Category: Wednesday’s Child

My post last week occasioned a lively discussion.  Not all of it was on point – divertingly, I was made to learn the meaning of “small ball” and “on base percentage” – but let us press on in more or less the same vein.  As the gentle reader may recall, last week’s post involved a man in a Russian village who stands to lose his children because one of them has taken up crocheting and there is no television in the family home.  For those who wish to follow the story, the man’s name is Ivan Sidorov and the village,...

A curious thing happened some days ago in the village of N– .  Nineteenth-century writers were exacting about sparing the localities where their narratives unfolded a likely embarrassment of disclosure, while at the same time saving their audience from fatigue attendant on superfluous knowledge.  Hoping that my own gentle reader may one day reward me, if only by renewing his subscription, I shall now adopt this antiquated practice. At first glance the tiny village, with a population of just over a thousand, seems a bucolic and tranquil sort of place, but facts show that it is in fact a human...

I have no statistics to corroborate this, but I would wager the incidents of choking to death in households where grace is said before meals are few and far between.

The political Right, both in the United States and in Europe, has come to perceive the professed worldview of Russia’s ruling junta as a conservative antidote to the poison of modernity, a somber counterweight to the West’s cartoonish decline, and an infusion of plain old horse sense to arrest its slide into liberal dementia.  To be sure, the poison and the decline and the dementia are all very much in evidence, yet the plain old horse sense issuing from the mighty steppes west of the Urals, alas, is just demagoguery – eyewash and bunkum on a par with the Soviet...

A new branch of agriculture developed in Russia, perhaps to compensate her denizens for the burning forests and poisoned lakes, is called troll farming.  The credit for this innovation goes to the man known as “Putin’s chef,” who also has in the commodious pocket of his apron the government contracts for supplying food to public institutions, such as schools and kindergartens, as evidenced recently by mass outbreaks of salmonella among Moscow’s children.

The favorite time to set off fireworks in Palermo is just after lunch, when of course it’s still light out and nobody can see them.  “No matter,” muse local worthies, “because everybody can hear them, and that’s the main thing.”  It’s a little like publishing books for the blind which are actually abracadabra set in braille and justifying the crazy venture by saying that what’s important is the feeling in the reader’s fingers. The South loves noise.  Garbage men make it, opera singers make it, quarreling neighbors make it, and the high point of the symphony season here a few...

Whenever I happen to see archival footage, which is usually in biopics, of twentieth-century musical titans, composers like Rachmaninov or Britten, I have the irrepressible sensation that actually these people belong in the nineteenth century and that their moving and speaking presence in the twenty-first is a clever trick, something like the tricolor celluloid screen my grandmother attached to the giant water-filled lens in front of her black-and-white Soviet-made TV to create the illusion of it being a modern color set.  The translucent screen made the top, where the sky might be in a film, seem blue, the bottom was...

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,...