... sharing my notes for the next classical show on KZYX where you can listen live at 10 am to noon on July 15, 2011...
PLAY LIST
July 15, 2011 “Wondrous World of Music” sitting in for Gordon Black
10:00 station ID, underwriting. Music of JS Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, Francais, and Cimarosa.
Johann Sebastian Bach Concerto for Violin no 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 15:00 approx
In three movements: Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro assai. This Concerto written between 1717-1723.
Performed by Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)
The legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin was the eldest child of Russian-born Hebrew scholars who met in Palestine, emigrated to New York City, and moved to San Francisco soon after their son's birth. As it turns out, Menuhin grew up just a few blocks from where my mother lived, in a Jewish neighborhood where Yiddish was the common language amongst the many immigrants. A true prodigy, after only three years of violin study, Yehudi made a legendary debut at age seven with the San Francisco Symphony. His Carnegie Hall debut came three years later, in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which garnered great praise and began his long, internationally acclaimed career.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Trio in G Major for Three Flutes 4:26
First movement: Allegro
Performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Christian Larde and Alain Marion, flutes
Ludwig van Beethoven String Trio in E flat, Opus 3 38:14
Performed by the Grumiaux Trio – Arthur Grumiaux on violin, Georges Janzer, viola; Eva Czako, cello.
This is Beethoven virtually channeling Mozart – this six movement trio was published four years after Mozart’s wonderful Divertimento and in the same key – some scholars believe this trio was actually written in the same year – 1792 – Mozart’s trio was published, and no doubt Beethoven heard Mozart’s trio performed in Vienna, and may have been able to study the score as well.
Antonin Dvorak Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22. In five movements 27:27
Performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Composed in no more than 12 days, 1875. “The most extrovert and ebullient of all Dvorak’s early works” ... In a very happy period, just after he won the Austro-Hungarian State Prize (Brahms was one of the judges), a year into his marriage, and just before the birth of his second child. During a space of five months he produced a string quintet, four duets, a piano trio and a piano quartet, a major symphony, sketches for a new five-act opera, and this work, the Serenade for Strings.
Jean Francais (1912-1997) L’Horloge de Flore for Oboe & Orchestra 15:50
Performed by Lajos Lencses on oboe with the Radio Sonfonie Orchestra of Stuttgart.
... in 7 short movements, no breaks between them, each lasting less than 3 minutes. Inspiration for this piece came from a poem by Stephane Mallarme which in turn referred to a “flower clock” or “horloge de flore” invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus in the 18th century – a garden plan that would create a clock that corresponded to the day and night opening time of different flowers. Each movement here corresponds to a particular flower – Galant de jour, Cupidone bleue, Cierge a grandes fleurs, Nycthanthe du Malabar, Belle du nuit, Geranium triste, and Silene nociflore.
Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) Concerto in G Major for Two Flutes 9:51
Movement 1 - Allegro
Performed by Robert Dohn and Helmut Steinkraus, flutes, with the Wurtemberg Chamber Orchestra.
14 July 2011
At the Speed of FedEx
It’s a tiresome truism – the virtual world makes the other world, the so-called “real” world real small, really fast. In the virtually real world I talk to my Italian teacher in real time on my real computer, even though she lives in Istanbul within sight of the Bosporus, and I live near the sea at the western edge of California.
Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.
This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.
I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.
By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.
The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?
Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.
About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”
By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.
The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).
Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.
On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:
Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.
You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.
NOTES:
Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.
Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.
The Italian “Internet Bookshop”
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.
Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.
This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.
I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.
By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.
The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?
Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.
About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”
By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.
The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).
Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.
On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:
“The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here – the woman’s sharp intake of breath – but all she says in reply is Thank you. We’ll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later.”
Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.
You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.
NOTES:
Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.
Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.
The Italian “Internet Bookshop”
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.
11 July 2011
A day at the beach below Elk, California
Michael, Christine, Joselyn, Zipper and myself had breakfast at Queenie's Roadside Cafe, then walked down to the beach on a gorgeous July day...
07 July 2011
Summer and a Book (& optional jug of wine, loaf of bread, thou)
Let the record show we were seven days into the month and my Sierra Club Wilderness Wall Calendar was still open to the North Cascades of June, not the Banff fireweed of July.
Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.
The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.
And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.
In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.
A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.
Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.
Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?
This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.
On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.
My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.
I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?
Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.
NOTES:
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.
A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.
As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.
“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
Marianne Moore “Elephants”
The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop
Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database
Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.
The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.
And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.
In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.
A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.
Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.
Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?
This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.
On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.
My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.
I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?
Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.
NOTES:
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.
A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.
As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.
“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
Marianne Moore “Elephants”
The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop
Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database
16 June 2011
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915 – 2011)
We lost an old man this month at age 96. They say whenever someone dies an entire universe – thoughts, feelings, experience – also dies. This could not be more true in the case of Patrick Leigh Fermor.
His books are inspiring, thrilling memoirs that inspire others to similar feats of travel and insight.
When Patrick Leigh Fermor was 19 he decided, having nothing better to do, to walk alone from London, along the Rhine, down the Danube, to Constantinople, now Istanbul. This was in 1933, ten months after Hitler's accession to power, through a Europe soon to disappear.
Years later Leigh Fermor pulled out his battered old notebooks and wrote two books about the trip, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The first was written in 1977, the sequel eleven years after that. Both have become true classics.
A high-spirited 19 year-old sets out across Europe, but it’s his 63 year-old future self who tells the story. Youth transformed by maturity, experience enlightened by scholarship, impulse tempered by reflection. In these books there is more than one kind of time, more than one state of mind. Fermor blends his selves with grace and intelligence.
Fermor on the Baroque: "Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus..."
Walking lonely stretches in the dead of winter Fermor amused himself by reciting aloud the Latin poets or Shakespeare. At one point a peasant woman walked out of nearby woods with arm loads of kindling. Hearing the strange words she dropped everything and flew back into the forest.
Fermor concludes A Time of Gifts standing on a bridge between Slovakia and Hungary: "Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets... I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels."
Fermor served as an irregular in the British Army in Greece during the Second World War. Living as a shepherd in the mountains of Nazi-occupied Crete, his small group captured the German general in charge of the island and conveyed him to British forces in Egypt. For this exploit and for his later writings Fermor was medaled and later knighted.
Over the years Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote a number of books, some set in Greece, all in his uniquely elegant style. This month, obituaries published all over the world praised both his courage and his creativity.
NOTES:
Newly reprinted this year, the story of that Cretan adventure:
Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, with an Afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Paul Dry Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 1589880668. Stanley Moss was the other British officer on this raid.
A summary of the thrilling story of the General's kidnaping told in the New Yorker in 2006: but to read the entire article you will have to register with Highbeam Business...
Fermor’s walk from London to Hungary:
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $16.95. ISBN 1590171659.
Hungary to Constantinople:
Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $15.95. ISBN 1590171667.
Words of Mercury is an out-of-print anthology of Leigh Fermor's writings. Many copies are available, mostly in Canada and the UK. Try Addall You can read a review here.
Fermor on the pleasures and rigors of monastic life: "In the seclusion of a cell – an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods – the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world."
Quoted from:
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Karen Armstrong. New York Review of Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 1590172442
Obituaries:
Christopher Hitchens in Slate
The Guardian
The Independent
His books are inspiring, thrilling memoirs that inspire others to similar feats of travel and insight.
When Patrick Leigh Fermor was 19 he decided, having nothing better to do, to walk alone from London, along the Rhine, down the Danube, to Constantinople, now Istanbul. This was in 1933, ten months after Hitler's accession to power, through a Europe soon to disappear.
Years later Leigh Fermor pulled out his battered old notebooks and wrote two books about the trip, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The first was written in 1977, the sequel eleven years after that. Both have become true classics.
A high-spirited 19 year-old sets out across Europe, but it’s his 63 year-old future self who tells the story. Youth transformed by maturity, experience enlightened by scholarship, impulse tempered by reflection. In these books there is more than one kind of time, more than one state of mind. Fermor blends his selves with grace and intelligence.
From A Time of Gifts "Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees...Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation... But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came?"
Fermor on the Baroque: "Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus..."
Walking lonely stretches in the dead of winter Fermor amused himself by reciting aloud the Latin poets or Shakespeare. At one point a peasant woman walked out of nearby woods with arm loads of kindling. Hearing the strange words she dropped everything and flew back into the forest.
Fermor concludes A Time of Gifts standing on a bridge between Slovakia and Hungary: "Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets... I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels."
Fermor served as an irregular in the British Army in Greece during the Second World War. Living as a shepherd in the mountains of Nazi-occupied Crete, his small group captured the German general in charge of the island and conveyed him to British forces in Egypt. For this exploit and for his later writings Fermor was medaled and later knighted.
Over the years Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote a number of books, some set in Greece, all in his uniquely elegant style. This month, obituaries published all over the world praised both his courage and his creativity.
NOTES:
Newly reprinted this year, the story of that Cretan adventure:
Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, with an Afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Paul Dry Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 1589880668. Stanley Moss was the other British officer on this raid.
A summary of the thrilling story of the General's kidnaping told in the New Yorker in 2006: but to read the entire article you will have to register with Highbeam Business...
Fermor’s walk from London to Hungary:
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $16.95. ISBN 1590171659.
Hungary to Constantinople:
Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $15.95. ISBN 1590171667.
Words of Mercury is an out-of-print anthology of Leigh Fermor's writings. Many copies are available, mostly in Canada and the UK. Try Addall You can read a review here.
Fermor on the pleasures and rigors of monastic life: "In the seclusion of a cell – an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods – the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world."
Quoted from:
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Karen Armstrong. New York Review of Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 1590172442
Obituaries:
Christopher Hitchens in Slate
The Guardian
The Independent
30 May 2011
Casino Grande
I was describing The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, an odd book that demonstrates within Italy’s dark heart hides an even darker place, then takes it back in a postscript.
I can almost understand the contradiction. Almost.
Everywhere you walk in Rome are monuments to Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, heroes of the late 19th century when Italy belatedly and with untold difficulty merged its walled cities and foreign-owned principalities into a modern nation state able to collect taxes and participate in wars.
The merging process didn’t quite take. Italy still has more dialects than France has cheese, more cynics than patriots, and a rising political party ready to split their section of northeast Italy from the rest of the scuffed-up boot.
In March, Italy celebrated 150 years of nationhood. That didn’t take, either. The official merger was ignored and much more attention given to the matrimonial merger of a royal couple in Britain.
Italians live in a country much younger than the United States. They are more concerned with dodging small trucks in smaller alleys than voting in elections. Their best energies are given to discerning the freshest possible groceries and trying not to step on the neighbor’s dog’s droppings.
Italians casually display what is called menefreghismo – an I don’t care attitude to everything outside immediate family and friends. One highly impolite saying runs Non me ne frega niente! – “I don’t give a (blank) about any of it.”
It’s a useful attitude when it comes to living with blatant corruption in Italy’s only national sport, soccer; when lying politicians own the newspapers and television channels that report on them, when the accused endure decades-long trials whose decisions eventually are overturned, a place where convicted criminals often hold seats in parliament.
Italians admit they live in a casino – a brothel, a miserable confusion, a mess -- but they can smell the olive trees through the garbage.
Naive visitors come for the glories, not the ghosts, and there is nothing wrong with that. Pilgrims to Rome were amazed not only at the bones of the saints and the magnificence of St. Peters, but stunned by the falling-apartness of it all. They still are.
Americans complain how expensive everything is, how this storekeeper lied or that church was closed. We make our personal pilgrimages to Rome in search of Raphael, only to experience invisible hands in the backpack on a hot and crowded bus to the Vatican.
As I listened to the neverending complaints I thought about the joys of sunset at Hadrian’s tomb, Raphael’s erotic paintings in the Villa Farnesina. A freshly squeezed spremuta, the famous pizza bianca in Campo dei Fiori, sliced off cleanly with one terrific swipe of an enormous knife. Etruscan marvels in a spotlessly clean museum located inside a gorgeous palazzo located in turn inside a gorgeous park.
The trattoria down the street where you knock to enter. Nuns flying down the sidewalk. The marvelous marble of Chiesa Nuova which lost the right to be called “new” several centuries ago.
The first strawberries of spring. Homemade ravioli in a homemade sauce served by the person who cooked it. The shouting, the laughing, the unruly joy of it all.
Italy is an unstirred soup, a kettle of contradictions, a tantalizing work of art obscured by a long, dark passageway. A language so ethereal they invented an inflexible grammar to make it real.
All this... and I don’t begin to understand how it all fits together. Does anyone?
I can almost understand the contradiction. Almost.
Everywhere you walk in Rome are monuments to Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, heroes of the late 19th century when Italy belatedly and with untold difficulty merged its walled cities and foreign-owned principalities into a modern nation state able to collect taxes and participate in wars.
The merging process didn’t quite take. Italy still has more dialects than France has cheese, more cynics than patriots, and a rising political party ready to split their section of northeast Italy from the rest of the scuffed-up boot.
In March, Italy celebrated 150 years of nationhood. That didn’t take, either. The official merger was ignored and much more attention given to the matrimonial merger of a royal couple in Britain.
Italians live in a country much younger than the United States. They are more concerned with dodging small trucks in smaller alleys than voting in elections. Their best energies are given to discerning the freshest possible groceries and trying not to step on the neighbor’s dog’s droppings.
Italians casually display what is called menefreghismo – an I don’t care attitude to everything outside immediate family and friends. One highly impolite saying runs Non me ne frega niente! – “I don’t give a (blank) about any of it.”
It’s a useful attitude when it comes to living with blatant corruption in Italy’s only national sport, soccer; when lying politicians own the newspapers and television channels that report on them, when the accused endure decades-long trials whose decisions eventually are overturned, a place where convicted criminals often hold seats in parliament.
Italians admit they live in a casino – a brothel, a miserable confusion, a mess -- but they can smell the olive trees through the garbage.
Naive visitors come for the glories, not the ghosts, and there is nothing wrong with that. Pilgrims to Rome were amazed not only at the bones of the saints and the magnificence of St. Peters, but stunned by the falling-apartness of it all. They still are.
Americans complain how expensive everything is, how this storekeeper lied or that church was closed. We make our personal pilgrimages to Rome in search of Raphael, only to experience invisible hands in the backpack on a hot and crowded bus to the Vatican.
As I listened to the neverending complaints I thought about the joys of sunset at Hadrian’s tomb, Raphael’s erotic paintings in the Villa Farnesina. A freshly squeezed spremuta, the famous pizza bianca in Campo dei Fiori, sliced off cleanly with one terrific swipe of an enormous knife. Etruscan marvels in a spotlessly clean museum located inside a gorgeous palazzo located in turn inside a gorgeous park.
The trattoria down the street where you knock to enter. Nuns flying down the sidewalk. The marvelous marble of Chiesa Nuova which lost the right to be called “new” several centuries ago.
The first strawberries of spring. Homemade ravioli in a homemade sauce served by the person who cooked it. The shouting, the laughing, the unruly joy of it all.
Italy is an unstirred soup, a kettle of contradictions, a tantalizing work of art obscured by a long, dark passageway. A language so ethereal they invented an inflexible grammar to make it real.
All this... and I don’t begin to understand how it all fits together. Does anyone?
Italy: The Bad, the Worse, the Really, Really Bad Stuff and the OK Parts
By the first 100 pages of The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, Italy is looking more than a little dark.
In the first 100 pages Jones has detailed political scandals, failures of the criminal law, pervasive corruption in Italy’s one national obsession, soccer.
It goes from bad, to worse, to the really, really bad stuff, and finishes later with the OK parts – sort of like a terrible, overpriced meal that comes with a really good dessert.
Jones talks about how Italian television is a mind-killing wasteland, how cynicism and alienation are the enduring posture of most Italians’ relationship with government and bureaucracy. All this, plus self-destructive terrorism, an ongoing, simmering sort of civil war that dates to the end of World War II. I could go on, and Tobias Jones does, in sometimes sleep-inducing detail.
After an effective and fact-supported dissection of the Italian attitude toward women and feminism – “there are basically no female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionary...” Jones reports the following conversation:
“How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?” he asks one of his female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.
“That,” she said smiling, “is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?”
“Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician (Silvio Berlusconi).
“Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,” she laughed.
What Jones describes is essentially true and verifiable – the scandal, the lying, the evasion, the cynicism, the deadly inability of anyone in Italy to find the truth because it is so overladen with lies. And I haven’t even mentioned the really dark parts where he talks about the failed “Clean Hands” political cleansing, Italians’ troubled relationship with God and religion, the baleful influence of organized crime, and so on until you almost can’t stand it anymore.
Jones published The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003, and it became a best-seller in Italy, proving that even Italians enjoy hating Italy.
And still, as most of us desperately want to believe, there really is another, much more lovely aspect to all of this gloom, another way of experiencing the boot.
In a revised postscript Jones gets around to admitting that “... I occasionally blush with embarrassment... (When I first wrote this book, five years ago) I was... fuming disbelief and fury at what I thought was happening in a country I presumed to call my home... (In this revised edition) I decided not to erase or soften my (words) because what made me angry then still makes me growl deeply today.”
“It’s only, perhaps, when you’ve been away that you realize the true value of the place,” he writes. “I was astonished at the intimacy and warmth of it. Whilst various sordid scandals make the news, the charm of street-level humanity goes unreported.”
More on this to follow...
NOTES
The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. North Point Press paperback $15. ISBN 0865477248.
This appears to be the original 2005 edition, without the revised postscript which changes the conclusions of the book a bit. The edition I read was purchased in Rome in a Faber/Penguin edition: ISBN 9780571235926.
More information is available at the Faber web site.
Tobias Jones has left journalism for the fraught joys of community. He no longer writes a column for the for the London Guardian, but you can still read them here (“A Life Less Ordinary”).
In the first 100 pages Jones has detailed political scandals, failures of the criminal law, pervasive corruption in Italy’s one national obsession, soccer.
It goes from bad, to worse, to the really, really bad stuff, and finishes later with the OK parts – sort of like a terrible, overpriced meal that comes with a really good dessert.
Jones talks about how Italian television is a mind-killing wasteland, how cynicism and alienation are the enduring posture of most Italians’ relationship with government and bureaucracy. All this, plus self-destructive terrorism, an ongoing, simmering sort of civil war that dates to the end of World War II. I could go on, and Tobias Jones does, in sometimes sleep-inducing detail.
After an effective and fact-supported dissection of the Italian attitude toward women and feminism – “there are basically no female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionary...” Jones reports the following conversation:
“How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?” he asks one of his female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.
“That,” she said smiling, “is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?”
“Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician (Silvio Berlusconi).
“Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,” she laughed.
What Jones describes is essentially true and verifiable – the scandal, the lying, the evasion, the cynicism, the deadly inability of anyone in Italy to find the truth because it is so overladen with lies. And I haven’t even mentioned the really dark parts where he talks about the failed “Clean Hands” political cleansing, Italians’ troubled relationship with God and religion, the baleful influence of organized crime, and so on until you almost can’t stand it anymore.
Jones published The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003, and it became a best-seller in Italy, proving that even Italians enjoy hating Italy.
And still, as most of us desperately want to believe, there really is another, much more lovely aspect to all of this gloom, another way of experiencing the boot.
In a revised postscript Jones gets around to admitting that “... I occasionally blush with embarrassment... (When I first wrote this book, five years ago) I was... fuming disbelief and fury at what I thought was happening in a country I presumed to call my home... (In this revised edition) I decided not to erase or soften my (words) because what made me angry then still makes me growl deeply today.”
“It’s only, perhaps, when you’ve been away that you realize the true value of the place,” he writes. “I was astonished at the intimacy and warmth of it. Whilst various sordid scandals make the news, the charm of street-level humanity goes unreported.”
More on this to follow...
NOTES
The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. North Point Press paperback $15. ISBN 0865477248.
This appears to be the original 2005 edition, without the revised postscript which changes the conclusions of the book a bit. The edition I read was purchased in Rome in a Faber/Penguin edition: ISBN 9780571235926.
More information is available at the Faber web site.
Tobias Jones has left journalism for the fraught joys of community. He no longer writes a column for the for the London Guardian, but you can still read them here (“A Life Less Ordinary”).
21 May 2011
Rome -- The fruits they are a-changin’ ...
May 21, 2011
The fruit and vegetables are changing... artichokes (carciofi) are done, except in restaurants catering to tourists. We are in the middle of peas (piselli), and now it’s strawberries and nectarines (fragole e nettarine).
I have yet to taste a single sour, flat, cruddy piece of fruit. Tomatoes, even purchased pre-packaged at the local supermercato, have that just-off-the-vine taste. Strawberries – at least the ones I bought yesterday – taste like they were picked off the vine as I ate them – hard to describe how delicious. Same for the nectarines... I lean over the sink and just devour them.
I took another walk in Trastevere today, this time with three goals – the Villa Farnesina and up the Gianicolo hill behind it to visit San Pietro in Montorio. On the way down the hill I managed to find an excellent Japanese restaurant on the big street Viale di Trastevere... and again, the four pre-sliced slices of orange were as sweet and delicious as you are imagining... and it’s not in season for citrus.
The Villa Farnesina was built by the richest man in Europe, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. He decorated this ravishing place with the assistance of Raphael and his helpers, architect Baldassare Peruzzi, and others. The paintings reflect the (now much reduced) gardens and orchards outside that originally led down to the Tiber (Tevere). Some are made to look like tapestries, with ruffled edges and faux tie-downs. It’s all erotic, colorful, cheerful, and the most fabulous love-nest you’d ever want to own. The large loggia rooms were intended to be open to the outside (now glassed in top to bottom)... peel me a grape and call me honey, honey.
The Gianicolo hill was the scene of months of deadly fighting between French troops defending the Pope’s rule of Rome, and volunteers from all over Italy who streamed there in defense of the newly-created and short-lived Republic (the wrenching of Rome from the Pope’s control took place a few years later). In this case the French won, with the loss of many lives. Garibaldi was there with a large contingent, and when the struggle was over, escaped to fight again.
The fallen Italians later became folkloric heroes. One of them died of gangrene at 21 from a battle wound. His words – poem, song, not sure – became the Italian national anthem. In the park at the top there is a 1941 fascist mausoleum in Mussolini’s favorite travertine marble with the saying O ROMA O MORTE enscribed above (this was one of Garibaldi’s mottos – another was “God and the People” and another was Obbedisco! ("I obey!") and another was... well there were several.
Along the path – actually a busy street – near the top of the hill – a spot with merry-go-round, big equestrian statue of, right Garibaldi, and a grand vista of the city – along the path is a row of busts of heroes – most looking like they could be working in any bar or wearing a business suit instead of military insignia and hats. The busts are very accessible both to passersby and to pigeons, yet have not been defaced or graffitti-ed. I don’t know if this is from respect or indifference. Either way, it’s unusual.
Another phenomenon... the asphalt below the vista lookout makes a perfect chalk board for lovers... I saw signs – big – many feet across – saying in effect that this marks the day that Alonso and Maria fell in love — and so forth.
I was pouring sweat. Not only was today hot, it had an undercurrent of humidity. At the very last moment, returning home, a few drops fell.
If you recall, I visited the church of San Francesco di Ripa earlier in order to see the voluptuous statue there, but only saw the feet and midsection. This time was even more – what, frustrating? Funny? – the church was closed for another hour, and I wasn’t waiting around. I made a return visit to Santa Maria in Trastevere – no wedding, but it appeared that a number of pre-teens were being rehearsed for an upcoming ceremony – not a bar mitzvah ... probably first communion.
I witnessed two weddings in progress... and afterwards on the way down the hill watched pigeons getting stomach pains eating rice off the paving stones.
The fruit and vegetables are changing... artichokes (carciofi) are done, except in restaurants catering to tourists. We are in the middle of peas (piselli), and now it’s strawberries and nectarines (fragole e nettarine).
I have yet to taste a single sour, flat, cruddy piece of fruit. Tomatoes, even purchased pre-packaged at the local supermercato, have that just-off-the-vine taste. Strawberries – at least the ones I bought yesterday – taste like they were picked off the vine as I ate them – hard to describe how delicious. Same for the nectarines... I lean over the sink and just devour them.
I took another walk in Trastevere today, this time with three goals – the Villa Farnesina and up the Gianicolo hill behind it to visit San Pietro in Montorio. On the way down the hill I managed to find an excellent Japanese restaurant on the big street Viale di Trastevere... and again, the four pre-sliced slices of orange were as sweet and delicious as you are imagining... and it’s not in season for citrus.
The Villa Farnesina was built by the richest man in Europe, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. He decorated this ravishing place with the assistance of Raphael and his helpers, architect Baldassare Peruzzi, and others. The paintings reflect the (now much reduced) gardens and orchards outside that originally led down to the Tiber (Tevere). Some are made to look like tapestries, with ruffled edges and faux tie-downs. It’s all erotic, colorful, cheerful, and the most fabulous love-nest you’d ever want to own. The large loggia rooms were intended to be open to the outside (now glassed in top to bottom)... peel me a grape and call me honey, honey.
The Gianicolo hill was the scene of months of deadly fighting between French troops defending the Pope’s rule of Rome, and volunteers from all over Italy who streamed there in defense of the newly-created and short-lived Republic (the wrenching of Rome from the Pope’s control took place a few years later). In this case the French won, with the loss of many lives. Garibaldi was there with a large contingent, and when the struggle was over, escaped to fight again.
The fallen Italians later became folkloric heroes. One of them died of gangrene at 21 from a battle wound. His words – poem, song, not sure – became the Italian national anthem. In the park at the top there is a 1941 fascist mausoleum in Mussolini’s favorite travertine marble with the saying O ROMA O MORTE enscribed above (this was one of Garibaldi’s mottos – another was “God and the People” and another was Obbedisco! ("I obey!") and another was... well there were several.
Along the path – actually a busy street – near the top of the hill – a spot with merry-go-round, big equestrian statue of, right Garibaldi, and a grand vista of the city – along the path is a row of busts of heroes – most looking like they could be working in any bar or wearing a business suit instead of military insignia and hats. The busts are very accessible both to passersby and to pigeons, yet have not been defaced or graffitti-ed. I don’t know if this is from respect or indifference. Either way, it’s unusual.
Another phenomenon... the asphalt below the vista lookout makes a perfect chalk board for lovers... I saw signs – big – many feet across – saying in effect that this marks the day that Alonso and Maria fell in love — and so forth.
I was pouring sweat. Not only was today hot, it had an undercurrent of humidity. At the very last moment, returning home, a few drops fell.
If you recall, I visited the church of San Francesco di Ripa earlier in order to see the voluptuous statue there, but only saw the feet and midsection. This time was even more – what, frustrating? Funny? – the church was closed for another hour, and I wasn’t waiting around. I made a return visit to Santa Maria in Trastevere – no wedding, but it appeared that a number of pre-teens were being rehearsed for an upcoming ceremony – not a bar mitzvah ... probably first communion.
I witnessed two weddings in progress... and afterwards on the way down the hill watched pigeons getting stomach pains eating rice off the paving stones.
17 May 2011
A concert, a kiss and a half-eaten sandwich...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
I have just purchased a single ticket for what sounds like a great concert, 28 May at the same place as before -- the Parco della Musica. I know the way there and back (basically, taxi), I know the place and how it works and the time is nice and early -- 6 pm, so I'll be home before it's too late.
Here's the program -- all eastern Europe:
Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Constantinos Carydis direttore, lexander Toradze pianoforte
Borodin
- Danze Polovesiane
Šostakovic
- Concerto per pianoforte n. 2
Cajkovskij
- Sinfonia n. 6 "Patetica"
That's of course Borodin, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. A powerful show. And if this link works, the red dot represents my seat...
I actually had wanted to go to a concert that is sold out -- the Israeli/Palestinian Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Daniel Berenboim... too bad. But this one will do.
This afternoon I managed to miss my school mates and an aperitivi party. As a warmup and wifi check-in I stopped for a glass of excellent red wine with peanuts and chips at Cafe Barnum at about 6:30, thinking to catch up with the gang in the Campo de’Fiore ... the wine and checking mail was fun, but although the cafes in the Campo were all packed, I never did find "my" group...
However, next best thing, I did finally find a friendly Lavandaria -- where they take your pants and your shirt and return them in 24 hours washed, dried and hung on hangars... what luxury!
I'll find out tomorrow where everyone was, but I don't think I missed much...
After turning my pants in to the red-headed lady behind the counter I decided to extend the evening by walking to Hadrian's Tomb (Castel Sant’Angelo) at sunset... glorious gigantic famous round thing on the Tiber... with a pedestrian bridge leading to it, lined with statues... of course I took pictures.
If you return into Rome along the bridge and on to the street in the same direction, Tomb at your back, the street leads you back into my neighborhood. I had not realized just how close these things are. From Hadrian's tomb it's a straight shot to the front of St. Peters... They basically are connected, and you can see one clearly from the other. Rome gets smaller every moment.
Wrote Jane Corey (we met in Firenze last Saturday) to ask how she's doing... Great, it turns out. In Paris visiting/staying with friends from Berkeley, eating salmon; tomorrow everyone's going to Giverny. Jane noted that in my case time must be going faster and faster... and it's true. So much I still want to do here -- walks in Trastevere, the Etruscan Museum not far from Villa Borghese, the Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Naples, and so forth... eating in every last tasty-looking hole-in-the-wall trattoria...
I'm keeping up with the work at school. It's getting easier, as we seem to be in a kind of review/holding pattern, repeating stuff we've studied earlier. A lot of this detail – the trapassato remoto? -- will be useless in conversation, but it's good to know more than one uses, I guess.
I'm hearing, reading and speaking Italian every day, all day long, and sometimes even the most humble human interaction can be surprising. There was a couple in a doorway embracing and kissing. She had a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, holding on to it with the same hand she was using to run her fingers through his hair. I know, it sounds creepy, but it wasn't, exactly. As I passed I called out "baciare e mangiare!" ("kissing and eating") and the guy looked at me and laughed.
Moments like that are why I'm in school. Not. Wait a minute... really? I guess so! Tell me what else Italian is good for. You can do opera in German, if you have to.
I have just purchased a single ticket for what sounds like a great concert, 28 May at the same place as before -- the Parco della Musica. I know the way there and back (basically, taxi), I know the place and how it works and the time is nice and early -- 6 pm, so I'll be home before it's too late.
Here's the program -- all eastern Europe:
Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Constantinos Carydis direttore, lexander Toradze pianoforte
Borodin
- Danze Polovesiane
Šostakovic
- Concerto per pianoforte n. 2
Cajkovskij
- Sinfonia n. 6 "Patetica"
That's of course Borodin, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. A powerful show. And if this link works, the red dot represents my seat...
I actually had wanted to go to a concert that is sold out -- the Israeli/Palestinian Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Daniel Berenboim... too bad. But this one will do.
This afternoon I managed to miss my school mates and an aperitivi party. As a warmup and wifi check-in I stopped for a glass of excellent red wine with peanuts and chips at Cafe Barnum at about 6:30, thinking to catch up with the gang in the Campo de’Fiore ... the wine and checking mail was fun, but although the cafes in the Campo were all packed, I never did find "my" group...
However, next best thing, I did finally find a friendly Lavandaria -- where they take your pants and your shirt and return them in 24 hours washed, dried and hung on hangars... what luxury!
I'll find out tomorrow where everyone was, but I don't think I missed much...
After turning my pants in to the red-headed lady behind the counter I decided to extend the evening by walking to Hadrian's Tomb (Castel Sant’Angelo) at sunset... glorious gigantic famous round thing on the Tiber... with a pedestrian bridge leading to it, lined with statues... of course I took pictures.
If you return into Rome along the bridge and on to the street in the same direction, Tomb at your back, the street leads you back into my neighborhood. I had not realized just how close these things are. From Hadrian's tomb it's a straight shot to the front of St. Peters... They basically are connected, and you can see one clearly from the other. Rome gets smaller every moment.
Wrote Jane Corey (we met in Firenze last Saturday) to ask how she's doing... Great, it turns out. In Paris visiting/staying with friends from Berkeley, eating salmon; tomorrow everyone's going to Giverny. Jane noted that in my case time must be going faster and faster... and it's true. So much I still want to do here -- walks in Trastevere, the Etruscan Museum not far from Villa Borghese, the Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Naples, and so forth... eating in every last tasty-looking hole-in-the-wall trattoria...
I'm keeping up with the work at school. It's getting easier, as we seem to be in a kind of review/holding pattern, repeating stuff we've studied earlier. A lot of this detail – the trapassato remoto? -- will be useless in conversation, but it's good to know more than one uses, I guess.
I'm hearing, reading and speaking Italian every day, all day long, and sometimes even the most humble human interaction can be surprising. There was a couple in a doorway embracing and kissing. She had a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, holding on to it with the same hand she was using to run her fingers through his hair. I know, it sounds creepy, but it wasn't, exactly. As I passed I called out "baciare e mangiare!" ("kissing and eating") and the guy looked at me and laughed.
Moments like that are why I'm in school. Not. Wait a minute... really? I guess so! Tell me what else Italian is good for. You can do opera in German, if you have to.
16 May 2011
quick link to Rome photos... so far
Just click here and take a look... let me know your thoughts? One friend thinks I cleaned up Rome too much. The next photos will be for him: graffiti, broken pipes, dog droppings... can hardly wait.
14 May 2011
the 18 hour trip north REVISED
May 13/14, 2011... the voyage north
Friday the 13th... after school I marched to Piazza Argentina and waited until 2 sharp for the Agenzi Viaggi (travel agent) to open and sell me train tickets to Firenze, and on Saturday Firenze to Orvieto to Rome, which they did. They also made a reservation for me at Hotel degli Orafi, which has become my/our favorite splurge in Firenze. It’s 4 four stars but feels like 10. Located literally at the foot of Ponte Vecchio... The Medici corridoio traverses the front of the building.
The corridorio was constructed by the Medici bankers back when the ufizzi (offices) actually WERE their offices, so they could walk back and forth unobserved and unmolested between the Pitti Palace on the other side of the river, and their uffizi, now The Ufizzi, the world famous art gallery. Once in a long while the corridoio can be entered and walked, but I’m informed the art inside is second rate... but just to be there and peer out the windows at the commoners below... would be something to do, I think.
Of course, having booked one day in advance, and wanting only a single bed/single room, I had room 204 with a view of the ventilator shaft. But still, it was the Orafi: all-marble bathroom, the best in shampoos and towels, just a very elegant, understated feeling. Actual, readable, books discretely placed on bookshelves...
I washed and walked 15 minutes to the piazza in front of the incredible Santa Croce (Dante is there, on a pedestal, but at the moment he’s under 360 degree wraps while some parts of him apparently are restored). Jane Corey walked into the square, looking like the highly lovely and confident solo traveler she is (“This wrinkled thing is the best dress I have... and the wrinkles are supposed to be there...”). We sat at an outdoor table at Ristorante Finisterrae on the square, squinting at the setting sun, catching up. Drank prosecco and ate bruschetta and a couple of the oranges and grapefruits that have been available for free in a pile ever since I first spotted this place in 2007.
Off to the incredibly fun and eccentric Teatro del Sale, not far from Santa Croce, on Via dei Macci.
I could write pages on this place, but to cover the main points – it’s run by and was invented by the chef Giuditta Pichi, who has one of the best restaurants in Firenze, on the same street: Cibreo. The Teatro feels like his living room, with enough space to invite a hundred people in for dinner and a show. You don’t just walk in, however. You have to be a member, and read the rules, which are all about honoring and respecting, and when you’ve joined (or they’ve found you in their computer from a previous visit) you then pay the 35E for dinner and the show, and you’re in.
They found me in the computer – this was a lot more fun and a lot more hectic than it might sound – and translated what they found as Anton Maksitov (close, I guess), written in silver ink on my burgundy-colored club card, good from last July 2010, to this July, 2011. I guess I better return soon.
Let’s run off a few things so you’ll get the feeling... Long line outside to get to the club window, where newbies receive a sheet of rules to read – handed out with all seriousness, no smiling – and then a return to the window with the filled out form and 5E. Then another long line entering the Teatro where at the front they take your evening’s payment.
In the first room, all wood, Giuditta is standing around, looking silvery and grandfatherly; there are rolled up T shirts for sale, plus: Teatro Aprons with double rows of buttons down the front; foodstuffs such as sauces, spices; the newsletter (5E to buy, free on the Internet, all proceeds to an Italian volunteer group bringing water to villages in Africa)... then the entry into the club. Small tables, folding chairs, a few couches, some theater-style seats... a roaring large kitchen to the right with something roasting that looks like (and turned out to be) lamb, pork and chicken turning on spits; a bakery in action... a table of help yourself hors d’oeuvres that this time included two sauces made of probably chick peas and something else, stewed beet greens with red chunks of beets, potatoes, lentils, rice, etc.
During the two hours of dinner new dishes came steaming out of the kitchen, each announced in an indecipherably shouted spiel from a cook leaning out the kitchen window into the room of diners. Sometimes you crowd at the kitchen window to get a plate of deep fried vegetables, or one delicious veal meatball in a sauce, or freshly baked bread sticks, and so forth... or half a large sardine deliciously cooked in fragrant oil, moist and bony. I got so full so fast I had to pass on several courses. At the end, a table full of whipped cream and crunchy biscuits and a flour-free chocolate torte and coffee...
Our table turned out to have, left to right, two women from Boston who were on a 10-day visit to Italy they won in a fund-raising auction (“I paid too much, but once I started bidding I wasn’t going to lose... We have to come back some time and pay regular prices...”) a mother and daughter from Holland, a couple from San Francisco who truly relished and analyzed each course – very good eaters; Jane, and myself. There was as much table wine and as much water, carbonated and not, as you wanted all night.
On the table, this sign:
... which translates, very roughly, to please return dirty dishes to the kitchen...
OK... we’re stuffed, we’ve all met each other and wondered about the place... now two of the hosts stand in front and announce the evening’s entertainment as the tables are cleared and removed, the chairs lined up theater style, facing the elevated stage which holds one red velvet chair and two microphones. We are urged not to stand and walk during the 50 minute concert because “the floor squeaks, and we are recording tonight.” The flamenco guitarist was Juan Lorenzo. He played fast and well, but had an annoying habit of presenting never ending cascades of notes and rhythm – well played and sometimes exciting, but all variations and no theme, if you know what I mean. His nylon strings, not entirely in tune at the beginning, kept sliding south but he never stopped to tune except for a passing twist on the low E... I don’t imagine the audience cared, but it bothered me. His CD was for sale in the lobby – recorded earlier, of course.
After the Teatro disgorged us Jane and I took advantage of the cool night air to walk down to the Arno, talking all the way, and since we were so close, to my hotel and the rooftop bar (open to midnight; view of Duomo in one direction, river in the other) for a thrilling nightcap of a big bottle of water and some delicious free sweet pastry pieces... I sent Jane off into the night with abundant hugs – are we going to have stories to tell – and got to bed about 1 am, after checking out the 600 channels on the TV (TV – what an idea – hadn’t seen one since leaving California).
Saturday morning I enjoyed the lavish breakfast in the lavish breakfast room, then checked out and walked slowly back to the Teatro area to find my “family” before they left at 11 a.m. for a visit to Fabio’s mother, who lives in the center of Chiusi (formerly the Etruscan capital, all those many eons ago). On the front door of Borgho Allegri 38 Fabio had left a handwritten note and map... he has a new workshop (laboratorio) two blocks away (due, quattro passi) where he works with an older Maestro making, repairing and refinishing furniture. Both were wearing gloves and smelling of fresh varnish. We shook hands by touching elbows.
It was fantastically fun to see Fabio again, ask about his wife and daughter (now as tall as him, plays clarinet in the school band which at this moment is visiting the band in Spain that had visited them here in Firenze). Before I figured out which hole in the wall was Fabio’s shop I noticed tiny, energetic Miu scampering in the street nearby. I knew then I was close. Miu, you haven’t changed a bit, and your humiliating doggy name still sounds like “meow” in English.
Fabio said in a dozen different ways that I was always welcome to look him up, that we are “family” in reality, that he would like to keep in touch and perhaps cook for Joselyn and I, and so forth. All real, all heartfelt, all just the best thing to experience on a sunny, fresh, Firenze morning.
I walked across town, paying respects to the Duomo along the way (newly auto-free streets make the neighborhood much more pleasant) and made my pilgrimage to the herbs and lotions store affiliated with the Sisters of Santa Maria Novella, officially Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella SRL. Hadn’t been there for three years, but I knew exactly which lovely room to enter, what to ask for (thanks to Joselyn for emailing me the words on the label) and I think I was served by the very same grand lady who was behind the counter several years ago. She knew exactly what I wanted – rose and geranium lotion for dry skin – with milk – all white– bianco – and went and got it. I then asked her for a second one, explaining I probably couldn’t get back for another three years, at least, and it had to last. Also picked up some sweet almond oil for the J (olio di mandorle dolci)... no more carry-on for me, however.
I stuffed it all in my backpack, and killed some time reading the Herald Tribune and sipping a caffe latte on the S. Maria Novella square; then caught the train to Orvieto.
Homecoming... I hadn’t been there since the 1960s and the amazing horizontally striped Cathedral hasn’t changed a bit. Walking slowly through town I stopped for a two-flavor gelato (casatta and ciocolatto) at La Musa, Gelateria artigianale, and soon realized photos were out of the question as long as chocolate ice cream was flowing over hands and fingers. At the amazing edifice itself spent 3E to get inside, for a long, leisurely look at the excellent mosaics and frescoes inside. Joined an Italian tour group with priests and nuns, following along as the guide described the major fresco panels – I didn’t need a guide to tell me those ecstatic humans being pulled out of the ground by Gabriel’s trumpets were different from the other humans over there, beaten down en masse by devils, and angels with lousy assignments... Usually this kind of hyperventilating garishly illustrated Bible stories well, both offends and bores me, but in this time and place I was captivated by the energy and skill of the work. Over the altar is a smallish piece by Fra Angelico, all the rest finished 50 years later by another hired painter, this time from Siena.
On the short train trip back to Stazione Termini in Rome, the woman facing me in our compartment carried on unending conversations on two mobile phones. She was called and made calls constantly, no respite. Seem,ed to be enjoying herself, too. Very entertaining for her, and for me, watching.
I am pleased with myself at such an eventful 18 hours, finally writing this at about 11 pm Saturday evening. I wish all days could be this interesting and fun and friends-filled. Maybe they can. We can make it so, as Captain Picard might say.
Friday the 13th... after school I marched to Piazza Argentina and waited until 2 sharp for the Agenzi Viaggi (travel agent) to open and sell me train tickets to Firenze, and on Saturday Firenze to Orvieto to Rome, which they did. They also made a reservation for me at Hotel degli Orafi, which has become my/our favorite splurge in Firenze. It’s 4 four stars but feels like 10. Located literally at the foot of Ponte Vecchio... The Medici corridoio traverses the front of the building.
The corridorio was constructed by the Medici bankers back when the ufizzi (offices) actually WERE their offices, so they could walk back and forth unobserved and unmolested between the Pitti Palace on the other side of the river, and their uffizi, now The Ufizzi, the world famous art gallery. Once in a long while the corridoio can be entered and walked, but I’m informed the art inside is second rate... but just to be there and peer out the windows at the commoners below... would be something to do, I think.
Of course, having booked one day in advance, and wanting only a single bed/single room, I had room 204 with a view of the ventilator shaft. But still, it was the Orafi: all-marble bathroom, the best in shampoos and towels, just a very elegant, understated feeling. Actual, readable, books discretely placed on bookshelves...
I washed and walked 15 minutes to the piazza in front of the incredible Santa Croce (Dante is there, on a pedestal, but at the moment he’s under 360 degree wraps while some parts of him apparently are restored). Jane Corey walked into the square, looking like the highly lovely and confident solo traveler she is (“This wrinkled thing is the best dress I have... and the wrinkles are supposed to be there...”). We sat at an outdoor table at Ristorante Finisterrae on the square, squinting at the setting sun, catching up. Drank prosecco and ate bruschetta and a couple of the oranges and grapefruits that have been available for free in a pile ever since I first spotted this place in 2007.
Off to the incredibly fun and eccentric Teatro del Sale, not far from Santa Croce, on Via dei Macci.
I could write pages on this place, but to cover the main points – it’s run by and was invented by the chef Giuditta Pichi, who has one of the best restaurants in Firenze, on the same street: Cibreo. The Teatro feels like his living room, with enough space to invite a hundred people in for dinner and a show. You don’t just walk in, however. You have to be a member, and read the rules, which are all about honoring and respecting, and when you’ve joined (or they’ve found you in their computer from a previous visit) you then pay the 35E for dinner and the show, and you’re in.
They found me in the computer – this was a lot more fun and a lot more hectic than it might sound – and translated what they found as Anton Maksitov (close, I guess), written in silver ink on my burgundy-colored club card, good from last July 2010, to this July, 2011. I guess I better return soon.
Let’s run off a few things so you’ll get the feeling... Long line outside to get to the club window, where newbies receive a sheet of rules to read – handed out with all seriousness, no smiling – and then a return to the window with the filled out form and 5E. Then another long line entering the Teatro where at the front they take your evening’s payment.
In the first room, all wood, Giuditta is standing around, looking silvery and grandfatherly; there are rolled up T shirts for sale, plus: Teatro Aprons with double rows of buttons down the front; foodstuffs such as sauces, spices; the newsletter (5E to buy, free on the Internet, all proceeds to an Italian volunteer group bringing water to villages in Africa)... then the entry into the club. Small tables, folding chairs, a few couches, some theater-style seats... a roaring large kitchen to the right with something roasting that looks like (and turned out to be) lamb, pork and chicken turning on spits; a bakery in action... a table of help yourself hors d’oeuvres that this time included two sauces made of probably chick peas and something else, stewed beet greens with red chunks of beets, potatoes, lentils, rice, etc.
During the two hours of dinner new dishes came steaming out of the kitchen, each announced in an indecipherably shouted spiel from a cook leaning out the kitchen window into the room of diners. Sometimes you crowd at the kitchen window to get a plate of deep fried vegetables, or one delicious veal meatball in a sauce, or freshly baked bread sticks, and so forth... or half a large sardine deliciously cooked in fragrant oil, moist and bony. I got so full so fast I had to pass on several courses. At the end, a table full of whipped cream and crunchy biscuits and a flour-free chocolate torte and coffee...
Our table turned out to have, left to right, two women from Boston who were on a 10-day visit to Italy they won in a fund-raising auction (“I paid too much, but once I started bidding I wasn’t going to lose... We have to come back some time and pay regular prices...”) a mother and daughter from Holland, a couple from San Francisco who truly relished and analyzed each course – very good eaters; Jane, and myself. There was as much table wine and as much water, carbonated and not, as you wanted all night.
On the table, this sign:
CARI SOCI
SIATE CORTESI,
PENSATE VOI STESSI
ALLA VOSTRA
SPARECCHIATURA
.... Grazie
... which translates, very roughly, to please return dirty dishes to the kitchen...
OK... we’re stuffed, we’ve all met each other and wondered about the place... now two of the hosts stand in front and announce the evening’s entertainment as the tables are cleared and removed, the chairs lined up theater style, facing the elevated stage which holds one red velvet chair and two microphones. We are urged not to stand and walk during the 50 minute concert because “the floor squeaks, and we are recording tonight.” The flamenco guitarist was Juan Lorenzo. He played fast and well, but had an annoying habit of presenting never ending cascades of notes and rhythm – well played and sometimes exciting, but all variations and no theme, if you know what I mean. His nylon strings, not entirely in tune at the beginning, kept sliding south but he never stopped to tune except for a passing twist on the low E... I don’t imagine the audience cared, but it bothered me. His CD was for sale in the lobby – recorded earlier, of course.
After the Teatro disgorged us Jane and I took advantage of the cool night air to walk down to the Arno, talking all the way, and since we were so close, to my hotel and the rooftop bar (open to midnight; view of Duomo in one direction, river in the other) for a thrilling nightcap of a big bottle of water and some delicious free sweet pastry pieces... I sent Jane off into the night with abundant hugs – are we going to have stories to tell – and got to bed about 1 am, after checking out the 600 channels on the TV (TV – what an idea – hadn’t seen one since leaving California).
Saturday morning I enjoyed the lavish breakfast in the lavish breakfast room, then checked out and walked slowly back to the Teatro area to find my “family” before they left at 11 a.m. for a visit to Fabio’s mother, who lives in the center of Chiusi (formerly the Etruscan capital, all those many eons ago). On the front door of Borgho Allegri 38 Fabio had left a handwritten note and map... he has a new workshop (laboratorio) two blocks away (due, quattro passi) where he works with an older Maestro making, repairing and refinishing furniture. Both were wearing gloves and smelling of fresh varnish. We shook hands by touching elbows.
It was fantastically fun to see Fabio again, ask about his wife and daughter (now as tall as him, plays clarinet in the school band which at this moment is visiting the band in Spain that had visited them here in Firenze). Before I figured out which hole in the wall was Fabio’s shop I noticed tiny, energetic Miu scampering in the street nearby. I knew then I was close. Miu, you haven’t changed a bit, and your humiliating doggy name still sounds like “meow” in English.
Fabio said in a dozen different ways that I was always welcome to look him up, that we are “family” in reality, that he would like to keep in touch and perhaps cook for Joselyn and I, and so forth. All real, all heartfelt, all just the best thing to experience on a sunny, fresh, Firenze morning.
I walked across town, paying respects to the Duomo along the way (newly auto-free streets make the neighborhood much more pleasant) and made my pilgrimage to the herbs and lotions store affiliated with the Sisters of Santa Maria Novella, officially Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella SRL. Hadn’t been there for three years, but I knew exactly which lovely room to enter, what to ask for (thanks to Joselyn for emailing me the words on the label) and I think I was served by the very same grand lady who was behind the counter several years ago. She knew exactly what I wanted – rose and geranium lotion for dry skin – with milk – all white– bianco – and went and got it. I then asked her for a second one, explaining I probably couldn’t get back for another three years, at least, and it had to last. Also picked up some sweet almond oil for the J (olio di mandorle dolci)... no more carry-on for me, however.
I stuffed it all in my backpack, and killed some time reading the Herald Tribune and sipping a caffe latte on the S. Maria Novella square; then caught the train to Orvieto.
Homecoming... I hadn’t been there since the 1960s and the amazing horizontally striped Cathedral hasn’t changed a bit. Walking slowly through town I stopped for a two-flavor gelato (casatta and ciocolatto) at La Musa, Gelateria artigianale, and soon realized photos were out of the question as long as chocolate ice cream was flowing over hands and fingers. At the amazing edifice itself spent 3E to get inside, for a long, leisurely look at the excellent mosaics and frescoes inside. Joined an Italian tour group with priests and nuns, following along as the guide described the major fresco panels – I didn’t need a guide to tell me those ecstatic humans being pulled out of the ground by Gabriel’s trumpets were different from the other humans over there, beaten down en masse by devils, and angels with lousy assignments... Usually this kind of hyperventilating garishly illustrated Bible stories well, both offends and bores me, but in this time and place I was captivated by the energy and skill of the work. Over the altar is a smallish piece by Fra Angelico, all the rest finished 50 years later by another hired painter, this time from Siena.
On the short train trip back to Stazione Termini in Rome, the woman facing me in our compartment carried on unending conversations on two mobile phones. She was called and made calls constantly, no respite. Seem,ed to be enjoying herself, too. Very entertaining for her, and for me, watching.
I am pleased with myself at such an eventful 18 hours, finally writing this at about 11 pm Saturday evening. I wish all days could be this interesting and fun and friends-filled. Maybe they can. We can make it so, as Captain Picard might say.
11 May 2011
A concert and a luthier...
May 10, 2011... The concert last night at Parco della Musica was excellent. I found the room muffled the music a bit, but I had an exemplary seat – 14 rows back and squarely facing cellist Gautier Capucon... he was a bit over-theatrical – reaching out with his bow arm as if gathering a swirl of notes to him before starting to play. He kept lifting his off (left) foot from the floor. He endeared himself to me when he turned his head toward the first cellist behind him when the music called for their duet. Capucon played the Schumann Concerto; the orchestra (Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) played a Schumann Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and after intermission the Brahms #1.
There were several unusual things about this concert. For one, the entire orchestra was off-stage until the appointed time for the concert to begin. I checked my ticket – was I in the correct hall at the right time? Then at precisely 7:30 they walked in and took their places... For another, they sat so that from my seat the first violins were stage left, the seconds stage right, with the violas behind them, and the cellos facing the audience from their seats directly in front of Conductor Semyon Bychkov. The basses (three for the Schumann, six for the Brahms) were located at the rear, left; brass to the rear right, and in between horns and winds. Dead center in the rear was the single percussionist who made up in volume and energy what several assistants might otherwise have added.
May 11, 2011... There is a coda to this... on my way home from school this afternoon I took another street on pretty much of a whim, thinking to find again the old man in the old shop who had sold me two perfect pens (and in this school, with answers to exercises necessarily written into tiny spaces, good pens are crucial). I have not found him yet (was he only a dream? No, I have two good pens and a pad of paper – where else could I have purchased them here?) but stumbled almost immediately into what clear was a violin shop.
It turned out to be the atelier of Claude Lebet (“Maestro Liutaio” or master luthier) who was out at the moment, but one of his several assistants undertook to answer my question – did they know the old man in the old shop? No, but since you play violoncello, would you care to try this one?
What a gift from heaven. I put down my school bag, picked up the cello and – it was really excellent – very loud and clear, from the lowest to the highest notes. Turns out it’s an exact copy of the original (insert maker here – I forget) cello now owned by last night’s performer, Gautier Capucon.
It wasn’t as good as his, being a month old, not centuries, but it played like a dream. If it turns out, I should have photos of another assistant playing it for me (so I could stand back and listen) and me playing, too.
The maestro arrived, I was introduced, and he went to work and ignored me. His work these days apparently is not wield knife and chisel, but to stare into the desktop computer of yet another assistant, and discuss web things. You can find him here...
Meanwhile, I was trying to remember the maker of my cello (Carletti natale 1941) and failing. I did discover that this shop will rent me a cello – a good cello but not like the one I tried – for 100E for a full month, case, bow included. A very very good deal, but one I probably won’t take him up on because I probably only have one or more playing sessions here in Rome, and I wouldn’t be playing it here in this apartment – no aural privacy, no music.
The maestro has published an authoritative and highly illustrated book on the instrument makers of Rome. As I left, the assistant offered me a gift – a peg holder made of leather with a tiny metal cup to catch the sharp point of the cello stick.
I was very impressed with the entire experience. It was a great pleasure to play, regardless of instrument. By the way, the one I tried would sell for approximately 22,000E.
There were several unusual things about this concert. For one, the entire orchestra was off-stage until the appointed time for the concert to begin. I checked my ticket – was I in the correct hall at the right time? Then at precisely 7:30 they walked in and took their places... For another, they sat so that from my seat the first violins were stage left, the seconds stage right, with the violas behind them, and the cellos facing the audience from their seats directly in front of Conductor Semyon Bychkov. The basses (three for the Schumann, six for the Brahms) were located at the rear, left; brass to the rear right, and in between horns and winds. Dead center in the rear was the single percussionist who made up in volume and energy what several assistants might otherwise have added.
May 11, 2011... There is a coda to this... on my way home from school this afternoon I took another street on pretty much of a whim, thinking to find again the old man in the old shop who had sold me two perfect pens (and in this school, with answers to exercises necessarily written into tiny spaces, good pens are crucial). I have not found him yet (was he only a dream? No, I have two good pens and a pad of paper – where else could I have purchased them here?) but stumbled almost immediately into what clear was a violin shop.
It turned out to be the atelier of Claude Lebet (“Maestro Liutaio” or master luthier) who was out at the moment, but one of his several assistants undertook to answer my question – did they know the old man in the old shop? No, but since you play violoncello, would you care to try this one?
What a gift from heaven. I put down my school bag, picked up the cello and – it was really excellent – very loud and clear, from the lowest to the highest notes. Turns out it’s an exact copy of the original (insert maker here – I forget) cello now owned by last night’s performer, Gautier Capucon.
It wasn’t as good as his, being a month old, not centuries, but it played like a dream. If it turns out, I should have photos of another assistant playing it for me (so I could stand back and listen) and me playing, too.
The maestro arrived, I was introduced, and he went to work and ignored me. His work these days apparently is not wield knife and chisel, but to stare into the desktop computer of yet another assistant, and discuss web things. You can find him here...
Meanwhile, I was trying to remember the maker of my cello (Carletti natale 1941) and failing. I did discover that this shop will rent me a cello – a good cello but not like the one I tried – for 100E for a full month, case, bow included. A very very good deal, but one I probably won’t take him up on because I probably only have one or more playing sessions here in Rome, and I wouldn’t be playing it here in this apartment – no aural privacy, no music.
The maestro has published an authoritative and highly illustrated book on the instrument makers of Rome. As I left, the assistant offered me a gift – a peg holder made of leather with a tiny metal cup to catch the sharp point of the cello stick.
I was very impressed with the entire experience. It was a great pleasure to play, regardless of instrument. By the way, the one I tried would sell for approximately 22,000E.
08 May 2011
Rome .. End of my first week here...
May 6, 2011... This first weekend was fun and full of events. Dinner with school friends Kathy (from Windsor CA), David, and his wife Tricia from Melbourne. We went to Avenue 60 in via del Gesu (short walk for P. Venezia) and enjoyed good food, esp. the wine (Kathy had me take photo of the label for her boyfriend. The report: we chose well). The place is clean, modern and well located, but only one other couple was eating there when we were – on Friday night! Never can tell why one place hits and another misses. Avenue 60 gets top reviews on TripAdvisor – in fact, that’s where I found it. Can anyone explain?
May 7, 2011... Saturday morning I bought flowers in Campo dei Fiori and journeyed (out by bus; back by Metro) to EUR (pronounced ay-ur) to join Ana Fitzpatrick to play cello/piano duets. Teleman, Vivaldi, Elgar (a bassoon sonata, very romantic) and Schumann...
Ana’s home is very comfortable, filled with art she has made (ceramics) or purchased, and two pianos, because she usually plays four-hands. Her friend and my future acquaintance Claudio was in Sienna visiting his elderly mother, which he does two weekends a month, bless him. All the time I spent with Ana was in Italian... I did OK but was a bit hard on myself that I didn’t have more words and phrases at hand... Ana has taught Spanish (she is from Argentina originally) and got in the habit of not only correcting me but interrupting me with the correction. I got used to it. She made us both a big salad (she became a vegetarian after her children did) and then did me a huge favor: Located an upcoming Schumann cello concerto/Brahms Symphony #1 and when I returned home I bought a ticket for next Tuesday night at the Parco di Musica (and now to find it and get there in time).
I got off the Metro at Colosseo, took a bus to Piazza Venezia (home of the huge monument that looks like a typewriter).. explored high above using Michelangelo’s famous steps. Walked home, slept well – very tired.
Sunday May 8 woke up early and treated myself to an early walk from here through Trastevere. Truly enjoyed the morning quiet. Found two possible places to stay with Joselyn next time we are here, both quite close (but impossibly more fancy): Hotel Residenza Farnese (four stars) just off Piazza Farnese; and in Trastevere: B&B Arco del Lauro. Both look possible... well located but on quiet side streets.
Took lots of photos, and when I arrived at Ponte Cestio Fabricio (the only bridge that spans an island in the Tiber) took out my Touch and followed the Rick Steves audio walking tour. I enjoyed his friendly voice, but soon realized it would have been easier to follow directly in the book RS Rome 2011 which I have here. Chiesa Santa Cecilia was beautiful – it was set up with white roses everywhere for a wedding or first communion. The well-lit statue of St. Cecilia was beautiful... this whole church was beautiful – a light and lovely hand – as if the ever-present nuns there were the architects, not the usual great (= egotistic) male builders. While I slowly looked around, a gaggle of nuns held a small service (sans priest) on the side – reading the bible, intoning prayers, and singing. One nun stood with one hand on keyboard and one hand on book. Beautiful. As I left, bells in the tower above the church exploded together. In the courtyard it felt as loud as the loudest ambulances and police.
At the farthest point of the walk – by this time I had finished the RS tour – I entered the interesting church San Franceso a Ripa. Rick does not include it on his walk, probably because the church is not much compared to many others here and contains only one thing that stands out – but it’s so amazing – the sculpture by Bernini, of Beata Ludovica Albertoni (1671-4) who is, according to another guide, “in a state of religious ecstacy bordering scandalously on the sexual.”
Sunday services were in full service. It would have been too much to wander up the left aisle to the last chapel to view Beata. I could only bring myself to wander in sight of priest and congregation one chapel away from the goal. In that adjacent chapel was a little door opening on to the Bernini room. I could barely peer at Beata’s feet and drapery – but however hard I leaned over the heavy oak bench that barred the passageway I never could see her famous expression... will have to return on another day, I guess. But it was fun anyway.
On the way home I waited to eat until reaching the nearby wifi café which turned out to be closed. So I tried the nearby ristorante (forgot the name; provide later) which turned out to be excellent, with an Israeli/international chef. Traditional Italian – not exclusively Roman – food made very well. House-made bread with small dishes of dried tomatoes and chopped olives to spread on it; fresh green salad with a ball of bufalo mozarella sitting on top (also walnuts and lemon) ahh.. .and finally house-made (what else?) ravioli in a light red sauce, filled with various seafoods – shellfish and actual fish. Very fresh. Two caffe lungos to finish, and now, 5 pm and four hours later, I can still feel them whirling in my rapidly beating heart.
I’ve been studying intensely especially today – finishing what I should have learned in Level 4; preparing in advance for what’s coming in Level 5 (enrolling in a new class, higher level; wasn’t happy with the teacher in L4). I’m far from ready, but more ready than I might be otherwise.
How does it happen that in every class there always are one or more students who outshine everyone else? They get every line of every exercise correct... I study, too. What am I missing? Sufficient brain cells, probably.
May 7, 2011... Saturday morning I bought flowers in Campo dei Fiori and journeyed (out by bus; back by Metro) to EUR (pronounced ay-ur) to join Ana Fitzpatrick to play cello/piano duets. Teleman, Vivaldi, Elgar (a bassoon sonata, very romantic) and Schumann...
Ana’s home is very comfortable, filled with art she has made (ceramics) or purchased, and two pianos, because she usually plays four-hands. Her friend and my future acquaintance Claudio was in Sienna visiting his elderly mother, which he does two weekends a month, bless him. All the time I spent with Ana was in Italian... I did OK but was a bit hard on myself that I didn’t have more words and phrases at hand... Ana has taught Spanish (she is from Argentina originally) and got in the habit of not only correcting me but interrupting me with the correction. I got used to it. She made us both a big salad (she became a vegetarian after her children did) and then did me a huge favor: Located an upcoming Schumann cello concerto/Brahms Symphony #1 and when I returned home I bought a ticket for next Tuesday night at the Parco di Musica (and now to find it and get there in time).
I got off the Metro at Colosseo, took a bus to Piazza Venezia (home of the huge monument that looks like a typewriter).. explored high above using Michelangelo’s famous steps. Walked home, slept well – very tired.
Sunday May 8 woke up early and treated myself to an early walk from here through Trastevere. Truly enjoyed the morning quiet. Found two possible places to stay with Joselyn next time we are here, both quite close (but impossibly more fancy): Hotel Residenza Farnese (four stars) just off Piazza Farnese; and in Trastevere: B&B Arco del Lauro. Both look possible... well located but on quiet side streets.
Took lots of photos, and when I arrived at Ponte Cestio Fabricio (the only bridge that spans an island in the Tiber) took out my Touch and followed the Rick Steves audio walking tour. I enjoyed his friendly voice, but soon realized it would have been easier to follow directly in the book RS Rome 2011 which I have here. Chiesa Santa Cecilia was beautiful – it was set up with white roses everywhere for a wedding or first communion. The well-lit statue of St. Cecilia was beautiful... this whole church was beautiful – a light and lovely hand – as if the ever-present nuns there were the architects, not the usual great (= egotistic) male builders. While I slowly looked around, a gaggle of nuns held a small service (sans priest) on the side – reading the bible, intoning prayers, and singing. One nun stood with one hand on keyboard and one hand on book. Beautiful. As I left, bells in the tower above the church exploded together. In the courtyard it felt as loud as the loudest ambulances and police.
At the farthest point of the walk – by this time I had finished the RS tour – I entered the interesting church San Franceso a Ripa. Rick does not include it on his walk, probably because the church is not much compared to many others here and contains only one thing that stands out – but it’s so amazing – the sculpture by Bernini, of Beata Ludovica Albertoni (1671-4) who is, according to another guide, “in a state of religious ecstacy bordering scandalously on the sexual.”
Sunday services were in full service. It would have been too much to wander up the left aisle to the last chapel to view Beata. I could only bring myself to wander in sight of priest and congregation one chapel away from the goal. In that adjacent chapel was a little door opening on to the Bernini room. I could barely peer at Beata’s feet and drapery – but however hard I leaned over the heavy oak bench that barred the passageway I never could see her famous expression... will have to return on another day, I guess. But it was fun anyway.
On the way home I waited to eat until reaching the nearby wifi café which turned out to be closed. So I tried the nearby ristorante (forgot the name; provide later) which turned out to be excellent, with an Israeli/international chef. Traditional Italian – not exclusively Roman – food made very well. House-made bread with small dishes of dried tomatoes and chopped olives to spread on it; fresh green salad with a ball of bufalo mozarella sitting on top (also walnuts and lemon) ahh.. .and finally house-made (what else?) ravioli in a light red sauce, filled with various seafoods – shellfish and actual fish. Very fresh. Two caffe lungos to finish, and now, 5 pm and four hours later, I can still feel them whirling in my rapidly beating heart.
I’ve been studying intensely especially today – finishing what I should have learned in Level 4; preparing in advance for what’s coming in Level 5 (enrolling in a new class, higher level; wasn’t happy with the teacher in L4). I’m far from ready, but more ready than I might be otherwise.
How does it happen that in every class there always are one or more students who outshine everyone else? They get every line of every exercise correct... I study, too. What am I missing? Sufficient brain cells, probably.
06 May 2011
lots happening in Rome
... and I guess I'm a tiny part of it. Please watch this space for actual "blog" comment in the next few days. I've been emailing and writing, going to school, struggling to get my apartment livable, trying to find better ways to get online, enjoying the filth and the flowers, the gorgeous, sunny fresh air and the cool nights... If one does not get toes smashed by a Mercedes, one could actually enjoy this place. I'm living down an alley -- Vicolo Bolo, which is just off Via dei Pellegrini, which is parallel to Corso Vittorio, which is next to... and close to my school. Many of the famous places here in Rome are no farther, in fact much closer, than my mailbox at home. In a mile or so I'm at dozens of churches, famous squares and fountains and all that. Rome. Too much to take in during one lifetime, but an easy place to spend a lifetime trying.
The best book I've read about Rome (actually, brought it along, even in its old hardback version) is "A Thousand Bells at Noon" by Franco Romagnoli... it's really a love letter to the city by a boy born there, a man who left, and an older man who returned. Remarkable. Now available in a $14.99 paperback version.
He died in 2008... wish I could have met him. See this NY Times obit
The best book I've read about Rome (actually, brought it along, even in its old hardback version) is "A Thousand Bells at Noon" by Franco Romagnoli... it's really a love letter to the city by a boy born there, a man who left, and an older man who returned. Remarkable. Now available in a $14.99 paperback version.
He died in 2008... wish I could have met him. See this NY Times obit
20 April 2011
Italy Takes Over the World
Let’s take a look at the data: By most measures, Italy will rule the world one day. You say China. I say Italy is sneaking up on the outside track.
Italy has already captured the travel market. Guidebooks to Italy greatly outnumber guides to China. More Americans visit small towns in Tuscany than villages in Shanxi. More people can name Italy’s President than China’s General Secretary or Premier. It’s not even close.
In China, everyone’s heading to the cities, looking for work and adventure. In Italy most people stay put, waiting for you to pile out of the next tourist van. Some have neighbors who once visited the nearest big city. That’s more than enough excitement.
According to the nation’s biggest book distributor, current books on China outnumber those on Italy. However, add the word “travel” and the figures reverse – travel books on Italy more than double those on China. There is one current travel book on Italy for every 4,754 Italians, but only one for every 75,616 Chinese. You could look it up on the InterGoogle. I did.
That’s how Italy takes over the world – one travel guide at a time.
Writers such as Rick Steves, the Frommers, contributors to Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Fodors, Insight, DK, Rough, Michelin, Brand, Blue – all continue to produce guides to the place. The one I take along is the latest Rick Steves, the most user-friendly and consistently updated. He’ll get you into places by the back door, find you a nice place to stay, and hold your hand while you wander famous museums listening to Steves on your Mp3 player.
Rick Steves is highly selective and does not try to cover everything. When Steves omits a place fewer Americans visit (and the reverse is true – Americans appear anyplace Steves recommends – he single-handedly made fashionable the small towns along the Cinque Terre coast of Liguria).
If you want comprehensive information look to Michelin or the Blue Guides. Lonely Planet is fairly inclusive and often provides extra detail. Lonely Planet favors the low-end of budget accommodations. Frommers and Fodors guides are budget-worthy but include more expensive places, too.
The best full-color maps and other visuals can be found in the DK Eyewitness Guides or National Geographic Traveler Guides. These are better for study than to lug around. Rough Guides are interesting for their distinctly British point of view.
One standout among these guides is the new series Insight Select Guides to places such as San Francisco, Istanbul, London, Hong Kong. My copy of Rome Select would look modishly fashionable casually resting on a café table across from, say, the Trevi Fountain. It has a beautiful fabric cover, a bookmark ribbon, and reads as if it was written person to person. If you’re in the mood for romance, ancient history, local flavor, modern art or a coffee break, Rome Select has you covered.
Some years ago Susan Cahill edited The Smiles of Rome, A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers and the collection is basically timeless. Entries include articles and excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to Federico Fellini and Muriel Spark. If you did take this book with you, you’d find yourself searching in St. Paul’s footsteps along the Ostian Way, or wondering at a statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli where Sigmund Freud once pondered “the complex soul of the artist.”
Most things in Italy are in the habit of changing slowly. That’s why film maker, cookbook author and restaurateur G. Franco Romagnoli’s book A Thousand Bells at Noon, A Roman’s Guide to the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City resonates a decade after it was first published.
“Like a lung timed by traffic lights,” Romagnoli writes of Piazza Barberini, “the square inhales and exhales cars and buses from the seven streets that empty into it.”
Another series that has been around for some years and ages well is The Travelers’ Tales Guides. 30 Days in Italy, True Stories of Escape to the Good Life includes this closing rhyme:
NOTES:
Rome Select, various authors. Insight Select Guides hard cover $15. ISBN 9789812822710.
The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill. Ballantine Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 034543420X.
A Thousand Bells at Noon: A Roman Reveals the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City by G. Franco Romagnoli. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0060519207.
Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey by G. Franco and Gwen Romagnoli. Lyons Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 1599212447.
30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. Travelers' Tales Guides paperback $14.95. ISBN 1932361421.
A few more:
The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (Wonders of the World). Harvard University Press paperback $14.95. ISBN 0674060318.
Rome from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregor. Belknap Press paperback $22. ISBN 0674022637.
One reviewer wrote: “I can't really have a favorite book on Rome, can I? No, but...well, this comes close. In three hundred pages of clean, muscular prose, McGregor has done the almost impossible task of pulling the glories of this city together in a neat, readable, incredibly well informed study...”
McGregor also has written “From the Ground Up” books on Paris, Venice and Washington DC.
Administrative map of modern China...
Italy: 12,620 books and 60 million people = one book for every 4,754 citizens.
China: 17,192 books and 1.3 billion people = one book for every 75,616 citizens.
Italy has already captured the travel market. Guidebooks to Italy greatly outnumber guides to China. More Americans visit small towns in Tuscany than villages in Shanxi. More people can name Italy’s President than China’s General Secretary or Premier. It’s not even close.
In China, everyone’s heading to the cities, looking for work and adventure. In Italy most people stay put, waiting for you to pile out of the next tourist van. Some have neighbors who once visited the nearest big city. That’s more than enough excitement.
According to the nation’s biggest book distributor, current books on China outnumber those on Italy. However, add the word “travel” and the figures reverse – travel books on Italy more than double those on China. There is one current travel book on Italy for every 4,754 Italians, but only one for every 75,616 Chinese. You could look it up on the InterGoogle. I did.
That’s how Italy takes over the world – one travel guide at a time.
Writers such as Rick Steves, the Frommers, contributors to Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Fodors, Insight, DK, Rough, Michelin, Brand, Blue – all continue to produce guides to the place. The one I take along is the latest Rick Steves, the most user-friendly and consistently updated. He’ll get you into places by the back door, find you a nice place to stay, and hold your hand while you wander famous museums listening to Steves on your Mp3 player.
Rick Steves is highly selective and does not try to cover everything. When Steves omits a place fewer Americans visit (and the reverse is true – Americans appear anyplace Steves recommends – he single-handedly made fashionable the small towns along the Cinque Terre coast of Liguria).
If you want comprehensive information look to Michelin or the Blue Guides. Lonely Planet is fairly inclusive and often provides extra detail. Lonely Planet favors the low-end of budget accommodations. Frommers and Fodors guides are budget-worthy but include more expensive places, too.
The best full-color maps and other visuals can be found in the DK Eyewitness Guides or National Geographic Traveler Guides. These are better for study than to lug around. Rough Guides are interesting for their distinctly British point of view.
One standout among these guides is the new series Insight Select Guides to places such as San Francisco, Istanbul, London, Hong Kong. My copy of Rome Select would look modishly fashionable casually resting on a café table across from, say, the Trevi Fountain. It has a beautiful fabric cover, a bookmark ribbon, and reads as if it was written person to person. If you’re in the mood for romance, ancient history, local flavor, modern art or a coffee break, Rome Select has you covered.
Some years ago Susan Cahill edited The Smiles of Rome, A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers and the collection is basically timeless. Entries include articles and excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to Federico Fellini and Muriel Spark. If you did take this book with you, you’d find yourself searching in St. Paul’s footsteps along the Ostian Way, or wondering at a statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli where Sigmund Freud once pondered “the complex soul of the artist.”
Most things in Italy are in the habit of changing slowly. That’s why film maker, cookbook author and restaurateur G. Franco Romagnoli’s book A Thousand Bells at Noon, A Roman’s Guide to the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City resonates a decade after it was first published.
“Like a lung timed by traffic lights,” Romagnoli writes of Piazza Barberini, “the square inhales and exhales cars and buses from the seven streets that empty into it.”
Another series that has been around for some years and ages well is The Travelers’ Tales Guides. 30 Days in Italy, True Stories of Escape to the Good Life includes this closing rhyme:
Paris has la Tour Eiffel
Babylon had its tower as well
But neither has the power to seize ya
Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
NOTES:
Rome Select, various authors. Insight Select Guides hard cover $15. ISBN 9789812822710.
The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill. Ballantine Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 034543420X.
A Thousand Bells at Noon: A Roman Reveals the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City by G. Franco Romagnoli. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0060519207.
Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey by G. Franco and Gwen Romagnoli. Lyons Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 1599212447.
30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. Travelers' Tales Guides paperback $14.95. ISBN 1932361421.
A few more:
The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (Wonders of the World). Harvard University Press paperback $14.95. ISBN 0674060318.
Rome from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregor. Belknap Press paperback $22. ISBN 0674022637.
One reviewer wrote: “I can't really have a favorite book on Rome, can I? No, but...well, this comes close. In three hundred pages of clean, muscular prose, McGregor has done the almost impossible task of pulling the glories of this city together in a neat, readable, incredibly well informed study...”
McGregor also has written “From the Ground Up” books on Paris, Venice and Washington DC.
Administrative map of modern China...
Italy: 12,620 books and 60 million people = one book for every 4,754 citizens.
China: 17,192 books and 1.3 billion people = one book for every 75,616 citizens.
14 April 2011
Glasses of Exotic Nutty Stuff
Lovely now; surprisingly youthful. Delicate grapefruit aromas. Flinty, buttery, vanilla toastiness, nice weight on the palate. Floral, sweet citrus and pear, sweet cream, roasted nuts and vanilla flavors. Soft floral and butterscotch notes.
If this was a woman I’d fall slobbering at her feet. If this was a potluck I’d think I’d stumbled into a BMW convention. But if this was a glass of wine, well, I’d ignore the foo-foo, drink whatever they served and ask for another.
With all due respect to the excellent winemakers at Hafner Vineyard, isn’t all this wine perfume a bit much? Is there anything else created by people as over described as modern bottles of wine?
You could make a meal out of what some can find in Chardonnay.
First course: Grapefruit baked with butter and vanilla. Then pears in sweet cream, roasted nuts, butterscotch pudding to finish. Not nutritious, but pretty tasty, I’d bet.
“Winespeak can only take you so far,” note Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater in their book Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine. “After that it is up to you...”
The authors quote a range of wine descriptions, from leather, pencil shavings, rubber, stone and compost, to licorice, chocolate and coffee. Since few can “really discern more than a small handful of scents and tastes” you might be better off to “just pour yourself a glass, drink it, and decide whether or not you like it,” they say.
If a reviewer writes a particular wine reminds her of “cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush” you might pass. Another wine evokes “a rugby club changing room.”
The authors of Is This Bottle Corked? have put together a number of brief essays on some of the main topics that might intrigue imbibers. The authors may sound at first a bit flip, but contained in their lightweight approach is a great deal of significantly useful information. “Flavor,” they explain, “is actually made up of two components: its ‘nose’ and its taste...certainly, part of the fun of drinking wine is catching the differences between what a wine smells like and what it tastes like.”
In another wine book prize-winning wine writer and British TV/radio expert Oz Clarke says Let Me Tell You About Wine, a Beginner’s Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Wine. His book is richly illustrated with photos, graphs and charts. Clarke invites the reluctant sipper into a comfortable relationship with the glass, and the book could not be more friendly to beginners.
Right at the start Clarke breaks down wine tastes and smells into 18 basic groups, each of which he then matches with the best wines in the world. Group 6 as one example is “Earthy” -- savoury reds which “are the classic food wines of Europe, the kind where fruit flavours often take a back seat to compatibility with food and the ability to cleanse the palate and stimulate the appetite.”
In this group he recommends Bordeaux and Chianti from Europe, Cabernets and Merlots from places closer to home.
“Your chances of walking into a wine shop and coming out with a wine that’s enjoyable to drink, whatever the price level, are better now than ever before,” Clarke writes. “The last quarter of the 20th century saw a revolution in wine, in terms of both style and quality.”
That’s fine with me. So set up another glass of that gooseberryish perfumy tropical fruit, crisp, refreshing, tangy, bone dry, peach pineapple and honey, black pepper, mellow, intriguing, herby, sweet-sour, blushing, succulent, subtle, sharp, toasty, exotic, nutty stuff... right now!
NOTES:
Is This Bottle Corked? by Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater. Harmony Books $19.99. ISBN 9780307462916.
Oz Clarke’s Let Me Tell You About Wine by Oz Clarke. Sterling Publishing $19.95. ISBN 9781402771231
Oz Clarke on the web...
If this was a woman I’d fall slobbering at her feet. If this was a potluck I’d think I’d stumbled into a BMW convention. But if this was a glass of wine, well, I’d ignore the foo-foo, drink whatever they served and ask for another.
With all due respect to the excellent winemakers at Hafner Vineyard, isn’t all this wine perfume a bit much? Is there anything else created by people as over described as modern bottles of wine?
You could make a meal out of what some can find in Chardonnay.
First course: Grapefruit baked with butter and vanilla. Then pears in sweet cream, roasted nuts, butterscotch pudding to finish. Not nutritious, but pretty tasty, I’d bet.
“Winespeak can only take you so far,” note Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater in their book Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine. “After that it is up to you...”
The authors quote a range of wine descriptions, from leather, pencil shavings, rubber, stone and compost, to licorice, chocolate and coffee. Since few can “really discern more than a small handful of scents and tastes” you might be better off to “just pour yourself a glass, drink it, and decide whether or not you like it,” they say.
If a reviewer writes a particular wine reminds her of “cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush” you might pass. Another wine evokes “a rugby club changing room.”
The authors of Is This Bottle Corked? have put together a number of brief essays on some of the main topics that might intrigue imbibers. The authors may sound at first a bit flip, but contained in their lightweight approach is a great deal of significantly useful information. “Flavor,” they explain, “is actually made up of two components: its ‘nose’ and its taste...certainly, part of the fun of drinking wine is catching the differences between what a wine smells like and what it tastes like.”
In another wine book prize-winning wine writer and British TV/radio expert Oz Clarke says Let Me Tell You About Wine, a Beginner’s Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Wine. His book is richly illustrated with photos, graphs and charts. Clarke invites the reluctant sipper into a comfortable relationship with the glass, and the book could not be more friendly to beginners.
Right at the start Clarke breaks down wine tastes and smells into 18 basic groups, each of which he then matches with the best wines in the world. Group 6 as one example is “Earthy” -- savoury reds which “are the classic food wines of Europe, the kind where fruit flavours often take a back seat to compatibility with food and the ability to cleanse the palate and stimulate the appetite.”
In this group he recommends Bordeaux and Chianti from Europe, Cabernets and Merlots from places closer to home.
“Your chances of walking into a wine shop and coming out with a wine that’s enjoyable to drink, whatever the price level, are better now than ever before,” Clarke writes. “The last quarter of the 20th century saw a revolution in wine, in terms of both style and quality.”
That’s fine with me. So set up another glass of that gooseberryish perfumy tropical fruit, crisp, refreshing, tangy, bone dry, peach pineapple and honey, black pepper, mellow, intriguing, herby, sweet-sour, blushing, succulent, subtle, sharp, toasty, exotic, nutty stuff... right now!
NOTES:
Is This Bottle Corked? by Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater. Harmony Books $19.99. ISBN 9780307462916.
Oz Clarke’s Let Me Tell You About Wine by Oz Clarke. Sterling Publishing $19.95. ISBN 9781402771231
Oz Clarke on the web...
07 April 2011
What's Wrong with the Vongolari?
The Italians. Besides being the name of Luigi Barzini’s excellent book of some years ago, to say the word “Italians” is also to say whew, who will ever understand them? Everyone has theories, but even Italians don’t understand the Italians.
Some things are easy to see: Italians are tribal. They owe loyalty first to family, last to nation. Their accidental country today is only slightly more unified than Libya and slightly more successful than Tunisia (with both of which countries Italy is historically tied). It’s easy to see the huge gap between south and north, commonplace to complain about cynical politicians and do-nothing bureaucrats. You can see all that and not begin to unravel what makes Italy, Italy.
I’ve decided to go to Rome next month to clear up the confusion. I’ll inspect any number of heavenly meals, talk Italian with a few patient natives, and let you know what the heck’s going on over there.
To prepare myself I’ve been poring over guides to Rome and reading the Italian detective novels of Andrea Camilleri, a native of Sicily now living in Rome, and Donna Leon, an American who lived in Venice for thirty years.
Both authors wrestle with modern Italy on every page, trying to explain and understand how Italians came to live in such a gorgeous and messed-up place.
In “August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Salvo Montalbano discovers that his suspect “happens to be the mayor’s brother-in-law” in the fictitious town of Vigata, Sicily, and gets almost all the city’s building contracts.
“And they let him do that?” the Inspector asks, as if he didn’t already know the answer. “Yes they do, because he pays his dues in equal part to both the Cuffaros and Sinagras...” the two dominant Mafia families in the area.
“So the final cost of every contract ends up being double the figure established at the outset... poor Spitaleri can’t do it any differently, otherwise he’d be operating at a loss.”
So much for the Mafia. In case a reader of these mysteries set in Sicily might imagine noble Venice relatively free of corruption, Donna Leon early in her book “A Sea of Troubles” is quick to point to another state of things.
Leon’s mystery is set on the island of Pellestrina, on the Venetian lagoon, home to a number of close-knit fishing families.
“I don’t know enough about the way things work out here,” a policeman from Venice reports, “but that’s the feeling I get: there’s too many of them and too few fish left...”
In one scene Commissario Guido Brunetti interviews a lagoon pilot whose job brings him in contact with these fishermen.
“The vongolari (clam fishermen)... “they’re hyenas. Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies... The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what’s been pumped or dumped into the water there. I’ve seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty meters from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing’s forbidden.”
“But isn’t there some control, doesn’t someone check them?” Brunetti asks. “(The pilot) smiled at such innocence... there are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore, (he) answered... but that doesn’t mean anything gets inspected, or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.”
“Why not?” Brunetti asks, as any reasonable reader of this mystery might. “Instead of speaking... he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.”
Both Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri love the land and the people. At the same time they clearly are unsettled over things they’ve learned. The way things work in Italy makes its residents crazy, angry, or much more common, indifferent.
There is no other country in the world where things are so messed up and at the same time so beautiful. The ever-clever Italian way of life is an affront to things most Americans believe. Life in Italy is a riddle not likely to be solved no matter how many excellent books are published, no matter how many times one travels there.
NOTES:
“A Sea of Troubles” by Donna Leon. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143116202.
“August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143114055.
Publisher web sites for Donna Leon include Grove Atlantic Press and Random House UK
Andrea Camilleri on the web can be found here and here and even here with an explanation of how the town of Vigata came to be invented.
Some things are easy to see: Italians are tribal. They owe loyalty first to family, last to nation. Their accidental country today is only slightly more unified than Libya and slightly more successful than Tunisia (with both of which countries Italy is historically tied). It’s easy to see the huge gap between south and north, commonplace to complain about cynical politicians and do-nothing bureaucrats. You can see all that and not begin to unravel what makes Italy, Italy.
I’ve decided to go to Rome next month to clear up the confusion. I’ll inspect any number of heavenly meals, talk Italian with a few patient natives, and let you know what the heck’s going on over there.
To prepare myself I’ve been poring over guides to Rome and reading the Italian detective novels of Andrea Camilleri, a native of Sicily now living in Rome, and Donna Leon, an American who lived in Venice for thirty years.
Both authors wrestle with modern Italy on every page, trying to explain and understand how Italians came to live in such a gorgeous and messed-up place.
In “August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Salvo Montalbano discovers that his suspect “happens to be the mayor’s brother-in-law” in the fictitious town of Vigata, Sicily, and gets almost all the city’s building contracts.
“And they let him do that?” the Inspector asks, as if he didn’t already know the answer. “Yes they do, because he pays his dues in equal part to both the Cuffaros and Sinagras...” the two dominant Mafia families in the area.
“So the final cost of every contract ends up being double the figure established at the outset... poor Spitaleri can’t do it any differently, otherwise he’d be operating at a loss.”
So much for the Mafia. In case a reader of these mysteries set in Sicily might imagine noble Venice relatively free of corruption, Donna Leon early in her book “A Sea of Troubles” is quick to point to another state of things.
Leon’s mystery is set on the island of Pellestrina, on the Venetian lagoon, home to a number of close-knit fishing families.
“I don’t know enough about the way things work out here,” a policeman from Venice reports, “but that’s the feeling I get: there’s too many of them and too few fish left...”
In one scene Commissario Guido Brunetti interviews a lagoon pilot whose job brings him in contact with these fishermen.
“The vongolari (clam fishermen)... “they’re hyenas. Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies... The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what’s been pumped or dumped into the water there. I’ve seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty meters from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing’s forbidden.”
“But isn’t there some control, doesn’t someone check them?” Brunetti asks. “(The pilot) smiled at such innocence... there are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore, (he) answered... but that doesn’t mean anything gets inspected, or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.”
“Why not?” Brunetti asks, as any reasonable reader of this mystery might. “Instead of speaking... he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.”
Both Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri love the land and the people. At the same time they clearly are unsettled over things they’ve learned. The way things work in Italy makes its residents crazy, angry, or much more common, indifferent.
There is no other country in the world where things are so messed up and at the same time so beautiful. The ever-clever Italian way of life is an affront to things most Americans believe. Life in Italy is a riddle not likely to be solved no matter how many excellent books are published, no matter how many times one travels there.
NOTES:
“A Sea of Troubles” by Donna Leon. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143116202.
“August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143114055.
Publisher web sites for Donna Leon include Grove Atlantic Press and Random House UK
Andrea Camilleri on the web can be found here and here and even here with an explanation of how the town of Vigata came to be invented.
31 March 2011
Paying Dues
The battle to get you to pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases continues, with increasing success.
One obvious question: Why would you ever want to pay more tax? Everyone has limited personal funds to spend on books and things. If you can save sales tax, why not?
Off the top of my head, some good reasons:
One, sales tax pays for schools, roads, libraries, other important things you use or need. Two, if you don’t pay that tax you are hurting people who live and work in your own home area. And the people who depend on them.
The bigger the purchase the grander the temptation. Here in Mendocino County you save 8.25% on your purchase of pantaloons, wrist watch or books. It is good to save money, but that does not make it ethical, moral, or right.
Very small increases in sales – or losses – spell success or failure for local stores. Have you counted up recently the empty store fronts in your part of town?
Sandy Torkildson of A Room of One’s Own bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, figured out that if a substantial number of her regular customers would agree to buy five more books in the coming year, she would have the wherewithal to sign a long and more expensive lease. They did pledge, and she did renew successfully.
Even such a small effort – just buy a few more things locally – can make a huge financial difference to any store, especially a low-margin, independent bookstore. Shop locally, help your favorite stores survive.
It’s like when someone offers to repaint your house or build a garage. They can do it more cheaply if they don’t pay good wages and employment taxes. If they do the right thing you will pay more. To me, it’s worth it for everyone’s well-being and peace of mind. If you don’t appreciate honest outfits, paint your own house, Mr Selfish.
Two states this month passed “sales tax fairness” legislation. When signed into law, Arkansas and South Dakota will require out-of-state retailers with “online affiliates acting as sales agents” to collect and send in sales tax on orders made by state residents.
The laws in these and other states vary, but in general they’re calling Amazon and other’s bluff.
Some California politicians and opinion makers have long advocated for reform. One LA Times columnist wrote, “Regardless of whether you favor raising taxes ... at least we should all agree that taxes already owed should be collected.”
California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner said “We’ve got the wholesale support of big retailers and small mom-and-pops. California businesses are finally fed up.”
The NY Times editorialized: “It never made sense to exempt online retailers from collecting sales tax... it's ridiculous.” According to the newspaper, Illinois is losing an estimated minimum of $150 million a year in uncollected taxes and California more than $300 million a year.
Online giant Amazon.com is actively fighting the sales tax recovery movement. Amazon already has disassociated itself from its associates and closed warehouses in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island because those states sought to recover lost sales tax. Now that Texas has demanded that Amazon.com pay $269 million in uncollected sales tax, Amazon has threatened to leave that state.
According to the money advice site The Motley Fool, Amazon “had gross revenue of more than $12 billion in the past year, which could translate to several hundred million dollars in sales tax revenue” just from Amazon alone, not counting the myriad other companies that avoid collecting sales tax, such as EBay.
Texas loses an estimated $600 million a year from online sales, according to their comptroller's office: “We regret losing any business in the state of Texas, but our position hasn't changed: If you have a physical business presence in the state of Texas, you owe sales tax.”
NOTES:
The “five more books” pledge
Inc.com (formerly Inc Magazine) has helpful hints for online retailers who DO want to collect sales tax:
Transcript of an excellent podcast from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (“Amazon is especially aggressive about not collecting sales tax. In fact, it only collects sales tax in five states. But, Amazon or its subsidiaries have a ‘physical presence’ in 17 states.”)
Booksellers testify on the subject
The Boston Globe on sales tax
One obvious question: Why would you ever want to pay more tax? Everyone has limited personal funds to spend on books and things. If you can save sales tax, why not?
Off the top of my head, some good reasons:
One, sales tax pays for schools, roads, libraries, other important things you use or need. Two, if you don’t pay that tax you are hurting people who live and work in your own home area. And the people who depend on them.
The bigger the purchase the grander the temptation. Here in Mendocino County you save 8.25% on your purchase of pantaloons, wrist watch or books. It is good to save money, but that does not make it ethical, moral, or right.
Very small increases in sales – or losses – spell success or failure for local stores. Have you counted up recently the empty store fronts in your part of town?
Sandy Torkildson of A Room of One’s Own bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, figured out that if a substantial number of her regular customers would agree to buy five more books in the coming year, she would have the wherewithal to sign a long and more expensive lease. They did pledge, and she did renew successfully.
Even such a small effort – just buy a few more things locally – can make a huge financial difference to any store, especially a low-margin, independent bookstore. Shop locally, help your favorite stores survive.
It’s like when someone offers to repaint your house or build a garage. They can do it more cheaply if they don’t pay good wages and employment taxes. If they do the right thing you will pay more. To me, it’s worth it for everyone’s well-being and peace of mind. If you don’t appreciate honest outfits, paint your own house, Mr Selfish.
Two states this month passed “sales tax fairness” legislation. When signed into law, Arkansas and South Dakota will require out-of-state retailers with “online affiliates acting as sales agents” to collect and send in sales tax on orders made by state residents.
The laws in these and other states vary, but in general they’re calling Amazon and other’s bluff.
Some California politicians and opinion makers have long advocated for reform. One LA Times columnist wrote, “Regardless of whether you favor raising taxes ... at least we should all agree that taxes already owed should be collected.”
California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner said “We’ve got the wholesale support of big retailers and small mom-and-pops. California businesses are finally fed up.”
The NY Times editorialized: “It never made sense to exempt online retailers from collecting sales tax... it's ridiculous.” According to the newspaper, Illinois is losing an estimated minimum of $150 million a year in uncollected taxes and California more than $300 million a year.
Online giant Amazon.com is actively fighting the sales tax recovery movement. Amazon already has disassociated itself from its associates and closed warehouses in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island because those states sought to recover lost sales tax. Now that Texas has demanded that Amazon.com pay $269 million in uncollected sales tax, Amazon has threatened to leave that state.
According to the money advice site The Motley Fool, Amazon “had gross revenue of more than $12 billion in the past year, which could translate to several hundred million dollars in sales tax revenue” just from Amazon alone, not counting the myriad other companies that avoid collecting sales tax, such as EBay.
Texas loses an estimated $600 million a year from online sales, according to their comptroller's office: “We regret losing any business in the state of Texas, but our position hasn't changed: If you have a physical business presence in the state of Texas, you owe sales tax.”
NOTES:
The “five more books” pledge
Inc.com (formerly Inc Magazine) has helpful hints for online retailers who DO want to collect sales tax:
Transcript of an excellent podcast from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (“Amazon is especially aggressive about not collecting sales tax. In fact, it only collects sales tax in five states. But, Amazon or its subsidiaries have a ‘physical presence’ in 17 states.”)
Booksellers testify on the subject
The Boston Globe on sales tax
24 March 2011
Billy Collins Goes on Tour
I admit I don’t read much poetry. I certainly don’t read poetry books all the way through without skipping a lot. I absolutely don’t read poetry books late into the next morning, going without sleep to enjoy the next poem, and the next.
I have never done this before – but Billy Collins, that sly poet from New York, got me and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until I’d finished each page, then the Acknowledgments, the About This Type page, the jacket copy, and the front matter, then a couple of poems over again...
The book is “Horoscopes for the Dead” and it begins with a poem titled Grave. Most of this collection concerns the dead and the living, what we’ve lost, what we are inevitably going to lose, and how the poet and therefore you may feel about all this.
The opening verses of Grave sound whimsical perhaps, and grim. No doubt someone who reads more poetry than I would find echoes of Whitman in the phrase “rows of the dead” and Frost in “the fields and the woods beyond.”
Collins in this poem plays another of his snob-deflating tricks. First, there’s a kind of overly high-minded passage...
“One of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,”
Followed a few verses later by a healthy deflation... “I was the one ... who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences.”
Despite the ever-present playfulness, the light-hearted humor, paradoxically some of these poems are deeply moving. The poet presses first one ear and then the other into the grass hoping to hear his mother and father’s voices... “What do you think of my new glasses?” Finally the poet and the reader approach the real silence:
“the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.”
Of course, the surest way to destroy a good poem must be to break it apart and try to retell it. The poet has already told his story more plainly and more, well, poetically, than anyone else can ever do.
Throughout this collection I half-smiled at many turns of phrase and unexpected zigs between one line and another. His poems can be surprisingly sophisticated and homely and plain pretty much at the same time. Billy Collins engages his reader in dialog without ever asking for more than a willingness to listen. Even a casual reader is drawn right in to Collins’ stories.
His unwillingness to overawe is most clear in the poem Gold. The rising Florida sun reflects – like gold – off a nearby lake. The poet’s east-facing room is filled with “golden light that might travel at dawn on the summer solstice the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.”
Several effusive stanzas later Collins writes “but the last thing I want to do is risk losing your confidence by appearing to lay it on too thick.”
You have to smile at that. You have to. Collins is a master. You say that to yourself while reading.
I was describing this book to a friend the next day. I mentioned a poem about his dog, titled Two Creatures, with a chilling insight at the end. She asked me to quote something. All I could remember was that Collins describes himself in one poem as “keeping an eye on things, whether they existed or not” and in another as “secretary of the interior.”
Much of this work was published previously in magazines and anthologies. Taken in this lovely little gray book, all were fresh again, and tasty and fun. The poem Grave has appeared in “Best American Poetry 2010" and “Best Spiritual Writing 2011.”
People who read poetry have known Billy Collins for years. If you haven’t met this poet, well, why not?
NOTES:
“Horoscopes for the Dead” by Billy Collins. Random House hard cover $24. ISBN 978-1-4000-6492-2.
About Billy Collins and his book tour...
Poemhunter has the text of many of Billy Collins’ poems and I don’t know how they deal with copyrights, but take a look...
I have never done this before – but Billy Collins, that sly poet from New York, got me and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until I’d finished each page, then the Acknowledgments, the About This Type page, the jacket copy, and the front matter, then a couple of poems over again...
The book is “Horoscopes for the Dead” and it begins with a poem titled Grave. Most of this collection concerns the dead and the living, what we’ve lost, what we are inevitably going to lose, and how the poet and therefore you may feel about all this.
“What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents.
“And what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond.”
The opening verses of Grave sound whimsical perhaps, and grim. No doubt someone who reads more poetry than I would find echoes of Whitman in the phrase “rows of the dead” and Frost in “the fields and the woods beyond.”
Collins in this poem plays another of his snob-deflating tricks. First, there’s a kind of overly high-minded passage...
“One of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,”
Followed a few verses later by a healthy deflation... “I was the one ... who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences.”
Despite the ever-present playfulness, the light-hearted humor, paradoxically some of these poems are deeply moving. The poet presses first one ear and then the other into the grass hoping to hear his mother and father’s voices... “What do you think of my new glasses?” Finally the poet and the reader approach the real silence:
“the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.”
Of course, the surest way to destroy a good poem must be to break it apart and try to retell it. The poet has already told his story more plainly and more, well, poetically, than anyone else can ever do.
Throughout this collection I half-smiled at many turns of phrase and unexpected zigs between one line and another. His poems can be surprisingly sophisticated and homely and plain pretty much at the same time. Billy Collins engages his reader in dialog without ever asking for more than a willingness to listen. Even a casual reader is drawn right in to Collins’ stories.
His unwillingness to overawe is most clear in the poem Gold. The rising Florida sun reflects – like gold – off a nearby lake. The poet’s east-facing room is filled with “golden light that might travel at dawn on the summer solstice the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.”
Several effusive stanzas later Collins writes “but the last thing I want to do is risk losing your confidence by appearing to lay it on too thick.”
You have to smile at that. You have to. Collins is a master. You say that to yourself while reading.
I was describing this book to a friend the next day. I mentioned a poem about his dog, titled Two Creatures, with a chilling insight at the end. She asked me to quote something. All I could remember was that Collins describes himself in one poem as “keeping an eye on things, whether they existed or not” and in another as “secretary of the interior.”
Much of this work was published previously in magazines and anthologies. Taken in this lovely little gray book, all were fresh again, and tasty and fun. The poem Grave has appeared in “Best American Poetry 2010" and “Best Spiritual Writing 2011.”
People who read poetry have known Billy Collins for years. If you haven’t met this poet, well, why not?
NOTES:
“Horoscopes for the Dead” by Billy Collins. Random House hard cover $24. ISBN 978-1-4000-6492-2.
About Billy Collins and his book tour...
Poemhunter has the text of many of Billy Collins’ poems and I don’t know how they deal with copyrights, but take a look...
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