Category: Feature

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

26 Jan, 2016

Rome, AMT 16, Part 3

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I’ll try to write more on Naples and weave it into my Rome diary, but to avoid getting too far behind, let us return to Rome, which we did in a geographical sense last Thursday, 20 January 2016. The train ride was uneventful, and we wisely avoided all the taxi-hustlers who greet you as you come out of Termini station and took a regular white Rome taxi.  It was still 20 euros to our apartment in Trastevere, though we have paid more on occasion. The driver was a wit.  He started in on politics.  “Are you following the elections,” he...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

23 Jan, 2016

Naples AMT 16

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I had only been to Naples perhaps twice, once on my own for a day in order to see the Museo Archeologico, and then for New Years with most of the family 7-8 years ago.  Apart from the Museum and the pizza, I cannot say that I much liked the city for all the usual reasons: It was dirty, there were too many beggars, and the whole place seemed sinking in crime, corruption, and sycophancy. This time, I decided, I should give the city one more chance.  I picked a hotel in the Centro Storico, the Albergo Palazzo Decumani.  The...

3

Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

21 Jan, 2016

Rome AMT 16 Part 2

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Rome AMT 16 Part 2 What do I say about Rome, after a brief visit of three and a half days, that has not been said before by everyone including myself?  What could be more tedious than one of those breathless travel pieces written by visitors to famous places who have faithfully followed their master Rick Steves or The Blue Guide?  If only the gushers would adopt the blank-screen strategy I have recommended, and look at Rome with the fresh eyes of a Martian visitor!  But no, they have to say something significant, which means, in the end, they get...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

20 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: The Pursuit of Convenience

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  The story may be apocryphal, but a friend told me the other day that the inventor, for lack of a better word, of the cylindrical paper sachet by means of which coffee bars where cappuccinos cost $5 dispense granulated sugar–thus distinguishing themselves from ordinary coffee bars, where the said sachets are in the more traditional shape of rectangles–took his own life. The man killed himself because he had grown disillusioned, not with mankind generally, but with the small portion of it that was using his invention; apparently, he had envisioned coffee or tea drinkers breaking the sachets in half...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

18 Jan, 2016

Rome in the Year 16 AMT

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Rome 2016 I I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: A Terminal Moraine

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  Last week little brave Norway woke up to the news, sprung on her by the national TV2 channel, that Einar Gerhardsen, who had been her duly elected and much respected Prime Minister no less than three times–in 1945-51, then once more in 1955-63, and again in 1963-65–was, until his death in 1987, a KGB agent.  Recruited along with two members of his cabinet following a state visit to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, thenceforth the august statesman, affectionately known to his countrymen as the “Landsfaderen,” or father of modern Norway, would answer to the code name “Jan.”  In fact, Gerhardsen was...

1

Feature / Peters

6 Jan, 2016

Dissolving the German People by Robert Peters

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Das Volk hat das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt. Wäre es da nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung löste das Volk auf und wählte ein anderes? The preamble of this piece is the last line from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Die Lösung” (“The Solution”), written by the disillusioned Marxist after the failure of the Workers Uprising on 17 July 1953 and the communist government’s response to that uprising.  The title of the poem suggests an objective correlative with the Nazi term “Die Endlösung” (“The Final Solution”), “The Holocaust” in contemporary parlance.  The term also applies, perhaps more appropriately for this piece, to the...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

6 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Summing Up and Down

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  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

1 Jan, 2016

Without Apology

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This piece is a slightly revised version of a piece I published some 16 years ago in a magazine I was then editing. “States Rights?  You can’t be serious!  What do you want to do–restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether he is a leftist at the Nation, a neoliberal at the New Republic, or a National Review minicon (or should that be “moneycon”?) looking for ways to pander and slander their way if not...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

30 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Eating an Englishman

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An extraordinary episode set Moscow’s beau monde on its ear last week–extraordinary in the sense that, if a cannibal, instead of boiling an Englishman in the nude, were to eat him together with his bowler hat, silk umbrella, and brogues by John Lobb of St. James’s Street, this might be considered outrageous cannibal behavior.  “What an extraordinary way to act at table,” other, more fastidious cannibals would be heard muttering. A veteran journalist by the name of Viktor Shenderovich was interviewed on “Moscow Echo”–supposedly the last oasis of dissent yet extant in the Russian media mainstream–and made some remarks about...