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Praise for
Dubravka Ugresic
“Ugresic never commits a sloppy thought or a turgid sentence. Under her gaze, the tiredest topics of the ‘tired’ continent (migration, multiculturalism, ‘new Europe’) spring to life.”
—The Independent (London)
“Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in the former Yugoslavia produced.”
—Charles Simic
“Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.”
—Richard Eder, New York Times
“Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.”
—John Balaban, Washington Post
“As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.”
—New Criterion
“Ugresic’s wit is bound by no preconceived purposes, and once the story takes off, a wild freedom of association and adventurous discernment is set in motion. . . . Ugresic dissects the social world.”
—World Literature Today
Also by
Dubravka Ugresic
in English Translation
essays
-The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays
-Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream
-Nobody's Home
-Thank You for Not Reading:
-Essays on Literary Trivia
fiction
-Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
-Fording the Stream of Consciousness
-In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories
-Lend Me Your Character
-The Ministry of Pain
-The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Copyright
All changes and revisions to the original edition of this book (published in Belgrade and Zagreb as Napad na minibar, 2010), including the title, essay selection, inclusion of new essays, chapter headings, and amendments to individual essays originate with the author.
Copyright © 2011 by Dubravka Ugrešić
Translation copyright © 2011 David Williams
“Cans of Tuna Fish and the European Classics”, “Captain, Sir, We Have Plenty of Coffee!”, “The Hairdresser with the Poodle”, “Dangerous Liaisons”, and “The Spirit of the Kakanian Province” translation copyright © 2011 Ellen Elias-Bursać
“Old Men and Their Grandchildren” translation copyright © 2011 Celia Hawkesworth
First edition, 2011
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-59-7
ISBN-10: 1-934824-59-3
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
1.
And by the mid-afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
—Jonathan Safran Foer,
Everything Is Illuminated
2.
“Help me. I had a dream last night. I was skipping through a meadow holding a picnic basket and the basket was marked ‘Options’. And then I saw there was a hole in the basket.”
“Mr. Kugelmass, the worst thing you could do is act out. You must simply express your feelings here, and together we’ll analyze them. You have been in treatment long enough to know there is no overnight cure. After all, I’m an analyst, not a magician.”
“Then perhaps what I need is a magician,” Kugelmass said, rising from his chair.
—Woody Allen,
“The Kugelmass Episode”
3.
. . . But one day
The sun will stand where the heart once stood
And there will be no words in human speech
That a poem would renounce
Everyone will write poetry . . .
—Branko Miljković, “Everyone Will Write Poetry”
4.
We human beings hog the limelight on this new stage of democratized media. We are simultaneously its amateur writers, its amateur producers, its amateur technicians, and, yes, its amateur audience. Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is now running the show.
—Andrew Keen,
The Cult of the Amateur:
How Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture
1.
Why Karaoke,
and What’s Culture
Got To Do with It?
It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan. This essay was not only conceived, but also half-finished, when it occurred to me to go and catch a bit of real karaoke. They say Casablanca is the most popular karaoke bar in Amsterdam. My companion and I, both neophytes, arrived at eight on the dot, as if we were going to the theatre and not a bar. Casablanca was empty. We took a walk down Zeedijk, a narrow street packed with bars whose barmen look like they spend all day at the gym and all night in the bar. Muscles and baggy eyelids—that pretty well describes our barman at Casablanca, to which we soon returned. On a little stage, two
