Saint Bernhard

Sitting in the window seat of a coach bus in Austria, heading west to Salzburg from Bad Ischl, I read a contemporary novel about a dinner party among artists in downtown New York. I did not want to read about the people of downtown New York while heading west to Salzburg from Bad Ischl, but because this dinner party novel is directly lifted from Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, a novel about a dinner party among artists in Vienna, it did not feel completely irrelevant to my position as a New York writer spending August among artists in Salzburg.