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October 8th, 2008
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Reliving the '60s



June 4th, 2008 issue

If you like crowded, sweaty rooms, the Prague Writers’ Festival was the place to be this past weekend. Both the Saturday night reception at the Mayor’s Residence and the Sunday opening gala at Divadlo Minor started the same way — late, with crowds jammed into the lobbies, waiting for the doors to open.

Inside, it was the usual mix of witty discourse, offbeat entertainment and moments of absurdist humor.
When the crowd finally poured into the main reception room of the Mayor’s Residence, chandeliers sparkled over tables brimming with food. But in one of those classic Czech moments, no one could touch the food (thankfully, the bar was open) until a lengthy welcoming ceremony was over.
Festival President Michael March made some cryptic remarks about 1968, the festival’s focus this year, like “It was a Freudian complex versus the military-industrial complex.” Prague Deputy Mayor Marie Kousalíková noted the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Prague, and the risks taken by samizdat writers and publishers in the years after. Mexican Ambassador José Luis Bernal observed that 1968 had been a pivotal year in his country as well, then introduced a mariachi band he had brought along.
The music was an odd cultural frisson, especially after a classical violin and piano duo had played a Kreisler caprice just minutes earlier. Asked later if he had ever shared a bill with a mariachi band, the violinist grinned and admitted it was a first.
The next night a capacity crowd jammed Divadlo Minor after a flood nearly canceled the program, which started with a film/slide presentation of the festival sponsors, with The Doors’ “Strange Days” as a soundtrack. Then the performance group Handa Gote did a pantomime of the crushing of Prague Spring — presumably. By the time the guy in whiteface came out wearing guitars on his feet instead of shoes, it was hard to tell. But the music was great, with Ed Sanders’ “1968” segueing into a Freedom of Expression award presentation to Russian poet and dissident Natalia Gorbanevskaya, then Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” introducing and setting the tone for the authors’ panel.
Guardian columnist Gary Younge was the moderator, and the first thing he did was admit that he hadn’t even been born in 1968. But the writers — Canadian Margaret Atwood, Americans Michael McClure and Paul Auster, and Czech Petr Král — all had vivid recollections of the year, both personal and political.
Auster got off the best quip about 1968, reading a passage from one of his novels in which the character says of the events of that year, “There would be no point in going over it again” — then adding dryly, “which is what we’re doing tonight.”
Interestingly, the subject that came up most often was the Vietnam War. McClure talked about watching squadrons of planes flying over San Francisco on their way to deliver men and munitions to Southeast Asia, and Auster recalled the choice facing all draft-age men in the ’60s opposed to the war: jail or exile. The indelible mark Vietnam left on the American psyche was perhaps most evident when McClure went on a rant about chemical weapons and petroleum byproducts, then suddenly paused, looked around and said, “I hope this is understandable.”
Probably more people understood Atwood’s remark that, from a woman’s viewpoint, one of the most significant events of the ’60s was that “Girdles disappeared.” That was verbal shorthand not only for changes in fashion, but the Pill, women’s liberation and what she characterized as a “huge change in acceptable social behavior.”
The Canadian Embassy sponsored a reception afterward, but for some the streets beckoned, cool and wet from the rain, with Country Joe’s words still ringing in the air: “There ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopie, we’re all gonna die.”


Other articles in Tempo (4/06/2008):

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