Author: Andrei Navrozov

The favorite time to set off fireworks in Palermo is just after lunch, when of course it’s still light out and nobody can see them.  “No matter,” muse local worthies, “because everybody can hear them, and that’s the main thing.”  It’s a little like publishing books for the blind which are actually abracadabra set in braille and justifying the crazy venture by saying that what’s important is the feeling in the reader’s fingers. The South loves noise.  Garbage men make it, opera singers make it, quarreling neighbors make it, and the high point of the symphony season here a few...

Whenever I happen to see archival footage, which is usually in biopics, of twentieth-century musical titans, composers like Rachmaninov or Britten, I have the irrepressible sensation that actually these people belong in the nineteenth century and that their moving and speaking presence in the twenty-first is a clever trick, something like the tricolor celluloid screen my grandmother attached to the giant water-filled lens in front of her black-and-white Soviet-made TV to create the illusion of it being a modern color set.  The translucent screen made the top, where the sky might be in a film, seem blue, the bottom was...

Though I’ve been his loyal customer for the better part of a decade, our butcher regards me with suspicion.  I see it in his eyes, as he looks away in the general direction of pork loin.  They remind me of the eyes of a local pharmacist, in my adolescence in Moscow, from whom I used to buy potassium permanganate by the gross. 

It’s that time of year again.  The doldrums of August is when the fig season is at its peak, and nobody from Syracuse to Cagliari wants to talk about anything but figs or to do anything other than consume them. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” as the poet said.  The sonnet, as the gentle reader may remember, is a melancholy, nostalgic dirge, just the kind of bagatelle one imagines Wednesday’s Child whistling as he pours himself a glass of Hine’s Rare & Delicate.  But in fact, few things on earth are mightier antidotes to grumpy nostalgia...

“I hate the working class,” my godfather, an artist who painted dream landscapes and equally apolitical still lifes, liked to say between sips of lukewarm tea, I fear only half in jest.  I thought of him the other day, when a neighbor’s ancient water main – expanding from violent summer heat, or else dislodged by one of the minor earthquakes we get every so often in Palermo – leaked into my ceiling and I rushed out in search of somebody who could stop the flooding. I don’t know, perhaps Switzerland, Holland, or some other kind of Germany is an exception,...

I have never hidden my impecuniousness from the gentle reader, indeed I have flaunted it on occasion.  And I do so again now, because otherwise the image I’m about to conjure up – with me on the deck of a large yacht, champagne glass in hand, exchanging pleasant inconsequentialities with the other guests – would reflect badly on the reputation of Wednesday’s Child.  This kind of story only makes sense if the narrator is poorer than the proverbial church mouse, and yes, I qualify.  I’m as poor as Browning’s “ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned,” if you remember...

Events of the week gone by have rent me in twain, with tears of impotence and helpless laughter contending for preeminence.  The tears came from watching the Kevlar-clad armada of Putin’s private army, known euphemistically as the National Guard, stomping on women and children in the center of Moscow.  Trust me, I’m not a claret-swilling sentimentalist who blubbers at the sight of roadkill.  Moreover, I’ve seen as much footage of police brutality in France, in Germany, and in the U.S. as the next guy.  But this was different. Probably like the gentle reader, I have in my mind a composite...

I often think that when the devil was designing his snares, he fretted about the most basic things like increased efficiency, ease of operation, and mass appeal.

Now to Agrigento, nay, to the selfsame hallowed spot where our Foundation’s eponymous helmsman passed the better part of last winter.  The annual weekend of mulberry picking was upon us, with tubs of pure grain spirit wherever you looked – the better to preserve the foragers’ prize in the cold months to come – and white shirts splattered with the fruit’s arterial blood, crimson as the famous Kensington Gore stage prop. As the day’s harvest was jarred and dinner drew near, a remarkable spectacle unfolded.  The people in a house next door harbor a multitude of cats – perhaps as...