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.
Zionism is much in the news these days, as are its many antipodes, and for reasons that are, lamentably, all too clear, the whole subject is a journalistic minefield. Rather than treading lightly, however, I seek forgiveness of the gentle reader in advance should an inadvertent explosion disturb his otherwise placid Wednesday afternoon.
In the wake of that dinner party in Brussels the other week, a couple of images haunt me. Well, haunt is perhaps too dramatic a way of putting it, but they have certainly stuck in my mind.
“Let us not argue,” I said to the neighbor on my left, who had just boasted to me of “meeting Putin. You know it’s his birthday today?” The dinner was a seated affair – forty tables of eight – in lavishness roughly at midpoint between a royal gala and a bar mitzvah in the Hamptons. The host addressed the buzzing swarm in Flemish, as all but a handful were compatriots, but as bad luck would have it one of the English speakers was the neighbor to my left.
What sorrows I have, I drown in brandy. In Armagnac, ideally, and it always strikes me as unjust that this remarkable panacea is essentially regarded as a niche tipple, a rich man’s foible, a postprandial showpiece at a far remove from the alcoholic mainstream of gin, whisky, and vodka. Even Armagnac’s big brother, Cognac, is relegated to the margins of wine lists, to say nothing of local brandies like Italy’s very passable Vecchia Romagna.
