Prague, this is a crone with claws

Kafka says you have to yield to Prague, or else. In so much of the analysis of his writing, and in his writing itself, the reader gets the sense of a divided love/hate relationship with the city. But it is sometimes funny. The Castle is truly funny in places, and all over the city there are humorous pieces of sculpture. In front of the Kafka Museum are these two guys peeing into a basin at their feet that is in the shape of the Czech Republic. Debbie and I sat waiting for the museum to open this morning and watched people react to this fountain. As these large copper men pee into their fountain, their hips swivel and their winkies raise and lower such that the water sprays all around. People hold their winkies, pat their bottoms, and put their hands into the "pee" streaming into the fountain. This fountain is so blatant about an essentially unspeakable and basic performance that it is powerfully attractive to the passing audience. It is positively magnetic. On our way home from a cafe last night, Debbie and I witness a gentleman merrily peeing between two parked cars, but the fact that he wasn't made of copper and he wasn't peeing into a symbolic basin just left him being disgusting in public.




So with this hilarious sculpture, the Kafka Museum starts with a bang. After the copper boyz, there is a big K. Here are Debbie and I doing interpretive tableaux with the K. For reasons of good taste, we did not do any interpretive tableaux with the copper boyz.


The museum is set up so that the viewers can experience Kafka's work through the disorientation that he creates in his texts. It kind of missed the humor, but maybe I am just a nut to find some of the surrealism humorous. There are two excellent short films, one that shows Prague from his twisted, modernist, cubist point of view, and another that is a brilliant summary of the The Castle. Whoever did the text was brilliant because the English, and I guess the Czech, narrative plaques were both poetic and informative. I felt like I had a better feeling for the texts after going through the museum where we are urged by a sign to let the space show us and the sound guide us through Kafka's parallel universe Prague.

In the part about the horror of bureaucracy, there is a hallway of filing cabinets most of which do not open. There are two phones, one does not work, the other has a voice reading The Trial, and there is a third phone one hears ringing but cannot be found to be answered. I tried to open some if the shut filing cabinets and laughed when I couldn't because it reminded me of my filing cabinet that I often can't open. They are full of information, but I can't get it, so I essentially don't have it. The cognitive dissonance could be frustrating, but it is also funny. Debbie and I stood amongst the filing cabinets that wouldn't open, listening to the phone ringing which could not answered, and laughed because of the feeling of urgency created by the phone that was artificial, but real, but futile. Good metacognition can result is really funny moments.

On our way home, we stopped at The Slavia Cafe for coffee. This is a slightly faded art deco cafe of the old French style where the room is large but crowded with little tables. The waiter was so sweet to speak to us in English, because he could, and let us order in "Czech". "Dva kavu prosim" resulted in two coffees from the lovely waiter who said, "That's easy!". This cafe was a place where Kafka and his art and music buddies would meet for coffee. A local person we met the other day said that all the other cafes in Prague raised their prices but the Slavia forgot.



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