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...
Called “Google Camp,” presumably because to Google’s event organizers being camp is always a good thing, the party drew some 300 of the great and the good who had used 114 private planes and an armada of megayachts to get here, expanding Sicily’s carbon footprint, by nearly one thousand tons of carbon dioxide, to the size of a Neanderthal’s flip-flop.
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...
I hate to sound like the sort of monomaniacal bore at a cocktail party who will only talk to you about the regrettable slump in hedgehog hospital funding, but really, this is important. The other week, in a post entitled “Anti-Homestead Acts,” I touched on the news that the ogres in the Kremlin are using tax law to alienate an already starving populace from the tiny kitchen garden plots of land on which the subsistence of millions of Russians, particularly the elderly, had been depending since the 1990’s. Now, as if such a thing were possible, there comes yet more...
A hundred years from now historians will doubtless scratch their heads over the news that the West’s only audible rebuttal to Moscow’s mendacity in Osaka has come from a notorious invert. Sir Elton John has found Vladimir Putin’s argument against Western “liberalism” unconvincing, because to him the word means, above all, open practice of homosexuality. Most other people, however – those, as it were, without an axe to grind – cheered the father of Slavic nations from Oslo to Timbuktu, which was understandable in that it was them, rather than Sir Elton and his niche audience of degenerates, that his...
