the heavy hands we are dealt

Just got back from a return trip to the outdoor Red Rooster Cafe, on a lovely chilly night in Belgrade. The cafe actually has a Serbian name, but the waiter didn`t bother giving it to me. My old buddy the Arizona Wildcats outside linebacker and kick returner wasn`t there. Too bad. Because, former Chicago sportswriter that I am, I wanted to ask him a few questions about the Central European American Football League. I checked the website briefly and there are teams in Novi Sad and Budapest, and I don`t remember where else at the moment.

The one person I always most wish I could bring on these trips with me is my paternal grandfather, who died in 2004 at the age of 94. He was the loveliest human being you could ever hope to meet, and almost never had a harsh word to say about anyone… In fact, the harshest thing I ever remember him saying, a couple of years before his death, was that he ~wasnt very impressed~ with President G.W. Bush.

In any case, he had a genuine fondness for maps. He would study atlases with the same meticulous care with which he did everything else. And unlike some older people, he was less interested in telling me about the old days than in hearing about my travels. Having been crushed by the early death of his own father and the burdens of the Great Depression, he had never gotten any further outside the USA than the portion of Ontario that lies within a stone`s throw of Detroit. A summer spent near Los Angeles in his youth, as the guest of a famous Hollywood actor who had come from the same small Iowa town, was always recalled in the tones of a religious pilgrimage.

It reminds me again of one of the most crucial facts about human reality, which is that almost none of our defining features are freely chosen. You do not choose your parents and siblings, your nationality, or the historical and economic conditions of your birth. You do not choose your native language or, for the most part, your natural endowments. You can change your name only at a certain social cost, choose your own religion only at a certain higher cost, and choose to change your biological sex only at an unusually high cost. And you will never be able to choose being born 30 years earlier or later than you were.

So, we are all dealt very heavy hands… and even when we feel free, the things that we see as options for our freedom are themselves conditioned by desires that are not themselves freely chosen in most cases.

What separates me from my grandfather is not geography, since we come from roughly the same place and to some extent the same social stratum. What really separates us is 60 years of the development of civilization, meaning that I faced an improved university, travel, and credit infrastructure that empowered me in ways that were not available to him. I should also mention medical infrastructure, since I would have lost my own father at an even earlier age than he lost his, from a similar disease, if not for vast improvements in cancer treatment over the course of half a century. There may also have been some civilizational losses from my grandfather`s time to my own, but I think they pale in comparison with the advances, at least in the part of the world that we both come from.

One of the games I like playing while traveling is to ask what might have become of me if I had been born in such and such a place rather than where I was actually born. The answers are always instructive, and not always necessarily worse, but generally quite different.

so, it does exist

Steven Shaviro just Facebooked me a photo of himself holding Prince of Networks. Barring clever PhotoShop trickery, that means the book does actually exist, though I don`t have it yet. Same thing happened with the last book. Oh well.

wordpress is really freaking out on me now, loading slowly and in weird ways, so I will be calling it a night on blogging unless the unexpected occurs.

The taxi ride from Novi Sad back to Belgrade was memorable. We went on a different route from the bus, through a national park, and saw many interesting things. The driver was born near Nuremberg while his parents worked there, which explains his good German, and in fact his sister still lives there. Great guy, 35 year old father of two, with much of useful interest to say about the former Yugoslavia and its remnants.

Incidentally… Yugoslavia split into 7 sovereign states, of which I have now seen 5, all except Montenegro and Kosovo. And the five I have seen are all so unusually intriguing that it makes me think Yugoslavia really must have been just about the most fascinating nation state in Europe during its existence, whether you want to talk about ethnography, linguistics, geography, history, religion… There was a bit of everything there.

Novi Sad

Only 9 minutes of credit left, and this cafe is too annoying to make renewing worth it (the usual screaming videogame kids), so a quick post on NOVI SAD, with a hat-tip to Malak for telling me about this site.

Nice bus trip through small towns from Belgrade to Novi Sad this morning. The small towns could pass for the ones I know from Iowa, except for some older architecture. The older people could even pass for Iowans (the state has a heavy Slavic element, myself included) though the younger people are obviously Eastern European in terms of style.

Had a nice taxi driver into the city, who speaks good German, and made me a pretty reasonable deal to be driven by taxi all the way back to Belgrade. I accepted the offer, which will give me more time to enjoy Belgrade on my second to last night there.

The enter of Novi Sad is cute and quaint. As soon as Serbia is fully integrated into the EU, this should be a tourist boom town.

The castle high above the river has a wonderful view. I thought I saw some bridge pillars without a bridge, and then was reminded by the web that all of Novi Sad`s bridges were bombed in 1999, as was the oil refinery, visible in the distance.

Before the castle, I had a nice hot meal with the rain pouring outside. That`s one of the good things in life, especially when travelling abroad, and philiosophers have barely written about things like this.

The rain stopped, and I crossed the bridge to the castle. Was caught in the rain again, and entered an old mill or bunker or power plant along the river. Juvenile “Black Arrows” logo didn`t scare me, since it looked more like a high school bluff than a real gang insignia. But clothes hung out to dry made it look like a den of outlaws, and Ipruidently hugn near the entrance.

The rain stopped, and I ascended to the castle.

No credit left. Sorry.