Prefect Kundera

When Milan Kundera was fashionable in the Eighties, two things stood out from the books even then:

(a) the taste (and talent) for philosophic abstraction;

(b) the dick-measuring (more commonly termed misogyny).

At the time he was outed as an informer (2008) he of course got the backing of several Nobel Prize winners who foolishly claimed Kundera had “refuted” the accusation. Others more subtly tried to shield him in the jargon of technicalities but Kundera himself did not explain beyond stating he could not remember. Neither did he sue.

On that same list of prominent backers we can also see a couple of his fellow Jerusalem Prize grabbers. Kundera’s 1985 acceptance speech for his share of the cash is remarkable for its brown-nosing of Israel but nowadays that can be seen as part of a pattern.

When the scandal broke in 2008, no one for or against him seems to have asked one basic question: wtf was he doing as prefect of the dormitory in the first place? In other words, what kind of student, what breed of person, would have landed that job in the Czechoslovakia of 1950?

Anyway, he was then let continue with the fantasy of his dotage – that he was a French writer – and the very next year he took his turn at the depraved mutual back-scratching of arts celebs, when he publicly backed Polanski.

The Visit

Dr. John Flynn

Photo sources (above): montazsmagazin.hu and kino.de

In 2008, an Austro-German co-production of a TV film version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play Der Besuch der alten Dame (‘The Visit of the Old Lady’) shifted the setting from Switzerland to Austria. There the filming took place in Styria. Most importantly they picked a very good ‘Claire Zachanassian’ in Christiane Hörbiger, niece of the porter in The Third Man and aunt of Falco’s manager in the biopic Verdammt, wir leben noch.

At the climax in the original play, though, the richest woman in the world does not waver an instant from her quest, which is to return and exact deadly vengeance on the man and the town that ruined her life.

Otherwise, given that Alfred Ill is still in the end murdered by the townspeople for the fortune she has promised them when he dies, it remains a good version of the classic…

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Córdoba … the Spanish one

Dr. John Flynn

Andalucía 28/12/16

Frosty morning. B. and I headed to Córdoba after ten. The high-speed train from Puertollano was too fast for the camera. I saw a lot of olive trees down south. On arrival, Clonmel’s permanent representative in Castile-La Mancha thought it wise to ask someone how far we’d have to walk. We were then advised to get a taxi from the station to the old town. Córdoba’s charms are quite stunning. The Romans took it from the Carthaginians in 206 BC. The Moors took it from the Goths in 711 AD. The Christians took it back from the Moors in 1236. Perhaps Spain will never be one of my favourite countries but there is something awe-inspiring about the key sights down there. We didn’t go into the Alcázar fortress – the queue was long – so we missed the gardens. That was a research blip on my part. The…

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Tihany

Dr. John Flynn

Tihany…

I was here in April 2009. Tihany village lies near the narrowest point of the eighty-mile-long Lake Balaton. The little lake behind the village (see the video below) is a geological anomaly that is 25 m higher than the real one. The stone jetty below the Benedictine abbey is on the eastern side of the peninsula. The hazy Balaton is a light, smoothie green. We had lunch below the crest of the great lake view beside the abbey (apatság) and then we got the ferry to the south shore.

This short drone video (courtesy of Zoltán Tóth) is well worth watching.

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Passau in October

Dr. John Flynn

2017

The Inn is very scenic near Passau. High wooded riverbanks continue for several miles of train track. The warm sunshine in Bavaria contrasted with the fog in Linz. Having gone down the left bank of the Inn to the peninsula tip where it meets the Danube (blink and you’ll miss the Ilz, around the tip), we walked back through the Altstadt and had a nice meal at a place called Bi Plano. It got cold outside at sundown but there were orange blankets on the backs of the chairs. Passau in Bavaria is very like Steyr in Upper Austria but it’s also clearly a college town.

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