kathy is making serious progress learning croatian – she puts in 3-6 hours each day studying it.  i just sit around and drool. she overheard 2 old dudes on the bus talking in croatian about the american poet and his wife who live in lizjnan.  i find a lot of older men look longingly at me with kathy, wishing they had a younger chickie of their own… while a lot of older women severely frown – either at me, thinking i left my old wife for this young thing – or at kathy, thinking she’s encroaching on their territory.  no one has any idea of the truth.  if they did, they’d go out and find their own kathy… i’m thinking of selling lesbian kathys for the women, older kathys for the young.

we’re going to a croatian poetry reading tonight.  i of course neither speak nor understand the language.  figure it won’t be a problem cuz i don’t understand most poetry written in english anyway… or wish i didn’t when i did.  wherever we finally settle, i’ll learn the language.  until then, i’ll probably just learn words like hello, please, thank you… and for the rest i’ll simply point and grunt while looking harmeless.

i worked on a collage, a poem, learning the blues harp, learning typing, learning croatian, and the laundry today… only the collage and the laundry show promise.

Steve’s been asking me to post wurds. Here are some wurds. 

Boats of all condition are everywhere here. From the top of a hill in Pula, I can see a large ship building facility, and the tops of boats stick up above the building roofs. The roofs are also dotted with antennas. Steve thinks the antennas look like fish bones, floating in the blue blue sky.

It gets really blue every couple days here due to a wind called the bora, which comes in from the north. It pushes out all the clouds and the sky is left thick blue, no discernable pollution. From the top of a hill in Liznjan we can look out and see a hundred kilometers on some days, onto the calm blue Adriatic to a long coastal island to the mountains beyond.

Sunday we went to our hosts’ house. Milena made a plate of whole fish smeared with garlic and herbs, and a plate of calamari sauteed in garlic and olive oil. We started with a concoction of dried fish mixed with what I think is mayonnaise. Tasted like a zesty roasted tuna. I guessed that it was cod, and we looked up the English name and I was correct. While we ate the fish, Milena stirred up some pancakes, which she smeared with nutella. Yum!

I’ve always been hesitant to eat seafood unless I know what I’m eating. A lot of the seafood I’ve had in the States has just not been done correctly or the fish isn’t fresh. But here I’m learning that even if it has tentacles, I’ll like it. So I don’t question, I just open my mouth and gobble it up.

Milena taught us how to make coffee on the stove. We have a special water pot which is tapered as it goes up to the neck. We fill it about 2/3 with water, and boil. Then remove from heat. Add ten heaping teaspoons of expresso coffee, and mix it slowly at the top until all the clumps are dissolved. At this point, Milena takes a teaspoon of the top coffee grit and puts it into each cup with a teaspoon of sugar. Then heat the coffee a little more, allowing the coffee granules at the top to sink in a bit. No straining of the coffee, just pour into the cups. It’s really, really strong and I can write lots afterwords.

Watching MTV this morning with Steve. We see some type of small concert venue and Northern Light is playing. I’m looking at his performance, I like it. But I think our friend Blue of Urban Jellen would do better. It’s so cool to have met him.

Croatia vs. Krakow – I want to write more extensively about this. Immediate thing that comes to mind is that Croatia is just so beautiful. I’m getting my eyes saturated with nature. Krakow had its own beauty, but it was urban, grimy. In Krakow, you can tell that it was a former communist country. Croatia is different, people seem happier.

Practically, we can’t settle in Croatia because there are not enough people here. We need a place with a large English-speaking community. It would take me a long time to learn enough Croatian to be able to satisfy my yen for conversation. And I think it’s an imposition for me to expect Croatian intellectuals to speak with me in English.

That said, I love love love talking with Sabina, Milena’s daughter. She’s preparing to go to graduate school for economics. She has a genuine interest in it, and she is interested in the world and ideas. She has not spent any significant time in an English speaking country, yet I am constantly floored by her fluency. She speaks English very well.

We’re thinking of returning to the US later next year for a poetry tour. Also, I want to interview some people, get more material for Steve’s biography. It’ll be an opportunity for me to retrieve the info in his journals as well. So probably a month in Cleveland, and a couple weeks to a month in Boston, W. VA and Chicago, and also a few days in New York and some western cities. Then we have a rough idea that we’d like to spend a couple months in Mexico.

Also during our time in the US it seems a good opportunity to submit manuscripts. I’m getting together three manuscripts: Steve’s stories, his poems, and my poems.

We think maybe in the spring we’ll return to Krakow for a bit because we know some people there and it seems to make sense to return.

We’re also interested in traveling out East, but it seems difficult to arrange and expensive to get there as well. We need to go to an embassy to get visas.

KIKIRICK MASLAC KEKSI (Peanut Butter Cookies)

1/2 C kikiriki maslac
1/2 C maslac
1/2 C smeđe šećer
1/2 C šećer
1 1/2 C brašno
1/8 t sol
1 t maslac-vanilija
1 t soda bikarbona
1 jaja

Smješaj zajedno kikiriki maslac, maslac, smeđe šećer i šećer. Mješaj jaja i maslac-vanilija sa maslac i šećer materijal. Tokođer brašno, sol i soda bikarbona napraviti tjesto.

Proizvestij tjesto napraviti sitana lopta. Stavij svaki lopta u šećeru. Stavij svaki lopta na keksi plahta. Stiskaj tjesto sa viljuška jedan smjer, i također drugi smjer.

 375F štednjak radi 10 minuta.
The above is a recipe I translated into Croatian for Fanny Farmer’s Peanut Butter Cookies.

 1/2 C peanut butter
1/2 C butter
1/2 C sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
1 1/2 C flour
1 t baking soda
pinch salt

Cream butters and sugars. Beat in egg and vanilla. Then flour, salt, soda until dough forms. Roll into teaspoon-sized balls. Roll each ball in sugar. Place on ungreased cookie sheet, and press one way with fork and then other way. Bake 375F for 10 minutes.

This is my favorite recipe. Cookie crack.

 

our hosts (melina, sabina, branku) fed us fish and chocolate pancakes sunday, then took us to rovinj, a 1,600 year old istrian village built on a hill that was an island until 500 years ago.  it was like walking thru a fine foreign film.  on the way, we stopped to examine a kazun, a thousand or more year old 10 foot high round stone hut built by shepherds using no mortar or cement… just stone stacked on stone, including the stone roof.  it was standing in front of 600 year old grove of olive trees.  so much history, tradition, beauty – so very much oldness.  the new parts here are older than oldest white america… there’s a 3,500 year old burial ground near the town – the sole example of a mycenaean tomb outside of greece.

and then there’s the new – riding to pula monday, the bus packed old to young, the radio blares out “i’m going to kill every last motherf~cking one of you” from the pulp fiction soundtrack.  i’ve heard more public motherf~cking here in croatia than anywhere outside the cleveland bus system… i know the players know what they’re playing, so it must not matter here, or maybe it’s not offensive cuz it’s in another language.  actually, all fathers are motherf~ckers, or at least mothers-to-be-f~ckers.  i’ve f~cked other’s mothers, but none of my own (my being childless and all, since the 1st thing i did when i left my wife in 1974 was have myself sterilized).

the shots above and below are of rovinj, and the kazun along the way.

nuther weird dream – i was homeless, illegally sleeping on cardboard in an abandoned room on the floor of ken nevadomi’s old movie theater studio warehouse (a place which does not exist)… ken had a nightmare where he was on fire and woke in agonizing wails – had to be a recurring condition cuz there was a live-in nurse/girlfriend who soothed him.  his dream set the tops of my feet and front of my ankles smoldering in flame – the hot coals of my flesh started my pants burning from the inside out, and my flesh bubbled with huge blisters.  my dreams are rich – they amaze and entertain me… 2 nights ago, mother dwarf was washed away by a flash flood while walking beside me on a sidewalk.  kept searching for her.  just about to write her off when she climbed back up the hill and shook herself like a dog, laughing. she wasn’t going to let reality beat her.  she’s been dead 17 months now, yet she still visits my dreams.  i miss her.  but – if she hadn’t died, there’d be no kathy, and i’d be dying from undiagnosed throat cancer.  what weird weird weaves we walk. it’s all interconnected, and i’ve been given neither map nor diagram.

 

kathy’s collecting data to write my biography (& my autobiography) – cool… can’t wait to become famous and appear on hollywood squares.  i gathered together my newspaper reviews for her, and i was struck by the words others have used to paint me.  here’s 3 excerpts on my 1st 1-man show at spaces gallery 22 years ago… these mean something because they were written about an unknown me by folk who had no idea who or what i was.  i don’t appear to have changed much since then.

Wide Open Spaces – Geraldine Wojno Kiefer – Cleveland Edition – 9.13.1984

Smith, a computer programmer by day and object maker by night, stalks the streets like many of us stalk bargains. He comes up with stuff as unrelated as rubber eyes and automobile nameplates, then fits them into his own glittering icons, which, although unlike Krider’s ethereal statements in their gutsy out-of-the-gutter immediacy, recall them in intensity and drive.

Smith’s work bursts out of the aesthetic realm and confronts religion treated as an empty formality, along with other modern horrors like war, gossip, dishonesty and torn human relationships. And it does so literally, as bits of broken glass, fencing and metal shards spring menacingly out of the picture into our space. Some of Smith’s fantasies are part of public domain, some are intensely personal, but all are unremitting and barbed with wit. 

Spiritual Fulfillment – Sally Norman – Dialogue Magazine – 9.1984

Steve Smith uses pop images in a more overtly corrosive and downbeat manner. Grafting the flea market funkiness of Rauschenberg onto the Cubist fracture of Schwitters, he joins toy soldiers, plastic Jesuses, and ancient newsprint in collages that explore the potency of cultural symbols.

He gives his works titles like “The Validity of Relationships” and “Exploration of Conscience,” weighty subjects that he interprets by using baubles fit for the junkyard – a cheapening of central cultural themes intended as an attack. He drives the attack home with the bite of rusted wire, shattered glass and obscene imagery.

His works acquire additional sting because in using icons that either represent or can be made to represent ideas, he is, in a sense, using cultural themes as found objects. The implications of this can be disturbing. 

Art Gallery Plugged In To Shock – Helen Cullinan – Plain Dealer – 9.25.1984

Steven Smith shows a variety of found-object relief constructions using newspaper and collage elements, old miniature toys, bits of glitter and mechanical scraps, whatever. The results are interesting and provocative, but more morbid than poetic. Joseph Cornell he is not.

But there is something in Smith’s compositions other than poetry or Cornell’s cosmos; rather the visualization of probing and seeking, differing vastly from one work to the next.

“I deal in symbolic juxtapositions of the odd and unwanted,” Smith writes in his show statement. “My materials consist of cultural castoffs, sociological implications and the refuse known as suburban thought. My goals are simple; erase your labels; learn to look about … Learn to see dead frog and rust and thus re-see yourself.”