Stalking the Slackerstalker in Slovenia and Croatia



Follow along on your maps, stalkers! I will be gone (maybe entirely) from the interwebs for the next month on an Odyssey, minus fleece but hopefully with sirens.



First Stop: the land of the Bird-handed Girl - Opatija, staying at the Imperial Hotel, inspired by this woman's account of the place. I will dance barefoot on the sand just like Isadora used to.



Second Stop: "Cheers Queers" the queerest spot in the former Yugoslavia for five days - where I'll be a guest of the coolest women's center in the whole of Croatia (it is said). If it's not cool enough I will be at the only youth hostel I could find in the whole city of Zagreb.



Third Stop: Rijeka at this beautiful old (cheap) hotel on the water.



Fourth Stop: Via a former convent in Venice to Florence, with parents in tow. May all our genetic revelations be amusing. We'll be staying at this hotel - I can see why they didn't post an outside view on their website.



Fifth Stop: in beautiful Fiesa and Piran, Slovenia at this sweet little brick number. We will rent a car and drive to a farm where I will ride a Lippizzaner and a town (Lokev) where my parents will ogle old things from wars and stuff. Before or after that we will go sit in hot water.



Sixth Stop: on our way to our hotel in Ljubljana we will stop at the famous Lipica stables where I'm having a riding lesson. Then we're going to the Predjama castle a visit inspired by that site's virtual tour, and by this article where a tourist notes that the noble who lived in the castle fended off troops by tossing roast duck and fresh cherries down at them from the parapets.



Seventh Stop: the unfortunately (for English speakers) named resort town Bled, where they tend to have world conferences on things like suicidology and nervous disorders. And chess. I will be disappointed if we don't make it to Kobarid for the award-winning WW I museum, but this site's virtual tour of the place will make up for it.



Eighth Stop: back to Fiesa and Piran and Portoroz for the maritime festival that has the cyberstyley name "Internautica."



Ninth Stop: brez roditijelej - sans parentals - I will be going to a beautiful place in the western Slovene alps to ride for a few more days before I leave via Ljubljana (and this hostel, the cheapest one I could find) and Prague (where I think I'll be staying in a student dorm- parrrr-ty!).


Hopefully I have not been mislead by the maps and schedules at Euroave.com, Routenet.nl, Trenitalia, the Slovenian bus system site and this little UK-Croatian site.

More From the Genre of Strange Online Tarot Innovations:



The Blogger Tarot - today's card is the High Priestess/ Web Grrrl. I got this in a reading last night, in fact. However, to be correct, I didn't just run into Ani in a deli. We had a long, long string of chance and intentional run-ins on the street and fan-to-starlet chitchats backstage. I was quite the stalker in my day. It started at the Bottom Line (NYC) in January 1992, when I dressed up in my fanciest clothes to sneak in (I was underage) to see Ani open for Two Nice Girls. Ani used to be so, SO enthusiastic to meet her fans. Back when Gretchen Phillips was a diva.

She was a Panther before Panthers were Cool.



Born in 1892 Rebecca West (nee Cicily Fairfield) was a socialist, suffragette, and feminist journalist who had an unmarried partnership with HG Wells. Their partnership produced a boy who took his middle name from HG's nickname for Rebecca: Panther.



I'm absorbed in reading her famous 1100-page Yugoslav travelogue Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. She writes in this book like a matron of her time, aged 45 and becoming increasingly reactionary in her cultural tastes (she mentions feeling nausea when she sees a woman perform a male folk dance in male clothing, or when non-Negro dancers perform Nego dances: to her it looks like primitivism, backsliding, viscerally wrong). So she's no great beacon of open-mindedness, but she is a very self-conscious and astute observer of the 1937 Yugoslav state that she's observing. She mournfully add (when the book was printed in 1942) to text where she talks about the Hapsburgs' treatment of Croatia as the worst betrayal ever enacted on a people in Europe the small footnote reminding the reader that it was written in 1937. The book's (1942) dedication is "to my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved."


Besides providing rich historical context for my trip (in only five days!) to the former Yugoslavia, she has also given me clues for packing. She and her husband endured a freak snowstorm when she arrived in Zagreb a day before Easter 1937... I arrive two days (and sixty-six years) after she did, so into the pack go the long underwear. Read for yourself a short bio of the fierce, opinionated Rebecca West.


Here's her pouncing controversially on the Habsburgs:

?I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else,? ... ?the Herzegovinians had found that one empire is very like another, that Austria was no better than Turkey.?

And pouncing again-- this time on the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand:

?Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side so hard as the people who were murdered.?

You Can't Change the Ocean-- You Can Only Change Your Course



Read about the Tall Ship Semester for Girls-- how cool.


"Girls who might otherwise be hanging in the mall now find themselves hanging in the rigging."



Coming from a San Francisco-based organization, that sounds fairly ominous, but in fact it's completely wholesome and inspiring.

While the US Troops are Busy Planting Evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Scrambling to Explain Their Own Violations of the Rules of Combat...

Like bombing press headquarters...



Take a Break and Enjoy a Little Safe Pre-Stalinist Communist Art


At An Exhibit of Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era.



It reminds me of what I liked about my brief time in the Soviet Union at age 15 in 1989, and in the immediate post-Soviet years 1993-4. For example, the understanding that girl-children can grow up to be great architects -- as taught in a children's book illustration published in 1933.

This Week's Circumlocutory Heavyweight World Championship Belt Goes to...
Unnamed British Official as quoted in this week's Global Development Briefing, for using the word "people" more gently and euphemistically than I've ever, ever seen it used.



Here's the KO:

"There is a temptation to say why should we be subtle after we weren't supported in the Security Council. We certainly hope people will resist that temptation."



- An unnamed British official on the likelihood of another acrimonious political battle in the UN Security Council over the administration of Iraq's oil industry after the war, in an interview for The Washington Post. The US Defense Department is reportedly pressing ahead with plans to temporarily manage the industry and use the proceeds to rebuild the country, creating a conflict with US allies in Europe and the Middle East. UN and British officials said the US lacks the legal authority to begin exporting oil even on an interim basis without a new Security Council mandate.

I don't always read through the whole briefing, but the quotes are always special. It's the feature with which they always start their round-up of world events affecting "developing" countries. Subscribe to the (free) Global Development Briefing mailing list here.

A Contribution to My Collection of Bad Celebrity Poetry, By Donald Rumsfeld.



Yes, he says existential, effusive, poetic things. A journalist just added the line breaks.



A PBS airing of "Blair's War" tonight featured a review of how Rumsfeld fucked up our relationship with Europe: he actually did say that France and Germany are "old Europe" and when we think of Europe today we think a little further East. Like RUSSIA? Russia, who is more and more reluctant to issue visas to US citizens because they just don't want our business anymore? Russia, who was just visiting its ally Saddam Hussein the week before we started bombing, probably making another arms deal?

Today, A Competing Lego Tarot Deck, Would You Believe

Ok, Playmobil, technically, but still. Mystical plastic square bendy figures.



I like the happy smiling blondes chained to the Devil the best.

Again Departing From the Hippy Crap Saving the World Stuff

(because it is a lot easier to wake up in the morning sober when I don't watch CNN at 3 am)

To Celebrate the Lego TAROT!



"Not Sanctioned By Lego In Any Way."



The Queen of Swords as Lego-Leia in her sticker-bikini with a lightsaber is my favorite.



Thank you, thank you, thank you, Reasonably Clever. You made my day.



And as Reasonably Clever says: "Please drive safely, offer void in Utah, don't mix old and new batteries."