Malta in the NYT

[Henry]

June 25, 2008,  1:39 pm 
Mopeds, Horsemeat and Pynchon on Malta

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/mopeds-horsemeat-and-pync
hon-on-malta/index.html 

Then we combed Valletta, marching up and down the hills looking for evidence
of the now-sleepy city's illustrious past and marveling at the cute
Victorian-style balconies. On Strait Street in the heart of the Gut, the
entertainment district once frequented by visiting sailors, I was hoping to
find the Metro Bar, where a key scene of Pynchon's unsummarizable "V" takes
place. We asked old-timers and were directed to a doorway filled with
cinderblocks. The Metro Bar was no more. 

Like the New Life Music Hall, the Smiling Prince and the Blue Peter - whose
faded signs hung over locked and cobwebbed doors - the Metro had shut down
sometime after 1979, when the British naval base closed, and I was left to
wonder what lay within. Did it still look, as Pynchon wrote, "like a
nobleman's pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes"? Did "statues of Knights,
ladies and Turks" still line the "wide curving flight of marble steps" that
led to the second-story dance floor? Or had the Metro's owners carted off
the decorations that had lodged within the imagination of young Pynchon (who
presumably visited Valletta during his 1955-57 stint in the Navy)?

Today, all that remains of the Gut's glory days is a 90-year-old tattoo
parlor and a few graybeards who remember the noise and chaos and fun. "But
now it's too quiet here, too quiet," one of them told us. "If you come at
Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, you can bring shotgun and you can shoot and
nobody, nobody take notice."

His nostalgia was palpable, and another Pynchon line seemed apt: "Monuments,
buildings, plaques were remembrances only; but in Valletta remembrances
seemed almost to live.

P-Liste trip from NYC to Malta some day? (Make mine chocolate) [hm]

HENRY MU

Information, Media, and Technology Consultant

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog_rss/henrymu