Top photo: Café Aedes, Berlin. Bottom photo: Café Bonaparte, Georgetown, Washington, DC
I write in cafés, a habit going back at least twenty years. I don’t remember when this began, because I have been writing for well more than forty years. The first twenty years, there was no habitual work place; I wrote anywhere and everywhere; at some point early on in the next twenty, I became essentially unable to work seriously in what were a series of rather nice “home offices.” I found the quiet to be, oddly, debilitating, the lack of distraction to be stupefying. I am able -- it is fair to say that I am only able -- to produce concentrated creative work amid the human drama of a good café.
From about 1985, I worked in either McP’s Irish Pub or Clayton’s Café, both in Coronado, California. We left the States in 1991, but were unsettled and traveling for much of that period, before arriving in Slovakia in 1994. Until we left Slovakia at the end of 1999, when I worked at all (I was teaching philosophy full time during those years), my cafés were the Gremium Café, and more rarely, Maximillian Café, both located in Bratislava’s old town. I went often to nearby Vienna then, and my place there was the Café Griensteidl on Michaelerplatz. They had a no smoking section, meaning that except on the worst days I could go home after a couple of hours working and not have to wash the stink out of my hair and clothes. In Trieste, I found Il Caffè San Marco to be a good place to write.
During the years 2000 - 2002, we lived in South Africa. South Africa is not a café society; even if there were any sorts of traditional cafés, it wouldn’t be safe to try working in one. As a result, in those two years I managed to write less than 100 pages of the manuscript that became Possessed by Shadows. I was stupefied in South Africa. Which is not to say that, otherwise, I did not enjoy living there, because I did. South Africa was one of the more fine living experiences I've had. Just not a good place for me to write.
We pass through DC from time to time, language and training of one kind or another, between one post and the next, but seldom for long enough to bother trying to find a fitting café; the right café is not just any café. But we have lived in DC for the last two years now, and I finally found Café Bonaparte here, where I can be found through the morning hours most days.
From February, 2003 until August, 2006, we lived in Berlin. I found my favorite café of them all while there, but not without a number of months trying to find the right one. I tried out the Café Bleibtreau and it worked all right until the owner, who was always present, figured out I was an American and I was instantly persona non grata. (Those were not good times to be an American in Germany, to be an American anywhere, really.) Then I found a great student place across the street from the Berlin Technical University, Café Hardenberg. It could have become my place, except the food was mediocre and, unacceptably, the coffee was weak. One day, bending against a cold wind surging through the tunnel-like lane called Savignyplatz, I popped into Café Aedes for something hot and bracing: a caffé corretto (espresso corrected with grappa). It was perfect, the best, most honestly Italian coffee I had found in Berlin. So I kept going back for the coffee, then discovered the affordable and delicious tramezzinis, and began to notice that all the staff spoke Italian with each other, noticed that most of the other customers were regulars and frequently sat for long periods of time with a book, a magazine, a notebook. I sensed a fit.
During the subsequent two and a half years, I finished one book there and wrote well into another. I met my now good friend Ferdinand there. I became friendly enough with the owner, Giuseppe, who is originally from Sicily, that Holly and I have a standing invitation to stay with his family at their farm and olive orchard on the slope of Mt. Etna.
Café Aedes became a sort of home, and I still miss everything about it.
