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We are all Christ and we are all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, T.V., records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication. So let's use it.
-John Lennon '69

In 1969 Czechoslovak youth communicated to the world the message of our birth right through characters like Jan Palach who took a certain Slavic saying literally: If you want to set something afire, you must burn yourself. By setting himself alight in Wenceslas Square, Jan Palach ignited an unprecedented underground movement against the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia. Bohemian boys, like Balmain boys, rarely say intimate things. Although we hardly ever do; somehow under the surface we are helpless at fighting the huge iceberg of emotional energy which even rips Titanics apart. Some of us identify ourselves with courageous acts no mattter how crazy and in those rare moments we are not ashamed to be true to our man-childhood feeling. The rare moment takes place when one least expects it so you find choking your throat with anger and tears, but somehow the feelings displayed by others become a kind of badge of binding honour. Simone Weil, who like George Orwell knew what it meant to live under communism, observed in her book The Need for Roots that truth is a need of the soul. She went on to say: The need for truth is a need more sacred than any other need. Yet it is never mentioned. One feels afraid to read once one has realised the quantity and monstrousness of the material falsehoods paraded in even the books of the most reputable authors. Thereafter one reads as though one were drinking from a contaminated well. Anything we read about the reasons for Jan Palach from the poisoned pens of authors sponsored by the Secretariat was a big lie.

Do you know, my story is the saddest and the silliest you would ever hear, Alan Sheriff, the hero of Thomas Keneally's latest fiction, The Tyrant's Novel confesses to his visitor at a detention camp for refugees.

In Vienna young exile men wore cheap John Lennon’s specs and pretended leather jackets ... spent disproportionate amounts of their time looking for dreams to come true. When I first came to Australia the limited English words I possessed in my vocabulary generally came from the Beatles songs. In 1980 the roof of the world kept falling on top of me wherever I went. Just like I never forget the day I learnt about the death of Jan Palach, or the fateful crossing of the Iron Curtain, I will never forget the day I learnt about the pointless fatal shooting in New York. It was incomprehensible that the John, the one we were forbidden to admire in the Eastern parts of Europe, was gone. Unfortunately, the death of John Lennon defined not just my six months in exile, but also many decades after!

John Lennon’s song that is seared in my memory eerily opens with the words : ‘I magine there is no heaven and it is easy if you try ... Imagine there’s no countries, it is not hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.’ It is not hard to feel all this confusion, all this loneliness, all this heartache, all this struggle, it's not hard to figure out how any Central European without a family feels in a city of exiles where snow never falls at Christmas or any other time. Like Lennon, I would learn that monsters exist in all our cultures not just communist so as homeless wonderers many of us just had to learn how to side step them and sometime even face them. Refugees and migrants depict the side tourists seldom see, milk-crates as furniture, eating alone tinned baked beans for brekky, lunch and dinner, second hand rags inside a broken plastic bag rather than souvenir bag. We are all like the characters in the movie Titanic who at the first seven minutes of the movies boldly proclaim: We have nothing. So we have nothing to lose!?! Unlike tourists, we dare to explore the darker streets of the Kings Cross and be fearless when it comes to embracing the waves at Bondi. There are no three or five star hostels we are all equal under the axis of exile. We are irresistably charmed by every little miracles donated to the Salvation Army and St Vincent De Paul. We learn that, for us, there is no right thing to say or write. So we write and say what others whisper in private. Tears, like water, provide the glue that turn the raw material of exile into useful concrete of collective survival. John Lennon was the strongest cement there ever was for many Czechs who felt part of this fragile universe during the Christmas of 1980.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
Philip Roth

The cementing for me took place inside a little remote Czech club in Campbelltown area. Just like in the Slavic pub in Cabrammatta, inside this (poor cousin of the Czech Sokolish French Forrest club) Campbeltown club most of us were without families and John Lennon was our symbolically mourned brother. The world was separated by one degree that night even the beer had a personality. It is said that beer evolves into an art form during wakes. I became a Bohemian Crocodile-Dundee who put to practice my nights behind my cousin Gejzo’s bar. As you do, I jokingly challenged the Moravian barmaid with angelic high cheekbones by saying: Call that a head? That is not a head; this is a head! Home grilled Christmas carp and Silvester mackerel are tasty miracles which represented the distilled essenceof all that is wonderful about Czech adoption of a melting pot recipe. Like most Slavs, I tend to drown my heart, one heady beer at a time, with a Janosik-Tarzan cry and a loud splash. It is amazing to discover that even in Campbeltown, at the edge of the habitable world, (irony-intended) intoxicated lifelines are impossible to resist like the unexpected and unconditional taste of Silvester night kisses layered in spine-arching poetry of Slavic folk dance! And then we went to her place to listen to John Lennon.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Lennon fans threaten his killer as release looms
Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, could be released from jail next month in a move that has sparked fears of retribution from Beatles fans.
Chapman will have a parole hearing in the week beginning 4 October, officials at the New York State Parole Division said. It will be held behind closed doors. However, one official said they had 'no idea' what the outcome of the hearing would be.
• My Surreal Christmas Without Snow and without John Lennon [link first seen at My Surreal Vienna]
• · Angela Bennie examines the dynamic state of the art. Our home-grown talent is winning acclaim overseas, but has acting in this country evolved into a recognisable generic style? Australian thrall
• · · Sheriff is a writer in limbo; he can neither expect adoption by his new land nor return to his homeland, an unnamed, oil-rich dictatorship The Tyrant's Novel
• · · · Philip Roth immersed himself in literature from behind the Iron Curtain. He went every week to a little college on Staten Island to attend Antonin Liehm's classes on Czech culture and edited a series of eastern European fiction for Penguin. My life in New York after Portnoy was lived in the Czech exile community - listening, listening, listening. I ate every night in Czech restaurants in Yorkville, talked to whoever wanted to talk to me and left all this Portnoy crap behind. That was idiotic, this was not idiotic. I lived up in Connecticut, where Philip Guston was my friend, and had my east European world in New York, and those were the things that saved me. I think that's why Hemingway lived in Key West; he liked to be in a world that had nothing to do with what he did all day. Fame is a worthless distraction
• · · · · Lyn Tranter and Greg Hunter will be knocking on doors of Frankfurt Book Fair promoting a biography of Ian Thorpe, the complicated swimmer (Germans love dogs and a photo of Ian and Max might stimulate an interest in a kind of Antipodean Labrador Rex imaginary - smile ) Lyn’s partner, John Tranter is the founding editor and publisher of the free quarterly Internet literary magazine Jacket
• · · · · · The board and officers of the American Nudist Research Library did not attend the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University this past week. None of them, apparently, could find a thing to wear. Honors for Nude Lit, Fish Tarts