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January 25th; It seems that a Chinese Year of the Dragon is just starting, so in honour of that, two more from Little Dragon: Come Home / Crystal Film.
January 24th; Lots of stuff out there if you just know how to look for it.

January 23rd; Must make note of this British bookshop list.
January 22nd; Finally finish new script for the recutting of heritage film about Norway.

January 21st; Read Franc's copy of 'The Course of Irish History'. A book connected to an Irish Republic television series. Each chapter is by a different historian. Would have liked more on the Dark Age era Irish kingdoms and local warlords. Interesting that two of the writers express regret that the Norman conquest of Ireland wasn't completed but got rolled back by resurging Gaelic chieftains over the following two centuries. Norman Ireland's enclaves had almost disappeared by the time the Tudors invaded from across the sea, largely down to worries over Irish armies intervening in England's feudal civil war, The War of the Roses. Sounds as if somehow the 16th century was just a bit too late to finally unite the island under one ruler. Some of the earlier clan battles and rivalries from four or five centuries before that sound romantic, probably because of the time that's elapsed.
January 20th; Bit of Northern Soul: The Admirations / You Left Me. Skipping, upbeat rhythm tussles with sad melody. Lovely evening meal at Esther's with Heather & Anti. I hear all about Anti's project to sell a powerful microscope to a Hungarian university, and his Tarot cards come out very strangely indeed on the topic.

January 19th; So here is Old Sarum in idealised picture form. Looks like it was important for something.
January 18th; During her morning business programme on Irish radio, Emma phones me up for a short interview about Hungary's constitution & debt crisis.

January 17th; A break from Norwegian film in the office over a green tea with Franc. As I return from the loo past the back tables in the small coffee bar a couple of quite smartly-dressed tarts cheerfully proposition me, blowing me kisses as I apologise for being unable to afford them.
Should I work on my memory for faces?
January 16th; Lunch with Annika. We chat about philosophy, academic conferences, human politics. A more lemony sunset with a chilly wind as I walk back to the office. Heart-stirring winter afternoon shadows are pencilled onto buildings round the back of the Keleti railway station.
Finally, some proper headlines: Demon Infestation in New York school district.

January 15th; Quiet Sunday in Budapest grappling with stuff. Afternoon tea with Annika & Mr Saracco. As I meet her she is walking straight out of a very Nordic-looking sunset just over the Danube. I see only an intense ball of blinding golden light at the river bank and a woman's voice in the heart of the fire laughing and shouting my name. A couple of tunes from the zombie/garage/surf-guitar genre: Watusi Zombie / Invasion of the Apemen.
January 14th; Train up to Budapest from the Alfold or 'Great Plain'. Green tea with Georgina at Lakitelek station. Watch another lowland-dust-enhanced sunset on my train as it trundles through all the one-chestnut-tree village stations, stopping at each one. The sun is red-tinted as it slowly descends, seemingly pinned between long hovering slabs of blue-grey cloud. Short interesting attack on an academic Marxist, and a light, funny account of New Year's Eve. End long day with soothing hot bath at home in Budapest flat. Make sure to use cheerful green bath plug, cleverly connected by short chain to blue rubber float shaped like small whale.

January 13th; Friday. Chinese checkers with Zsuzsi. I win one game, she wins the other. Letty & Kasper are back from their various schools as well.
1/ Article answers the question 'Why Are Clever People Ugly?'
2/ Apparently this is a very odd online German course.
3/ Trailer from a French guns-and-chicks film I've never seen - curious how dated it feels.
4/ Is Sugar Toxic? Slightly plodding but thorough nutrition article.
January 12th; "Taliban Handling Corpse Urination Video Surprisingly Well"

January 11th; Still working on documentary scripts. It seems there was a second, separate nuclear-reactor accident in Japan last year, and it's still not clear if things at that plant are healthy either.
January 10th; Write introduction to Norwegian & Syrian films. Japan's new generation of male 'herbivores' have their women alarmed, apparently.

January 9th; Quarrel with Georgina in the car down to the Alfold. Not a good start. Must note this page about bookcases.
January 8th; Finish another of Robin's books 'Enjoy Your Symptom!' by Slovenian cultural-studies guru Slavoj Zizek (pronounced "Zhizhek"). This is a book of articles, each starting with an example from a film, usually a movie from the 1930s, 40s, or 50s, which is the jumping-off point for a discussion of Zizek's peculiar mix of Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Hitchcock - the four people he likes to talk about most. Like French psychoanalytic thinker Lacan, Zizek manages to write impressively difficult, deep-looking stuff that is also quite good fun to read. His text gives readers a seductive blend. Flattering humour, offhand references to Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Austin, Brecht, a rich range of sources. It feels like initiation into a sect of penetrating cleverness. You join a small coterie of enlightened ones who see beneath the conspiracy of everyday life. Thinkers who blend popular films and hard philosophy are certainly more prevalent since McLuhan changed how pop intellectuals promote their ideas and themselves. Zizek has a special interest in 1940s film noir and Hitchcock's thrillers. That said, Zizek has clearly read the material he quotes - this is no skating act. Many of his inferences and arguments are frivolous, but he has at least done some genuine reading and thinking. Every few pages you encounter what feels like a sharp insight. The theorist inspiring this book is Jacques Lacan.
Lacan's main thought is that we are all haunted by an unnameable desire which restlessly moves from goal to goal, never satisfied. More mysteriously, this unnameable lack or hunger actually names the lost unity, the vanished Garden of Eden of early childhood before we had names for things and became named ourselves. Each time we reach a goal, Lacan says, this nameless desire moves to another goal, because we do not see that it is itself a kind of label for goal-less bliss, namelessness, lost unity: in a way the very first name. This idea is an interesting one. It seems to explain a lot about human unhappiness.
Lacan's story is essentially that this & related concepts were really what Freud was teaching and that we must all go back and reread Freud. Much of Zizek's discussion is the application of Lacanian ideas like this to film and other bits of current culture, mixed in of course with plenty of Marxist concepts. This book consists of five explicitly Lacanian articles.
In the post-McLuhan, post-Frankfurt way the whole thing is persuasive but still rhetoric. It's written within two traditions (Marx and Freud) which explicitly deny critics the right to answer back. Critics are denounced for either voicing hidden class interests or voicing subconsciously motivated denials, or both. So they can be dismissed without having to even engage with their criticisms. If it admits to being speculation, speculative thought is a very valuable aid to any thinking community. On the other hand, without that essential element of humility, witty & interesting as Zizek's speculations are, he is still just building an elaborate Marxo-Freudist sandcastle on the sneer "Well, you would say that wouldn't you?" (So I need not ...in fact should not listen to you). That's a debating tactic philosophers used to call "poisoning the wells". No-one mistakes Schopenhauer's or Nietzsche's thought-provoking aphorisms for evidence-supported practical conclusions (bodies of social science). Which is why - despite suggesting all the most interesting bits of "Freudian psychology" decades before Freud claimed it all as his own - Schopenhauer & Nietzsche don't have movements named after them using their work as "tools". Zizek and Lacan are both wonderfully thought-provoking, but they claim rather more for themselves than just provoking thought.

January 7th; Back in Budapest. Finish one of Robin's books: 'Understanding Media' by Marshall McLuhan, a fine piece of vintage early-1960s pop-sociology. He outlines his theory of "cool media" like the fuzzy low-res screens of 1950s and 60s television, seminars or comic strips, which all invite audiences to fill in bits and participate, as against "hot media" like radio or cinema or printed text or lectures which enhance one sense sharply and demand less involvement from their audiences. He does this in a set of short snappy chapters, each of which sails airily through a set of literary quotes, references to current advertisements or TV characters, intriguing historical details, making his claims & arguments in playful aphorisms, sometimes even puns. McLuhan was very fashionable, so therefore became unfashionable again, and is now getting his revival. This book though leaves me wondering if they weren't right to be retreating from him in the 70s. He writes very well, he is witty, he has some intriguing ideas - it's a heady mix. His prose is casually sprinkled with rather lovely poetic images: such as where he talks about the road becoming the runway and being rolled up inside the aeroplane as it takes off. However, there is also something glib and smart-alec about the whole theory, or 'vision' might be a better word. It's like a more intelligent version of Marxism, with means of communication replacing means of production as the technical determinant explaining all societies, but of course that's not a high bar to cross. It's not at all clear how strong he thinks these media factors in cultures are - totally determining, moderately influential, mildly influential - and this difference matters quite a lot.
There's naturally something thrilling about a writer who throws out claims like: Hitler could not have risen to power in an era with television, only an era with radio. This thrill should put us on our guard though. His historical details, whisked past us like a conjuror's props, are nonetheless fascinating - the waltz as a "fast, mechanical dance for the mechanical era"; the Eskimo's igloo as a recent, not ancient, development made possible by civilised man's primus stove; the absence of phone directories and ministry switchboards in Soviet Russia in 1960. The use he puts them to is suspect though. Every one of his artfully tossed-in snowflakes of evidence could mean other things, or a mixture of things, and he quotes Elias Canetti far too respectfully for my comfort. McLuhan's blizzard of similes, looked at one by one, are awfully similar to Canetti's transparently daft ideas in 'Crowds and Power' (that prison cells have barred windows because they are like the teeth of a predator's mouth, that trading goods is like a monkey fist opening and closing to grasp tree branches, and so on). He is perhaps excited by Canetti's writing because Canetti showed him how to rebrand lyrical playfulness as intellectual breakthrough? I'm guessing. He frequently wrangles with Toynbee & Mumford, obvious rivals who also try to explain all of history with one or two bold analogies.
One of the few things McLuhan suggests people do is study all these media messages and frames more closely. He says that media are more influential than what is said with them, so we should research them more. Literary people (except for him, of course) cannot "read" visual media; advertisements are richer than heiroglyphics in terms of cultural information; ads, concert posters, bus tickets, airline maps, radio jingles and so on merit serious attention, etc. But how true is all this? They certainly merit intelligent attention, but do they really contain more meaning and interest than boring oldee-worldee objects of study like books? Each medium certainly conveys "a" message, but McLuhan makes it sound like the only message. The medium is "the" message he says, breezily dismissive of mere content. A second's thought here, with the 1960s safely past, shows just how silly is the claim that the medium, the channel, is everything and that the overt message/content counts for much less. Which is what makes it slightly worrying that this is really the founding document of Media Studies. It's worth asking what forty five years of taking McLuhan in deadly earnest (as a theoretical master revealing powerful new analytical equipment, rather than as a clever, talented essayist with some stimulating perspectives and provocative turns of phrase) has actually achieved, for students learning these supposed "media skills" and for everyone else.
January 6th; Recommended online manual written by a pharmacologist about withdrawing from highly addictive tranquilisers, those in the benzodiazepine group. It seems Xanax is one of these. On the train back to Budapest, sun low on skyline goes under the train. As I look out of the carriage on the dark side, I can see a long strip of sun against fences, walls, and hedges, from under the train. Shadows of the wheel units ripple on and off buildings and fields. I spend the whole trip reading by an open window in the corridor, since the compartment has the hottest temperature I've ever felt on a Hungarian train, and they're typically overheated. Like having my legs next to an open oven door.

January 5th; A stroppy, but in parts interesting, fine-art rant. '12 Art World Habits to Ditch in 2012'.
January 4th; Russian spy milks Facebook celebrity.

January 3rd; Robin & I drive Agi & Kata to the next village to catch their coach back to Szekesfehervar. Breezy sunny weather.
January 2nd; Chinese checkers with Zsuzsi, more Tarot reading with Agi & Kata.

January 1st; After dark, as she's nervous about remembering the gears and handling the older car she hasn't driven for a while, I join Georgina in the big blue Mercedes to the next village, Tiszakurt. There we pick up Zsuzsi off the bus back from her New Year's party. Back at home, Agi's niece Kata has also arrived.
Here's a slightly overwritten but still worrying article about ways existing networks can be used to exclude, isolate, and harass individuals. Curious paleontology piece says human brains have been shrinking for several thousand years.

December 31st; Robin drives to Budapest. Georgina's friend Agi arrives and we spend the evening reading Tarot spreads and chatting.
December 30th; Start planning & writing an intro for the Wolfson Prize essay about how a euro-currency country can make an orderly exit from euroland and restore its national currency.

December 29th; Finally get down to work list. Reacquaint with gorgeous images of the sun like this for the physics book. That photograph comes from this man's website. 2 tunes from clubness & smoovdom land. Ambassadeurs / Zeb.
December 28th; We continue to feed logs to a fire & a stove. Standing by the glowing hearth in the sitting room, a fire which hasn't gone out now for a week, Robin makes the interesting suggestion that 'hearthlessness' = 'heartlessness'. We are talking about how the first decades of homes heated without any open flames by radiators and electricity saw people buying electrical heaters with revolving mirrors hidden behind backlit plastic coal to give the comfortingly familiar impression of dancing flames. Many years ago the Nigel of Darkness remarked that the modern role of the television set in most homes is as a warm flickering hearth around which people can gather and talk, largely ignoring what is on the screen. When I suggest that electric heaters with revolving mirrors were not so stupid, and subtly revealed a real loss, Robin speculates that homes with no hearths created a generation of people with not quite no hearts, but at least uncentred people with no sense of any logical centre to the activities of the home.

December 27th; As we potter round restarting stoves in the kitchen and studio, and I get something of a caffeine buzz from drinking a lot of black tea I find myself telling Robin that the quince (he has some in his kitchen) is a kind of "hyper-pear", with a flavour "over the horizon of pearness". I read his 1970s book 'In Search of Dracula' in which Raymond McNally & Radu Florescu research the life and mythology of Vlad The Impaler, nicknamed Little Dragon ('Dracula'), after his father Dracul. Vlad's real-life career in Romania, five hundred years before Bram Stoker's late-Victorian novel that mingled the horrific Vlad with the vampire myth, was cruel enough. Perhaps the special dread he aroused was due to his mix of sadistic nastiness and twisted humour. The incident where Turkish diplomats refusing to take off their turbans in Vlad's presence get their turbans nailed to their heads is an oft-quoted example of this humour at work. It seems the book got made into a documentary film in which Christopher Lee starred in a double role, wearing both the red-lined cape of Stoker's villain and the traditional costume of a 15th-century Romanian prince. The book's historical research is interesting. Many Romanian peasant folk myths are vindicated by independent sources and there is an interesting contrast between Romanian views of Dracula as a patriotic hero who terrified the Turks as no other leader had, and the hatred of the Saxon German-speaking minority who were among the first to feel Vlad's wrath. The authors even speculate that German-speaking Romanians had blackened Vlad's reputation vindictively and that, while certainly not a very kind man, he was perhaps not quite as monstrous a ruler as he was depicted.
December 26th; Boxing Day. Finish another of Robin's art books about Brancusi, just called 'Brancusi', by the Beaux Arts Magazine for a show at the Pompidou Centre in 1995. The book consists of three long articles: 'Brancusi & his times' by Harry Bellet, 'Symbols & Forms' by Claire Stoullig, 'Brancusi's Photographs' by Elizabeth Brown. The illustrations are excellent, showing sculptures like 'Timidity' and 'Princess X' in their sensuous simplicity, on their elaborate stands, stone on wood or wood on stone, stands often more complex than the smoothed, egg-shaped, polished works on top. The three articles contain intriguing details about Brancusi's life, his talent at self-publicity, and his saintly focus on a kind of spiritualising purity in his work. This meticulous simplifying in his sculpting, involving lots of scraping and polishing, represented - the authors claim - a direction different from that of the king apparent of modern art, Picasso. Interesting also to read about the early support of Marcel Duchamp, who was able to live for many years after from gradually selling off his shrewd early purchases of the Romanian's sculptures before Brancusi became sought after by American collectors and their price went up hugely.

December 25th; Christmas Day. Last night in the small hours finished a very short biography from Robin's library of 'Turner' by Michael Kitson with 50 pages of plates and 40 pages of text about the English painter's artistic career. Kitson sees Turner as very much an eighteenth-century painter who went in a new direction, discovering the subjective effects of light independently from the French Impressionists he was so often compared to but predated by thirty years. Though Turner seemed to be a disappointed man by the end of his life he was supported by the artistic establishment, was commercially successful, and strongly backed by the Royal Academy right from the start of his career, showing there for the first time at age 15 in 1790. This is already interesting since the careers of the later 19th-century artists we respect depended so much on shocking the bourgeoisie, leading the avant garde, being a lone romantic rebel, yet somehow also being counted as part of the subversive anti-tradition tradition of the Salon des Refuses that got the Impressionists rolling. Turner by contrast joined the establishment early, was helped and encouraged by them, and made his bold, visionary experiments with light & colour from inside that establishment. Some of his smaller watercolours have Turner float glittering colours over casual-looking outlines: apparently without effort he conjured up masses, moods, shadows and perspectives of unforgettable light fused with the landscapes or weather it shivered & surged across.
Light snow outside. Grey sky never completely becomes day. Help Zsuzsi make some mince pies, and then afterwards we search out a jigsaw puzzle of kittens and a much harder "erotic" puzzle we don't finish but which features some amusing jigsaw pieces shaped like a wine glass, a bunny rabbit, a pair of handcuffs, the usual. Also today I read another biography, this one rather dense with monochrome illustrations, about the life of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi. Dan Grigorescu's book 'Brancusi & His Century' is written with complex ideas and quite odd English ('rigorousness' instead of 'rigour' and 'treasured in Museum X' throughout to mean they own a piece) which can be blamed on the translator from Romanian to English, Andrei Bantas. Nonetheless Grigorescu very carefully discusses what Brancusi (and Bantas's English tries conscientiously to err on the side of precision, although 'precision' is another word he uses very strangely) was trying to achieve with his purified shapes and his debt to Romanian folk art. Interesting after the short Turner book to read that Brancusi also was quickly spotted and supported within Romania and given official support. His journey to Paris in 1904 was not so much a heroic trek on foot by a starving outsider as a conscious move by a young but already rising star sculptor to the centre of European artistic thought at the time. In Paris - again - he was quickly appreciated and given generous help by celebrated artists of the day like Rodin.
Much of day, Robin is sawing planks to redo the boiler-room floor. Much of evening he & I are engrossed in two infuriatingly brilliant metal-link puzzles, one of which I bought for Bela and one of which popped out of my Christmas cracker at lunch. We finally get the hang of both little metal toys and feel happy, to Zsuzsi's amusement.
2 tunes by hiphop smart-mouth singer Azealia Banks. I suppose we're still in an age of self-styled rebels if she's another success: 212 and The Chill$.
December 24th; Christmas Eve. Sanyi of the Stranded Truck, still there at 11.30pm last night, has done brilliant work taking up floorboards in Robin's boiler room to isolate a plumbing problem. He is still around today, waving a pickaxe about and chuckling at his own jokes. These are the jokes Sanyi tells in his incomprehensible accent. Part of today Robin is replacing floorboards. Buzz-heavy Groove Armada tune with some plinky lemon off-notes.

December 23rd; Letty drives Robin into town. We meet my printers to look at prices for his catalogue. Apparently a naughty CNN interviewer was disingenuously asking some commentator the other night if there might be a "coup" in Hungary soon. Butter wouldn't melt in the IMF's mouth, I suppose.
Late in the evening Robin & I drive out into the Great Plain without Letty. On the way he drives us past a frozen goods lorry from a firm called 'Alex' labelled with a mistaken logo featuring an octagonal ice crystal, although of course all ice crystals are hexagonal. Later on down the night-time road Robin mentions once waking out of an intense dream in which he felt a line of gold down one side of his whole body.
December 22nd; Tea with a friend who shows me her newly-assembled furniture. More tea with another friend afterwards in a book shop.

December 21st; Christmas shopping carols in Corvin mall by now well irritating.
December 20th; A retired Hungarian tells me he is hearing disgruntled murmurs from former police officers wanting to assassinate Orban.

December 19th; Two more songs by Electronicat's Fred Bigot, a man who really likes the button marked 'buzz'. Un, Deux.
December 18th; Now I can see book sales generated by my Salisbury Review cover article starting to flow. Our gloomy predictions about crisis in euroland coming true by the day.
On a few eerie occasions in the last six weeks I've been in the ground-floor lobby of my building, waiting for the lift to come down, when I get the sense I am not alone. Looking round I slowly make out a small, thin, dark, crumpled figure sitting on a kitchen stool out in the lobby, smoking. Wherever he is sitting there is always shadow. He seems to be the husband of the janitor, and he has the curiously bruised, creased face some homeless people here have. He almost looks tanned but on closer inspection his skin is not sunbrowned, but darkened by broken blood vessels, as if the rings under his eyes have spread out to fill his whole face. We greet each other these days, and his cigarettes smell strangely pleasant, as if he rolls them using pipe tobacco. He seems permanently weary, but he might just have given up trying to impose himself on the world.

December 17th; Saturday. Over to Marguerite's flat to water her plants. Drop in on seamstress, who seems in good spirits. After dark, on the street I see an angry-looking man between two small children. Each tot is holding one of his two hands as they walk. He seems extremely frustrated and is ranting to them in Hungarian in a high mechanical voice. He says "Iftherearelotsoffloorsinabuilding Then You Need To Know The Number Of The Floor. Iftherearelotsofflatsonafloor Then You Need To Know The Number Of The Flat..." and continuing for several more sentences in this vein of strained, near-hysterical sarcasm without pausing for breath. I overtake them and both of the two patient little toddlers have faces of baffled embarrassment, wondering why Daddy is off on one again and why someone else couldn't be their Daddy instead.
In related news about totally self-centred people who take themselves utterly seriously, eight women in Britain are actually prosecuting police forces because undercover coppers didn't tell them the truth. These women have decided that the single most important thing about several undercover police officers spying on various protest groups is that those men lied to them to get them into bed and break their hearts, who cares about anybody else?
December 16th; Friday. Gets slightly chillier. Very nice mulled wine in the evening at Jeremy W's Christmas drinks. Amazingly sell three books, and hear about a woman's self-help book called something like 'All Men Are Jerks'. Nice.

December 15th; Thursday. Do voiceover in the morning. Tea with Kalman at the Italian Institute. While I am waiting there for Kalman to arrive, the affable Italian bar man looks at me with concern and urges me to drink a beer and relax a bit, but I drink a green tea all the same. Seems Christopher Hitchens is dead. Sad to lose such a cheerful wit, and especially sad he had to die of such a nasty, slow illness, but also odd how someone so wrong & muddled could convince so many he was right & clear. A quick tongue with the clever putdown obviously goes a lot further in making you a "public intellectual" than actually thinking major topics through. Style trumps substance once again - or was that lifestyle act what it took to get people to read his often lucid & sensitive magazine writing?
December 14th; Wednesday. Never trust someone who's never been punched in the face? The double book launch at Brody House for Sylvia & me goes well.

December 13th; Tuesday. One of those illnesses that takes its time about departing. Some panicky rushing around town preparing for tomorrow.
December 12th; Viktor visits again. We drink Croation schnapps & use both laptops at once.

December 11th; Viktor drops over, and we download a free disc-burning utility at a cafe with WiFi while I read some Tarot spreads for him. By night I finish my copy of 'Extreme Money' by Satyajit Das. This is a slightly intense but also entertaining & detailed attack on the last 50 years' growth in leveraged buy-outs, junk-bond trading, and complex debt derivatives. He stresses how banks' increasing dependence on day-to-day trading in financial markets has taken over from traditional lending as their main activity. The book is very much in the style of his piece in our imprint's compilation about the financial crisis, 'Collateral Damage'. Illustrative quotes from popular culture intersperse careful explanations of how various deals in the tradeable risk system were unsound & in bad faith. This book is an excellent way to quickly grasp some of the technicalities of what went wrong. Sleep 11 hours, still snuffling & coughing.
December 10th; Drive back to Budapest, or at least Budapest airport, with Robin & Georgina. Rest at a nice empty cafe table for about an hour inside the airport. This is to use their free, unlimited, easy-to-access WiFi hot spot (conceited "Paris Airports" "free WiFi" promoters please note) to check a couple of things, then get home to bed/floor by 8pm for 17 hours of rest. 13 hours asleep while snatches of reading & coughing fit into the other 4.

December 9th; Coughing more. Head hurts and scalp tingles. Am slow all day. Endure a horrible night on Robin's sofa in front of log fire, battling The Bacillus.
December 8th; Day starts well, but I can half-sense another program running in the background. Some kind of illness is gradually settling onto me, like a big bat. Pretending it is not happening, chat with Robin in the evening, poring over his box of buttons.

December 7th; Find pictures for, write, and then voice over an extra minute & a bit about alchemists in Cesky Krumlov for Kalman. Am able to leave office at 1pm. God, is it possible? The Czech film ordeal is finally over? At 4pm lesson with IT Attila do a bit of interpreting for him with a British businessman specialising in shopping malls. The Englishman luckily also brings his own Hungarian interpreter who does most of the work. By 6pm I'm on train to Robin's house in the Great Plain, exhausted, but with the prospect of rest. Just before getting off at Szolnok for the usual ridiculous sprint down the tunnel connecting different platforms in the huge deserted 1960s station (just five minutes to change trains, and no-one in 180 years of railway timetabling has worked out that if you have the spare room you can often arrange that connecting trains be on facing platforms) I am standing in front of my seat in my train compartment. I look through the glass windows onto the corridor and the windows from the corridor into the black night rushing past. There appears the most astonishing & vivid optical illusion I've ever seen.
I can see all six of us in my compartment, five seated, reflected in the outside corridor window very clearly. There I am, standing, closest to the corridor and behind me the middle-aged woman, behind her the teenage girl with dyed red hair on my side right against the far window. Then on the other side, facing the teenager, is the old frail deaf lady chatting silently in sign language with her grey-haired brother or husband, also deaf. Next to him is - in our real compartment - a man of about 30 reading a book, sitting facing me. But in the reflected image in the glass the man with the book has vanished, and the old lady is there ....twice. Very convincingly she has totally replaced the man facing me with his book, and in the glass reflection are two identical old ladies, sitting either side of the grey-haired man. I look from different angles to try to understand the illusion, but she has replaced him perfectly and fits into the mirrored compartment without any sign it is a double reflection. Most extraordinary is that I cannot see any reflection of the reading man at all, not even as a faint image overlaid by old lady. Two identical elderly women, gesturing in stereo on either side of the grey-haired man, both women equally crisp, look obviously absurd. However, there is no other sign that something odd is happening to the reflections in her corner of the window, though that must be what it is. I wish I could have photographed it.
December 6th; Button Trader Sylvia kindly whips up a quick supper and we discuss buttons & books.

December 5th; Morning work with Kalman.
December 4th; Sunday. Like yesterday, am unable to get an internet connection.

December 3rd; Remarkable party at Marguerite's. A groaning board of snacks & treats. One feature is that early on, four guests get stuck in the building's brand new lift at her floor. We have conversations with the trapped guests through the lift door for half an hour, until engineers can release them. Later some of us play scrabble while Emma the fluffy dog runs around being social. I ask everyone how I can get modafinil.
December 2nd; Meet IT Attila at Arkad shopping centre. Finally, in the late afternoon Kalman sits down to edit the Czech film with me, and we start to make progress. While in the early evening he takes part in a tenants' meeting I read a couple of old articles at Frieze magazine online, amuse myself slowing down the fadein and fadeout on the movingtoyshop web page, and pop on a Facebook button.

December 1st; Impromptu dinner at Terri & Alvi's. A very happy-seeming couple, Kati & Davide, join us, and Alvi snaps one of our Tarot positions with his mobile phone, using some clever phone application to make the tabletop under the card spread look like the surface of a lightbox.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?

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November 30th; The Salisbury Review issue with - apparently - my cover article in it should be out in the next day or two.

November 29th; More interview coaching for Adriana. Three songs from Little Dragon: Constant Surprises / Empire Ants / Please Turn.
November 28th; Re-record a single sentence for Malev. Kalman & Mark the sound engineer find a cunning mixing-desk wheeze to disguise the changes that have apparently happened to my voice since the original was taped a couple of years ago. Kalman keeps saying how much I've "matured". Thanks mate. Sylvia & I do more planning for the double book-launch party.

November 27th; Breakfast at Kalman's. He puts lots of spices into the frying pan, and these burn up into pale grey smoke that fills his kitchen, brings tears to our eyes and makes us both cough uncontrollably. Effectively our omlettes pepper-spray us, getting their revenge in first since we clearly plan to eat them soon. Once the crying & choking is over, though, they are delicious. More work during day grappling with a paper for a cancer journal. Impromptu evening soup party at Marguerite's with two friends whose identities shall remain undisclosed. Quick tune from un Freunch rockeur du mix, the wonderfully named Fred Bigot: Dans Les Bois.
November 26th; Another truly remarkable law being prepared in the US. What are we going to do with these people?

November 25th; Mulled wine with kind Marion. Tasty dinner at Sylvia's. Hear stories about Ronnie Barker and two porcelain traders she used to know.
November 24th; Do mock Oxford interview with soignee young Adriana from Spain. She tells me that all Hungarian boys sound gay to her, but that Italian boys are gay. An important distinction, probably. She also proudly mentions having rescued a 16-year-old would-be monk friend from a lifetime of Catholic devotion by seizing on a chance remark of his that some girl he knew seemed "interesting". Thereafter she repeatedly urged him "Go out with her! Go out with her!" until finally he did.

November 23rd; Surprise dinner at Ernesto's. Meet jovial Basshar at the dinner, until he rushes off, suddenly summoned by phone to stop a political quarrel between two fellow Syrians.
November 22nd; Over at Marguerite's for the night so that fluffy dog Emma has company while her owner visits Madrid. Emma behaves well and is cheerful, bustling round Marguerite's flat busily chewing on squeaky toys and so forth.

November 21st; Seems that members of South Korea's parliament sometimes mace each other during debates. At least they care.
November 20th; Over to Marguerite for a tasty omlette, to say hello to her dog Emma, to use her Wifi, and to help her carry what I suggest is an aesthetically-challenged coffee table back from the absurd furniture warehouse Kika. This is a local chain of shops blatantly titled to sound almost like Ikea. She says she is not bothered if I think the table is ugly, pointing out she'll almost never see it because it will be covered in books and papers most of the time, and it's cheap anyway. On unpacking it, as I predicted, there is a problem: no pre-drilled holes, so she must buy a special drill bit for going into wood before she can assemble it. Flat-pack furniture that gives the customer a creative role.

November 19th; Bump into Henry in the Corvin shopping centre. Franc joins us. The three of us discuss teaching & internet marketing.
November 18th; Button Trader Sylvia sweetly invites me out for dinner at boutique hotel Brody House, where we watch a dapper Frenchman do some very clever conjuring tricks beside each of the four dinner tables, and Sylvia & I swap ideas about selling. William seems to like the joint book-launch idea. We have one last beer in the repulsively smoky cellar bar Vitula.

November 17th; Spend whole day working with Robby only to number the shots on the film. Seems that no-one has done this yet, and without this it is very slow to produce a first draft. Since the deadline is tomorrow, it is obvious we cannot finish in time. I feel ill.
November 16th; Get told I have been disobeying clear instructions with Czech film.

November 15th; Payment comes tomorrow for Panama job.
November 14th; Monday. No money or food, so Robby, the Dutch video editor, kindly shares his lunch with me. Then generous Ernesto invites me over for supper, where I encourage Viki to also interpret some Tarot spreads.

November 13th; Sunday. Homing in on internet-access freedom.
November 12th; Saturday. This competition might be fun.

November 11th; Some people get excited today by it being the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of this century. Some even celebrate the moment today when it is 11 minutes past 11am.
November 10th; Productive day working with Robby, Kalman's new Dutch video editor, rebuilding the Cesky Krumlov / Holasovice architecture film. Andi tells me I should also mention Agi, yesterday resplendent in turquoise stockings, in my weblog if I'm going to write about her addressing me in Spanish. Brief beer with Mr Saracco after dark. He is in good spirits and buys a copy of the book. Aniko seems to have finally recovered from her heavy cold, and sends me another of the images we have to get done for the fusion power book.

November 9th; Wake on my sofa out of a dream in which slow-moving swarms of flying bee-wasp-type things burst out of the walls of a sandy tunnel a few inches under the ground and mass onto a kitten or hamster. They eat it alive in slowmo. Not very nice really. Exhausting day at Kalman's office. New video editor from Holland interviews. Learn by text message that my money stash for landlady tonight is not enough, and must borrow another twenty quid to meet a water bill for several months that just came in, back to you in the studio Trevor. Kalman & I talk about money worries. In the late afternoon, he takes me back to his flat and generously shares his meal with me, some rather tasty macaroni carbonara. In all the excitement, I rudely forget to go round to Gordon's at 1pm to sell him a copy of the book for cash. Seems I seriously offend him. On top of what would have been a very useful tenner it turns out he'd have given me some lunch too. Could have done with that.
November 8th; Robin treats me to breakfast. Ernesto is helping him design his catalogue. All my students have cancelled this week (Poor Attila sends me text messages making it sound as if he has tonsilitis). So suddenly have no cash. Work through day & evening to finish newer Panama travel-agency translation.

November 7th; Business breakfast at Vesna's firm. They provide rather nice croissants. The firm, Sova, design and/or make hand-tufted carpets. Valentin, the founder of the company, unexpectedly buys a copy of the book as Vesna - who works with Ernesto on interior-design projects - shows me photos of some lush & intriguing rugs dreamt up by carpet designers they work with, such as Kata Brinkus, Csilla Safrany, Erika Fuzessery. Work afternoon at Kalman's and then Robin drops by my flat in the evening.
November 6th; Esther takes me to meet Catherine briefly back from teaching English in Saudi Arabia. We veto the new ice bar with furniture carved out of blocks of ice as too expensive (an obvious winning business concept in Hungary - the only culture I've ever known where women hate the cold so much they whine incessantly to everyone about catching a chill up their fannies). Instead Catherine kindly treats us at a shisha bar where we all puff apple-flavoured smoke through hookahs like Alice's caterpillar, but less expertly. To top this, Catherine also buys a copy of the book, sweetly saying she needs to learn about the economic crisis. Life on the teachers' "compound" in Arabia sounds a little claustrophobic, rather like living on some kind of moon base, but Catherine is as cheerful as ever about it. Her Brazilian friend & fellow teacher/linguist Andy tells me that Portuguese irregular verbs are not the nightmare I'd been warned against. Last thing we repair to the dark deserted concert-bar room of the Cotton Club. Last there with Ines, I think. A sea of small round tables and lots of red velvet seems to create the right ambience for some successful Tarot readings for the three of them.

November 5th; Go with Marguerite and her fluffy white dog Emma to Tim's Guy Fawkes bonfire party out in nearby village of Paty. Very appropriately, Tim burns a large effigy of the euro currency symbol atop a sort of wooden castle, narrowly avoiding setting fire to a neighbour's house. A close brush with what would have been an all-too-vivid metaphor for how the euro spreads its woes to neighbouring economies. Wonderful cooking from Tim's wife Erika. No major fireworks and small dog Emma enjoys the food & company hugely. Straight back into town for delicious dinner with Zoe and her two friends. We hear how someone in Sydney attending a Coptic Christian festival had their suit stained with blood spattered onto him by an overenthusiastic self-flagellator. Zoe suggests Adam Curtis is a silver-tongued closet state-socialist and relates how she once attended a talk he gave in London where he showed a three-minute snatch of Kim Philby's funeral: slightly odd choice of material perhaps. She relates crossing communist China as a schoolgirl during Mao's Cultural Revolution to visit her father then posted in Mongolia - worrying moment when put by Maoist Chinese handlers into a separate taxi from the Queen's Messengers she was supposed to stay close to at all times.
November 4th; Surprise dinner at Ernesto & Eva's flat. Once again, as a later course Ernesto knocks up a superb midnight pizza. Interesting anecdotes.

November 3rd; Decide to replace my half-rotten leather watch strap with something I make myself, money being not so plentiful right now.
November 2nd; Meet Attila & Bubu in the Arkad shopping arcade. Finally meet Treehugger Dan at Sylvia's button-book launch party but leave early, feeling rather feeble. Feeble not something a hipster would feel, of course.

November 1st; Arrange my books on the floor in low piles of 2 or 3 into an almost closed rectangle. Makes Balint laugh anyway. Decide not to visit cemetery.

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