Homes for home-libraries

 

Emmi's son George signing books for Raphi and Kati

More about books

I often wonder what will happen to my books when I die. I often think about giving them away now while I am alive, but I love being able to get up and look up a poem, I love being able to get up and find out what Mária Hári said or what AP wrote, and I love to put my hand out and take any one of Oliver Sacks’s books from the shelf. I like having my books around me, I like delving in.

After the posting that I wrote when I was reading Chekhov my friend Emmi sent me the following about finding a new home her friend Susan’s home-library –

Our Holocaust-survivor friend Susan died in Szeged in her 99^th year during the first week of January this year. She had a good library. My sister Magdi had the sad task of emptying her flat, and thought there would be plenty of interest in her books from book-sellers. This was a big disappointment – she nearly had to pay the bookseller to be allowed to leave a pile of GOOD books at his place!

Miraculously at these time, one of her younger Budapest friends, (married, learning English, 3 children) asked my sister’s advice of how to build up a home-library (they had none) since one of her daughters loved to read. Here was the solution to the book problem in Szeged.

This young Budapest friend and her husband drove down to Szeged in a small truck with my sister and became happy owners of an excellent collection of world literature (good hard-backed volumes, the type that I love to read). They also assisted with shifting some of the smaller pieces of furniture and all the paintings from the walls in Susan’s flat which was a big help for my sister.

There are still some readers amongst us then!

Thank you Emma, I do so hope my home-library problem will be solved as well as this when I no longer need it.

“I kicked the doctor into the wall”

"Winter" by Susie Mallett

That is what Jason Carr tells us on his blog!

This just appeared in my inbox:

http://jasonsworld7.blogspot.com/2012/01/peto-part-1.html

Please make the time to read it, and not just this posting but all of it.

There are only three posting on the blog as yet so there is not much back-reading to do.

I, for one, will be following it in the future and I will pass the URL on to by budding students who will enjoy the inspiration that I am sure they will receive from reading this and, at the same time, they will be able to improve their English.

Well done Jason! I look forward to hearing more, especially about how you kicked the doctor into the wall!

A good read for the train

Mein verspieltes Land, Ungarn in Umbruch by Paul Lendvai

It is hard work for me to read a book about politics for fun when it is in English, it is even harder work to read one in German about Hungary, but this one is so interesting that I am giving it a bash.

 

Why?

I lived in Hungary for four lovely, long years and visited the country at least twice each year for the following sixteen years. Since 1989 the majority of my work colleagues have been Hungarians.

During the past twenty-two years I have got to know the country and the folk quite well, perhaps better than I know the country and its people where I now live.

The search that led me to Hungary

Perhaps all things Hungarian interest me so much because it is there that my journey took me as I searched for direction in my pedagogic work. It is the land where I discovered that through conductive pedagogy it is possible to change, to be brought up conductively and to learn to live independently. It is where I learnt about living conductively and how to teach others how to do so. It is where I learnt so much that would help me as I continued in my work helping people to transform what had been dysfunctional lives to functional ones. 

My fascination with this country began the moment that I arrived and was taken on a journey though Pest to Buda, the bus driving all around the houses delivering fellow students at their flats until I was dropped off in Zöldlömb, where I lived for the next four years. This fascination continues to this day, fed of course by my daily contact with Hungarians and made easier by speaking the language.

The book

Recently I read this article online: 

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/paul_hockenos_hungary_europe_right_wing_extremism.php

I do not regularly read a daily newspaper in Germany and had not seen anything written about Paul Lendvai’s book when it was first published in German, but I was hooked when I read this review on line and immediately ordered it at the shop-on-the-corner and two days later I had a copy in my hands.

Now I am doing my best to read it. Having read in the Boston Review that a record number of copies, for a non-fiction book were, sold in Hungary, but the majority of them have not yet been read, I am determined that however difficult it is I will read it through to the end. 

For this reason it is my train-book. It is not good as a tram and bus-book, those journeys are too short and the book too difficult to understand to read on short journeys, I would end up reading the same pages over and over again. No, this is certainly a book for longer journeys. I need an hour or two to get into the swing, to re-read some sentences and to enjoy the success of getting through another fifty pages.

Step by step, though Paul Lendvai’s clear description of complicated political situations and his interesting portraits of old and new political figures, I am beginning to understand what has been happening in the political world in Hungary over the past twenty two years, since I first got to know the country. This is an account of the changes in Hungary’s political system seen through the eyes of a Hungarian living and working in Austria.

If I was politically more capable I would be trying to from links between the recent history of Conductive Education and the Petö Institute and the ups and downs of recent Hungarian politics. This is not really my field, so this job I will leave to others who can do it much better than I could, and I will just give you the tip to read this very interesting book. It is available in German and Hungarian, and other publications by Paul Lendvai are also available in translation in English.

Notes

Mein verspieltes Land, Ungarn in Umbruch by Paul Lendvai, 2010 – published by ecoWIN, ISBN- 978-3-902404-94-7 

Boston Review -

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/paul_hockenos_hungary_europe_right_wing_extremism.php

Something from my collection of bits-and-pieces

"My collection of puppets from Ecseri piac, Budapest"

Does anyone know anything about these puppets?

One set is more recent than the others but all probably characters for acting out the same story. There is a mother and a father in each set, two children, a boy and a girl, and a green “person”. In the older set there is also a Saint Nicholas and a devil, in Hungarian: Krampusz and in German: Krampus.

Can anyone tell me about the green person?

Is it Knecht Ruprecht? That character, first mentioned in a story about Nürnberg from the 17^th century, has been referred to by Grimm as Robin Goodfellow, a sprite who could quite possibly be green. Or is it the Pelznikel who sometimes appears wearing a mask and dressed as a woman? Or a Wichtel, or a wight, a hob, a leprechaun or a nisse? All dwarf-like creatures from various countries, some, like those from Ireland and Sweden, often depicted as being green.

I am only guessing now, from snippets that I have read here and there, and as we know in the CE world it is not a very good idea to guess, because we usually tend to come up with at least ten when adding only two and two!

I have absolutely no idea who the green character is and would love to find out. So if anyone recognises the green person in these two sets of puppets, or knows anything else about them please let me know.

I bought them, by the way, in 1991 at the Ecseri piaz in Budapest.

Notes

http://www.ecseripiac-budapest.hu/fotoalbum.html

http://budajest.com/2010/04/29/ecseri-piac/

Moszkva tér, a lost comment

Moszkva tér 2003 by Susie Mallett

I tried to post this on Andrew’s latest about his Moszkva tér:

http://www.conductive-world.info/2011/07/lmy-moskva-ter.html

but I had no luck.

Then I sent it to Andrew for him to post there himself, but now I have it back again and will make a final attempt to post it is here on my own blog. Fingers crossed!

Almost everywhere I walk in Budapest I am reminded of something that I have read about dreadful happenings in the city. Despite this I also have some long-lasting memories of my own experiences in the city of Budapest. I lived near to the Petö Institute so I crossed through Moszkva tér whenever I went into the city centre. I was surprised and also reassured on my last visit in 2009 to find every crack in the pavement and each pothole still there in the same place in the area around the Metro entrance and the clock.

Andrew’s list is brilliant, but I would still like to add a few things to it.

My own memories also include:

The pogacsa shop selling scones and pastries of every flavour under the sun

The brilliant book stall that saw many of my forints, and still does when I am there

The clock under which I always meet my Hungarian friends:

Moszkva tér az óra alatt:

http://www.kavehazak.hu/talalkozopontok/talalkozopont.php?id=5

The people from Transylvania selling their wares on the far side of the square, separate from the “tessék-ladies” (with the flowers)

The lady with baby rabbits at Easter who always stood at the bottom of the stairs up to the Post Office

The flower shop near the Metro entrance

The mushroom-checking station with its long, long queues on a Monday morning

The Knights of St John of Malta centre

The hours spent crossing the road if you decided to arrive there by foot and not by tram or bus

The first arrival of the pink Barbie-doll tram

Grey-ness, busy-ness, tired-ness, but life as it really was and is

Young students shaking hands and kissing as they met each other or said their goodbyes, something that we Brits were not used to, though I believe that this has become more usual in British youth-culture over the past twenty years

Bablevés in the Gösser Pince, I think this is the cellar bar that Andrew mentioned, where I used to go with one particular Hungarian friend after a long day at the Institute

The flower market, a blast of colour on a drab rainy day

Moszkva tér is the place where a Hungarian conductor taught me how to get on a 49 tram during the rush hour. She told me: “This is no place for English queues, here you need to use your elbows!” She demonstrated how to lift the elbows so they stuck out sideways like a chicken’s wings. This ensured that I was not shoved out of the way while entering the crowded tram. When I looked I realized that all the elderly ladies, laden with shopping bags, really were standing there waiting with chicken-wing elbows at the ready! I soon discovered that my pointy elbows were rather good at fending people off. I still prefer the English queuing system, though.

The jobs-worth cashiers at the Metro ticket office who suddenly changed in the mid-2000s to helpful English-speaking sales people. I still have my blue student ticket from 1989 that cost under 100 forints for the month.

Notes

Here are a few of the many You Tube and website results that I found after Googling Moszkva tér!

Moszkva tér :

http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9ll_K%C3%A1lm%C3%A1n_t%C3%A9r

http://www.c3.hu/~eklektik/moszkvater/farkas-nagy.html

The song that my colleagues often sing-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEWQPXTrha4&feature=related

Learn about the transport system from Moszkva tér

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOCmlYuBNiE&feature=related

Activities in the square:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HrTP4aEwio&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9FEotVHu8A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw5Mysb5p7k&feature=related

There is a film in nine parts on you tube, called Moszkva tér, the epilogue has a nice shot of the square from above:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFtgbJ51oqw&feature=related