In Prague my pace of writing has sharply improved. I believe this is because I am sharing living space with not one, but two other writers, and I feel compelled to outproduce them. It is hard to understate how petty and competitive writers are, especially young ones. However, my pace of drinking has also greatly increased, because that's all that anybody does here, and because the friend I am visiting, Ben Zuerlein (a fellow graduate of the Boston University program), is the Lance Armstrong of drinking (in his words), and I can't help but try to keep up with him.
Prague is very beautiful, although it also feels like the sort of place where a person might spiral into horrible despair. All everybody does is drink (I can not overstate this) and there is a kind of cheery nihilism that goes through the culture, to the point that it even infects their civic institutions. But if one is not cheery, it can quickly become maddening. For example, the tallest building in Prague, the television tower, has giant sculptures of babies crawling up and down it, and from a distance they look "like ants crawling up and down a penis", according to the artist responsible for them. It is important always to keep in mind that this is the home of Franz Kafka. Prague clearly shaped him -- or perhaps he shaped Prague. In any case, so far I have been cheery.
One of Ben's roommates is a Bulgarian girl named Tanya. She has an extremely deep voice, cold blue eyes, and she chain-smokes repentantly. She plays at being constantly bored with whatever is going on around her, but it is only an affectation, if not something like a comic routine. She is a writer too, and between her, myself, and Ben, we have a very nice dynamic, in which Ben and I babble nonsense and she breaks in occasionally to inform us that we are babbling nonsense. I think I will have a very good time here.
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