New Year’s Eve is always a conundrum wrapped in tinsel dilemmas, still more so for a habitual inebriate prone to superstition. But even when sober, my compatriots believe that “as you meet it, so you’ll spend it,” meaning that the last day in December represents the coming year in miniature, something like one of those presepio Biblical scenes, complete with microscopic sheep and papier-mâché Magi.
Well, here we are again, on the isthmus between Catholicism and Orthodoxy – shall we call it Christhmus? – as all around us the Italians stock up on panettone and prosecco while we fast. No worries, because in two weeks’ time, when our Christmas comes, we infidels can buy those festive trappings discounted.
My thesis last week was that the ambition to create world caliphates on the part of groups or regimes with totalitarian methods and aims often breaks on strategic mistiming, of which the invasions of Israel and Ukraine are examples currently in the news. Peace, peace, peace is the war by which the West is won, whereas those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
Contemplative inaction, as the gentle reader may be reminded by the calls to patience back in the days when he was a boisterous child, is of the essence. But then, when at last the fish takes the bait, it’s dexterous action that is of the essence, with the angler jerking his rod at just the right moment to set the hook and eventually landing the catch in the hand net.
The big reason I welcome colder weather is that after the inescapable shorts and sleeveless shirts of Sicilian summer I can wear jackets and suits again. But not only because a jacket lends respectability – my vaguely professorial look has on occasion helped me get credit from merchants and of course I would never go see the bank manager dressed for a budget excursion – but also because a gentleman’s jacket is like a lady’s handbag. It safeguards the algorithms.
The gentle reader, I’m quite certain of it, is long grown tired of my adventures in the dentist’s chair. But the naked man – or the man with lice, in another version of the Russian proverb – keeps on about the bathhouse, as “thou talkest of what ails thee.” And so I square up for yet another round of self-indulgence and self-pity, an indifferent hand to begin with, but downright embarrassing when played once too often.
In the 1975 Soviet film classic An Irony of Fate, or Did you Have a Nice Bath, two principal characters exchange New Year’s gifts. The man gives his fiancée a bottle of “French perfume,” while she presents him with another contraband import, an electric shaver “with the floating heads.” The exchange was not meant to condone black marketeering or to condemn conspicuous consumption, as the epoch to which the film belonged had been a continuation of Khrushchev’s “thaw.” It was meant to show that the characters’ extravagance is lovingly reciprocal.
Like many other people, ever since he became a household name I thought Elon Musk an idiot. An idiot, mind you, can be a successful entrepreneur, even at times a good husband or father, and outwardly in all respects he seems a perfectly ordinary fellow, but if you listen to him for just a few moments you realize that this kind of dimness cannot be hid under a bushel.
The smell of burned cheese and cheap frying oil overhanging a street, such as Palermo’s savagely pedestrianized Via Maqueda, signals the presence of the mass tourist. The tourist is both predator and prey, the collective criminal and the collective victim of his crime. He is here on Sicily to pursue happiness, but instead has it rudely imposed on him by people whose idea of a transient’s happiness is their own enrichment.
Hallowmas, which is today, marks the start of the pomegranate season, a fruit that evokes the myth of the goddess and her chthonic descent into winter. With persimmon and prickly pear, pomegranate forms a trio of late autumn fruit which, at least on this side of the Messina Strait, is largely overlooked by cultivators. A forager’s dream, they just grow, often by the roadside. They are the partridge, woodcock, and grouse of the fructiferous world.
