Gentle reader, I will be frank. There are no two gentlemen of Verona in my story, and the one and only gentleman I dilate upon rather belongs to Sicily than to the north of Italy. But ever since my salad days as a jobbing journalist in London I have envied my yellow press colleagues writing headlines of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” variety….
I must’ve been staring at the sign over the restaurant in Via Roma for too long, because my wife pulled on my coat sleeve and asked if everything was all right. This is a new Japanese restaurant in Palermo, and like all new Japanese restaurants in Palermo it was started by the Chinese
Say what you will about them, but my compatriots have brains. A new survey is just out, and though the gentle reader likely shares my own derisory view of social science, I want to use the occasion to vent some national pride. The survey, by the Moscow think tank Levada Center, sampled 1600 adults spread over 134 locations throughout Russia who were interviewed in person in their homes.
Across meridian and frontier, the world seems to be shrinking. Like a cheap shirt thrown in the washing machine by a careless teenager, or else by the slovenly and incompetent mother who raised him, it seems to have lost its original color and dimension over the spin cycle of a generation.
There is a historical episode to which time and again I turn as more news of the West’s strategic enfeeblement comes over the transom. The gentle reader may find the reference obscure, but I can assure him that to most Russians of my age and background it’s textbook stuff. The episode is the June 1937 torture and execution, on Stalin’s orders, of Marshal “Red Napoleon” Tukhachevsky. His confession of having been all along a German agent, which survives in the archives of the secret police, “is dappled with a brown spray that was later found to be blood-spattered by a...
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell. But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical.
A friend of a friend asked his friend, a medical student, how many bones there are in the human body. In reply he heard that there is no definite answer. “You mean to tell me,” he pressed on in astonishment, “that since the days of the Victorian vivisectionists nobody’s bothered to come up with the answer?”
The gentle reader may recall that I was once a student at Yale. There, unforgettably, a preternaturally astute classmate named Steve (where is he now, I wonder? In a nuthouse, most likely, along with everybody else who is preternaturally astute) once buttonholed me to deliver a lecture on the architecture of the university, specifically the residential colleges, the Sterling Memorial Library, and other structures of the 1930’s.
I have often wondered about the principle of disclosure, which is so easily taken to interesting lengths. Of course like others I can applaud when a journalist doing a story on some Fortune500 company is criticized for not revealing that the CEO is his brother-in-law, or when a juror is prosecuted for concealing an intimate connection with the man on trial. But beyond that?
All drunken men are alike, one might say paraphrasing Tolstoy, but every drunken woman shows inebriation in her own way. Up to a point, however. When they’ve had one too many, all Russian women of my generation or younger end up singing the same song with the inevitability of a cuckoo clock chiming the hour…
