Letter of Recommendation: Il Caffe by Gramellini (Il Corriere della Sera)

When I want to read Italian news, I turn to Il Corriere della Sera. I don't know how that wound up being "my" newspaper (since I didn't study or live in Milan) but it might have something to do with Indro Montanelli (who presided over the letters in the newspaper when I moved to Italy after college and answered one letter each day in the paper).

And when I want to wade into some bit of Italian news or controversy, I turn to Massimo Gramellini's column, which is called Il Caffe.

There are lots of ways to learn Italian or deepen your knowledge of the language. And reading Gramellini's vignettes in the Corriere della Sera newspaper is just one way.

The newspaper labels his short column "una tazzina di parole ogni giorno": a cupful of words every day. And they are sometimes fightin' words, but almost always worth reading.

BTW, another way to deepen your knowledge is listening to Italian radio. I've written about this before; listening to the news or to cultural programming in Italian is a way to keep Italy on the brain, to practice my Italian and also simply to hear about global news from an Italian perspective (I love "Il Libro del Giorno," for example, a daily show about new books coming out in Italy). 

And hearing the language in this way, versus reading a static website or newspaper, can help you move vocabulary from words you know passively to words you can imagine using in conversation.

What's interesting is, you can listen to Gramellini's column, too!

Click on this sentence to read (or ascoltare!) his latest.

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New York journal, part II

Oct. 18

It's 5 p.m. and I'm at the corner of 42nd and Sixth Avenue, the edge of Bryant Park. More specifically: at the Belgian waffle stand. 

In the glass building to my right, I see a wavy, slightly distorted reflection of the Empire State Building behind me. The ping pong players are back in the park. The Christmas market kiosks are going back up. The city is throbbing.

Oct. 20

On the 190 bus

I stayed late at the library tonight with a plan to eat a belgian "waffel" from the stand in Bryant Park. And as I walked through the park to the kiosk at the far corner, every patio table was full. Groups were meeting, lessons appeared to be underway. A rock duo made their way through the Zeppelin catalog outside the Whole Foods, and every building was lit up.

I took the (slightly) less-trafficked 41st Street to Port Authority and slipped through the back of Times Square, mesmerized by the glowing, flashing screens. I never do that! I am never mesmerized! But this week, well, yes, quite mesmerized (thanks, Pandemic).

It is truly a thrill to be in NY! How starved I am for movement and engagement. There's not enough time for all the books I am requesting at the New York Public Library for my fellowship but I am thrilled to scan their contents even briefly, making note of anything I should investigate further.

New York journal: 440 W. 34th Street

How many times have I prowled the precincts around 34th Street, home of course to the train station I used all throughout childhood? Similarly, how many times have I told the story my mother tells of buying her meat at Macy's when she and my father lived in their newlywed apartment?

And yet only today did I try to find their apartment, after securing the address from my 83-year-old mother (when I said, 'You probably don't remember your old address in New York,' she replied in Prime Pat mode, 'Of course I do!' And she did).

I think I found the building -- a red-brick affair that doesn't appear to be a building that went up anytime soon so surely it was standing in 1966, the year they married.

Around the building some rather tall skyscrapers have sprouted up, making it possibly, in my mother's words "a high-rent district." (A phrase that unfortunately may disappear after her generation of New Yorkers leave us).

She'd mentioned their church (St. Michael's), which is on the same block, so I stopped in to say a prayer -- not only for her, mind you, but for myself. Lucky as I am to have a mother like her, I asked for strength that I can help her during the last stage of her life.

I took pictures of the building, I took pictures of the streetscape, I noted an overpass she'd mentioned. If you step out of the building and into the street, you have a straight-shot view of the Empire State Building. Wow!

Then crossing back over 9th Avenue, I stopped for a ciambellina (it is the name of the blog, after all) at an Italian bakery, then sat by the origami sculptures south of Times Square to enjoy it. And to savor the world whirling around me, and within me.

A walk through New York is an exercise in saturation. If I could attach a notepad and pen to my hands and write while simultaneously craning my neck to take it all in -- well, that would be perfect (maybe also add a camera on my head, kind of like the one perched on top of the Google Earth car).

And a walk through my parents' New York overwhelms me with such curiosity and tenderness. To love what they loved is so rich as to be intoxicating.

So, of course, I enjoyed every minute of my journey to New York by train. I took the new Hartford Line to New Haven where I caught a Metro North train to NYC. ("If you can make it there..." I thought as I jotted down notes).

No one can ever convince me that train travel is anything less than spectacular! As I mentioned in my last post on visiting New York, you eavesdrop on people's lives as the train winds its way past backyards. The laundry you put out on the line to dry? I saw it!

Indeed, from the train, I saw my newly (re-) adopted state in a new way, as I gazed out of the windows. For example, at one point the tracks bisected a small lake in the middle of Connecticut.

I believe if we truly want to know our surroundings, we need to see things from a vantage point other than our cars. Each station gave me a glimpse into a new town, especially on Metro North. In Meriden, the town green looked welcoming. In Westport, I spied coffee shops I'd like to visit. In South Norwalk, I wouldn't mind stopping to look at furniture at Safavieh, which even has an outdoor patio.

I won't dress up the time spent: I arrived the train station in Hartford at 7:45a and didn't make it to New York until 11:45a. But oh what I did between those two times!

I am in New York this week for part two of a short fellowship at the New York Public Library focused on translation, and to prepare, I read my newest copy of Airone. I had packed the monthly mag as a treat for the train ride and it didn't disappoint. Even with the features that don't reflect Italian life, per se, I learn something about what interests the average Italian. Or I simply learn about a topic that's new to me, like the profile of French photographer Robert Doisneau, whom many Americans know as the artist behind the seminal black and white photo of a couple kissing on a Parisian street. Doisneau, according to Airone, considered photography "un bisogno privato" (literally "a private need") and "un insopprimabile desiderio di registrare" (translation: an indomitable desire to record what he saw).

The train horn for me was a symphony, a lullaby, a voice beckoning me home.

And just as we were crossing over into New York, I saw the Circle Line making its rounds!

As you may know, it's a helluva town -- the Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.

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Leonardo Sciascia on what's worse than death

I have taught Leonardo Sciascia's novels because I believe they telegraph something essential -- and dangerous -- about Sicily and Italy.

I especially enjoyed including Il Giorno della Civetta on a syllabus when I was teaching a course called The Literature of Travel. It's a whodunit only in the narrowest sense -- there's a death (in fact more than one), and it wasn't by natural causes. (In English, the book is called "Day of the Owl.")

What it actually is: a novel about the mafia -- and about Sicily and the mafia. And hence apt for a course in which we attempted to analyze books that distilled the essence of a place.

When I teach it, I zero in on one scene, and in particular on one sentence. It's a scene in which a manual laborer finds himself at the local police station for questioning because his brother has been shot. The man has nothing to do with his brother's demise -- and hence nothing to fear -- but he is as uncomfortable as one can get, sitting in his local precinct at the mercy of the law and other forces.

And Sciascia slips in a line that is indelible -- even unfathomable -- to describe the brother's state of mind:

"Niente è la morte in confronto alla vergogna."

You can translate it like this: Death is nothing compared to shame.

And just like that, the Sicilian author challenges everything I know about life!

Because until I read that line, I thought nothing is worse than death.

Nothing tops death as far as unfortunate events that happen to you during your sojourn on Earth.

But Sciascia knows something I don't. He knows about a certain kind of man living in a particular society for whom pride trumps every other concern.

I mention this because 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of the book's publication in Italian, and also the centenary of Sciascia's birth (his life: 1921-1989).

For more information, you can read about Sciascia on the site of the Italian agency charged with promoting Italian literature:

https://www.newitalianbooks.it/leonardo-sciascia-in-other-languages/

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No one told me Phil Schaap died

No one told me about Phil Schaap's death in September, or perhaps better yet, I somehow missed his obit in The Times. 

No one told me I suppose because my father is the only person who would think to tell me and now he’s not fit to tell me much, given all of his health problems.

The funny thing – wrong phrase but we use it this way all the time – I wrote about Phil Schaap for the first time earlier this year, which has had me thinking so much about him this year, and especially this summer.

Not only thinking about him but also seeking out his one-of-a-kind voice on his radio show on WKCR. Indeed, just over the weekend I indulged my typical driving-through-New York-on-my-way-to-Jersey habit of losing myself in my favorite old NY radio stations, WKCR and WFUV.

And there he was on “Bird Flight,” of course (the radio station re-broadcasts his shows).

I wrote about him as part of an essay for CNN about my father, and how much I don’t know about him even as he heads toward his human twilight. I also talked about what I did know: that he’s always loved Jazz and he passed on that reverence and passion to me, partly through marathon Jazz shows broadcast on Columbia's WKCR. 

What I loved about Phil Schaap is his full embrace of the subject. As Franz Kafka once said, "Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." Which means Schaap can be an inspiration to us.

You can read Schaap’s obituary at this link below. I would have loved to read it in the newspaper itself – an odd journalistic treat since placement and space indicate so much about the person’s importance when you’re dealing with an obit in The Times.

And Phil Schaap was important because he told us Jazz was important. And it is, it so very is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/arts/music/phil-schaap-dead.html

Avon Journal, I

Over the summer I visit my parents on the Jersey Shore and it's the normal chaos -- or maybe the new chaos of my parents, now elderly and ailing, being shadows of their former selves. 

Daddy, for example, doesn't seem to understand almost anything I say, and he doesn't make long or appropriate responses to anything I say that he may understand. 

I ask him: Do you want some water? Are you OK? Are you tired? 

He's noncommittal -- either because he cannot hear me or because he cannot comprehend these questions.

But then Mommy says something absurd.

It happens when we're at the breakfast table shortly before my Uncle Larry is due to visit from his home near San Francisco.

She says to my father, "Does Larry need to clear customs when he comes from California or is that just for international flights?"

He pauses for the briefest of moments, and then replies, "That's just for international flights." 

It's not a basic question. In fact, the basic questions I ask him he does not understand (or hear). 

But this crazy question from Mommy that requires some thought and knowledge, he understands and responds in a totally normal way.

I don't want to lapse too much into sentimentality but I find it telling -- maybe even compelling -- that the voice he's heard every day for more than 50 years cuts through the confusion of old age, end-stage blood cancer and hearing problems.

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Love this: How a Barber and Journaling Expert Spends His Sundays

I'm a sucker for a journalistic profile of any kind, even a mini-profile in the form of the Sunday Routine column in The New York Times. And this guy writes in his journal! My kind of guy!

He's also spreading the word about keeping a journal to others -- a calling we both share.

"Basically, I’m sharing ways to keep journaling simple and to not overthink it while at the same time talking about the value of doing it every day so that it can become a habit. I feel like some people use social media to document their lives, but creating posts isn’t great for record-keeping and doesn’t provide the space for reflection that writing a journal entry does."

(He's also a barber.)

Read about his Sunday Routine by clicking on this sentence.

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The chaos of reading and writing

Earlier this year, I decided to surround myself with all of the books I wanted to read. 

No more sensibly putting off book orders or borrowing more books from the library. To immerse myself in the genre I've been writing and teaching -- memoir -- I would begin amassing all the books from that genre I wanted to read. It's the genre I often write in, and it's also a genre I've been teaching of late, and so quite logically, I need to be more purposeful in loading my bedside table with the personal stories of authors I know and love (and ones I don't know and don't love yet).

I also decided I would tackle the long-deferred TBR list, which included a number of essay collections.

Maybe you're already doing this.

In any event, it meant continuously bothering the librarians at my local library with hold requests, and also ordering books online, even though I was still working my way through my Christmas literary stash. (And then whenever we visited local bookstores, I would buy something to support them).

It quickly became an avalanche of books. Everything I read seemed to point me to new works I need to read, in a never-ending loop. So I read an essay by Rebecca Solnit about a Virginia Woolf piece on walking called "Street Haunting" and in the course of reading it, I realized I have to right now read Solnit’s book on walking AND the essay by Woolf about the same, because if nothing else I know I love walking and I know I love other writers who live walking.

Along with the Solnit books, I made a list of memoirs I wanted to read, with help from the index of Beth Kephart's "Handling the Truth and Philip Lopate's To Show and To Tell, and began buying and borrowing. Home came Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples, a memoir I’d wanted to read ever since reading Staples’ seminal essay "Black Men and Public Space," which I teach (I also follow Brent on Twitter; he's on the Times' editorial board but posts a lot of garden photos). Home came a book by Paul Auster that mesmerized me – my first Auster book! Plus Pedigree by Patrick Modiano, which I’ve wanted to read for a while, and also Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever’s memoir about her father. I also finally read more of Alfred Kazin's work through A Walker in the City.

Unrelated to memoirs, Liz sent me Dora Bruder by Modiano (in Italian!) so that went on the pile, as well.

I also wanted to read books about writing memoir. So I read Inventing the Truth: the Art of Memoir (Zinsser) and The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts whom I met at Bennington.

Plus a book I hope to teach as part of a travel literature course I've taught, A Stranger's Pose, by Emmanuel Iduma about his travels throughout his native Africa.

But hold on a moment. I’m polyamorous when it comes to literature so I always have a few Italian books going as well, to feed my literary translation side-business. I learned that an author I’ve translated had published a new book in Italy – a memoir, no less – and I had to buy it. It seemed like the right moment also to buy another Italian book I’d been eying by an author I discovered last year. So two more books – well, three, because I added another one to the carrello (I was shopping on the Italian Amazon website) – were on their way to me. When the books I arrived, I promptly began reading all three, and was inexplicably thrilled to discover in the copious notes accompanying one novel that the concept of borders figures prominently in the work of the author, Piero Chiara, who grew up near the Italian-Swiss border. My mind raced! I don’t even know why but I felt that intellectual shiver that drives me to amass ever more books on the floor, bed, desk and kitchen counter. 

I don't want to suggest it's a real emergency. But I do wonder if I am doing more harm than good. Were we meant to cram so many books into our heads at one time?

(Or should I just say words? To make matters simple, I've left out of this account the New Yorker articles Liz has recommended and anything from The New York Times, my daily gift, as well as any other periodical I subscribe to, including the Kenyon Review and Airone, which Mike calls "Gente" but it's not that gossipy).

And my God where will it end?

In some ways, it sounds noble if my aim is lifelong education and professional development. But I am not immune to the mental fragmentation so rife in lives that are increasingly digitized. Lives where we pay attention to so many different things, real and imagined.

I've just finished the Auster book, The Invention of Solitude, which is itself quite fragmented, or at the very least the second part of it is.

At the same time, I am working on many different pieces of writing, and also working on a mammoth translation project that I am constantly being distracted from.

Is this just another manifestation of the fragmentation rife in modern life? Or perhaps the fragmentation reflects the pandemic -- where non-work life spills into work spaces -- and also perhaps the eternally distracted life of the working mother. Or should I just say this working mother? 

Ever since getting serious about creative writing eight years ago, I’ve been indulging what I call the Life of the Mind. I am, in many ways, living not only the life I dreamed about, but the life I didn’t dare allow myself to dream about. I write, teach, translate and edit, and although I don’t make much money or draw a pension, I am basically paid to revel in literature. To pay attention to literature. That’s one job description that fits me to a tee.

But is what I am doing productive? Am I able to retain what I read? 

I guess I subscribe to the messy desk theory of the world. The more books strewn across your desk (and your bed and your nightstand), the better.

As one writer who's dubbed herself Rust Belt Girl puts it on her blog of the same name, "Relationship status: reading."

Yet I ask as a personal favor, can someone tell me if there is a limit to the number of books one can productively read simultaneously?

Also, does it matter if you only read the first half of a book? Asking for a friend, inasmuch as we should be friends with ourselves.

And of course, happy reading!

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