps, in light of these charges, it is worth revisiting Kundera's 1969 debate with Vaclav Havel, in which he accuses the playwrite and dissident of "moral exhibitionism.")
For those who listen to books more than read them, the version of the Ballad of the Whiskey Robber on Audible is performed by an ensemble cast including Eric Bogosian, Dmitri Martin, and Tommy Ramone.
The comedian Dmitri Martin?
The punk-rock drummer Tommy Ramone?
YouTube also has a lot of audiobooks free, and if you know how to download as a .mp3 then you can put on phone or in car without paying for YouTube+
Check your online library as well. The same version is available on mine for free.
Why hasn't Matt mentioned he lived in Central Europe on the pod before?
Frantically checks bingo card
You mentioned Tom Stoppard. I saw his play "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead" at the Young Vic in London in 1974. I was 10. And it was a fantastic play.
There's a big biography of Stoppard I'm working through. He's living such a rich and artistic life. I believe the story goes that he approached Hermione Lee at a party! Last summer, I saw Rough Crossing at American Players Theater in rural Wisconsin. It was brilliant!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/28/magazine/tom-stoppard-interview.html?searchResultPosition=1
My first exposure to Stoppard: seeing R&C performed in oral interp competitions circa 1992 in rural South Dakota. That movie reached EVERYWHERE! Second exposure: Shakespeare in Love, which I didn't get at the time, but now I think I'd love.
Hidden in book #2's blurb is the #fifdom book club's next book (picked completely independent of this post): Stasiland.
Thanks to Jaye for making the pick, though I still want Kmele's recommended America in the King Years to be on the to-do list!
Will Kmele be on a podcast from Davos?
This is a subject that fascinates me and there's a few books I love:
1. Between East and West by Anne Applebaum, a brilliant travelogue through Eastern Europe from the early Nineties.
2. Revolution 1989: the Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebesteyn is a very readable journalistic history
And for a much broader travelogue/history of Poland, I can't recommend strongly enough A Country in the Moon by Michael Moran, an Australian who moved to Poland in the early Nineties and brilliantly captures the strangeness of those early years after communism. But it's also a sweeping, fascinating history of the country. I have read it at least three times.
Read it quite awhile ago, but the Arthur Phillips book is good.
It's a long (and super fascinating) story, but he -- like a lot of Czechs! -- was initially an enthusiastic commie after WW2. And, like a lot of Czechs, this enthusiasm faded. But he had pretty much a lifelong feud with Havel, in part over having been previously gullible, in part over being successful abroad after 1968 while Havel & the Chartists suffered at home, in part because he eventually abandoned writing in Czech. It is also very complicated, all the moreso since Unbearable Lightness of Being is arguably the most important international fiction that memorialized the Czechs' plight at the hands of the Communists.
I imagine there's a strongly autobiographical element to Kundera's novel Life is Elsewhere, about a self-absorbed poet who becomes a party loyalist. Brilliant book.
Interesting paragraph from Moynihan here in 2008: https://reason.com/2008/10/14/odds-and-sods/
According to the state-funded Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ratted out an anti-communist spy working against the Soviet-backed government in Czechoslovakia. As the New York Times reports, the agent was arrested, "narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine."Kundera denied the charges. (Perhaps, in light of these charges, it is worth revisiting Kundera's 1969 debate with Vaclav Havel, in which he accuses the playwrite and dissident of "moral exhibitionism.")