Last night, we celebrated my partial recovery by drinking a bottle of Zibibbo. The grape, otherwise known as the Muscat of Alexandria, is most often made into a sweet wine or even a passito. Passiti, which go back to the ancient Mediterranean, are wines made from grapes left to dry on the vine. Columella says the Carthaginian version was called Passum, a term that may be preserved in the Italian.
On Saturday, I finally was able to fall asleep in the afternoon, but my slumbers were cut short by the expected arrival of Il nostro amico Russo, who had driven down with my landlord, a lawyer in Palermo, who returns to his home periodically. I was not the most entertaining of hosts, though I did bring out a good bottle of grappa di amarone, barricata. I had managed to drink a glass or two the previous Thursday and now had to watch as Navrozov ruthlessly swilled glass after glass. I begrudged him not my liquor, but I did resent his enjoyment.
Baby, it’s dumb outside! The revolutionaries are blaming Trump for the divisions they have been creating for over 50 years.
This is perhaps my sixth trip to Sicily. I say “perhaps,” because I’m not very good about dates. It’s not that my math skills are particularly deficient. As a schoolboy, I always tested higher in math than in verbal skills. It’s not even my almost complete lack of interest in mathematics, which has kept me blissfully ignorant of most higher math. My real deficiency is something I regard as a virtue: an instinctive refusal to apply numbers to the phenomena of human life. Aristotle did not make the mistake that has been made, over and over, by philosophers since Descartes...
We had decided to stay in a little hotel in the center, the place in which we had spent a week during our first trip to Italy, 30 years ago. I had been foolishly attracted to the Alberto Cesàri, when I discovered that Stendahl had passed a good part of his sojourn in Rome in this very place. It was and is an unpretentious place, though about five years ago they added a rooftop bar and breakfast room. In 1988 most of the guests were tourists like us, but this time we were the only Americans, except for a Fox...
Speaking a different language forces the traveler to wonder how in the world foreigners manage to distort English—and vice versa. In Italy a bar is a place to get coffee and a pastry, have a light lunch, drink a glass of wine, but it is not for serious drinkers and does exclude children.
Growing up, my only training in the martial arts was the experience of getting beaten up by older boys until I learned how to inflict pain even when losing a fight. It was a useful lesson, and just as useful was my intuitive understanding of the basic principle of judo, which (so I have been told) is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be...
A paragraph from an irresponsible rant on the murder of a Saudi journalist. …. It is quite possible that the murder took place exactly as the press, claiming the CIA as the ultimate source, has described it. On the other hand, there is no reason to believe anyone in the media, whether Jim Acosta or Sean Hannity, and after the past few years it is pretty clear we have no reason to believe the FBI, and if the FBI is specializing in political propaganda, can the CIA–the agency that appears to have engaged in massive drug smuggling in order to...
Suppose someone like Mike Pence or Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh were to say–as a transparent comment on the effeminate and race obsessed Barack Obama–that he could not grapple with serious issues because people of his sort are “confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues,” all Hell would break loose. And rightly so, because it is quite wrong to reduce political issues to amateur psychologizing or to find base irrational motives for other people’s arguments. Only children–the word Vladimir Putin used to describe Obama and Ms Clinton–talk this way. But when Obama uses the same words in a transparent...
First, a Digression on What The Greeks Mean To Us The ancient Greeks are among are most significant ancestors or, at least, godfathers. They are one of those mirrors we hold up in order to contemplate our own faces, which we inevitably confuse with theirs. Christians have often read their own darkest impulses into Greek mythology and “idolatry.” (A passing thought: Did St. Paul or St. Jerome really believe educated Greeks worshipped statues made by human hands?) Romantic poets found the dynamic imagination they were trying to cultivate, and since Nietzsche some have found justification for their own chaotic passions...
