On Praguensia, trickster cities, & strangers in the night…
#ReadersNotebook: my notes on the Intelligence Squared podcast interview with Helen Oyeyemi
This notebook entry is a bit more fragmented than my previous entries. . . this is basically just a transcription of a page torn out of my notebook where I was jotting down quotes, thoughts, & further reading titles while listening to this podcast interview:
Podcast: Intelligence Squared
Interviewer: Ruchira Sharma
Date: Feb 14, 2024
Praguensia?
a body of work by lovers of Prague…
“a city or a state of mind”
“a zone of communication or transformation”
“a place where fiction comes to become nonfiction—things that you don’t imagine as possible suddenly cross this bridge into the possible and vice-versa”
Prague is its own entity, “a living being.”
trickster
so beautiful but it’s so much more than that
“that sense of trying to fictionalize a city that already does a lot of fictionalizing itself” was like “running around with a net trying to capture some of the visions that Prague had to spare” (or did she say share?)
→ “I think I have been able to present my corner of the mystery.”
“Everybody has their angle that they collide with.”
“I went as far as I could with this until I hit my angle where I had to step back and say ‘I don’t know’ and just enjoy the mystery of Prague.”
(Literally my relationship with her entire body of work.)
“There are so many eras that Prague has lived through and none of them define Prague.”
“It’s not possible to address it all when writing a ‘Prague book’.”
“You see glimpses of all of the influences of these times” when navigating the art, the film, the literature, the history, & the physical city itself, but it’s all just part of a patchwork that itself can only be called “Prague” & not anything else.
Re: on ✌🏻 magic ✌🏻 in her books…
“I don’t see those things as magic… I think that what happens a lot in the way that I write and the way that I conceive of fiction is that while I’m making things up I might as well just make everything up… You’re already in an unlikely realm so all of the unlikely things can happen.”
“It’s also a way of talking about what happens psychologically as we read…”
“I reread a lot and I’ve noticed that when I go back to books that I’ve read.. there are passages that make me think like ‘I don’t think that passage was in the book the last time I read it…’ Like there’s a sort of reorganization that happens every time you return to a text… and in a way cities like Prague can take advantage of that because so much of Prague’s history still remains unknown and gets shuffled around depending on who talks about it… more of a literary device that’s about portraying what goes on in the mind when we read, when we visit a place, when we try to conceive of a place.”
The Good Soldier Švejk (pronounced “Shake”)
by Jaroslav Hašek
an unfinished satirical dark comedy novel
1000 pages
her desert island book 👀
Rereading connects before ungrasped elements to her deepened(?) knowledge…
“That’s what I love about books in general: the way they wait for you to know more, and to have seen more, and to feel more, and come back to them and open new doorways and enter into these passageways that before you barely noticed.”
the dynamic of your life being connected to another person’s but in a way that’s more like invisible threads
that are inexplicable
there’s no discernible reason why these two people have this connection
→ how Oyeyemi feels about her attachment to Prague
she can’t verbalize the feeling, or the “irrational connection”
it allows her to live her real life > she was waiting for her real life to begin
parallel between that & a lot of the friendships she observes irl & in literature
“The thing that actually becomes the most permanent thing in your life is the thing that you think is temporary or it’s just going to be for a while…”
…things i think are going to be a big deal, aren’t…
…permanent presence…
The way that parts of us can show up and have this really strange & lasting influence in other people’s lives and then other times you just brush past people… ‘strangers in the night.’ So the way that cities can do that, the way that people can do that to each other…
…and in PARASOL, Prague enters the dynamic of the friendships & reacts differently to each one of them & to their dynamics with each other—“so there’s a sort of alchemy there.”
Oyeyemi’s relationship to Prague is an “enemies to lovers” storyline…
Both of her responses to Prague (the enemies & the lovers parts) are featured in the book.
“It was like a romantic comedy where the two people hate each other so much that it ends up meaning something.”
She says she doesn’t usually have that reaction to a place that usually she is a very appreciative traveler & is always able to find something to like about a place but with Prague the first time she was there she just hated everything about it.
And then later when she came back, nothing about the city had changed, but suddenly she loved it all.
She genuinely doesn’t know what happened.
It just felt so irrational.
She tried dating other cities but nothing felt the way that Prague did.
(WHATTHEFUCKHELENOYEYEMI
GETOUTOFMYHEAD
Ok sorry about that…)
She feels “vulnerable” in regards to this book in a way that she “hasn’t been with other books” just because she has an issue with sincerity, she prefers to be ironic & be distanced, & not talk too passionately about the things she loves because then if someone else doesn’t love it then she’ll be really upset.
(redacted)
“There has to be some element of risk involved in the art that you make—it’s like the finishing touch.”
This book is “something that I just want to be there for the next person who comes to Prague and is like why do I randomly feel such a draw to this place when there’s absolutely no reason for me to feel this way… and then it will touch on…”
Nezval: “Prague With Fingers of Rain” 1930s
when she read this it felt like had it been written now, it felt like somebody else has been—just sees it
“and that was when i knew that it wasn’t just me”
“and then you read other works and you see that other people feel like this”
“So I like being part of this chain of unlikely Prague-lovers.”
“In a way I would be fine if the city that I see only exists in my imagination but it is nice that it also has an objective reality in some sense.”
Prague is “a place that shouldn’t just be visited once.” “There’s just so much to it in so many layers. It also depends on the mood that you catch Prague in…”
of the city, some Aloofness. Illusionist?
At times she says that while she loves the city, she has no idea how it feels about her and it’s kind of just like: “ok that’s fine if you love me that’s your issue” but then when she was away for sixth months she had really vivid dreams of waking up at home in Prague—
Also graffiti of her name in huge letters started showing up randomly around her neighborhood. Her friend sent her pictures of her name on busstops & tramstops & walls.
But it stopped once she got home.
“I took that as a sign that Prague was calling me back. That Prague misses me too! So sometimes you feel your affection returned, sometimes there’s an aloofness, sometimes it’s very straightforward & certain, & sometimes there’s a kind of desire to mislead…” a kind of ambiguity, or refusal to be trustworthy or dependable…
The House of the Hairy(?) Ghost—a pub that she passed once and made a note of visiting one day but then she could never find it again
What do you hope people get from this book?
“A different picture of what resistance means, of what resistance to circumstances means. Because a big thing about what I admire and love about Prague so much is that so many people have tried to define the city and control the city and just haven’t been able to because it’s just too weird for them.
“And I think that… and if anybody out there who maybe feels like just that they’re too weird to live in some way it’s just a way of saying no like this is, this too is a way of being in the world. And a successful way of being like it means that you get to exist within these spaces that nobody has names for or words for, it’s possible to thrive. Prague is the home of all those concepts, & people, & beings.”
“We’re encouraged to switch off the understanding of ourselves but we’re doing it all the time. We’re fictionalizing and romanticizing everything and everyone all the time. It also has to do with our interpretation of what happens to us and how we see other people so just allowing that free association that would turn everywhere into Prague.”