Category: Access

We had snow in Palermo for the first time in fifty years, and the young barman in a truck stop where I go for coffee whenever Signor Baldo, my provider of choice, is indisposed, finally spoke to me of something other than the weather. “You’re Russian,” he said, because that’s what I’d told him the day before. Then, in a confidential tone, as though imparting some lifesaving news, he continued:  “In Russia, you beat Hitler.”  I often wonder about what the average man knows.  Reading Russian viewer comments on YouTube the other evening, after watching some stupid police drama, I...

What’s next, a thoughtful reader was asking in reply to my musings last week, a ban on cotton?  Well, since toilet paper had been put forward the week before last as a candidate for the ban, I suppose cotton is not that far afield, but I would argue that books is something we need to look at more urgently.  And not just new books, either.  The burning of libraries, private as well as public, would surely send a powerful signal to paper producers all over the world to stop despoiling our natural habitat, at the same time providing vegan workshops...

“If you want to become an optimist and really understand life,” thought Chekhov, “stop believing the things that are said or written about it and just try seeing it for yourself.”  As I’m down with the ‘flu, and all I’m seeing at the moment are the wooden posts and canopy of my Chinese opium bed, it’s a little difficult to understand just how optimism has wormed its way into that sentence. In the morning my near and dear crowd around the bed like bearded worthies in Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, reproaching me for past crimes against health...

When I was a child, custom required small children to nap for an hour in the afternoon, the Quiet Hour being the accepted euphemism for these postprandial outings in the poppy field.  The rather surprisingly bourgeois practice was also mandatory in Soviet kindergartens, in young pioneer camps, in short, wherever parents, older siblings, or staff wanted to regain a life of their own for at least a portion of the day.  Here in Italy I often think back on that Soviet version of the siesta, which sheds light on a whole variety of goings-on in a country that in so...