A Librarian Hermit We Be

Our couchsurfing adventures continue, and we’ve since moved from London to York, and back again, and then mega-bused it up to Newcastle (anyone seen the outrageous UK train fares recently), where we are currently residing on two couches. Not at the same time we hasten to add. We’re not that huge for a start. It’s just that we had been been offered a flat oop north where we intend to hermit away and finish up our sound editing (and get some poems down dude!) and then since we arrived on Friday we happily met up with our very old friend Clare (old as in long time no see not old as in like OLD dude!) and ended up couchsurfing her co-op Georgian house in the centre of Newcastle. Nice. But after this debauched weekend of catching up, we fully intend to catch up with our sound and written word. So there. Our librarian has also been helpfully operating undercover as an audio engineer for artist Angie in Brixton though, where we recorded the sounds of Tooting Lido including the water fountain and sounds of the outdoor swimming pool, so we have been workingnotshirkin we hasten to add. In the meantime, here are some pictures from our travails, and a message about submissions for any Czech litbods out there. More from us soon! Over and out boys!

On the way from London to Newcastle, via the Megabus, our itinerant librarian found she couldn’t help herself when it came to more toilet door graffiti

The ancient walls of York

We left the kittens under our last couch in London. All together now . . . ahhhh!

The Angel of the North

PRAGUE TALES 2007
New Europe Writers Ink is now seeking submissions for their next print publication: Prague Tales 2007.
They are interested in short stories, poems, memoires of literary merit. They are not interested in journalism or sociological tracts. Each submission should reflect upon the writer’s experience of Prague or in the Czech Republic.
Send your submissions together with a short biography.
The deadline for submissions is February 10th 2007.

Our first unhealthy couch . . .

So, if you’ve been following our intrepid librarian’s blog, you’ll know that she has been couchsurfing her whole way round Europe. Which means she has met some awesome, lovely people, who she hopes to stay in touch with wherever the hell she ends up. So, up until now she has been a happy bunny, but our Barcelona experience is turning into a bit of an unhealthy one . . . turns out our current couchsurfing host does not live with three other guys like his profile stated, nor does he have any form of hot running water, any kitchen facilities, and the first night we arrived we had to share his double bed as there was apparently another couchsurfer in the next room (who mysteriously never turned up). As of last night, at, ooh, 11pm, he also came back with 2 Lithuanian chicks and asked our librarian to leave. Now. Being the toothful, mouthful, stand-uppish kinda girl she is however, our librarian stood her ground and insisted that trying to find a bed in busy Barcelona at 11pm on a Thursday night, and with a poetry library in tow, was just not going to happen. So that’s where we are up to folks, and no library today for us, as hey, er, we still gotta find a bed! And we have 12 hours to go . . . We do have a meeting with the Slovenian Consulate General later this afternoon however so it’s not all rain. In the meantime, get in touch if you can help!

Installing la Biblioteca Poesia en Barcelona . . .

. . . you would think would be an easy thing. What with Barcelona una cultura capital non? But it seems that las personas en las liberias that we tried were a little, shall we say, suspicious, and even though we talked to them in Spanish, did not dig our idea. Or want to suggest anywhere else. But after a three hour traipse around the area near Placa de Catalunya, we accidentally found ourselves on a street next to a cafe with its very own library. So we went in to ask. We got a phone number, rang up the chick who was in charge of permissions for this type o thang and explained what our librarian would like to do in her cafe. . . and so we have a meeting in about 2 hours with said owner to go over the full story and then hopefully we will be installed in Barcelona for the next few days and our blossoming librarian (finally tanned! No longer the white, pasty specimen espied between shelves of dark books at their ideal storing temperature of 16 degrees) will be able to offer you Barcelona citizens membership de la Biblioteca Poesia. So we will post our addresses for the library installation later today if we are successful! In the meantime, here are some Barcelona sounds, and some pictures of what we have seen so far. We also know we keep promising to upload our Germany podcast, but right now our librarian also needs to find a new couch as some Canadian couchsurfers are about to turf her outta her current couch and onto the street unless she can find a bed somewhere else . . . so er, get in touch if you can help! Our librarian doesn’t take up much room, it’s just her library that needs more space! Hasta luego chicos y chicas! Vamos!

The first thing we always do is find the local library!

The poetry shelves at Biblioteca Jaume Fuster

En la placa de Catalunya, this street band bring on the Barcelona beat . . .

Mirador de Colom

. . . which is so tall . . .

. . . it won’t fit in one picture

Barcelona graffiti

. . . which is great

By the docks at night

The fountain at Placa de Catalunya

Taking down the Mexican promo building, so it now looks like a mechanical insect

Where our couch host works . . . he is in the blue T shirt. And he is kicking us out from his couch today. Ouch.

Port de Barcelona

La Rambla . . . Barcelona’s famous street market. . . and tourists galore

Can You Help? . . . the Couchsurfing site has died!

Hmmm. Yeees. Interesting. So, if you’ve been following our travels, you may have noted that we have been getting around by Couchsurfing, a wonderful site that has enabled us to find a bed for our travelling librarian and her poetry library. Guess what? The site has died. It died this week, which means it not only lost our profile, but it lost ALL the data stored about us, who we had contacted to couchsurf, and it also means that from now on we cannot couchsurf anymore . . . aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh. So, Can You Help Us Find a Bed? We need only one space, it can be a floor, a couch, a bed, any flat surface whatsoever as long as there is a roof involved. We need this for the following places and dates: PARIS from night of Saturday 22nd July through to the day of Friday 28th July; BARCELONA from night of Sunday 30th July through to the day of Friday 11th August; MADRID from night of Friday 11th August through to the day of Saturday 19th August. We can promise you a private poetry library installation in your own home if you can help us out! Post a message on this site in the comments sidebar (which has dropped to the bottom left of this page as we have messed up our blog code again - hey, any coders reading this? Can you tell us where we html-d wrong?). This gets emailed to us direct also, as well as appearing as a comment...right. After that swift appeal for help, we had better leg it over to Cafe Wuk to install the library for day2 in Vienna. Byeeeeeeee.

The Libarian arrives in Vienna . . . finally

So we have managed to make it to Vienna, despite the machinations of a rowdy and mutinous crew aboard the fair ship boat where we were couchsurfing (exceedingly literally in this case, ahem) for the last half week of our library stay in Prague. We became known as the Libarian on the basis of . . . not sure. However, it stuck, it sticks and we quite like how it is vaguely similar to barbarian...bare...liberian. Probably in that order also. We can emphatically announce that Prague was our favourite library installation, on the basis of: the wonderful places we got to set up the library (Cafe Metropole, Shakespeare & Sons, Eric’s house The Boat; the number of new library members we signed up (23; the free SPINACH meal English chap Nick provided us with; the awesome Nuclear Bunker music session with a heart-breaking rendition of Blue Moon by The Duchess (soon to be posted in our Prague podcast); and the first contravention of our Bye ByeLaws which resulted in Eric being catalogued and added to the Library (ref. Bye ByeLaws 15 & 25). He has to make his own way to where we are next set up however, in order to be put on display and potentially borrowed. So, we are in Vienna for the rest of this week, and interviewing the Director of the Schule Fur Dichters, Ide Hintze, and we are about to leg it out of this internet cafe and on over to persuade some Viennese bookshops/cafes/flat surfaces that they need a travelling poetry library set up in their vicinity. As soon as we have the addresses folks, we’ll post them here so you can come on down and borrow our poetry books. Speak soon!

Just before we leave Dresden for Prague . . .

We’d like to say thanks to Mona, our couchsurfing host, for being such a rockin&rsquo bed provider. Actually, technically it really was a couch, and we really did surf it. We also installed the poetry library at Mona’s house tonight, and she joined along with her friend Susie. Here they are enjoying our library . . .

We also allowed ourselves ONE WHOLE DAY OFF today, well, actually, what with blogging and all, it was only half a day. Come to think of it, since we’re posting the pictures we took on our 1/2 day off here, and we did set up the library (albeit at midnight), maybe in fact it wasn’t a half day off at all . . . hmm. Maybe we need to rethink this ‘time off’ thing a little . . . seems like we’ve turned into a ‘tweaker’, of the blog and library variety I hasten to add, not the erm, less salubrious kind. ANYWAY. Here are some pictures of Dresden. In all the conversations we’ve been having about what the hell poetry exactly is recently, I think one definition might actually be Dresden itself. Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Gross for convincing us to come here is all I can say. Here is our poetry of Dresden in pictures . . .

. . . woops we’ve hacked our blog in Berlin!

Yes, we‘ve been hacking our own blog and somehow have erm, gone a hack too far?! We‘re figuring it out, and luckily the cool dude we are staying with in Berlin happens to know all about this stuff and hopefully will help! Well, at least we made it to Berlin . . . we are spending the next few days inside editing the Ruigoord audio ready for our first podcast. Then we are allowed outside to explore. We do officially have our first library member though! Niko Topp who is providing accomodation also . . . thanks Niko. More coming soon. Especially the bit about unexpected massages in places you didn‘t want to be massaged - a full commentary on our Dutch Ruigoord exploits will be written soon! In the meantime, to keep you entertained, check out some great pictures of Ruigoord at Nippy Noya’s site. We are also heading on over to the BastardSlam tonight to check out the Germanic Poetic Innit and interview some more poets. This is what is going dahn:
MC: Wewalt Kosslowski, DJ: Wanja, Featured Poet: Anselm Neft. Mit: Micha Ebeling (lsd), Frank Kloetgen (Agrar Berlin), Udo Tiffert (zwei Texte), Felix Roemer (Agrar Berlin / Smaat), Paul Hofmann (pony hamburg)...

Here are some photographs of Ruigoord that Barry Fitton & friends took:

Entrance to Ruigoord Church

Hans Plomb introducing the Saturday afternoon poets

Barry Fitton reading on Zondag aanvang - Podium Kerk styleee

Erwin, De Antistresspoweet, who you‘ll also hear interviewed in our podcast

Georgia Scott accompanied by Nippy Noya