Posts Tagged ‘Matthias Politycki’

In Vino Veritas

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

 

We held our 8th Salon last night. 55 guests, 29 bottles of wine, 10 bottles of beer and 1.5 bottles of whisky drunk. 5.5kg of potato salad, 4kg ofwine cheese, a few kilos of grapes, 10 baguettes, two and a half cakes consumed. 39 books sold. What’s more, at midnight was my birthday. 15 guests sang me a birthday song. One gave me a beautiful bunch of flowers, another Nemesis by Philip Roth. Even my 16-year-old daughter this morning confirmed that there had been a fantastic buzz around during the entire evening.

 

One explanation: The Salon has now acquired a substantial and sufficient amount of regular attendees, guests who know what to expect and feel at home and help to create a relaxed, inspiring atmosphere. Any newcomer breathes in that air when they step into the house.

 

Another explanation: The Peirene Salon received fantastic news last night: male angst and anxiety is on the out! No longer worth talking about! Hurray! An audible sigh of relief went through the crowd. Joy and happiness and good tidings were felt in every heart thereafter.

 

Who was the bringer of such good news? Matthias, David and Nicholas, the three stars of the evening. I had brought them together to talk about male woes and worries as depicted in their writings. They are sorry, they told me, that’s really not what their writing is about. The more they talked, however, the more they revealed. Matthias accepted that his entire novella was an heroic attempt to “exorcise a night-mare”. David talked movingly about the fact that his book was written with an emotional urgency after he knew he had seen his father for the last time. And Nick pointed out that his column in the New Statesman has autobiographical connotations. In short, many of us women perceived considerable quantities of interesting male angst on display. But we were far too polite to say so. And anyway, by the time we finished the 29th bottle of wine, these gender related differences in interpretation scarcely seemed to matter any longer.

 

The audience was thrilled and rushed to buy the books afterwards. The rest of the evening is history.

Dutch Treat

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

The nymph has a crush. On her Dutch author, Jan. Her behaviour is quite despicable. I’ve been telling her that this not on. We are aflickr respectable company – no office romances. But she’s gone deaf, her head has been turned.

 “He twitters”, she cooed, when I demanded an explanation.

“All a man has to do, is to twitter?” I replied incredulous.“Peirene, frankly, I expected more of you.”

“He doesn’t just twitter,” she continued in a soft loving voice. “He twitters in English. And, oh, he does it so well. He tells little stories and makes profound statements and chats to my friends. He is the perfect man for a nymph,” she concluded, gazing blurry eyed right past me and out of the window.

 

I had heard enough. I know how it started. And I have no one else to blame but myself.

 

On Monday I tweeted about meeting one of our authors, Matthias, in a Highgate pub. I wondered aloud about whether I could persuade him to tweet in English. Jan – so far Peirene’s only internet-savvy author – picked up my tweet and suggested that perhaps he should twitter in English too. I was thrilled with his proposal. Maddy then thought of the name PeireneVoices, where any Peirene author and translator can twitter. She set up the account and created a beautiful elegant logo. And there is Jan now tweeting away daily, gaining fans months before his book comes out. No wonder Peirene has fallen for him. I understand. I was once young too.

 

So I showed compassion and tried to reason with her.

“You are too young to get tied down. Look around. Test the field. There are other attractive men lining up to meet you: not only Jan, but also Christian, Matthias and Alois, just to mention a few.”

“But they don’t tweet! Not even in their own language. Let alone English.”

“Well, give them a chance. Christian will be our guest twitterer on Friday when he is here in London and Matthias will be in the UK for two whole months at the beginning of 2011. I’ve got a hunch, he might be twittering by then.”

“How do you know?”

 I could feel she was softening.

“Maddy and I  had a drink and a chat with him on Monday,” I said. “That’s how I know.”

 

The nymph thought for a moment. Then:

“So when did you say Christian is coming?”

“Thursday and he’s staying till Sunday.”

“Will he take me out?”

“Yes, he’s got events booked for all three evenings.”

“And he will twitter on Friday?”

“Friday afternoon on PeireneVoices.”

 

I  returned to my desk. Every now and again I threw a glance across to Peirene. I could see she was thinking. Eventually she turned to me:

 “Is it ok if I take next Wednesday off? I need to go to the hairdresser, and have a facial. I might get my nails done too. It was on my mind anyway. Nothing to do with Christian coming. Just so as you know. And Jan’s still the best twitterer.”

 

Oh yes, my dear little nymph is vane and – most of all – rather fickle.

 

 

(Photo by sheping from flickr)

Potato Dream

Friday, December 11th, 2009

 

And another fab weekend! Yep, my weekends are just a continuous stream of fabness. Turn green with envy – I don’t mind.  My weeks might potatoe-1be hard work. But my weekends? Pure pleasure – first spreadsheet delight, now salon galore! I’m not joking. It was really nice. And it’s only now, four days after the event, that I really can grasp what a success it was.  It was the first ever totally sold out salon. I managed to fit 40 people into my study/office where we hold the reading. Truth to be told it wasn’t an exercise in physical comfort. 40 adults in a front room sat on little primary school chairs. I don’t think people minded too much – or at least no one has sued me yet for bodily harm. Instead the audience felt intellectually, creatively and emotionally uplifted by the three stars at the front, Matthias Politycki, Rosie Goldsmith and Anthea Bell. The Dream Team. Author, Journalist, Translator. As they made the audience laugh AND cry and laugh again, I suddenly felt incredibly lucky, that three such successful people were sitting in my literary salon.

 

So Dream Team went down well, the wine went down well – extremely well! – the cheese went down well, the cake went down well ( as you might remember I’ve given up on the strawberries) BUT the potato salad! The potato salad didn’t go down well. At the end of the evening I had 3.5 kilos remaining. My heart sank when I saw it. I knew something had to go badly wrong – and this time it was the potatoes. It took a bit of mental effort to remind myself that I had initially made 7 kilos of it. My guests therefore had dutifully eaten their staple food, hadn’t’ they? I calmed down and reassured myself that the salad had indeed been cherished. I also realized that I had sorted out our family dinners for the entire following week. Until …. my fourteen year old appeared on the scene. “I hate potato salad!,” was the statement. “Since when?” I asked back. “Since last week.” We managed to strike a deal. We had potato salad for dinner on Monday and Wednesday. Tuesday and tonight I will eat it alone. I think then I, too, will have finally reached my limit. Until the next salon.