Wednesday reading. Yes, I know it's Thursday.

Finished reading: Magical Tips to Deliciousness by Paul Ho, who is almost consistently referred to in the book's seven prefaces as "A-Bao." It is a cookbook of mostly single portions? Or perhaps one is meant to make like six of these for a small family dinner? I mean, a whole casserole is one chicken leg. It's nicely illustrated with finished dishes but minimally explained and it looks like there's some matter that is not translated. Though the translation looks good, fluent and idiomatic and only a few ingredients leave me scratching my head so I figure those ingredients probably really are things we don't have here. The title of the book may actually be Savory Dishes because that's how the book is referred to in at least one of the prefaces. One of the prefaces is written by Martin Yan, who has a cooking show I've never seen, and I get the feeling that the other preface writers and Paul Ho/A-Bao are probably all TV cooks. Googling Paul Ho is useless, though. Apparently there is someone called Paul Hollywood! I found that out. But no linkies for you.

I found this book in a Taiwanese bookstore in San Francisco where I was trucking around Chinatown with my editor and online friend Tanni-Fan who is doing a whirlwind tour of the West Coast. I determined I would buy a bilingual cookbook while she was looking at the Chinese novels and being talked at very fast by the proprietor of the shop.

Currently reading: Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz. I've been reading it forever! I just read the Defenestration of Prague. I almost didn't make it through the Hussite Wars. I had never placed the Hussites on a pedestal, but I was really disappointed to read what they were really like. Which is pretty bad, but you could argue that the Catholic Church and their royal allies were even worse. I believe that the counter to the argument would be -- of course they were, they had more resources to be horrible with. I do think I detect that the non-catholic Bohemian Estates cleaned up their act a lot in the century or so after, so by the time you get to the battle of White Mountain (I have been to White Mountain! I've been to a lot of the places mentioned in the book!) I see much less reason to be appalled by their general behavior. The book is only 375 pages, you'd think I'd be done with it by now, but it is pretty dense. About a hundred pages of it is King Charles. Hana-my-daughter-in-law had already explained to me why Charles is Charles and not Karel, but reading his early life brought it home to me: he wasn't raised in Bohemia, but in various places around Europe, notably Paris, and his father was from Luxembourg, so no reason for him to be called Karel. Unlike a lot of other rulers of Bohemia, he did at least learn Czech. And he did a lot of very cool things (and I discovered I had the details of the Hunger Wall wrong: the cause of the economic downturn that inspired the building of it was just the finishing of other projects, not crop failure), but you know, he had Jews murdered in order to confiscate their stuff, like all the others. Well, no, actually, he was worse than some of them and not as bad as others.

History is a terrible, terrible thing.

So he doesn't seem to explain what the "Black and Gold" in the title refers to, but on a hunch I looked up the flag of the Holy Roman Empire, and in fact it was black and gold. Well, all right. The thesis of the book seems to be, by the way, that ethnic dioversity and polyglottism are the defining characteristics of Prague history and culture going back to prehistory, and that actually its Czechishness is not that deep or defining, and people should stop being obnoxious nationalists. There were Germans and Jews and Italians there from the beginning, for example, sort of, though it's as hard to call those people Germans in any modern sense as it is to call the Slavic people who arrived after the Hungarians Czech in any modern sense of the word. This thesis harmonizes nicely with the thinking I've been doing about Central European demography while I study it to better understand the world of not-Poland. This idea that there are places that have "always" been the home to some idealized "nation" appears to be a  modern one. In the old days people seemed to up and cart themselves across the landscape rather freely, and while they might claim land and fight over it and they might be horrifically xenophobic and willing to carve each other up over language or religion, they didn't have the elaborate national myth and personification of the Land to bolster up their terrible actions towards each other. I am not sure that internationalism and solidarity politics is possible without passing through the fires of nationalism, though.

Those medieval Europeans sure did truck around that landscape though. We've got these people -- princes, charlatans, priests, scientists, poets, artisans -- careening from London and Ghent and Cracow and Madrid and Milan and Prague to everywhere else, sometimes with thirty or a hundred and fifty carriages worth of stuff, and sometimes more than once in a year. And sending artwork and telescopes over the Alps!

Reading next: Probably A Natural History of Dragons. Emma lent it to me.

Did I mention I read Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (link leads to a more positive review) a while back? I was disappointed. It was all fan service, and mostly repetitious to the point of dulling the fun. Oh well.

And therefore today's poem is about Moravia

Yeah, after writing about the Prague history book I went searching for a poem that had some connection. I decided not to try "Bohemian poem" a moment's reflection will tell you why. I'll get ot some of that this month, though.

So first thing I found is this, and I understand it completely. The fellow who wrote it, Nick Mcrae, was at the time of the posting anyway teaching literature in Slovakia.

From here. More about the poet here.

Moravia

by Nick McRae

— for my father
In this city whose name you can’t pronounce —
where women pace barefoot in dry grass and rusting
bottle caps, sandals in hands, skirts trailing for days;
where old men pack grocery aisles, tens of them, alone,
palming blocks of Edam; where flower-sellers, mustached,
slick-haired, silk ties cinched tightly, flit restaurant to restaurant
like rumors, roses spilling from their arms, pockets full of coins,
while outside, street kids release firecrackers from paper shrouds;
where paraders roam squares, scarves waving,
whose chants rise even as the bottles fall to stone;
where girls in wooden fair-booths, eyes study-weary
beneath the ridiculous haberdashery of corporate America,
slice salami for bankers and tourists and the hungry poor
with soiled bills outstretched — I think of you.
You told me once you’d rather do without all that,
that you’d only ever have one home and that wasn’t it,
that you’d never call this home, said you’d never
lost anything here. Home is the place we lose things:
daylight hunched over engines and their elegies
to oil, the decades of dust; money year after year
bailing your boys out of jail in towns with names
familiar as worn flannel; sleep, teeth (one to an apple,
one to a walnut you find nestled in black leaves
behind a church); your fear of losing me every time
I return to feel your stubble against my cheek.
Here, thousands of birds on spires and antennae
raise their terrible throats to the morning
as though they’d never met. Right now
I am alone in a train car with a girl you’ll never know,
and as we idle at a border crossing, eyeing each other’s passports
for the first time, she gives me handfuls of radishes,
and I know I will lose her, lose whole days pacing alleys
in the cobbled pastels of this city I will also lose,
which will become, as I speed away from it, my home.