Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,

Responses from the Future

What a lot of cool conversations I have had as a result of my last post.

First cool thing: I was out with a friend who is an iphone adept. This is the person who sort of lobbied for me to get an iphone, and finally convinced me to get one by showing me the birding app possibilities. Not a birder, but someone knows how to connect with my buttons. We were walking in a park, and I stopped to listen to a bird, whose song I could not recognize. I was saying how someone thought I had been describing a birding app that worked like Shazam: you let it hear the bird, and it identifies it. That would be WAY cool, but sadly I know of no such app. I had only been talking about the birding app having recordings that you can play to identify or even call birds. Cool enough.  "Why don't you just record this one?" this friend said. "Doh!" I said.  I never thought of holding out the phone to record a birdsong, and then playing it next to my birdsong identification CDs. What an awesome idea! What an opportunity missed that day! (Bonus: you can save recordings to Evernote (see my sidebar to check out this super cool shareware program with an on-line+mobile app. I could put them right in my Evernote nature journal. OMG.) (Also: feel free to develop such an app, or to tell me about one if it exists.)

Second cool thing: a visual artist and teacher that I am friends with told me she loves dance and music more even than visual art. She also told me she plays tennis HARD. Then my thoughts came around to the practice of art as a kinetic activity, too. I love the idea of "the gesture of the artist", and consider it one way of defining something as art. Of course, as she pointed out, ballet is an archaic form (like opera). She proposed Cirque du Soleil as the newest form of dance. What a provocative thought that was! I had had vague thoughts in that general area, like about figure skating, but never actually managed to define it so clearly. It makes perfect sense. Cirque has taken out many of the circus-y parts, and kept the physical parts and the music. Some related thoughts: there is a continuum of athletic activity that runs from dance to, shall we say, football. In my view, anything where there is a judgment of artistic merit - leave it outside competition. Scores or times are the hallmarks of the athletic activities suitable for competition; artistic merit is for the arts - all about personal response. So despite an identical level of athletic demand on the body, I think gymnastics and figure skating do not belong in the Olympics any more than ballet does. To come back to the starting point, figure skating is hugely popular in a way ballet is not - really it is another new dance form, too.  More thought required. (PS I am interested in the current, but I love the archaic.)

Third cool thing: I have been thinking about how my friends act as a digest for the internet, previewing content, and sending me the most interesting stuff. So much better than me trolling around for hours getting tangled in the marginally interesting, and then one of my friends sent me this link to Seth Godin's blog entry "Are you an Elite?" Now here's a guy who understands me, and my friends, and my blog-readers. We just have fun exploring ideas and technology and information and culture, and we love to share that, and just as Seth says, there is a remarkable modern ability for us to access each other and all that stuff we love. The other point he makes that strikes me as key is this:

"The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that  engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from."

Selfishly, I want organizations to build platforms that engage me, (hello iphone) but I also want that for my kids to enjoy and for the happy future of humankind on planet earth.

He also wrote a blog post about post-secondary education and what it means now and going forward, an article we have discussed in our family quite a bit, called THE COMING MELT-DOWN IN HIGHER EDUCATION which is a very clear statement of something I worry about for when my children get there. Here is the key point he gets to on this:

"The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference... "

Read: allows them to access organizations with platforms that engage them as elites. He refers his readers on to a book: DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz. This is a book to get on for the Kindle reader app on my iphone, for sure. Yours too? If you  haven't read it already, it is also time for you to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. You can search my blog for my review of the book, or use the hot link under Links to Writers in my sidebar. Seth Godin and Anya Kamenetz are there now too.


Now the marigold wonders nervously:
What about the negative side of the technology that allows us to live in the future? That calls for another post.

Some things are so funny

A lot of things are kind of funny, but lately I have been thinking about things that are REALLY FUNNY, and I thought I would share them with you all! (Yes, possums! All of you!) Amazingly, or not, they all kind of intersect with books.

I've said it before: I love a smart-ass. I last said it about Michael Chabon and his characters in my post about my favourite ten reads of 2008. (Starting to think about this year's list. HMMMM.) Anyway, these are my top favourite funny things of the moment:

The comics (and everything else) on Wondermark created by David Malki ! are to die for. Did you like the one at the top of the page? I also loved his screen-shot videos of creating the comics, beautiful little works of art, and I plan to continue rummaging around his site to look at all the offerings.

No-one is smart-ass-ier than the writers of, and nothing can be funnier than McSweeney's. I particularly love McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes. No more need be said on that. I also adore, and have (probably inappropriately) shared with my kids McSweeney's Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists. Suffice it to say that the cover of the book is illustrated by a unicorn, and among other funny topics for lists there are lists something like: "Things that make a unicorn cry" and "Messages sent to me by my mother when she was learning to text-message".

Produced by McSweeney's, there are also more books, a great web-site, and several unusual-format periodicals. Results are uneven, but these people can make coffee come out your nose, if you are not careful.

I am also a recent convert to the BadAss of the Week site by Ben Thomson. From him you can learn real stuff WHILE COFFEE COMES OUT YOUR NOSE! I had seen some of his postings on the Cracked! website, but when he guest-blogged on the Powell's Books enewsletter (see under reading links - it's all good) about Aeschylus, I had to check into him further. This is my second mention of him in a row, he's that good.

A smart laugh must be one of the most satisfying things that can be experienced. Hope you get one, or two...

Here is a bonus Wondermark comic:

(Except I don't have a cat. Draw your own conclusions.)


The marigold hopes nervously that it's OK for me to have reproduced these two that actually illustrate my life. In any case, go to the site and find the ones that mean most to you.

Days you can only have in a small Italian town

photo by souci photo

Well, we have had another of them:

One day we went to look at a local archeological site, Colombarone, unusual even anywhere in Italy. It is history in layers, starting with a Roman villa of the 4th century, which lasted until the 6th century, then was squatted in as a ruin for a while. Then in about the 7th century, the foundations and building materials were re-used for a basilica, which fell into disuse about the 11th century, but were re-used again for a parish church in the 12th century, which also gradually fell into ruin, leaving behind what became a chiesola or little church, which led to the discovery and partial excavation of the site in the 18th century. Over the last 25 years the site has been excavated and researched extensively, and put on display under a canopy. We spent about an hour there, had a personal tour guide, and bought the kids' and the adults' books about the site. It can give you shivers, this stuff.

Then we had to rush to an appointment with a young local ceramicist, Annalisa Speziali, who wanted to teach the kids about ceramics by letting them glaze prepared bodies. Ceramics is one of the historical arts of this region, and as a way of life and art it is dying. They all enjoyed it so much, that she subsequently had them in to her shop to form a body each, which are now drying out, and which she will let them glaze, and then fire in her kiln. Before we leave, we plan to go see her laboratorio with its kiln, out in the country. I guess we will be packing a handful of ceramic pieces in our luggage to bring back. (Check out her props under Art Links, to the right)

THEN we had to rush to meet family friends, a star of the Rossini Opera Festival and his wife and daughter, who happen to be from Rochester. We became friends with them a couple of years ago when we overheard them speaking and recognized their American accents from our part of the world. We had aperitivi with them (Aperol spritzes, natch) at one of our mutual favourite local bars, the bar El Cid. The kids like it because they can bike around in the park, instead of sitting at a table. Sadly, it was not karaoke night, as we had all hoped to enjoy a bit of over-kill together. As it was, musically speaking, we had to content ourselves with the tenor's Bel Canto Concerto a few days later, about which more another day. Suffice it to say it was not a hardship. (See the link to tenor Gregory Kunde's home page under music links, to the right. Greg and his wife Linda are also active in music in Rochester. I have given the link to their chorale as well. We plan to make the trip to see them sing close to home, too. I guess we are joining the legion of fans who follow Greg around the world.)

Side note here: A couple of years ago, we met some family friends from home for a day in Florence (instead of meeting them at the park with our Starbucks coffee, as usual). Just before splitting up to go our separate ways, we decided to buy the kids t-shirts on the ponte vecchio. We chose a booth and stopped at it and started shopping. The guy in the booth recognized the Pesaro accents and asked. Why yes! We had come from Pesaro. He used to work there. Really? Where? At a bar near the Palla di Pomodoro (a really fabulous public sculpture in the park near the sea). Really? We hang around that area. Which one? The Bar El Cid! Well, we'll say hi to Ivan for you. Now that's a small town and a small world.

How places in the world offer such a smorgasbord of cultural options, so casually, so easily, so delightfully? The mix seems impossible for one life to encompass, let alone one day.

The marigold wonders nervously:
This is as valid as summer camp, right?

Modernism - Why?

I realized I need to say a little more about Modernism. Movements do not spring up in a vacuum. Harold Bloom, in his brilliant book The Western Canon, posits literature as a dialectic - or argument - the geniuses of one generation fighting off the influence of the previous generation by creating something new. I love this idea and find it useful when thinking about any part of culture. So...

Modernism was a deliberate attempt to distance the arts of the 20th century from any work that had come before. The screaming pace of industrialization and the brutality and loss of the first world war, led artists to decry the effete and upper-class-feeling decorativeness of the immediate past, not to mention THE PAST in a general way. Pared down, egalitarian, daily experience, communicative - these were the sought-after qualities. Nothing was meant to feel "styled" for effect.

Then...Post-modernism is a response to Modernism. For Post-modernists, Modernism is a style, too, despite its anti-style stance. All of the work of man can be seen to be constructed within a style paradigm, even if that style paradigm says it is about plain-ness. Therefore it is an historical style against which an artist can position his or her work, and can be referred to together with any other historical style in a world view that encompasses the idea of culture as a construct.

The marigold wonders nervously:
that does make it more clear, doesn't it?

Modernism or Post-Modernism: How to Tell

I was talking to a friend about a book and how to place it in modernism or post-modernism, and she urged me to post my simple way of thinking about it here, so:

Quick version:

Modernism offers the simplest version.
Post-modernism is self-referential.

Long version with a couple of examples:

Modernism offers the simplest version - stripped down - with no embellishment or ornamentation. As Mies van der Rohe said, "Less is more." This is true of writing: think of Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. It is true of art: think of Piet Mondrian at the beginnning, through Barnett Newman and up to recent post-minimalist Agnes Martin. In music, the ultimate and explicit practitioner is Schoenberg, whose 12-tone "...technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any...". In architectural design it is the Bauhaus movement, exemplified best by Mies himself.

Post-modernism is self-referential. We no longer need to use Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
...willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.* There is no sense of disappearing into another world, another person's POV, no looking through an imaginary window. The creator is present at all times. Think of Jose Saramago, (in my mind THE most brilliant practitioner of post-modernism on the planet): he is always laughing there behind his narrator. The artist and his world are evident in the construction of the art. Installation art, performance art, conceptual art and multi-media art can fit into post-modernism. Post-modern art can include words, appropriated images and other popular culture references. Step up Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer, to be examples. Likewise for architecture: think of Michael Graves's jokey Dolphin and Swan hotels at Disney World - using references to historical architectural features - nothing to do with form following function, or the demands and/or opportunities of our era.

Post-modern music: not sure I know enough to say...requires some study and thought.

*from Biographia Literaria (1817)

The marigold asks nervously:
Does that help? Suggestions, anyone?

1984 - Steampunk?

I was moved to re-read 1984 by Ann Coulter who said she is the liberal-left's "Emmanuel Goldstein". She noted that although we all claim to have read the book, few got her reference. It is a good book to read (or re-read) in our times. Maybe it is always a good book to read to think about your own time.

It strikes me first of all that this is a steampunk book, as I understand the category: technology projected inaccurately (by chance or on purpose) resulting in a much darker, grimmer vision than actual technological advances have produced.*

Secondly, I suffered several shocks of recognition as I was reading, not police state, totalitarian stuff, but the shifts in the experience of normal daily life:

Children are trained to be wild and ungovernable, while also remaining zealous followers of the party line, questioning only their parents' authority, never the state's. (Think anti-smoking, think environmental issues - the level of programming is comparable.)

Mass-produced "art" for the masses - pornography, cheap broadsides covering crime and sports only, music fabricated by computer-like machines.

The working tax-payers can be seen to be the Outer Party members, held to a boring and rigid orthodoxy, squeezed into position between the luxury-loving, nonsense-issuing Inner Party, and the unconfined, irresponsible Proles. Think of Al Gore, leaving his mansion to fly in his private jet to preach energy-responsibility, or rock star Sheryl Crow thinking we could all start using a little less toilet paper to save trees, while on the other hand, mortgages are given to people who have no hope of paying them, and little girls feel that they want to dress like prostitutes.

The marigold asks nervously: 'Twas ever thus or is it worse now?

* The Toronto Public Library defines "Steampunk" as a "steam-powered and clockwork-driven" future. I think that fits 1984 in style.

Opera Manga - Awesome updates

Well...here's a cool thing. The Vancouver Opera publishes on-line manga mini-versions of their opera season! I was so thrilled to see La Boheme in their line-up because my kids watched the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast version last spring. I can't wait to put it in their hands, but not before I read it over.

The mangas can be found on the delightful Vancouver Opera blog: the link is at the top of my music links list. Go to "read" and look at the bottom of the roll-out links. The blog itself is fun and loose with lots of manga and other pop culture references. Where opera absolutely can and must go to stay with us in our time. The blogger sent me a note to say that they will soon be publishing their opera mangas in a collection, and I am already lining up to get it.

From the Vancouver Opera blog I was led to the Opera Chic blog, which pretty much says it all. (It's the next item on the music links list.) There is a current way to talk about opera, and to position it. It's just that very few opera companies are very agile with it. Not to mention that everything costs money. The Catch-22 is that you have raise money to develop these media to generate revenue to attract people in order raise money and pay for the media you are developing to attract people...

I gave up searching bookstores for P Craig Russell's The Magic Flute and finally ordered it. It is way cool, too. Not only is interesting to me, but my kids pick it up and riffle through the pages looking for the parts that they recognize. They don't really know that opera is meant to be old-fashioned and uncool. They know it to be contemporary and fun.

It's amazingly satisfying to have a place to muse and wonder and have answers generated through the ether in such a direct way.

The marigold wonders nervously:
Is it actually magic?