DAILY PHOTO: Hotel Queen Elizabeth, Gödöllő
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Author Archives: B Gourley
Relentless Rain [Sonnet]
It rains for days on end in this city. The people peer out under umbrellas. Nothing 's washed clean; it's soggy & gritty and brutal as a Kafka novella. The streets aren't light, but nor are they true dark. The light isn't absent, just sapped of vim. The gray that remains is like Fall in Denmark. Relentless rain is relentlessly grim. The gutters are glutted with murk and sludge. The rushing waters can't sweep it all clean. All work 's drudgery and all walks a trudge, and there's no sparkle in the pavement sheen. Do some "sing in the rain?" No, they just mock -- their umbrella flipped out and w/ sodden socks.
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Dragonfly [Kyōka]
the dragonfly is still, and I wonder whether it's dead, and further wonder whether anyone has thought that of me
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City Sonnet
A million lives are packed in this city, and each one struggles to be its own self: the starving, rotund, ugly, and pretty -- the tailored and those who buy off-the-shelf. And everyone fails, yet they all succeed in being different, while being alike. And they all heal, while they also all bleed, and almost all would survive a first strike. Everyone knows someone - just not neighbors. They love to remain enigmatic at home, while transparent with those who share labors -- though some want everyone to leave them alone. A city is a strange place full of strangers, and those who choose it thrive on its dangers.
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DAILY PHOTO: Fő tér, Szentendre
Accidental Travel [Sonnet]
If you can follow rivers to the sea by drifting without thrashing or grasping -- just let the flow take you upon a spree, a spree of dunk and breathe, without gasping, then you will witness all there is to know. You'll see shaky shanties and vast estates, the birds in flight and creatures: fast and slow, the weeping willows, and fish tempting Fates. If you can roll around the rocks -- always -- and never crack your head and silence all the voices saying you've reached your end-days, and never rush and never, ever stall... If you can do all this and keep the flow, it won't matter you don't know which way you go.
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Shadow of Night [Haiku]
a park at night. the shadows are darker because of the light
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BOOK REVIEW: The Art of the Tale by Steven James & Tom Morrisey
The Art of the Tale: Engage Your Audience, Elevate Your Organization, and Share Your Message Through Storytelling by Steven JamesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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This is a fine book on storytelling, storytelling with a focus on business presentations and speeches. That said, this is a topic for which the market is glutted. There are many books available about storytelling, and while this one doesn’t distinguish itself by being exceptionally bad, neither does it distinguish itself as exceptionally good. It’s a decent book on storytelling, and if you’re interested in stories for work presentations or speeches and haven’t read other books on the subject, you might as well try this one. However, if you’ve studied up on the subject, I wouldn’t expect to discover anything profound or novel in this book.
The book does focus on some subjects more than do others. One of my favorite parts was chapter 11, “Warts and All…,” because it addresses an issue that books tend to overlook or gloss over, and that’s how to deal with the skeletons in one’s closet (or in the company’s closet.) It offers an intriguing look at the dark side of Henry Ford.
One of the strengths of this book is that it summarizes key lessons and repeatedly revisits core concepts (e.g. the StoryCube, which is these authors’ outline for presenting the fundamental elements of a story.) The book’s greatest weakness is probably oversimplifications and banal statements, particularly given that the authors critique the simplifying statements of others. For example, they offer a criticism of the common distinction between plot- and character-driven literature that misses that there is something fundamentally different between Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “The Hunger Games” that is worth understanding, and – to the degree their criticism is true – much of this book could be similarly criticized as oversimplification or false dichotomization / categorization.
Reading this book helped me think about the subject of storytelling, particularly the non-written variety of story, but I can’t say there was anything groundbreaking or of unmatched profundity.
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DAILY PHOTO: A Castle at Night
BOOK REVIEW: Rivers of Babylon by Peter Pišťanek
Rivers of Babylon by Peter PišťanekMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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This is a Horatio Alger story (rags-to-riches) done Slovak style, which is to say it’s decidedly more edgy and gritty than the typical American version would be. The protagonist’s success is not solely the result of hard work and determination, but also a nasty temper, a capacity for brutality, and an unstudied skill for reading and manipulating people (despite a lack of education or intellectual acumen.)
Rácz (the story’s lead) returns home to his village from military service believing that he has a modest inheritance coming his way, only to discover that some members of his extended family absconded with his deceased parent’s savings. The father of Rácz’s sweetheart recommends that Rácz go to the big city [Bratislava] to earn some quick cash because the father can’t very well marry his daughter off to a destitute young farmer. Rácz does go to Bratislava and happens to sit down in a dinner next to an old man who is looking for his own replacement to run the central heating system for a block that is dominated by a high-end hotel catering to foreign visitors as well as some mostly luxury shops and businesses. It’s not a prestigious job, essentially a furnace stoker, but the pay is not bad and most people treat the stoker pretty well because they’re scared of having their heat go out in the winter – except the hotel manager, who is a bully. Rácz has his “Falling Down” moment after being tormented by the Manager, and his burst of anger — and the realization that he can control the hotel and all that’s around it by blackmailing everyone to keep the heat working — starts him down a path that will result in his rise to gangster-king status.
The book is humorous throughout, though it’s largely black humor. As for trigger warnings: the book includes acts of rape and kidnapping. Rácz does have a kind of moral compass, and one does see where his limits lie and the ethical rules he applies, but that moral compass is wildly off-kilter in comparison to most of society. I found the psychology of Rácz and other main characters (e.g. Video Urban, a character who is far more street smart than Rácz, but not as capable of brutality) to be intriguing, and the book offers a vision of what made the Soviet leader’s tick. [The era seems to straddle the fall of Communism as a shift to privatization takes place in the book’s latter half.]
If you’re interested in Slovak literature or gangster literature or both, I’d highly recommend this book.
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