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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In NYC again, and Hearing the City in the Key of Daddy

My reunion with New York City last month came after a Covid-imposed, 20-month hiatus. I bet many other people visited the city this summer, after the same anguished separation.

But in my case, I re-emerged in the city (rising up from the train platform below the ground) after another kind of hiatus. 

I was back in New York for the first time since my father had fallen ill.

Perhaps that wouldn't matter, except I realized my father embodies Manhattan for me (my mother gets Brooklyn in all of its colorful, fairy tale glory). 

Growing up, I visited the city with my parents countless times -- afternoons at the museum, overnight stays at Midtown hotels, visits to family in Brooklyn -- and I memorized stories of their newlywed days in Manhattan when they would buy their meat at Macy's. I divided Long Island, where I was born, in two: the families with roots in the city and the people who rejected that New York was the alpha and the omega.

I was visiting Manhattan for a short research fellowship at The New York Public Library, and on the train ride to Grand Central, I felt that rasp of excitement, that frothy giddiness I’ve known since childhood when the destination is New York and the method of transit is the train (“This is the train to New York, making stops in…”). Watching Harlem through the train windows, I felt as though I was eavesdropping on people’s lives.

I had hoped no one would be over my shoulder, accompanying me as I walked the streets of “The City.” But I knew better. In my heart of hearts, I suspected my father’s voice -- his impressions relayed through his signature expressions -- would provide a soundtrack, regardless. New York's vibrancy -- its urgency -- was made first manifest through my father's stories. The tales of strolls along the avenue and visits to fancy hotel lobbies long gone and staying out all night, the excitement of it all painted on his face and vibrating through his voice. He grew up in one of those Jersey cities just on the other side of the Hudson for whom Manhattan is your backyard, if you happen to have the center of the world out back.

Mike, Leo and I were staying in Midtown, which probably only exacerbated the sensation of walking in my father’s footsteps since that was the precinct he'd haunted before it was inundated by tourists -- that area and anywhere near Lincoln Center or the museums uptown, including the Frick. 

(The Frick would be just any New York museum, mind you, but it will remain forever precious to me because that's where the Hans Holbein portrait of St. Thomas More resides. After I studied More in high school at St. Anthony's, my father become obsessed with tracking down where he’d seen the famous Holbein portrait. He finally figured out it was at the Frick. Who would care? But he did – so I do. When I finally visited the Frick some years ago, I stationed myself in front of the portrait as if there were a kinship between myself and the painting almost as keenly felt as a normal relationship.) 

Each morning last month during my visit to New York, I had to toggle between our hotel on 50th Street and the New York Public Library, so from 50th down to 42nd every day, and from Third Avenue over to 5th.

No one ever walked that expanse more joyfully, more studiously than I did, all the while with the singular voice of my father plying me with memories. I was hearing the city in the key of my father.

(I was also hearing the voice of my Uncle Joe because I believe he was the one who had me memorize the order of the non-numbered avenues east of 5^th Avenue: Madison-Park-Lex. As I walked, I unwittingly repeated it like a little mantra.)

Even certain words in my head are rendered in his voice, like cab or taxi. (Not surprisingly, they form a key part of a New Yorker's vocabulary).

The way my father always talked, it was like the exhilaration of the city rose up from the streets, was contained in the streets. I could hear him mapping out routes to various places, on foot. And to this day, what I like best to do in New York isn't attend a concert or eat at a restaurant or grab drinks -- it's simply to be in the streets. Walking through New York is a passion, an instinct. I slept badly the first night in New York but if I had the whole day to roam, that would be no problem. When we went there as children, my father walked with a long, brisk stride that we struggled to duplicate.

It’s that same old story I've written about before: loving something that someone I love urged me to love. Think about that for a moment. It makes for an extremely potent, poignant obsession. I have dozens of examples, from the literature of James Joyce to jazz music to walking fast (“city walking”). I love all those things because he has loved them. And it’s like a double web of admiration and love, far more than simply stumbling upon them on my own. I don't get to decide if they are important -- they simply are, whether I like it or not (Memoir 101).

What I read the summer I was 16

I keep old journals. Lots of them. In fact, I heap them all in a vintage wicker basket my parents used to take on picnics. And lately, I've been trying to organize them -- mainly by affixing labels to the covers so I can figure out what years or events the journals cover.

And that's what led me to discover a journal that contained a list of the books I had read when I was 16 years old. It was probably the first time I'd logged the books I'd read -- something I continue to do to this day in a small notebook (for reasons I can't quite pinpoint).

Back then, I was meeting certain authors for the first time -- Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus and James Baldwin -- and amassing as many of their titles as possible.

In some cases, the titles were books my father recommended -- including Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Sterile Cuckoo and Breakfast at Tiffany's (he's always had wide-ranging interests; he also put me onto the book by Feynman, the renowned physicist).

Another impulse motivating some selections: reading books that were repellent to good society in one way or another. Exhibit A: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I would have trouble reading it now. But back then, I resolved to face how ugly society could be to women. Henry Miller could also fall under the heading of authors who challenged the status quo, but my father encouraged me to read his works so in some ways it doesn't count since it didn't involve rebellion.

Here are some of the books I read that summer AND the following summer (the lists appeared together in the notebook):

The Stranger – Albert Camus

The Sterile Cuckoo – John Nicholls

Them – Joyce Carol Oates

The Fall -- Albert Camus

Six Degrees of Separation – John Guare

Hiroshima – John Hersey

Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The Joy Luck Club -- Amy Tan

What Do You Care Anyway? -- By Richard Feynman

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov

Native Son -- Richard Wright

Go Tell it on the Mountain -- James Baldwin (did not finish)

Play It as It Lays – Joan Didion

Illusions, Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah – Richard Bach

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury

Pentimento – Lilliam Hellman

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

The Last Tycoon – F Scott Fitzgerald

Cybele – Joyce Carol Oates

Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby

Opus Pistorum – Henry Miller

Conclusions can be drawn. For example, as much as I was already a Feminist in high school, I hadn't yet committed to seeking out books by women authors so there is not a concentration of books by women. Not many books in translation either (Did Nabokov write Lolita in English?). And not many books by diverse authors. It would take me a while to read the essay "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin and realize his style of writing suited me to a tee, and hence I needed to read all of this works. I also hadn't yet read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

What did you read? Do you remember? Is it possible you have a log somewhere? Look for it. In many cases, the ideas in these books continue to reverberate in my mind. Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, for example, was so explosive I see it my mind as written in all-caps.

"The worst of us are a long drawn-out confession"

Nov 19, 2020 – the day Leo’s teacher called him “an intellect.” But before she does, and before her remark can cause me to burst into tears, my soundtrack pivots on a handful of songs that soothe and at the same time perpetuate a sudden, mysterious sense of malaise: "Cedars of Lebanon," and the song just before it, on the U2 album "No Line on the Horizon."

My pal Bono says:

"The worst of us are a long drawn-out confession
The best of us are geniuses of compression."

Bono doesn't need me to lionize him in any way but those are powerful lyrics that reveal an acumen in human psychology. I can imagine the people under the heading 'long drawn-out confession' as much as I can imagine those who keep it tight (maybe too tight).

He's writing about someone in the latter category who's lost a spouse to endless warfare and aggression. The character, if you will, has to keep living even though one of his main reasons for living has been snuffed out by a conflict with no resolution in sight. But in our day-to-day lives, how do we sum up tragedies like this? The details in the song about their domestic life are heartbreaking -- 'tidying the children's clothes and toys' -- and in the aftermath of her demise, he hasn't 'been with a woman, feels like for years.'

Then Bono ends the song here, with a world weariness so deep and menacing it sounds like a sneer:

"Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you
Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends."

Mark Rothko, or sunrise photos c/o the dog

Well, the dog wasn't the photographer but I would not have been outside in an impromptu Mark Rothko museum if it weren't for Caramel.

(You can read more about my morning "travels" with Caramel at the Brevity Nonfiction Blog.)

When I saw these colors in the sky, I flashed to Mark Rothko paintings stored in my brain. Stored but until that moment never deciphered or beloved.

In fact, I never felt any kinship with the so-called color field paintings. What was he trying to express?

But now I want to know, was Rothko trying to approximate the sunrise or the sunset with his color paintings?

And should I bother to find out? Maybe. Or maybe I should simply enjoy the moment where art and nature mix in an unexpected way (courtesy of the dog).

Either way, I won't dismiss them when I see them again in a museum or book of paintings. I might just have experienced something similar.

So you don't forget (Bourdain, but also many others)

Today is my friend's birthday and when I log onto Facebook to leave a message, I see she has changed her profile picture. It’s the photo I had remarked upon, the one she had posted when her brother committed suicide. 

It’s of the two of them, and my friend is maybe 18 years old or 20 years old in the photo. Her older brother has his arm wrapped around his little sister, affectionately, protectively. 

To cut to the chase, the photo haunts me.

In fact, I opened up a separate Facebook tab this morning so I could keep my eyes on that photo, so I could return to it periodically throughout the day, as a reminder of some specific things, of some nonspecific things -- basically of everything about life that is fraught but also good.

As I told her once, the look on her face is the glittering, breathtaking promise that life offers us when we are young (Actually, the line I think of comes from a James Bond movie: she looks like “promise itself.”) She is innocence defined, but also, the photo taken as a whole – with his arm draped around her – telegraphs how much she loved him and looked up to him. 

It’s the photo from the Good Days, capital G, capital D. The photo from back before -- back before life happened. They are both tan, and young, and looking as though they’ve just competed in a fun family three-legged race contest or some other such joyful, innocent, salt-of-the-earth, life-is-great kind of activity.

And now the photo inserted into the small digital corner where we can identify ourselves visually on FB telegraphs all that can be lost. All that makes us tear our hair out.

The haunting nature of life on earth defined. You like this? It will be gone. 

You like living? You love your family? They may disappear in ways you will never, ever forget.

For a long time, I kept his online obit bookmarked on my phone so I would have to thumb over it to get to Facebook or whatever site I was seeking to access. Like that 'finger in the wounds that are still infected,' which Elena Ferrante talks about. Almost as if to say, Jeanne, do whatever you need to do, smile and laugh and cross 1,000 tasks off your to-do list, but your friend’s brother committed suicide and nothing can reverse that fact. 

It’s like a slow-moving virus, silent and stealthy, and you won’t know who it’s stalking until it’s too late.

Why does this photo haunt me so much? How I feel doesn’t quite square with the facts. He was not my brother and while she is a good friend, she was never my best friend or anything like that. I don’t even know if my visceral reaction can be explained by saying I like her very much. The reaction in fact is a mystery – somehow this photo of someone else’s life triggers a reaction in me similar to all the other deaths on my account – Tom, Uncle Joe, my father-in-law. 

In fact, it’s like that photo I have of Uncle Joe with his parents (my grandparents), in the kitchen in Bayonne, back before. Back before my grandmother died young or at least, too early for me to know her, back before my uncle also died young (or at least before his time, as we like to say).

The photo of my friend with her brother long before suicide caught him is sorted in my brain in a box near the one that houses the photo of my uncle, my fun-loving uncle whom I never knew as much as I wished.

I'm thinking about this now all the more so, perhaps, because of the Bourdain movie, which I tried desperately to see at one of the local arthouse movie theaters in Hartford. (I will try to see it on CNN, I guess, because I think it will be screened at some point). 

While we were watching Anthony Bourdain on TV, vicariously enjoying his culinary and global adventures, suicide was out there, stalking him, from country to country, maybe.

Perhaps given the nature of his fame -- that he was known by millions of people all over the world -- we are seeing suicide in a new light. Paying attention to it in the way we should. Maybe.

In any event, to my friend's brother I say: Rest in peace. You are mourned by people whom you never even met.

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Swooning at the New York Public Library

Back before the pandemic made us shelve all kinds of plans, I won a short-term fellowship at the New York Public Library that had to be postponed. And last week, I was finally able to do a part of the fellowship.

In my diary at one point, I wrote, "I can't believe I am in New York!"

It wasn't the only thing I couldn't believe; I couldn't really believe how beautiful the New York Public Library's main branch is.

It hardly seems possible that there's a place as opulent as this that anyone from anywhere can enter and tour for free.

I'd visited the library before on multiple occasions but was never doing research so I didn't access some of the internal rooms that are nothing short of breathtaking.

People flock to the Rose Main Reading Room because the ceiling is gold-encrusted (like you might see in a French chateau) and the walls wood-paneled. Even the hallway outside of the reading room is grand.

And I flocked there, too, except when I got there, I found it was also home to the largest Italian dictionaries I'd ever seen. Six or seven-volume sets, several of which not only flooded the reader with possible meanings but also gave the history of use for a particular word. Like, this particular word appeared in a line from Boccaccio in the 1300s! A golden ceiling above me and the heaviest Italian dictionaries around!

I spent my days not only poring over Italian dictionaries but also immersing myself in works of literature I've begun to translate or plan to translate. Indeed, the fellowship gave me access to works by Italian women writers who survived the Holocaust that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to assemble in one place easily (in some cases, the books are out of print). I feel like I chipped away a bit at my project, which I've called, "Translating the Untranslatable: Holocaust Imagery in the Works of Italian Women Writers."

I will be writing a post about my project at some point for an NYPL blog for short-term fellows but I'll just mention here that I, for one, will never be able to learn everything I need to know about the Holocaust. In fact, I need to be reminded of it regularly, I need new details, I need fresh ways to understand how this atrocity happened not long ago but rather so recently that my parents were already alive (albeit toddlers). 

In Dopo il fumo: Sono il n. A 5384 di Auschwitz Birkenau, Italian author Liana Millu quotes a verse of poetry that sums up the feeling I am left with when I consider what people of my same species did to other people of our same species: 

"Andate, o umani. Più niente

voglio a che fare

con voi.”

(A rough translation: "Go now humans, I want nothing more to do with you.") 

All of this, and Manhattan awaiting me outside the walls of the library!

For information on the short-term fellowship program, visit this link.

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Dimmi tutto

Il bello quando tu abiti all'estero è che tante cose -- usanze, luoghi, abitudini -- sono leggermente diverse, invece di totalmente diverse (quando le cose sono totalmente diverse, la situazione può essere anche un po' sconvolgente). 

Ho scoperto appena sono arrivata a Siena come studentessa universitaria che quando entravo in un negozio di abbigliamento o un alimentari, il proprietario o la commessa mi diceva subito, "Dimmi," o "Dimmi tutto."

In USA quando entro in un negozio, vengo accolta come cliente in un modo o un altro, certo, ma nessuno mi dice, "Dimmi tutto," o "Mi dica." Mai una cosa del genere. 

Invece, la commessa americana ti chiede, tipo, 'Ti posso aiutare?' O, 'Ti posso essere utile?'

C'era un alimentari a Siena vicino all'appartamento di una mia amica inglese che pure lei studiava all'estero. Si trovava nella Contrada della Chiocciola, a due passi dalla Porta di San Marco.

(Ricorderò forse per sempre il suo indirizzo: Via San Marco, 46.) 

E all'alimentari lavorava un tizio un po' più vecchio di noi ma abbastanza giovane da essere incantato dall'arrivo di due ragazze straniere.

A noi sembrava che lui ci accogliesse in modo particolare e quindi quando diceva, "Dimmi tutto," noi due -- essendo ragazze un po' sciocche -- immaginavamo tutt'altro che un etto di prosciutto crudo o un po' di gorgonzola!

Pensavamo che chiedesse tutti i nostri segreti! Pensavamo che aspettasse le nostre confessioni più intime.

Più tardi, ho capito che l'insieme delle parole "dimmi tutto" faceva come una frase fatta, con un senso stretto particolarmente nel contesto di cui parlo -- quando vai a sbrigare una faccenda qualsiasi, chi ti aiuta ti risponde cosi.

Ma difficile cambiare idea quando pensi di averlo capito tutto e fra l'altro quello che hai capito ti fa ridere da schiantare!

Quindi quando sento la frase 'Dimmi tutto,' torno subito a quei mesi che studiavo a Siena e andavo a trovare le mie amiche a Via San Marco, 46. 

Non so se gliene abbiamo mai detto tutto ma per me, il commesso all'alimentari fa parte di una marea di esperienze in Italia che mi hanno cambiato e mi hanno convinto di dedicare gran parte della mia vita allo studio della lingua e letteratura italiana.

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Hartford by bike

I'm drawn to smaller, former industrial cities, that some people would call perhaps somewhat down at their heels (I would call lovely). Chalk it up, perhaps, to being the daughter of a man from Bayonne, N.J. Indeed, when I arrived in Allentown, Pa., to begin a newspaper reporting job, I looked around and said to myself, "This reminds me of Bayonne so I'm good."

My current small, former industrial, "down-at-the-heels" city is Hartford, and it might be the most stunning of them all (I say down at the heels, but what I mean is: no longer in its heyday -- a fate so many cities in America face, given the way the proliferation of cars and the particular construction of interstates through urban neighborhoods changed how Americans lived and worked, decades ago).

But yes, I said stunning because one thing I've discovered in every small, former industrial, down-at-the-heels city I've haunted is premium housing stock. No longer pristine, perhaps, but you can't hide leaded-glass windows or turrets or widow's walks or grand wraparound porches. If they're there, you can peer through the neglect to see the original glory.

But I may be off on the wrong foot because the homes in the neighborhood of Hartford I've been prowling are more or less pristine. I bike, mouth agape, at the real estate treasures I encounter just north of Farmington Avenue, not far from Elizabeth Park (seen in photo). Grand homes, huge homes, homes that say, 'Now wouldn't you want to come inside?' Oh yes I would.

I am touring the neighborhood by bike, which is perhaps the perfect mode of transport. I can cover more ground than I would on foot, and I can breathe the neighborhood in, in a way traveling by cars obviates.

I am not really much of a biker, more of an explorer, but I have often used my bike as a means of acclimating myself to a new place, after decades of moving around for my work. I get the lay of the land -- on two wheels.

During the pandemic it was a particular good way to fool yourself into thinking you had done something or been somewhere. That's because I like to have little small destinations that I bike toward. For example, I often bike to the UCONN Law School campus on the western edge of the city of Hartford (see in this photo that was published on the school's Twitter account).

In some ways, it's an interesting "third place," or really probably a "fourth place," because I go there when I don't want to buy anything, I don't want to browse, I don't want to participate in commerce -- I just want to be dazzled visually while allowing the mental state exercise induces to wash over me.

And UCONN's Law school dazzles me visually and simply fills me with joy that something so beautiful is a mere bike ride away from house -- free for me to take in anytime I want.

I actually attended grad school for Italian literature at UCONN's Storrs campus (the main campus) but what I wouldn't have done to commute to this gorgeous little campus! Maybe I need to get a law degree, too?!

It actually reminds me of Yale's campus in New Haven -- I kid you not. Probably because of its Gothic architecture, and also specifically an arcade that I joyfully bike through (I believe there are similar such mini-tunnels at Trinity College in Hartford, which also has a Gothic feel).

Our single-family homes are what make American cities and towns particular -- each home is potentially a shrine for a certain aesthetic. Each home has a personality -- that's ours for the taking simply by biking by.

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Rebecca Solnit on walking in a city

I'm reading Rebecca Solnit's nonfiction book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and it's a perfect book for someone like me who loves to walk.

On walking in a city, and the promise of the urban environment, she writes: 

"One does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might."

Yes!

She's articulated something I've always sensed but couldn't put my finger on.

Also: I love the subtitle: A History of Walking. Why not? We've been walking since the beginning of time, and therefore it's an activity with history worthy to be explored.

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Amy Winehouse died 10 years ago (essay for Entropy)

Hard to believe, but Amy Winehouse has been gone for a decade. For me, it was almost equally unbelievable that I would become a big fan of her work.

As I explained in an essay I wrote a few years ago for the literary magazine, Entropy, I was an older mother of a toddler. Not a typical Winehouse fan!

But then at some point during the years following her death, I became obsessed with a version of her song, “Tears Dry on Their Own,” which appears on the CD, “Amy Winehouse at The BBC.” Especially while driving – driving alone, where I can listen to the CD over and over. I can turn it up. I can sit close to the steering wheel as I do when I want to pay close attention to something, staring out at the street in search of an explanation. 

And I’ve found a form of genius inside of the song. She sings about a failed love affair that ends when the man “walks away,” and “the sun goes down,” while the narrator, the jilted one, stands and watches, forced to accept this turn of events. The inflection of her voice, and the rise and fall of the notes have the same effect on me as the love affair in the song had on Winehouse, or the song’s narrator (possibly, one in the same). 

You can read the essay here:

https://entropymag.org/variations-on-a-theme-in-memoriam-amy-winehouse-years-later-my-tears-are-still-drying-on-their-own/

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My Home is My Muse (for Brevity)

If you have books strewn about your house and articles you've printed out and copies of the newspaper you're saving from months ago and favorite novels you've positioned just so as if they were pieces of sculpture or paintings, take a look at my essay, "My Home is My Muse," for the Brevity Nonfiction Blog.

There I wrote about how I like to decorate my house with books -- forget window treatments or accent rugs. Who gives an F?! I just do it by placing books all around me, in every room, on every surface, in different ways. And by taping up anything that inspires me -- a notecard, a magazine article, a picture Leo has drawn.

On a serious note, I am so glad they published it because it gave me a chance to talk about the part of my literary life that is flourishing. And it's the way the walls of my house and the surface of my desk beam back to me all the projects percolating in my head and the plans I have and the passions that I keep.

The link, again, is here:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/07/05/my-home-is-my-muse/

Edith Bruck: Recounting the Holocaust Until She Can’t

It's hard to walk away from a writer once she tells you surviving the Holocaust is like being pregnant with a monster she can never deliver or abort.

The comparison comes from Edith Bruck's 2014 nonfiction book, Signora Auschwitz.

Similarly, as a part-time literary translator, I find it very hard to leave things be when I see an author like Bruck remain largely un known in America because her works haven't been translated into English.

I am doing my small part to try to introduce Bruck to a wider English-speaking audience by publishing some of her poetry in translation, and also by doing some comparative literature research at the New York Public Library during a short-term fellowship that will began next month.

In the meantime, I wrote a review of Bruck's new memoir IL PANE PERDUTO, which hasn't been translated into English yet, for Three Percent. It was one of five finalists for this year's Strega award, Italy's highest literary prize.

Bruck has spent her career writing about the Holocaust in myriad ways, publishing fiction, nonfiction and poetry informed by her experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. In this new memoir (published by La Nave di Teseo in 2021), we learn in this work that when she was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp long enough to become a hated kapo pointed to smoke from the gas chambers and said, “You see that smoke?” When she nodded, he said her mother had been burnt alive, adding, “Your mother has become soap like mine.” 

More than 75 years later, the Hungarian-born Bruck remains committed to telling the story of the Holocaust. The 89-year-old transnational Italian writer’s new book, Il Pane Perduto, was one of five finalists this year for the Strega award, Italy’s highest literary prize. For the woman known to some as “Signora Auschwitz,” it’s of a piece with a long body of literature in which she has likened the experience of surviving the Holocaust to being eternally pregnant with a monster she cannot abort. And she has pledged to bear witness until she can’t.

Read the rest of the review here:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2021/07/08/edith-bruck-recounting-the-holocaust-until-she-cant/