Just The Caffeine Talking

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 3

Sunday was my final day at the con. Most conventions are three-day affairs: show up Friday afternoon, do stuff Friday night and Saturday, maybe a few things Sunday morning, then head home after lunch. Not Arisia. Taking advantage of the MLK Day weekend, it stretches into Monday. That means Sunday is a busy full day rather than the tag end. 

I started my day moderating a panel on "Ringworld at 50," celebrating half a century since the publication of Larry Niven's landmark novel Ringworld. Opinions of the book among the five panelists varied, but we all agreed it's one of the most influential books of that era — not to mention a turning point in Mr. Niven's own career.

Slight pause after that, while I busied myself getting checked out of the hotel and finding a place to stash my stuff. Arisia may be a four-day convention, but I had prior commitments on the 20th and so couldn't stay to the end. 

I did manage to sit in on a couple of panels. The first was on book to film adaptations, and how one's impression of a work is affected by which version one experiences first. There are some cases where the film is actually better than the novel — my personal example is Carl Sagan's book Contact, which is full of plot holes the movie version avoids.

Another very useful panel was about crowdfunding and tabletop games. I may be dipping a toe into the Kickstarter world with an upcoming roleplaying game project, so it was all very informative. Watch this space for more information!

At 5:30 I participated in the panel "Writers React to Bad Writing," which might well have been called "Writers Forget Their Homework." We were all supposed to bring examples of bad prose to pick apart, but a minority of the panelists actually accomplished that simple task. I had selected a passage from Dan Brown's thriller Inferno, but cleverly left my copy at home so I had to reconstruct it from memory.

During the empty slot between that panel and my final event I taped an interview for Tyromag TV, which will probably appear in a few weeks. I don't think I picked my nose on camera.

I wound up my participation in convention programming by moderating the panel on "Hacking D&D," in which five panelists suggested rules tweaks or entire game mechanics from other games which can be ported into the most popular roleplaying system. In most cases they can probably be used in just about any game system without much tweaking. At least a couple of the examples are things I plan to use in games from now on.

With that done I could drop my name card into a recycling bin and join some other CSFWites at the ongoing "House of Toast" party. I had kind of assumed "Toast" was a euphemism, or maybe an acronym for something, but no, it was a party with about half a dozen toasters working full time popping out bread, and tables of exotic stuff to spread on them. We crunched down our toast and left the con. I got a lift to where my car was parked, and drove through a cold night back home.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world, and one man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate arrives in just two weeks!

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 2

Saturday the 18th was a light-duty day for me, which meant I got to enjoy the con as a member rather than as one of the dancing monkeys. 

Still fighting off my cold, I slept in on Saturday morning, starting my day by having brunch with my CSFW colleague Alexander Jablokow at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Many things of great import were discussed, though I can't quite recall any of them at the moment.

In early afternoon I sat in on a Meetup for gamemasters, discussing techniques, best practices, and resources. I had hoped to find some other gamers from western Massachusetts, but no luck. 

After that I took a turn about the dealer room and the Art Show. The quality of the artwork on display at Arisia is the highest I've seen at any convention since the Worldcon I attended in the summer of 2018.

In the late afternoon I watched a fascinating talk by David Shaw about the future of food. Unlike most studies of this topic, which focus on production, he concentrated on how new technologies and methods are affecting the art of cooking. Nor was this just theory: the talk was illustrated by slides of amazing dishes he himself had prepared. 

Following that I met with author Walter Hunt, chiefly in order to gush about his new novel Harmony in Light, and hear super-secret details of the upcoming sequel. 

After a rest to recharge my batteries, I put on my dancing-monkey costume and led a meetup for writers at 10:00 p.m. They were a great bunch, and I hope to see some of the works-in-progress they talked about during the session. 

And then off to bed and out like a snuffed candle.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate by James L. Cambias is coming to a bookstore near you February 4. 

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 1

I drove out to Boston on a sunny but cold January afternoon, left the car at the disintegrating Alewife garage, and rode the T to the good old Westin Waterfront hotel.

Various delays en route and long lines at the hotel meant I barely had time to get my room, get my Arisia badge, and get my Participant Packet before it was time for my first event. But despite the crowds the hotel and convention staff were very efficient, so I was able to slide into the Independence room with a few minutes to spare.

"Stories From the Cities" was the title for a session of three readings by Andrea Hairston, W.B.J. Williams, and myself. Dr. Hairston read a couple of rousing chapters from her upcoming fantasy novel, Mr. Williams shared part of an urban fantasy work-in-progress, and I read an excerpt from (of course) The Initiate. All three seemed well-received by the half-dozen attendees — not a bad crowd for the very first time slot at 5:30 on Friday afternoon.

Immediately after that, conveniently in the same room, we had the panel on "Not With My Intellectual Property, You Don't." The panel included Diane Martin, Kristin Janz, Emperor Joey 1, Mark Painter, and myself. It became a very lively and thoughtful round-table discussion, touching on the effect of corporate ownership on works of art, the role of pastiche, fan fiction, and reimaginings; and kindred topics.

Then I hustled all the way across the hotel for a very fun panel about the Bone Wars between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. With a peerless panel of experts including Mark Amidon, Ken Gale, and Jeff Hecht, we filled the hour with fun paleontology history. The four of us dovetailed nicely in our knowledge areas, so we had excellent "chemistry" and energy.

I paid a visit to the Art Show, hobnobbed with the convention's Guest of Honor, Cadwell Turnbull, and then . . . I went to bed. I'd been fighting a cold all afternoon, and didn't really think it would be wise to spread viruses around the hotel and just make myself sicker in the process.

Con Impressions: a big crowd, lots of young people. Fewer hall costumes than I recall from past years, but the brutally cold day might have something to do with that. Convention management ran extremely smoothly. The 75-minutes time slots with 15-minute breaks in between gave everybody time to get around and the panelists could spend a full hour in discussion. I think I prefer the longer time slots.

 

A secret order of wizards rule the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate arrives February 4, 2020!

Arisia 2020 — The Initiation Begins

This year's Arisia convention will be back at the Boston Westin Waterfront, January 17-20. I'll be there Friday the 17th through Sunday the 19th, and it's going to be a busy weekend.

Friday 5:30 p.m.: "Stories From the Cities" — A joint reading with myself, Andrea Hairston and W.B.J. Williams. All three stories are connected with cities; my own will be an excerpt from my upcoming book The Initiate.

Friday 7:00 p.m.: "Not With My Intellectual Property, You Don't" — A panel discussion about the legality, morality, and practicality of writing continuations of other people's fiction. (I'll be moderating.)

Friday 8:30 p.m.: "Cope vs. Marsh — The Bone Wars" — Pretty much what it says on the tin: a panel discussion about how the personal rivalry between two 19th-century scientists transformed paleontology. (I'll be moderating and plugging the hell out of my card game.)

Saturday, 10:00 p.m.: "Late Night Writers Cafe" — A meetup for writers and those learning the craft. I'll be one of the two co-hosts.

Sunday, 10:00 a.m.: "Fifty Years After Ringworld" — Larry Niven's novel Ringworld is one of the field's enduring classics. What makes it so great? (I'll be moderating this one as well.)

Sunday, 5:30 p.m.: "Writers React to Bad Writing" — A panel of writers will bring in examples of bad writing in published work, and explain what makes them so bad.

Sunday, 8:30 p.m.: "The Hacker's Guide to D&D" — Ways to tinker with the mechanics of everyone's favorite roleplaying game in order to make it easier or more fun. (I will, inevitably, be moderating.)

 

The tyranny of the sorcerers must end! The Initiate arrives in bookstores February 4, from Baen Books.

Philcon 2019!

This weekend I'll be attending the venerable PhilCon convention, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That's near enough to Philadelphia that you can still get scrapple for breakfast, so I guess it qualifies. Here's my schedule. Stop by and say hi!

Fri 6:00 PM in Executive Suite 623: READINGS — PAUL LEVINSON, APRIL GREY, JAMES CAMBIAS

    I'll be reading a chapter from my forthcoming novel The Initiate.

Fri 7:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Promenade: AUTOGRAPHS — PAUL LEVINSON, APRIL GREY, JAMES CAMBIAS

Fri 8:00 PM in Plaza II: CREATING IDIOMS FOR FANTASY WORLDS

    [Robert C. Roman (mod), Alex Shvartsman, D.L. Carter, James Cambias, Ann Zeddies]

    What do you have your characters call a French braid in a world where France doesn't exist? How do you fill the descriptive lacunae created when you want to avoid language that's anacosmistic?

Fri 11:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Three: EYE OF ARGON INTERACTIVE

    [Mark Singer (mod), Keith DeCandido, B. Lana Guggenheim, Michael Ventrella, James L. Cambias]

    Yes, I'm going back for another struggle to keep from cracking up as I read from the charmingly inept Conan knockoff The Eye of Argon. Pray for me.

Sat 11:00 AM in Plaza II: WRITING FOR ALIENS — FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES

    [Sally Wiener Grotta (mod), Tom Purdom, Ann Zeddies, Chris Kreuter, James Cambias]

    What if a species had no concept of marriage, or placed no value on raising one's own offspring? How would you write a culture that valued other relationships over ones that are viewed as the most important to humans without them coming across as cold and uncaring?

Sat 2:00 PM in Plaza II: OBSOLETE SCIENCE

    [Earl Bennett (mod), Michael Swanwick, James L. Cambias, James Beall, B. Lana Guggenheim, Russell J. Handelman]

    Remember when spaceships went whizzing through the ether? Remember the hollow earth? What obsolete scientific ideas shaped SF, and which ones still persist in it?

Sat 5:00 PM in Plaza III: HOW TO SERVE OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS

    [Simone Zelitch (mod), David Walton, Dr. Valerie Mikles, Bruce Dykes, James L. Cambias]

    What it says on the tin.

Sat 7:00 PM in Plaza II: THE EVOLUTION OF MARS

    [Darrell Schweitzer (mod), John Ashmead, Tom Purdom, James Cambias, Earl Bennett]

    How have depictions of Mars changed in SF from the imaginings of Burroughs and Bradbury to the Mars we know now from studying its surface?

Sat 8:00 PM in Plaza III: GREAT SCIENCE FICTION MCGUFFINS

    [Mary Spila (mod), Joe Siclari, Richard Stout, Christopher Hinz, James L. Cambias]

    Alfred Hitchcock defined the McGuffin as the 'object' everyone in the story is looking for. This can be anything from a secret formula to a magic amulet to a living being. Which have been the genre's most interesting ones?

Vacation in Prague: Day 7

Over the past forty years of travel I've learned that one should always build in one or two unscheduled days when planning a trip. That way, if something's closed, or it's pouring rain, or someone gets a kidney stone, you have a little cushion so there's still time for all the things you wanted to do. And if there are no problems, then you've got a bonus day to spend as you wish.

Saturday the 20th was our bonus day.

In the morning Diane and I went out to a Farmers' Market, which was a bit disappointing. The food on display was lovely and impeccably clean, but all of it was obviously grown far from Bohemia, and it was all packaged for immediate consumption. No ingredients. I have no doubt that there is an actual farmers' market in Prague (probably several), but I expect it's out in the periphery someplace, easier for farm trucks to reach but probably much less scenic.

We did get some fruit for breakfast and took it back to the flat, along with some croissants from a bakery we passed along the way. After eating and showering the three of us set out a couple of hours later with two vague goals: find a thumb drive for Diane to use at the biology conference which was the whole reason we came to Prague, and possibly look in at the cinema museum.

Our course took us southeast, toward Wenceslaus Square (which is really a boulevard) and the more modern, trendy part of Prague. En route we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/pub called "Lokal" which has apparently been serving up the same hearty grub and beer since the 1920s (to judge by the decor). It has the "beloved and unchanging local institution" feel of a classic diner or a Southern cafeteria. Dumplings were had.

We gave up on the cinema museum, after determining that none of us was really enthusiastic about the plan. After that we just sort of wandered, looking for a thumb drive. In the U.S., one can find them for sale at most office-supply shops, department stores, and supermarkets, but apparently the Czechs only sell them at dedicated electronics stores. I don't know if there's not as much demand, or whether Czech computer users are more devoted to "cloud storage." It's not the sort of question one can ask easily.

We did see some lovely interwar department store buildings, with glass roofs and Art Deco sculptures. It appears that independence and the triumph of Modernism don't seem to have put a damper on Czech architects' love of putting statues on buildings, it just made the results more streamlined.

With a drive in hand we navigated homeward by dead reckoning, stopping along the way to get the gloppiest Prague treat: Trdelniks filled with ice cream. Trdelniks are a kind of cake or brioche wrapped around a cylinder and cooked over an open fire. I've found a couple of Web sites angrily asserting that they're not a traditional Czech dish but rather some rank imposture from Slovakia. Anyway, they're pretty good plain, and when filled with soft-serve they're . . . pretty messy. Imagine a giant ice-cream cone with a big hole in the bottom ineffectually plugged by a small cookie.

And that's about it for our trip. We spent the evening packing and getting checked in for our flight home. Robert and I handed all our spare Kroners to Diane to use during the week-long biology conference, and the next morning he and I got a cab to the airport. Sixteen hours later we were home.

Next Time: Impressions and Reflections.

Vacation in Prague: Day 6

Another late start on Friday the 19th — didn't leave the flat until past 11 a.m. The adventurers crossed the river again and braved the Prague light-rail transit system for the first time. Since most of our previous explorations had been within the rail-less Old Town section, we hadn't bothered. One purchases tickets at tobacconist shops and then use a scanner aboard the tram to activate them. This is a common system in Europe; in Naples one can only get subway tickets at the tobacco stand even inside the main train station. We managed to work out how to use the scanner on the tram with the help of a young Czech couple with a cute baby and matching hairstyles (kind of a Mohawk gathered into a ponytail). The young woman even gave up her seat to this aged tourist, so you can be sure I took the opportunity to yield it back at the next stop to the first even slightly middle-aged looking lady who boarded.

Our tram route involved a longish detour with a hairpin bend and a curve around to the north of Prague Castle, because of course streetcars don't handle steep inclines well. Our destination was actually off to the southwest of the castle: Strahov Monastery.

What with locating a tobacconist's shop and figuring out the tram system, we didn't reach the monastery until noon, which is when it closed for an hour so that the monks could celebrate Mass in the chapel. So we had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant next door. Bread dumplings were present.

The monastery had two main attractions we were hot to see. There is Yet Another Baroque Library Hall — two of them, in fact, one all dark wood, the other plasterwork and gilding. Gorgeous. As at the Klementinum, visitors could only look in at the doorway because a thousand people a day breathing on the books would turn the whole place into a mess of mildew in short order.

The other draw is the Cabinet of Wonders. This is a little museum of curiosities, mostly from the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's a mix of natural history, anthropology, and art. They've got some Egyptian statuary and a sarcophagus (sadly most of the Egyptiana was off-exhibit), a few Chinese porcelain figures and bronzes, a suit of chain mail from someplace, and a small cannon. The natural-history collection has lots of shells, a narwhal horn, two "elephant trunks" which our reproductive-physiology expert identified as whale penises, lots of fish skins, a couple of crocodiles, and some interesting rocks.

It's not really worthwhile as a museum itself; but as a historical exhibit about what an early private museum would have been like it's wonderful. Between the Cabinet of Wonders and the two gonzo libraries, the Strahov Monastery is the perfect lair for a fantasy-novel wizard or school of magic.

We decided to stroll back rather than take the tram, as it was all downhill and we wanted to see more of the left bank of the Vltava. That plan was interrupted by rain almost as soon as we got out of the monastery, so we took refuge in a cafe long enough to have dessert and wait out the worst of the downpour.

Our route back took us across the Charles Bridge, which is one of Prague's most popular sights. I don't know why. It's a nice old bridge with lovely statues of saints and the life of Christ — but you can't really look at the statues or the bridge, or admire the view from the bridge because at any given time there's something like two thousand other people on the bridge taking selfies and complaining about how crowded the bridge is.

At the Old Town end of the bridge we did see a gentleman showing off his big boa constrictors. One was simply big but the other was immense — five meters long, at least. Both snakes got a lot of attention, and the biggest one definitely seemed to be posing for the cameras.

Napped at our flat again — I heartily recommend a mid-afternoon nap while traveling; it breaks the day up into two distinct phases and keeps you from dragging around and snapping at one another. In the evening we had a ramble about the square and stopped at one of the open-air cafes to share a plate of salmon sandwiches and drink a glass of wine.

A note about drinks: Prague is famous for beer, but I'm not one of those people who can discourse for hours about the differences among porter, ale, and stout. The beer was good, even the stuff our local contacts disparaged. My beer tastes were formed in America in the 1980s — the last gasp of the regional German-name breweries in the U.S. before the rise of craft brews and hipsters going on about hops. The Czech brews reminded me a lot of those beers (it's no coincidence that "Budweiser" is named for a town in Bohemia), and that was fine with me.

With wine I can be a bit of a snob. I did my best to stick to locally-grown wine while we were in Prague. Czech wines are sweeter than the western European and New World vintages I normally drink (I don't know why wines get sweeter as you go east), but they were pretty good. Or at least the white wines were; since it was hot summer weather we didn't really want any reds. If I ever go back to Prague I may try to work in a visit to some local wineries, to get a better sense of what Czech growers are doing. But if you go, I recommend trying the local product.

Next time: Not Much!

Vacation in Prague: Day 5

On Thursday morning we ventured down along the riverbank south of the Charles Bridge, admiring the gorgeous Beaux-Arts buildings. We wandered as far as Prague's newest (and, in my personal opinion, most over-rated) architectural landmark, the "Dancing Houses." If you haven't seen pictures, it's a pair of vaguely whimsical modern structures made to give the impression of a waltzing couple. While I'm in favor of anything opposed to the tyranny of bland Internationalism, I also favor practicality in architecture. The groovy shapes of the Dancing Houses just scream "unusable interior space" and — sure enough — one of them had a prominent sign advertising space for rent.

From there we ducked inland and had lunch at the National Cafe, which sounds like a remnant of Communism but actually takes its name from the avenue on which it stands. The place was quite the cultural mecca in Prague's boom years before and after World War I. Our plan had been to have just a light lunch, but the menu was too tempting so that wound up being our main meal of the day. I had a delicious braised beef in sour cream sauce with cranberries (hadn't expected to see them in Europe) and the inevitable bread dumplings.

Thus fortified, the adventurers went a few blocks north to the Clementinum, or Klementinum, a former Jesuit college which now houses the Czech national library. The place started as a Dominican monastery, but in the 16th Century the Jesuits took over and constructed a sprawling Baroque complex which rivals Prague Castle in size.

Because it is an active library, you can't just wander around the interior, so we took the guided tour. There were big signs warning that the lift was out of order, so visitors should be prepared to climb lots of stairs. And climb we did. First we went two floors up a narrow iron spiral stair (with some traffic-management issues as another tour group was trying to come down at the same time) to the magnificent original library hall (it's the place in the picture if you do a search for images of "Clementinum Library"). For preservation reasons we were only allowed to look in the doorway, not go inside. We were also forbidden to take pictures, as the library hall is considered part of the Czech "national patrimony."

To an American, that seems odd. All of our "national patrimony" is — more or less by definition — in the public domain. NASA recently made its whole collection of space images available for free, and there's no copyright on the Declaration of Independence. One should note, however, that Americans don't have a history of bossy foreigners trying to steal our stuff.

The Czechs do have such a tradition, and one reason getting to that library hall was so difficult was that just before the Germans rolled into Prague in 1938, the staff of the Klementinum demolished the big stairway leading up to it, and built a wall across the doorway to keep the bossy foreigners from finding it.

They continued that ruse for fifty years, even while the next set of bossy foreigners, the Russians, used the building as a surveillance post, watching for menacing groups of four or more Czechs assembling in the streets below.

After looking in, we continued to climb. The stairs led up into the Astronomy Tower, where Jesuit astronomers used a camera obscura system to determine noon every day (and signal to the rest of the city by waving a flag). Above that was the observing level where actual stellar observing was done, and where we could get a spectacular daytime view of the city.

(Irony alert: one of my fellow tourists was reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins before the tour began. It's all about how awful "religion" is and how it promotes ignorance and superstition. Then we went to look at places where monks and priests did cutting-edge science.)

After enjoying the view we went back down those narrow stairs (the upper levels were excitingly creaky original construction), and walked back to our flat for a much-appreciated rest.

In the evening the adults went down to St. Nicholas Church on Old Town Square for a concert. The church is yet another amazing Baroque showpiece. It's a Hussite church — part of the dissident denomination re-founded in 1920 and drawing its inspiration from the martyred reformer Jan Hus. Ironically, the building itself is pure Catholic Counter-Reformation in style.

In a Baroque church it's only appropriate to hear Baroque music — Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, and some others, performed by an organist, a trumpeter, and a soprano. The music was lovely, a perfect ending for the day.

From what I could see, pretty much every church in Prague hosts musical performances every evening, at least during tourist season. The musical audiences fill the house, and I'm sure their admission fees are a huge help in keeping those great buildings in repair. But I did find myself thinking melancholy thoughts: people were once willing to die for their faith, but now the churches are just prettier-than-average concert halls.

I dropped off my fellow adult at the flat and went for a solo ramble in the general direction of Wenceslaus Square to the southeast. It was a fine evening and the streets were packed. I passed another TORTURE MUSEUM, and (for the second time that day) saw a massage parlor (the kind that actually give massages) offering the creepiest thing I saw in Prague: Fish Pedicures. The patient sits with his or her feet in a large aquarium, home to a lot of small, hungry fish. I don't know if there's a specific type of fish preferred for pedicure duties, or if any will do if they're hungry enough. The fish nibble all the dead skin off the patient's feet. I have no idea how well it works, and very little inclination to find out.

After a final drink at a cafe in Old Town Square, I also headed off to bed.

Next time: Wonders!

Vacation in Prague, Day 4

After all the activity of the first few days, we took it easy on Wednesday. Got up late and had breakfast even later, with the result that we didn't even leave the apartment until past noon.

Following a suggestion from a Prague native (see below) we crossed the river to the lovely Letna/Letenska Park on the north side of the Vltava. The park is home to the World's Biggest Metronome, a David Czerny sculpture occupying what was once the site of the World's Biggest Statue of Stalin — which, given that this is Stalin we're talking about, must have been pretty damned big. And since everything on that side of the river is a lot higher up than the other side, we wound up climbing a lot of stairs again to get to the park — only fifty meters due up instead of nearly a hundred to reach the Castle.

The park was not our destination, though. That lay on the far side: the National Technical Museum. It's a cool science-and-technology museum, with exhibits on timekeeping, chemistry, and photography. The gallery of astronomical instruments includes a giant sextant once owned by Johannes Kepler himself. There's also an extremely comprehensive and interesting exhibit about printing.

But the heart of the museum is the two-story gallery devoted to vehicles. They've got planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, motorcyles, a balloon, and probably some pogo sticks. Among other things there's the official car of Edoard Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Also a Spitfire of the RAF Czech Squadron (my impression is that "fighting your way back to your homeland" ties with "throwing oppressors out of windows" as the Czech national pastime). Great stuff. We prowled around for three hours.

After that it was time to rendezvous with our local contacts. Thirty-odd years ago that would have meant making a covert recognition signal, then passing documents at a dead drop. Last week it simply meant meeting the delightful young owners of Planeta9 Publishing, an up-and-coming Czech-language SF publishing house.

At their suggestion we all sat in a lovely beer garden overlooking the city, and spent a fun couple of hours talking about Prague, science fiction, aliens, crocodile reproductive systems, and the finer points of book cover design.

They finally had to leave, so we grabbed chicken "kebabs" (=gyros) at a stand in the park, then made our way back down to ground level and our flat. Other than a brief outing for more groceries, that was our day.

Awful History, Great Buildings

This seems like a good place to describe Prague. The heart of it is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen anywhere. (The suburbs look like the suburbs of just about every city in Europe I've been to.) Prague's history of foreign occupation and oppression just happened to exactly fit the worst eras of architecture.

So there are lovely Gothic structures from when Bohemia was an independent kingdom, but then the land was under foreign rule and wracked by war, so nothing important got built until the late 17th century. Once the after-effects of the Thirty Years' War finally died down there was a boom in putting up wonderful Baroque buildings (or retrofitting medieval structures with Baroque facades). That lasted until the political unrest of the French Revolution era through 1848, when the Habsburgs again cracked down on the country. So Prague missed the whole mid-19th century era of monotonous red brick.

Toward the end of the 19th century Prague became one of the industrial dynamos of the empire, so a lot of delightful Beaux-Arts buildings went up as the city expanded beyond its old walls. Independent Czechoslovakia saw some nice Art Deco construction in the 1920s, but then a decade of depression, another decade of occupation and war, followed by half a century of Communist rule meant that basically nothing got built in the center of Prague. They skipped the post-war glass box era, the moonbase buildings of the 1970s, and the "postmodern" glass boxes with doodads on top of the 1980s.

Nobody plunked an International-Style skyscraper into Old Town Square, or tried to cover the Castle with a glass pyramid. The only exception is the giant Sputnik-era television tower looming over the city on the eastern side like one of H.G. Wells's Martian fighting-machines. "Bearable" is probably the kindest way to describe it. Prague was also fortunate in that the old heart of the city didn't get wrecked by war. The Skoda works in Pizen got the lion's share of bombing raids, and the Red Army didn't have to fight its way into the city in 1945. Unlike London or Berlin, there was no need for horrible post-war "infill" construction in Prague.

I loved the buildings of old Prague. The guiding principles of local architects seem to have been: (1) More gilding! and (2) More sculptures! All the old buildings have fantastic gold detailing, or giant carved figures supporting balconies or perched atop the roofs. There's a cheerful lack of consistency, too: one can see angels and Green Men and caryatids all on the same facade.

A note to comic-book fans: Mike Mignola lied to us. His drawings of old Prague in his comics evoke a dark, creepy city, with crooked spires and blind-eyed broken angels. What he neglected to show is that those buildings are hot pink or chrome yellow, with gold mosaics like a Klimt painting over the entrance, and Tiffany glass fanlights. It's a setting for comic opera, not horror.

Next Time: How to Hide a Library!

Vacation in Prague, Day 3

On Tuesday the 16th we slept until nine and breakfasted on croissants and scrambled eggs, then set out to see the sights of the Jewish Quarter. This meant much less walking, as our flat was right in the middle of that part of town.

We began at the Old New Synagogue, which follows the international tradition that things with "New" in their name are often the oldest of that thing around. (Examples: Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia; the Pont Neuf in Paris; and the New Forest in England, which will celebrate its thousandth anniversary in a few decades.)

The Old New Synagogue was built in 1270 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Gothic chapel, but with no crucifixes and more Jews. It does have little booths outside the main chamber with slit windows looking in, for the women of the congregation. It was nice to see that the Old New Synagogue is still an active synagogue.

The legend of the Golem of Prague mentions that the inert body of the Golem was stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, so naturally our adventurers had to snoop around to see if there's any truth to it. The synagogue does have an attic, but it can only be reached by climbing up a series of iron rungs set into the eastern wall. The bottom fifteen or twenty feet of the rungs have been removed, so nobody can get up there without a ladder or a crane. (No mere human, anyway. A supposedly abandoned attic would make an ideal secret headquarters for a crime-fighting man of clay.)

Our second stop was the Ceremonial Hall in the middle of the old Jewish cemetery. It was the headquarters for the old Jewish burial society, and is now a museum on the history of Jewish burial societies. I found myself wondering about the influences that group might have had on later Protestant fraternal orders, which were burial societies among other functions. Weirdly, one cannot actually get into the cemetery from the Ceremonial Hall.

Next door to the Ceremonial Hall is the Klausen synagogue, which was built in 1694 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Baroque chapel, but with no crosses and more Jews. Evidently Prague's Jewish community were willing to follow contemporary trends in ecclesiastic architecture. Nowadays the Klausen is a museum of Jewish rituals and practices, which most of our team of adventurers were already familiar with.

Still hunting for a way into the cemetery, which was right there, we worked our way around the block to the Pinkas Synagogue, undoubtedly the saddest of Prague's remaining synagogue buildings. It was made into a Holocaust memorial in the 1950s, so the place was stripped down to the bare plaster walls, which are covered with a list of names — all the murdered Jews of Czechoslovakia.

I found the memorial doubly sad, because it means that synagogue will never host another wedding or bar mitzvah ceremony. The well-meaning artists and architects who created the memorial destroyed the synagogue as a living institution.

Already in a morbid frame of mind we finally found our way into the cemetery, which is absolutely packedwith headstones. It looks less like a cemetery and more like a storage facility for headstones. One can roughly date them by appearance — the older stones are smaller and simpler, while the later ones get big and elaborate. This cemetery is no longer used for burials, I suspect because there is literally no room left.

The exit popped us back out at the Ceremonial Hall, and from there we walked south to the Maisel Synagogue, the last one on our tour. It's a much-rebuilt building, currently in its Franz Josef era Neo-Gothic incarnation. Like too many of Prague's synagogues, the Maisel is also a museum — in this case, of the history of Jews in Bohemia and Prague in particular. It did display some works by David Gans, the Jewish scholar and mathematician who was a contemporary and occasional collaborator of Brahe and Kepler during his time in Prague.

By then it was early afternoon, the perfect time to walk another couple of blocks south to Old Town Square in time to watch the famous Astronomical Clock strike two p.m. We kept our hands on our wallets in the crowd, as it seemed like perfect conditions for a pickpocket.

With our wallets intact we walked across the square, dodging people in giant inflated bear costumes, to the wonderful Gothic church of St. Mary Before Tyn, where we saw the grave of Tycho Brahe himself. The actual grave is marked with a plain slab bearing his name in big letters, but propped above it is the old marker, with a very long and hard-to-decipher Latin epitaph, plus a bas-relief of the great Dane himself.

After that we were dog tired, so plodded back to our flat for a nap and a change of clothing before our big fancy dinner out, at a restaurant called La Veranda (which did not, in fact, have a veranda). It was actually on the same block as our own building, so getting there didn't even involve crossing a street. We all got the six-course tasting menu and shared a bottle of Czech reisling on the waiter's recommendation.

The six courses consisted of:

(1) A tiny bowl of Vichysoisse, with a good potato flavor, not too milky.

(2) Beef tartare with little dabs of truffle mayonnaise. For some reason the Czechs have adopted beef tartare as a national favorite; it was on the menu at nearly every restaurant. From which we can deduce that the meat supply chain in the Czech Republic is reliable and well-inspected.

(3) Seared foie gras. This was amazing: the exterior was crisp while the inside was like a custard. We had to get more bread for the table with this course, as none of us wanted to waste a drop of lovely liver custard.

(4) Sea Bream, served simply enough with brown butter and lemon. Yum.

(5) A little beef filet with potato puree. It was described as sirloin but looked more like hangar steak to me. Excellent either way.

(6) Seasonal berries with white chocolate gelato and currant sorbet. I accompanied this with coffee.

All in all, an excellent dinner, and we cheerfully climbed five stories back up to our flat and collapsed.

Next Time: Technology!