The Budapest Bardroom

John Nadler is a Canadian-born journalist and writer living in Budapest. His first reporting job in Europe was with the English-language newspaper Budapest Week after being interviewed and hired by its then editor (and current Bardroom co-organizer) Steve Carlson. His published books include ‘Searching for Sofia’ (Random House, 2003), and A Perfect Hell (Ballantine Books, 2005). He’s currently the Budapest correspondent for TIME magazine.

1. What’s the last thing you read that made your hair stand up on end?

“My hair hasn’t been able to stand on end since 1994. Figuratively speaking, I just reread Michael Chabon’s ‘Wonder Boys’, and loved it more than the first read. It’s a runaway rail car of a book.”

2. What’s the last piece of literature that made you cry?

“The first draft of almost anything I’ve written. The most emotional thing I’ve read in recent years is Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘Lunar Park.’ This novel is like parenting: First you laugh, then you’re horrified, and at the end you weep.”

3. Name a writer/poet who you’d be most psyched to see show up at your
Bardroom gig and how would you return the compliment if he/she liked
your set?

“Canadian writer Alice Munro. She’s almost 80 years old, and gorgeous. I’d offer to have children with her.”

4. What would you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

“Anything that promises afternoon naps and semi-unemployment.”

5. Did you ever get laid because something you wrote?

“I’m still waiting.”

Jude Shiels has been playing music professionally since he was 14 years of age. He sometimes plays in the touring band of his father Brush Shiels, who is a very important figure in the history of Irish rock. Jude has toured in Ireland, Britain and the USA. In 2001 Jude released an album with his brother Matthew (as the Shiels Brothers Band), called Hey Joe & Other Family Favourites. A tribute to the great blues guitar players of the late 1960’s. Jude has a new self titled album completed which he will release this summer. It brings together his folk, blues and jazz influences such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Charlie Parker and is focused on his songwriting and acoustic guitar playing.

1. What was your first (poem / piece of writing), and how bad was it?

“I was 9 years old. I wrote an essay which linked the Khlyst’s of early 20th century Russia with the troubles in Northern Ireland to members of the East German shotputter team fighting as mercenaries in the Belgian Congo and finally onto the underground rock music scene in communist Hungary in the early 1970’s, including the little known gospel movement. I submitted it for a school project and it was rejected on grounds of impartiality. It has since been published in Magyar Hírlap newspaper.”

2. Are you currently working on anything, and why’s it taking so long?

“I’ve been slaving away for years trying to put together a non-musical adaptation of Singing In The Rain. Why’s it taking so long? I can’t figure out a good title for it.”

3. What’s the last thing you read that made your hair stand up on end?

“The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer. A dark, demonic, depraved and deranged look at Hitler’s childhood. I loved it!”

4. What’s the last piece of literature that made you cry?

“Stop the War by Speakthe Hungarian Rapper. This guy has touched on some serious issues with sensitivity, eloquence and restraint. A big hit in Ireland.”

5. Did you ever get laid because something you wrote?

“Traditionally women have not been so interested in my mind.”

Gabor G. Gyukics is a Hungarian-American poet and literary translator. He translates American poetry to Hungarian and Hungarian poetry to American English. Thanks to an Arts Link grant he started an Open Reading series in Hungary in 1999. Gabor has translated works from Jozsef Attila, Attila Balogh, Paul Auster and Ira Cohen. His latest work is Lepkék vitrinben, released by Fekete Sas Publishing in 2006.

1. What was your first (poem / piece of writing), and how bad was it?

“Around 15 about a yellow curtain. It was so bad that my teachers liked it.”

2. Are you currently working on anything, and why’s it taking so long?

“Working on several things at once and of course none will ever end.”

3. What’s the last piece of literature that made you cry?

“Is there any such writing? Tell me about it.”

4. Name a writer/poet who you’d be most psyched to see show up at your
Bardroom gig and how would you return the compliment if he/she liked your set?

“BUKOWSKI coming out of hell to tell me how pretentiously shitty my
poems are and then I’d give him a Bee Dee.”

5. Did you ever get laid because something you wrote?

“I even got laid for things I didn’t write.”

Nikola Tutek’s short story, Pest Miniature, appeared in the Winter 2008 edition of Pilvax Magazine. In 2006, his first book Zlatna pirana (Golden Piranha) was published in Rijeka, Croatia. His short stories and plays have also appeared in prominent Croatian literary magazines, including Rival (Rijeka), Književna Rijeka (Rijeka), and the Književne novine of Belgrade. A collection of his short plays (Le Theatre Volant de Nikola Tutek) will be published in French in 2008. He is also planning the publication of his second book of short stories in Croatia, later in 2008.

1. What was your first (poem / piece of writing), and how bad was it?

“It was a poem called “Little Hamster”. I was six, and it was actually published in the local newspaper. As far as I remember one line went something like:

‘He started a fire and burned his little nose’.

“It was just too lame even for a six-year-old, I’ve no idea why was it published. Maybe the competition was weak. Anyway, this line proved to be visionary-it happened so many times to this hamster.”

2. Are you currently working on anything, and why’s it taking so long?

“I was granted money by the city of Rijeka, Croatia, to publish my second book. I have to provide 150 cards of text by July. The thing is that I have maybe 25 cards. This is the first time I have to write something before the deadline and it’s intimidating. I hardly write at all, and I sincerely doubt that I can ‘produce’ 150 cards of text by that time. I also have a very stressful job which basically brainwashed me. Ideas come slower and without a form. They are almost impossible to put on paper. I guess I’m at a really low point right now, but I hope that March will bring inspiration.”

3. Do you actually have moments of inspiration or is writing just a process of slogging day in and day out?

“Feelings, experiences, smells, tastes, whatever, gather in my subconscious for months or years. Than I just suddenly feel it’s time to write it down. It’s like fever or craziness, temporary black-out. I need exclusion, silence or some music I can bare at the moment, and some good wine. I can write tens and tens of pages in one night. And than months can pass without one written word.”

4. Did you ever get laid because something you wrote?

“Of course. She was totally crazy about my poems. She was in delirium when she read them. When I told her I would like to stop seeing her, she left me the copy of the poems in the mail-box with a little note: “Your poems are shit.” She was right.

“On the other hand, short stories and dramas never took me anywhere in that direction.”

5. What would you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

“I don’t think I ever ‘became’ a writer. I do not see it as something that I accomplished in my life, but more as something I wasn’t able (and never wanted) to escape from. I hope I’ll never stop writing because I would be incomplete without it. But I also think that I will never regard my self a writer by trade and destiny.”

Neil McCarthy is a poet/writer based in the west of Ireland. He is the co-author of two chapbooks of poetry (Voicing the Bell and Naked in Vienna) and has performed as a guest speaker at, amongst other places, the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea; Federation Square, Melbourne; Poetry Ireland, Dublin; and also at the Prague Fringe Festival. He is poetry has featured in many journals worldwide including The New York Quarterly and Poetry Salzburg Review. Neil will read at the Bardroom on December 2.

1. Are you currently working on anything, and why’s it taking so long?

“I’m working on a second poetry collection and that’s coming along nicely, though I would never rush it or give myself a deadline. I’m also trying to finish a travel book/political history book which has so far taken four years to get to the final few chapters as I like to visit most of the countries I’m writing about.”

2. Do you actually have moments of inspiration or is writing just a process of slogging day in and day out?

“I think moments of inspiration get the ball rolling, but for me, fine tuning a poem is walking away from the initial furious effort, and coming back to it when experience has filled in the gaps.”

3. What’s the last thing you read that made your hair stand up on end?

“My credit card bill. No seriously, my mother’s will. No, no, seriously, it’s Patrick McCabe’s latest book ‘Winterwood’. What a piece of writing.”

4. Name a writer/poet who you’d be most psyched to see show up at your Bardroom gig and how would you return the compliment if he/she liked your set?

“I’d have to say Dennis O’Driscoll (Anvil/Bloodaxe). To quote the Irish poet Stephen Murray, ’some poets draw a fist, others shadow box around the point.’ Dennis knocks you out. Return the compliment? I’d buy the man a kebab.”

5. What would you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

“Successful, rich and healthy.”