here comes everybody

I just saw this review of a new book by Clay Shirky, which is basically about why everyone should learn to stop worrying and love the internets (I do, I do). I love that the title is Here Comes Everybody, since it’s what G shouts every morning when he wakes up and heads for the kitchen. And then there’s the reference to James Joyce and HCE, the hero of Finnegan’s Wake. I love that, too, as the Wake makes a great cheeky metaphor for the web – vast and incomprehensible on the surface, but with a little faith and luck, when you dive in you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.

The last time I lived in Europe, a hundred million years ago, I was part of a Finnegan’s Wake reading group in Budapest. The entrance fee was a bottle of Bull’s Blood red wine (67 cents at the corner store) or a bag of snacks, and we discussed a page every week. We were all poor English teachers – I think the total of my possessions was four black sweaters, a coat, two pairs of pants, and a stack of old New Yorkers that came with the apartment I shared with two other book group members – but we were multi-national, with Hungarians, Americans, English, and a few real Irish among the regulars. I was the impostor, since I was the only group member who had never read past Dubliners before joining, and who went on to study medieval, instead of modernist, literature. But no one ever seemed to blame me, and we had a lot of fun getting tipsy over etymologies and wild speculations. One member played ringmaster/discussion leader each week, and I remember spending the afternoon before my session holed up at the British Council Library, which was housed in a gorgeous nineteenth-century pile on one of the city’s most beautiful avenues, poring over a key to mythology and a couple of old books of literary criticism (a prefiguration of graduate school, sadly, it wasn’t). That year was the longest, coldest winter Central Europe had seen in decades. I remember crossing the Petofi Bridge one night on the way to a group meeting and seeing ice chunks floating down the Danube. Another night I slipped on a patch of black ice outside a group member’s apartment and probably cracked a bone in my elbow – but not the bottle of Bull’s Blood I was carrying.

Joining the group – though I’ve never been much of a joiner – was the little wedge that opened up my life in Budapest, creating a little community for me there, and it’s still the lens through which I view that year. Budapest was beautiful, scarred and strange; still near enough to the Communist collapse that the shiniest, best-renovated buildings all housed fast-food restaurants. The young people I hung out with had been part of underground democratic political groups while I was filling out applications to university. The day I called the number on the flier I saw in the café behind the law university, I was having a fit of loneliness inspired by the lack of cognates. From there I moved on to Joyce, a couple of great roommates, singing in a symphony chorale directed by Kodaly’s last music student, bunking six to a sofa on a weekend trip to Lake Balaton, visiting the Turkish baths, and teaching English to the defense attaché for the Greek government, who asked me if I might consider a sideline job as his mistress. And all this in the days before Facebook.

I don’t feel nostalgic for that time – a high speed connection and craigslist would have made remarkable enhancements to my time abroad, and S and I would be able to seed a college fund on that year’s investment in long-distance phone calls, which we now make for free across a DSL cable. Although I will be able to tell my children, without lying, that I had to walk a mile (well, a kilometer, anyway) uphill and across a bridge in order to have access to email. But sitting here in another magnificent old apartment building at an easy walk from a different river, the past suddenly seems like, well, a long time ago. And I feel fond of it, those early steps that started me down this road before I even knew I was on it. Here comes everybody, indeed. I wonder if it’s even possible to buy Bull’s Blood in France.