Another review. . .

Luminous Depths has received a wonderfully positive online review here, by Christopher Paul Carey. I was able to thank him in person at the SFM/EMP's annual Hall of Fame ceremony. I also passed him the manuscript for One Who Disappeared.

Arrivals, Pursuits, Departures

The Luminous Depths: reviewed

The Luminous Depths has received its first online review. I’d like to thank its author, Ziv Wities, and The Fix.

One Who Disappeared: delivered

In February I completed, sold and delivered One Who Disappeared, the finale of my Czech trilogy.

Clocking in at 92,000 words and 460 manuscript pages, it’s definitely a novel rather than a novella. One Who Disappeared begins in Hollywood, 1949, and ends in Europe, 1938 -- amidst an anno terribilis strikingly different from the one we know. H.G. Wells is integral to the plot, as are two arch-enemies of Brentwood, California -- Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.

Meantime, I’ve left the Republic, and all things Czech, for a novel set in the American suburbs, circa 1977.

dark carnivals: sold

Long before I was a fan of Janacek and Capek, I was a kid with a wind-up Bell & Howell eight-millimeter camera and subscriptions to Starlog, Cinefantastique, Cinemagic, Future, and Fantastic Films. I spent many afternoons designing and building miniatures and armatures, and then shooting my own animated three-minute epics. Alas, the results were often blurry.

My heroes were John Dykstra, Ralph McQuarrie, Douglas Trumbull, Jim Danforth, Ray Harryhausen, Willis O’Brien. A career at Industrial Light and Magic (an analog career, not a digital one) beckoned.

My novel dark carnivals is an homage to that era, and to Ray Bradbury, and to Willis O'Brien, and to the Fantastic Film. In February I sold it to an American small press publisher, with a release date of Halloween, 2009.

dark carnivals is primarily a horror thriller set in the summer and autumn of 1977, featuring two kids -- both of them amateur animators; of course, it's also fantasia on Mr. Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes as well as Dark Carnival, the film that Bradbury dreamed of making in the 1950's. (Sinister films replace sinister carnivals in my book).

But dark carnivals is also set in 1931, and tells a secret history of the fantastic film, centering on special effects wizard Willis O'Brien's encounter with Henri Mordaunt, a rather long-lived magic-lantern magician whose career stretches back to the birth of the phantasmagoria in Post-Revolutionary France. Mordaunt promises to teach O’Brien new methods of animation. The meeting ends tragically, and its repercussions echo down to the autumn of 1977.

Yes, I was born on Halloween, and this is my Halloween novel.

Mr. Clute & Evanescence, Ms. Littleton & Yan Tan Tethera

Last month I finally met John Clute -- who wrote the forward to On the Overgrown Path -- at a brunch thrown by Eileen Gunn. I was able to thank John for his contribution and pass him a copy of The Luminous Depths. A few days later I received an email which read in part:

Subject: be very afraid

The Luminous Depths will fit very neatly into the talk I have to give in about a week on "horror motifs in sf", a description I will treat very loosely. The talk will probably be called "Evanescence and the Cenotaph: Terror in the 21st Century", and I will be citing (now) you, James Tiptree Jr's "Last Flight of Doctor Ain" (I don't care when it was written), W G Sebald's Austerlitz, and John Russell Fearn's (writing as Vargo Statten) The Creature from the Black Lagoon (maybe).

Evanescence is what modernity does to everything it touches.

The cenotaph is what modernity leaves behind, like Auschwitz, the shopping mall, the airport, the National Library of France in Paris.

Good to talk with you yesterday.

Sebald, Tiptree, The Creature from the Black Lagoon . . . and me? Yes, I am very afraid. Many thanks to Mr. Clute.

Also at the brunch I got to hang with Therese Littleton, an early, ardent supporter of Ceres Storm when she was at Amazon.com. Now she’s Curator at Experience Music Project's Science Fiction Museum at the Seattle Center, as well as co-publisher of a fascinating small press, Payseur & Schmidt.

A few months back I’d passed her the rather large manuscript of my Ceres Storm sidequel, Yan Tan Tethera; after the brunch she took me to a nifty little coffee shop on Capitol Hill and delivered her critique (the first critique YTT ever received: Tor had declined to publish it without ever seeing the manuscript, based on sales for Ceres Storm and Evening’s Empire).

In short, she adored it. I mean, really adored it. (I’m not deserving of such a reader). She promised to help me get the word out on it. I’ve since loaded her down with the manuscript to Ceres Storm’s prequel, In the Photon Forests, as well as a detailed outline for the fourth volume, The Wilderness of Ruin.

Sorry, Therese, I know you’re a busy woman.

(If you’re in Seattle, check out the Robots exhibit at SFM, an amazingly comprehensive look at a colorful, thrilling horde that will one day rise up and kill us all; my only nit-pick: a small card at the opening describes Karel Capek as the man who came up with the word "robot". You and I know that it was really his brother, Josef).

Some Chop-ek

To coincide with the publication of The Luminous Depths, I would like to present a sampling of work by Karel Čapek. Along with his brother Josef, Karel is a major character in my new novella and its upcoming sequel, the novel One Who Disappeared (For more on the Čapeks, see entries below).

First, an extract from the Brothers' 1921 From the Life of Insects, aka The Insect Play. The oddness and dark humor of this particular scene is found throughout the play, which was a hit far beyond Prague.

Second, two examples of Čapek's feuilleton-style: Inventions (1924) and "From the Point of View of a Cat." He wrote these almost daily, for the Brno newspaper Lidovy noviny (the People's Newspaper). These, as well as From the Life of Insects, were taken from Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader, and reprinted with the permission of Catbird Press.

Third, a larger excerpt from Čapek's forgotten Krakatit (1925), his long-out-of-print SF novel -- in part a prevision of the absurdities of the atomic era -- which easily begs comparison to such feverish fantastic nightmares as G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.

From The Insect Play, Act II. . .

MR. DUNG BEETLE: What, rolled away? My ball? Good God! Catch him! Catch him! Thieves! Murderers! (He hurls himself to the ground.) My hard-earned fortune! They've killed me! I'd sooner give up my life than my golden ball of manure! (He jumps up.) H-e-e-e-lp! Catch h-i-m! Mur-der-ers! (He rushes off left.)

TRAMP: Haha, a dung ball got stolen! Cry murderer! Cry thief! And you expect the sky to fall and share your awful grief! And yet, my friends, cheer up and try to smile a bit: The thief was one of your own. Who else would want a ball of shit? (He sits down to one side.)

MR. CRICKET (offstage): Careful, darling. Careful you don't stumble. Here we are, here we are, our little home! Our new little house! Oops, careful. Did you hurt yourself?

MRS. CRICKET: No, Cricket, don't be ridiculous.

MR. CRICKET: But darling, you must be careful. When you're expecting. . . (Enter MR. CRICKET: and pregnant MRS. CRICKET.)

MR. CRICKET: Open your eyes now. There! Do you like it?

MRS. CRICKET: Oh, Cricket, I'm so tired!

MR. CRICKET: Sit down, my little soul, sit down. Wait, nice and easy. There.

MRS. CRICKET (sitting down): Such a long distance! All that moving! Cricket, you must be out of your mind.

MR. CRICKET: Hihihi! Mother! Peek-a-boo! Mom! Mamma! Momsie!

MRS. CRICKET: Leave me alone. Don't be a pest.

MR. CRICKET: Hihi! I won't say another word. I was just joking around. Mrs. Cricket is not expecting babies, of course not! Shame on you, what do you take her for!

MRS. CRICKET (tearfully): You nasty thing, it's easy for you to make fun of it!

MR. CRICKET: But honey! I'm just so happy! Just think: all those little baby crickets, all the screaming, all the chirping, hihihi! My darling little wife, I'm going crazy with joy.

MRS. CRICKET: You. . .you silly little thing! Peek-a-boo, Daddy, hihi!

MR. CRICKET: Hihihi! How do you like it here?

MRS. CRICKET: Nice. This is our new home?

MR. CRICKET: Our nest, our mansion, our dear family shop, our -- hihihi! -- place of residence.

MRS. CRICKET: Is it going to be dry? Who built it?

MR. CRICKET: Would you believe it? Another cricket used to live here.

MRS. CRICKET: Did he? Why did he move away?

MR. CRICKET: Hihihi! Yeah, he sure moved away. He sure did! Bet you don't know where to! (He begins a children's song.) "Close your eyes and take a guess. . . "

MRS. CRICKET: I can't. Lord, it takes you forever to say things. Hurry up, Cricket!

MR. CRICKET: Well then. Yesterday, a shrike got him and stuck him on a thorn for his supper. I swear it. Honey, spiked him all through and through. Just imagine! He's up there wiggling his legs like this, see? Hihihi! He's still alive. And I thought right away, there's something in this for us! We'll move into his apartment. Bang! What luck! Hihi! What do you say?

MRS. CRICKET: And he's still alive? Ugh! What a horror!

MR.CRICKET: Isn't it? Oh, we're so lucky! (He launches into song.) Tralala. . . Wait, we'll put up our shingle right now. (He pulls out a sign which reads "Mr. Cricket's Music Shop.") Where shall I hang it? About here? More to the right? More to the left?

MRS. CRICKET: A bit higher. And you say he's still wriggling his legs?

MR. CRICKET: (hammering and demonstrating): I tell you, like this.

MRS. CRICKET: Brrr. Where is he?

MR. CRICKET: Would you like to see him?

MRS. CRICKET: I would. No, I wouldn't. Isn't it horrible?

MR. CRICKET: Hihihi, you bet. Is this hanging straight?

MRS. CRICKET: Yes, it's fine. Cricket, I feel so strange.

MR. CRICKET (runs toward her): Oh dear, maybe. . . your hour is here. . .

MRS. CRICKET: Stop it! Ooooo, I'm scared!

MR. CRICKET: But Momsie, who would be scared? Hihihi! Any woman can do it!

MRS. CRICKET: How can you talk like that! (She starts to cry.) Cricket, will you always love me?

MR. CRICKET: Of course, my little soul! (yammering) Yihi! Don't cry! Mommy!

MRS. CRICKET (sobbing): Show me how he jerks his legs.

MR. CRICKET: Like this.

MRS. CRICKET: Hihihi, that must be funny.

MR. CRICKET: There, there, there! You see? No more tears. (He sits down beside her.) Just wait, we'll make it all nice and cozy, and as soon as we're a bit better off, we'll put in. . .

MRS. CRICKET: Pretty curtains.

By Josef and Karel Capek (1921)

Translated by Tatiana Firkusny and Robert T. Jones

From "Inventions" (1924)

I like all kinds of technical inventions, not because they seem logical to me, but because they fascinate me beyond all belief. I don't like them in the sense that an expert, or an American, likes them; I like them the way a savage would; I like them as wondrous, mysterious and incomprehensible things, I like the telephone because it provides a person with all sorts of experiences, as when the operator connects you with the wrong party by mistake and you heartily greet that party with "Listen, you big ox," or something similar; I like the streetcar because it is unpredictable, whereas going on foot is utterly predictable and lacking in adventure. I acquired an American coke stove because it demands so much caution and constant personal attention, as if I had an Indian elephant or an Australian kangaroo in my house. So now I have acquired a Swedish vacuum cleaner. I don't know but what you could say that the Swedish vacuum cleaner acquired me.

Up until now I believed in a whole range of things: in the Good Lord, in universal moral law, in the atomic theory and other things more or less inaccessible to human understanding. Now I am compelled as well to believe in Swedish vacuum cleaners. I am even compelled to believe absolutely in the metaphysical, ubiquitous and extraordinary presence of dust. I now believe that dust I am and to dust I shall return, and furthermore that I am now in the continuous process of returning to dust. I think that I scatter dust wherever I walk or sit. I think that even as I write this, a small pile of dust is coming into existence under my chair. My thoughts descend to the floor in something like a rich gray dust. If I speak, dust pours like lies from my mouth, even when I speak the holiest of truths. Everything is turning to dust. Otherwise it is not possible to explain the existence, the quantity and the first-class consistency of the dust in my vacuum cleaner. In that enchanted pouch, rather.

Every belief and every idol requires certain ritualistic ceremonies. Ever since I have been serving the Vacuum Cleaner, a ritual ceremony takes place at my house each morning: Shaking Out the Pouch. It's very similar to when a parlor magician shakes a dozen glasses out of his sleeve, or a rabbit, a sheaf of paper and a live girl out of a hat; it is, in short, magic. You shake out the pouch in a more or less ritualistic fashion and anxiously lift it aside; a pile of dust appears; as I say, it is sheer sorcery. Dust from the Vacuum Cleaner isn't dirty, ordinary dust; it is dense, uniform, heavy and mysterious; it is conjured in some way or other, for you never understand how so much dust gets in there.

If it so happens that the pile of dust is smallish, you are instantly alarmed; no doubt heathens likewise are alarmed when their idol refuses to devour an offering. As far as you are concerned, it is a matter of faith and even ambition, of a sort, that the pile of dust be large. You search for some forgotten corner where there is still some secret and unexploited dust. If you weren't so bashful, you would go out and suck up dust from the street, in order to pay homage to your idol. When you are off visiting somewhere, you envy those people with beautiful, un-vacuumed dust. I think I'll begin secretly bringing dust back to the house with me, as I've probably extracted the last pinch of it at home.

by Karel Capek

Translated by Norma ComradaOriginally published in 1924

From the Point of View of a Cat

This is my Man. I am not afraid of him. He is very strong, for he eats a great deal; he is an Eater of All Things. What are you eating? Give me some!

He is not beautiful, for he has no fur. Not having enough saliva, he has to wash himself with water. He meows in a harsh voice and a great deal more than necessary. Sometimes in his sleep he purrs.

Let me out!

I don't know how he has made himself Master; perhaps he has eaten something sublime.

He keeps my rooms clean for me.

In his paws he carries a sharp black claw and he scratches with it on white sheets of paper. That is the only game he plays. He sleeps at night instead of by day, he cannot see in the dark, he has no pleasures. He never thinks of blood, never dreams of hunting or fighting; he never sings songs of love.

Often at night when I can hear mysterious and magic voices, when I can see that the darkness is all alive, he sits at his table with his head bent and goes on and on, scratching with his black claw on the white papers.

Don't imagine that I am at all interested in you. I am only listening to the soft whispering of your claw.

Sometimes the whispering is silent, the poor dull head does not know how to go on playing, and then I am sorry for him and I meow softly in sweet and sharp discord. Then my Man picks me up and buries his hot face in my fur. At those times he divines for an instant a glimpse of a higher life, and he sighs with happiness and purrs something which can almost be understood.

But don't think that I am at all interested in you. You have warmed me, and now I will go out again and listen to the dark voices.

by Karel Capek

Translated by Dora Round; revised by Peter Kussi. Originally published in Intimate Things, 1935

From Krakatit by Karel Capek

(In this selection from toward the end of the novel, Engineer Prokop -- a hulking, slow-witted explosives genius who suffered a concussion just before the book began, -- escapes the final apocaylpytic explosion of Krakatit, and finds himself wandering a transfigured landscape; the nightmare begins to fade at the sight of a beautiful horse).

[The horse] had a long silver mane and a tail which had never been clipped. At its head there stood an old man with a white beard and silver hair. He was coarse and pale, like the covering over the cart. He stamped about, reflecting, saying something to himself and twisting the white mane of the horse in his fingers.

Then he turned round, looking blindly into the darkness, and asked in a trembling voice: "Is that you, Prokop?" Come along, I've been waiting for you."

Prokop was not surprised, but only inordinately relieved. "I'm coming," he said, "but I've been running!"

The old man stepped up to him and took hold of him by the coat. "You're quite wet," he said reproachfully. "You mustn't catch cold."

"Old man," said Prokop hoarsely, "do you know that Grottup has exploded?"

The old man shook his head regretfully. "And what a lot of people must have been killed! You ran away, eh? Sit down on the coach-box, I'll give you a lift." He stumped over to the horse and slowly removed the sack of oats. "Hi, hi, that's enough," he mumbled. "We must get along, we've a guest."

"What have you got in the cart?" asked Prokop.

The old man turned round to him and smiled. "The world," he said. "Haven't you ever seen the world?"

"No, I haven't."

"Then I'll show you -- wait." He put the nosebag away and, without hurrying, began to undo the covering on the other side. Then he threw it back, revealing a box into which had been inserted a spy-hole covered with a glass. "Wait a moment," he said, looking for something on the ground. He picked up a small branch, squatted on his heels over the light, and lit the wick, all this slowly and seriously. "Now, burn nicely, burn," he said to it, sheltering it with his hands. Then he placed it inside the box, lighting it up. "I use oil," he explained. "Some of them have carbide. . . but that carbide hurts the eyes. And then one day it explodes and there you are; besides, you might hurt somebody. And oil, that's like in a church." He bent down to the little window and peered through it with his pale eyes. "You can see nicely," he whispered, delighted. "Have a look. But you must bend down, so as to be. . . little. . . like a child. That's right."

Prokop stooped down to the spy-hole. "The Grecian Temple in Girgent," began the old man, "on the island of Sicily, dedicated to God or to Juno. Look at those pillars. They are made so carefully that a whole family can eat on each stone. Think what work that means! Shall I go on turning? -- The view from the Mountain of Penegal in the Alps at sunset. Then the snow is lit up with a strange and beautiful light, as it's shown there. That's an Alpine light and the other mountain is called Latemar. Further? -- The sacred city of Benares; the river is sacred and cleanses the sinful. Thousands of people have found there what they sought."

The pictures were carefully drawn and coloured by hand. The colours had faded a little and the paper had a tinge of yellow, but the charming, variegated effect of the blues, greens, yellows and reds of the people's clothing and the pure azure of the sky remained; every blade of grass was drawn with love and care.

"That sacred river is the Ganges," concluded the old man reverently, and turned the handle further. "And this is Zahur, the most beautiful castle in the world."

Prokop simply glued his eye to the hole. He saw a magnificent castle with graceful cupolas, lofty palms, and a blue waterfall. A tiny figure with a turban in which was stuck a feather, with a purple coat, yellow pantaloons, and a Tartar saber was greeting with a low bow a lady dressed in white, who was leading by the bridle a prancing horse. "Where. . . where is Zahur?" whispered Prokop.

The old man shrugged his shoulders. "Somewhere over there," he said uncertainly, "where it is most beautiful. Some find it and some do not. Shall I go on?"

"Not yet."

The old man drew away a little and stroked the leg of the horse. "Wait, nonono, wait," he said gently. "We must show it him, see? Let him enjoy himself."

"Turn on, grandfather," said Prokop. He saw in succession the harbour at Hamburg, the Kremlin, a polar landscape with the Northern Lights, the Volcano of Krakatau, Brooklyn Bridge, Notre Dame, a native village in Borneo, Darwin's house, the wireless station in Poldhu, a street in Shanghai, the Victoria Falls, the Castle of Gernstein, the petroleum wells in Baku. "And this is the explosion in Grottup," explained the old man, and Prokop saw coils of reddish smoke being thrown high up in the air by a yellow flame. In the midst of the smoke and flames could be discerned fragments of human bodies. "More than five thousand people perished. It was a great disaster," sighed the old man. "That's the last picture. Well, have you seen the world?"

"No, I haven't," muttered Prokop, stupefied.

The old man shook his head in disappointment. "You want to see too much. You will have to live for a long time." He blew out the little lamp and, muttering to himself, slowly covered the box up again. "Sit down on the coach-box, we'll go on." He pulled off the sack which was covering the horse's back and put it over Prokop's shoulders. "So that you shan't be cold," he said, and sat down next to him. He took the reins in his hand and whistled quietly. The horse set off at a gentle trot. "Hi! Now then," sang the old man.

They passed along an avenue of birches, by cottages half drowned in the mist, a serene and sleeping countryside. "Grandfather," Prokop found himself saying, "why has all this happened to me?"

"What?"

"Why have I come up against so many things?"

The old man reflected. "It only seems like that," he said finally. "What happens to a man comes out of himself. It all winds out of you as if from a skein."

"Grandfather," cried Prokop, half closing his eyes in pain, "have I done wrong?"

"Yes and no," said the old man cautiously. "You've hurt people."

"Did I behave badly?"

"What?"

"Was I wicked?"

". . . You weren't clean inside. A man. . . must think more than feel. And you threw yourself at everything."

"Grandfather, that was through Krakatit."

The cart rumbled over the rough road, the white horse moving its legs in a tremulous and quaint trot. The light danced over the ground, lighting up trees and stones, while the old man bumped up and down on his seat, singing softly to himself. Prokop was rubbing his forehead. "Grandfather," he whispered.

"Well?"

"I've forgotten!"

"What?"

"I. . . I've forgotten how to. . . make . . . Krakatit!"

"There you are," said the old man calmly. "So you have found out something."

To Prokop it was as if they were passing through the quiet countryside in which he had spent his childhood, but it was very foggy and the light from the lantern penetrated no further than the side of the road, beyond which there was a silent and unknown land.

art by Karel Capek

A book report.

Yes, I finished Volume 2 of Professor John Tyrrell's magnificent biography last night.

I thought I'd toss out a few tidbits:

Janáček's endless tweakings.

Like any great artist, Janáček was meddling with his creations up to the very last moment -- in this case, his adaptation of Čapek's science-fictional stage play The Makropulos Thing. As he put it (in uncharacteristically clumsy syntax), "When one hears one's things, here and there [extra] filling in the orchestra occurs to one." He began to send insertions to the score up to and during rehearsals. According to a witness:

"Even at the final dress rehearsal he was still interposing with suggested alterations. At last the conductor lost his temper, 'This is impossible,' he shouted. 'No more changes!'

"Janáček appeared to accept the situation and disappeared. But on opening night, at a certain point, the cello leader looked up at the conductor in astonishment; the conductor maintained his beat, but in equal bewilderment -- both were hearing music they had never heard before. Although Janacek appeared to have been defeated, what he had done was to go to the library after the music was put away, and write into the cello part a solo that he felt should be in there."

Janáček's prose style.

The composer was always brilliantly -- and strangely -- expressive, especially in his later years. Not only in his music (as John Clute puts it, "the driven patchwork onomatopoeia of his mature music), but in his writings. Here is part of a feuilleton unearthed by Tyrrell, regarding how the composer felt at the end of Makropulos:

"I think of Abel's sacrifice -- an upright column of fire blazing up and disappearing high in the air in acrid smoke. [...] How many mosquitoes, wasps and beetles have had their wings singed. I was able to finish Makropolus. [...] I feel as if my pen wanted to drop out of my hand. Breathless, run off my feet -- I wait to see whether some little distant star will fall ringingly into my mind. [...] Tame as a dog, fierce as a vulture, dry as a faded leaf, crackling like a breaking wave, sputtering like brushwood consumed by fire. Receptive to every stirring of the mind -- and silenced in the holy stillness."


Janáček's uniqueness.

He was unorthodox in every way. Not only in his music but also how he behaved as a "great composer." Here he is in Frankfurt in 1927, the penultimate year of his life, for the German premiere of his unusual Concertino. Says Tyrrell:

Janáček sat in on various rehearsals. The conductor Jascha Horenstein recalled how he saw a man always sitting in the back of the hall and, from his appearance, decided that it must be the superintendent of the building. Kitted out with watch, chain and waistcoat, the man, he thought, looked more like the owner of an Austrian Gasthaus or a Czech coffee house: 'very bourgeois, very middle class, one would say lower middle-class, but middle class.' [...] At the reception after the opening night of the festival, Horenstein was eventually introduced to Janáček and the identity of this strange, uncomposer-like person was revealed.

Janáček's muse.

The predominent event of his last two years was his consuming obsession with his chaste-muse, Kamila Stösslová. It's undeniable that Janáček's towering achievements well into his sixties, up to his death at seventy-four, can be traced to her. She wasn't the first of these 'muses', having been preceded by Gabriela Horvátová (see below) and Camilla Urválková. But, as Tyrrell keenly puts it:

It is instructive to compare Kamila as 'muse' to her predecessor(s)[...]. the big advantage of Kamila Stösslová for Janáček was that she was so passive.

The managerial women for whom Janáček had a penchant usually got what they wanted out of him but inspired no works. Making no demands and seeming quite uninterested in Janáček's compositions, Kamila Stösslová turns out to have been his ideal muse: Janáček needed an empty canvas for his fantasies. Both the 'Kamila Stösslová' that Janáček imagined and the works this imaginary person inspired were Janáček's creation. Her very passivity allowed ample room for projection, her physical distance away from him in Pisek a positive advantage: too much reality would have burst the bubble.

And that fantasy, Tyrrell points out, even turns up in the fetish-bondage variety:

"And dear Kamilka, when you were lying on that divan, you were like a little lamb which I had a mind to take, tie all up in the shawl and run far, far away with it. And then I'd untie the shawl and stroke and kiss the dear little lamb. "

But all of this fades away when listening to the creations she inspired. Written in fire, is how Janáček put it. After reading Tyrrell's account of these last years -- never told so vividly -- I listened to the final opera, From the Dead House, based on Dosteyevsky's memoirs of his years in a Siberian prison camp, and to the second string quartet, Intimate Letters, a love letter to Kamila. Here, the driven patchwork onomatopoeia is pushed to near-breaking, and what might have been incoherant (like some of Janáček's more passionate letters to Kamila) is instead the most fearless and profound of his career.

Taken entire, Janáček: Years of a Life marks one of my most memorable reading experiences. And happily, Volume 2 comes at a crucial moment in the writing of my third Czech novella, One Who Disappeared, which tries to imagine a further eight years of Janacek's life, both personally and creatively.

Gregor Mendel, A Strange Nightmare, and Stalking the President

I'm continuing the immensely enjoyable voyage through Tyrrell's Tsar of the Forest (see below). I thought I might offer up a few random highlights from Volumes 1 and 2.

Certainly for me, one of the coolest revelations of Volume 1 regards Gregor Mendel, the famous Father of Genetics.

I'd become accustomed to the charming fact that most everyone in the Czechoslovak Republic (and the Austrian suburb that preceded it) knew one another; that here, there were no six degrees of separation, only two or three at the most. I could accept (gladly) that Janáček's foremost champion, Max Brod, performed a similar chore for his friend Franz Kafka, and that Brod also enjoyed playing Mozart duets with Albert Einstein. Or that Karel Čapek, whose sister worked with Janáček at the Brno newspaper, was also a close friend and acolyte of the Republic's President, Tomáš Masaryk, and that Čapek's anti-fascist science fiction novel The White Plague was made into a film by Hugo Haas, the brother of Pavel Haas, Janacek's student.

But Mendel, who died when Janáček was in his (relative) youth? When not experimenting with peas and bees in his garden, Mendel was Abbot of the Augustinian monastery in Brno. I knew this, and knew also that Janáček had spent his youth at the Monastery, but one of the marvelous nuggets of Tyrrell's exhaustive research, hitherto unknown, was this from Volume 1:

"It is one of the strange facts of Janacek's life that for two years he was under the charge of Mendel; two of the most famous people associated with Brno connected in this way. Mendel had contact with Leo at least twice a year since he needed to see his semester report. And from 1872 when Janacek took over Krizkovsky's post as choirmaster at the monastery during the latter's permanent absence in Olomouc, he would have had some dealings with Mendel from time to time."

Mendel, Einstein. . . Add to that Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, who was also born in Brno. His family home was a few doors down from Pavel Haas's on Gomperova street. In Gödel's case, there's no evidence that he played stickball with the Haas brothers, or ran over Gregor Mendel's foot with his bicycle. The fiercely German Gödel escaped from Brno at an early age, and eventually settled in Princeton, where he became a good buddy of Max Brod's piano partner, Einstein.

Janáček, like many of us, had strange dreams. This one seems worthy of David Lynch:

"I'm going through some sort of an alley of trees, and in the hollow of a tree I see a ham hanging. I seize it and wrap it in a bloody canvas. I bring it home. During the gluttonous meal it changes into a baked haunch of veal. But alas! My wife points to a sign on it, according to which someone recognized that it was stolen from him.

In terror I awake: I, a thief? I calm myself; after all it's just a dream. "

Tyrrell points out that this was written to the monstrous Diva Gabriela Horvátová (see below); and that it might be read as a potent yet puzzling allegory of their shameful tryst.

Lastly, to point out the pleasure of Tyrrell's telling, there's this set-piece from September, 1921. President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk arrives in Brno on his first official visit. Janáček awaits him at the train station, notebook and pen at the ready. A feuilliton, published later, captures:

". . .the murmurs of the crowd, the gun salute, the call to attention for the guards. It records the fragments of Masaryk's replies to the speaker of the Regional Council and to the Mayor of Brno. Masaryk, he declared, spoke in A flat minor (Janáček's favorite key) without modulation. 'There was certainty in his answers; on it lay a whiff of that known sadness of contemplation' (perhaps since Masaryk was a philosopher as well as a politician). But the next day the sun shone and when Masaryk visited the Czech Technical College and responded to his welcome. . . the mood had changed and Masaryk's 'key' had shifted to a "hypolydian D with a variable 2nd (E-E flat) and 4th (G-G sharp)'. To put this into perspective, one has to imagine, say, Elgar following Lloyd George around for two days of speeches, jotting down a dozen speech fragments and publishing a little article about it in the Manchester Guardian. The fact that this seems an unlikely enterprise is not just a reflection of how different Janáček was to every other composer of his time or of the pride Janáček took in his newly created state and its aged president; it also vividly demonstrates Janáček's creative response to just about everything around him." -- from Janáček: Years of a Life Volume 2