Wedding 2010
It's not mine or even my daughter's, but my step-daughter's wedding that suddenly appears over the horizon like a glowing ball of tendriled flowers. We will sit down with thirty-five others who love her and the adorable groom. What to do with the jubilation? Her father, my husband, spent all his alternative energy years ago protesting Vietnam. For this happy occasion, he goes out and buys a new sport coat. That's it. He will not propose a toast nor sing some version of the Minnesota Rouser--Hat's off to.....
As I orient myself toward this celebration, images of my own parents flit through my memory. Both my weddings occurred elsewhere than Charleston, S. Carolina, where I grew up. My parents flew north, first to New York, then to St. Paul for these weddings, some twenty years apart. As we sat around the opening dinner for the second, my father, the gregarious Italian, smiled around the table and commented, "We are here to honor a marriage. Is it yours?" He bowed slightly to my dear friend at his right, missing me entirely. A few moments later, he said, "I have two daughters, and I see one of them is here." He looked at me, but did not recognize my sister from Boston a few seats away.
Aghast, I cried later to my friends, as we stood outside: "Why didn't my mother tell me he was losing it?" My mother: Queen of Denial. Only now years later do I recognize the justness of her behavior. Why trouble me about something I could do nothing about? Why incite me to dis-invite them, which I hate to admit, I might have done at that age.
For the rest of the weekend my father behaved rather normally. Only as we sat in the airport restaurant for a final meal did he show off his rambling brain. As his finger scrolled down the menu, he asked the waitress, "Can I have this and this and this and this?" She queried me with her eyes, and I shook my head. "He'll have the chicken cacciatore," I said and turned to listen to my mother effuse at the other side of the table. She was describing her years as a librarian cataloging ancient collections of Charlestoniana.
I don't want to shock my step-daughter or her fiance. May there be no discordant behavior at their celebration. I'll probably nothing more than smile broadly and hug them hard. Yet two poems skip and jump or burn brightly when I think of them: "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, for starters. It's about marriage; it's humorous, and each of the partners glows with charming idiosyncrasy. The lines that pop up this morning are
The Owl looked up to the stars above
And sang to a small guitar
"Oh, lovely Pussy, oh Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are,
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Then there's the "runcible spoon" which helped them dine "on mince and slices of quince" before
...hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced to the light of the moon.
Since I'm ga-ga for cats and birds, it's not surprising that this charmer follows me around.
But for serious wishes, for wishes of swoon, nothing can beat Keats' "Bright Star":
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
I know, the ending breathes the poet's youthful death and his love's long pining. I probably won't recite it. I don't want to frighten them or speak of death on the occasion. Yet Kerats' poem carries such beautiful, expansive yearning. I carry it with me, its lines slipping into consciousness, twined with the Owl and the Pussycat, as I go out into this chilly October morning among the falling leaves and the last brilliant maples.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Margotlog: Loot or Museums in New Worlds and Old
Margotlog: Loot or Museums in New Worlds and Old
Recently, two excellent Minneapolis Institute of Arts docents guided my writing class from Metro State through a "City and Country" tour, with an added stop in the African rooms. I've followed this practice of taking writing students to the MIA for years, partly because many of them have never visited this astonishing treasure in our midst and because it's a break from the rather bare walls of the classroom. After the tour, the students must write a description of a work of art that particularly intrigues them.
I wasn't with the class during this year's tour because I was in Italy, visiting another order of museums entirely. Museums like Ferrara's Schifanoia, which was a palace decorated for the pleasure of the Este family, to relieve them of boredom with ranks of frescoes depicting court life and the "decades" of the zodiac, meaning every month divided into three "ten's" or decades, with a representative image for each "decade." Or the city's archaeological museum with the two Roman piroques I've described in an earlier blog. Or a convent with its own set of frescoes, badly damaged by water seepage, but still curious and interesting.
What does one do, in the middle of a prairie and river city, in the wilds of the "New World" to bring the world's art into your midst? As I understand it, the MIA was founded around private collections, and still benefits from the extraordinary generosity of individuals who donate either funds or art itself to the museum. I've never studied the means of this acquisition, though from time to time, I've read about collectors, and am currently writing a novel based on the lives of Libby and James Jackson Jarves. He acquired Italian "gold-ground," late medieval paintings for almost a song in the middle of the nineteenth century. Often he bought these works from former religious houses destroyed by Napoleon or from aristocratic families fallen on hard times whose chapels were destroyed.
This year, my Metro State writing class contains students from around the world: Laos, the Sudan, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, even Greece by way of North Africa. Not to mention Minnesota or Wisconsin-born students with their own sets of attitudes and experiences. It's quite exciting to work with such students. The class's visit to the African wing meant to elicit their questions about the purpose of what we call art, and along the way to raise their awareness or at least concern about how we acquire art.
Of course much Western art was initially intended for religious purposes. Fra Angelico, for instance, was a priest whose radiant images of the Madonna or Christ or other figures from his life continue to evoke devotion when one visits the monastery of San Marco in Florence. Yet over the centuries some of his work has become detached from its original religious purpose and now hangs in museums. We Westernized Christians who frequent museums have become used to this. But when my students from Africa encountered objects which had spiritual significance in their original countries, they were disturbed. They used the term "loot," implying that the images were stolen or taken without permission from the people who made them.
The docents explained that many American museums return works from Native American and African people if they discover that works have been stolen or sold to middlemen during wars and other violence. Likewise, the attitudes of colonialism and racism have led explorers and other "visitors" to "lift" statues and other objects from communities these visitors considered "primitive" which is another word for ignorant, superstitious. In the name of science, such "looting" occured for the purpose of study and the advancement of knowledge.
Yet, when my students from African confront us in the United States with their concern, the goal of advancing science rings hollow. I relate the bits of information I have about Native American tribes petitioning institutions like the Smithsonian in Washington for the return of sacred objects as well as the bones of their ancestors, brought into the museum more than a century ago during what we casually call the Indian wars. Yes, restitution for past errors is going on.
My students' concern reminds me of the distance we frequent museum goers have traveled from one kind of devotion to another. It's not a mistake that, for someone like me, museums evoke spiritual awe--at the range of human devotion, the beauty or compelling strangeness of religious objects, and overall, the astonishing creativity of humankind. Yes, visiting the MIA, I feel linked to an impulse toward reverence, appreciation for natural beauty, and the need to portray what is morally troubling--impulses that travel the world. But objects from other cultures cannot have for me the intense meaning they evoke in those who actually bow down and worship them. Placing such objects in museums may preserve them, may spread their essence wider, but it inevitably denatures them. And for people who know firsthand the religious power of these objects, seeing them out of their natural context is, indeed, troubling, even shocking. Something inside them shouts, "This is wrong." Unless they are told the entire story of how these objects made their way into the museum, they will probably continue to feel this way.
Thus, our visit to the museum sends education in many directions: my students continue to teach me not to treat what I see in American museums as "given," but to ask how these works got there. It's a huge question which cannot be answered all at once because the answer is different for every object.
At least becoming more sensitive makes me aware of the question
Recently, two excellent Minneapolis Institute of Arts docents guided my writing class from Metro State through a "City and Country" tour, with an added stop in the African rooms. I've followed this practice of taking writing students to the MIA for years, partly because many of them have never visited this astonishing treasure in our midst and because it's a break from the rather bare walls of the classroom. After the tour, the students must write a description of a work of art that particularly intrigues them.
I wasn't with the class during this year's tour because I was in Italy, visiting another order of museums entirely. Museums like Ferrara's Schifanoia, which was a palace decorated for the pleasure of the Este family, to relieve them of boredom with ranks of frescoes depicting court life and the "decades" of the zodiac, meaning every month divided into three "ten's" or decades, with a representative image for each "decade." Or the city's archaeological museum with the two Roman piroques I've described in an earlier blog. Or a convent with its own set of frescoes, badly damaged by water seepage, but still curious and interesting.
What does one do, in the middle of a prairie and river city, in the wilds of the "New World" to bring the world's art into your midst? As I understand it, the MIA was founded around private collections, and still benefits from the extraordinary generosity of individuals who donate either funds or art itself to the museum. I've never studied the means of this acquisition, though from time to time, I've read about collectors, and am currently writing a novel based on the lives of Libby and James Jackson Jarves. He acquired Italian "gold-ground," late medieval paintings for almost a song in the middle of the nineteenth century. Often he bought these works from former religious houses destroyed by Napoleon or from aristocratic families fallen on hard times whose chapels were destroyed.
This year, my Metro State writing class contains students from around the world: Laos, the Sudan, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, even Greece by way of North Africa. Not to mention Minnesota or Wisconsin-born students with their own sets of attitudes and experiences. It's quite exciting to work with such students. The class's visit to the African wing meant to elicit their questions about the purpose of what we call art, and along the way to raise their awareness or at least concern about how we acquire art.
Of course much Western art was initially intended for religious purposes. Fra Angelico, for instance, was a priest whose radiant images of the Madonna or Christ or other figures from his life continue to evoke devotion when one visits the monastery of San Marco in Florence. Yet over the centuries some of his work has become detached from its original religious purpose and now hangs in museums. We Westernized Christians who frequent museums have become used to this. But when my students from Africa encountered objects which had spiritual significance in their original countries, they were disturbed. They used the term "loot," implying that the images were stolen or taken without permission from the people who made them.
The docents explained that many American museums return works from Native American and African people if they discover that works have been stolen or sold to middlemen during wars and other violence. Likewise, the attitudes of colonialism and racism have led explorers and other "visitors" to "lift" statues and other objects from communities these visitors considered "primitive" which is another word for ignorant, superstitious. In the name of science, such "looting" occured for the purpose of study and the advancement of knowledge.
Yet, when my students from African confront us in the United States with their concern, the goal of advancing science rings hollow. I relate the bits of information I have about Native American tribes petitioning institutions like the Smithsonian in Washington for the return of sacred objects as well as the bones of their ancestors, brought into the museum more than a century ago during what we casually call the Indian wars. Yes, restitution for past errors is going on.
My students' concern reminds me of the distance we frequent museum goers have traveled from one kind of devotion to another. It's not a mistake that, for someone like me, museums evoke spiritual awe--at the range of human devotion, the beauty or compelling strangeness of religious objects, and overall, the astonishing creativity of humankind. Yes, visiting the MIA, I feel linked to an impulse toward reverence, appreciation for natural beauty, and the need to portray what is morally troubling--impulses that travel the world. But objects from other cultures cannot have for me the intense meaning they evoke in those who actually bow down and worship them. Placing such objects in museums may preserve them, may spread their essence wider, but it inevitably denatures them. And for people who know firsthand the religious power of these objects, seeing them out of their natural context is, indeed, troubling, even shocking. Something inside them shouts, "This is wrong." Unless they are told the entire story of how these objects made their way into the museum, they will probably continue to feel this way.
Thus, our visit to the museum sends education in many directions: my students continue to teach me not to treat what I see in American museums as "given," but to ask how these works got there. It's a huge question which cannot be answered all at once because the answer is different for every object.
At least becoming more sensitive makes me aware of the question
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Margotlog: Country and City in Italy
Margotlog: Country and City in Italy
Food and the countryside--two topics my Italian friends never tire of discussing. I think of their food fascination as "lingua" which means tongue as well as language, or as in the name of a nice family-run restaurant on the other side of the Arno in Florence, "Casalingua," home tongue or home cooking. When my friend Pat Smith who's lived in Italy since the 60s argues with me across the lunch table in refined Ferrara about how to spell and thus interpret a hometown cheese of my father's, it's a perfect example of this crossover from language to food. I say, "When I visited my grandfather's hometown of Pescopagano with my father in the late 70s, his cousins explained the town cheese as "cacciacavallo," or horse's catch. The two round balls of cheese are covered with wax and connected by a small rope. So when horsemen went hunting, "caccia," they threw the cheeses over the horse's neck to have ready for lunch."
"No, no," Pat insists. "It's cacio, which means cheese, or cheese carried to market on the backs of horses."
Our mutual friend, Ruey from Vermont, also come to Italy years before married to an Italian, tries to soothe our ruffled feathers: "It's all in how many c's." Now when I look up the cheese in my dizionario, I find no form of its name, but both words: caccia, to hunt, and cacio, the whole cheese. Hmmm. There in the mists of time and local dialects that cheese rises above the rims of Pescopagano mountains, two little globes connected by a rope of stars which loops into an outline of a horse.
Each town or village, paese, has its peculiarities, bred of isolation and domination by various other European powers: Spanish and French in the south; Austrian and Napoleon's French in the north. Holding tight to home, refusing to relinguish affection to a larger nation, because for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, there was no centralized authority, only the local priest, a distant magistrate somewhere down the mountain, and the taste of home, dialect, and food on the tongue.
Scratch an Italian and find a countryman. My father, whose trail I'm tracing to Ferrara where he studied the violin and lived on the edge of the ghetto in the mid-1920s, couldn't have been further removed from the earth. He hated to get his hands dirty, those hands which even to the edge of his death, stroked the violin strings with talent and delight. But his speech, once he got together with his three brothers, could become quite earthy. We girls and our North Dakota Swedish and German mother disdained his silliness, his obsession with the "cesso" or toilet, and his swearing in Italian: "per de la madonna!" We, in our Protestant rigor, knew almost nothing about la madonna except at Christmas when she bore the baby Jesus and one of us might be chosen to portray her in the church pageant.
Ferrara does not have as many medallions or niches devoted to Mary such as one finds at almost every street corner in Florence. I wonder if this difference may be related to large population of Jews which before World War II lived in Ferrara. My last day there, I follow the map to the Hebrew cemetery which is just inside the city walls, and find, first, a bit of farmland inside the city. Serene, small fields are bounded by hedgerows, planted with fennel, cabbages, and herbs. A placard describes the Renaissance town planner, Rosetti's desire to retain country life within the city, and possibly hold onto some source of nourishment in the event of siege. Huge birds I identify as some kind of woodpecker, with beige bodies and intensely blue wings, as blue as our blue jay, swoop over the fields and land, hopping like flickers. Also like flickers these birds sport a large area of white just before their tails. Later, Pat and Giangi admit they have no idea what bird I've seen.
Locating the Hebrew cemetery with its large metal gates and note to ring the custode, I wander for an hour in this huge, almost empty park of ginkos, oaks, and ash. Some gardeners are shoveling up the ginko seeds which are responsible for the peculiar smell which I've noticed even on the approach to the cemetery. I pause before graves with the names "Finzi" and "Contini," reminiscent of the Finzi-Continis of Bassani's novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. When I checked into the very comfortable B&B, Locanda Borgonuovo, the son of the owners insisted there was no such garden. Perhaps so, but the cemetery provides a restful, enigmatic tribute to these distant people, so many killed in the Holocaust. At one edge a plain building stands with doors wide: I pause and look inside. On a black table, scarred and old, stands a menorah, or am I not remembering correctly? It seems to me some object of devotion rests there. A line of chairs faces the table, where I imagine real people as well as ghosts sometimes gather to attest to a way of life practiced for centuries and memorialized in this park.
Food and the countryside--two topics my Italian friends never tire of discussing. I think of their food fascination as "lingua" which means tongue as well as language, or as in the name of a nice family-run restaurant on the other side of the Arno in Florence, "Casalingua," home tongue or home cooking. When my friend Pat Smith who's lived in Italy since the 60s argues with me across the lunch table in refined Ferrara about how to spell and thus interpret a hometown cheese of my father's, it's a perfect example of this crossover from language to food. I say, "When I visited my grandfather's hometown of Pescopagano with my father in the late 70s, his cousins explained the town cheese as "cacciacavallo," or horse's catch. The two round balls of cheese are covered with wax and connected by a small rope. So when horsemen went hunting, "caccia," they threw the cheeses over the horse's neck to have ready for lunch."
"No, no," Pat insists. "It's cacio, which means cheese, or cheese carried to market on the backs of horses."
Our mutual friend, Ruey from Vermont, also come to Italy years before married to an Italian, tries to soothe our ruffled feathers: "It's all in how many c's." Now when I look up the cheese in my dizionario, I find no form of its name, but both words: caccia, to hunt, and cacio, the whole cheese. Hmmm. There in the mists of time and local dialects that cheese rises above the rims of Pescopagano mountains, two little globes connected by a rope of stars which loops into an outline of a horse.
Each town or village, paese, has its peculiarities, bred of isolation and domination by various other European powers: Spanish and French in the south; Austrian and Napoleon's French in the north. Holding tight to home, refusing to relinguish affection to a larger nation, because for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, there was no centralized authority, only the local priest, a distant magistrate somewhere down the mountain, and the taste of home, dialect, and food on the tongue.
Scratch an Italian and find a countryman. My father, whose trail I'm tracing to Ferrara where he studied the violin and lived on the edge of the ghetto in the mid-1920s, couldn't have been further removed from the earth. He hated to get his hands dirty, those hands which even to the edge of his death, stroked the violin strings with talent and delight. But his speech, once he got together with his three brothers, could become quite earthy. We girls and our North Dakota Swedish and German mother disdained his silliness, his obsession with the "cesso" or toilet, and his swearing in Italian: "per de la madonna!" We, in our Protestant rigor, knew almost nothing about la madonna except at Christmas when she bore the baby Jesus and one of us might be chosen to portray her in the church pageant.
Ferrara does not have as many medallions or niches devoted to Mary such as one finds at almost every street corner in Florence. I wonder if this difference may be related to large population of Jews which before World War II lived in Ferrara. My last day there, I follow the map to the Hebrew cemetery which is just inside the city walls, and find, first, a bit of farmland inside the city. Serene, small fields are bounded by hedgerows, planted with fennel, cabbages, and herbs. A placard describes the Renaissance town planner, Rosetti's desire to retain country life within the city, and possibly hold onto some source of nourishment in the event of siege. Huge birds I identify as some kind of woodpecker, with beige bodies and intensely blue wings, as blue as our blue jay, swoop over the fields and land, hopping like flickers. Also like flickers these birds sport a large area of white just before their tails. Later, Pat and Giangi admit they have no idea what bird I've seen.
Locating the Hebrew cemetery with its large metal gates and note to ring the custode, I wander for an hour in this huge, almost empty park of ginkos, oaks, and ash. Some gardeners are shoveling up the ginko seeds which are responsible for the peculiar smell which I've noticed even on the approach to the cemetery. I pause before graves with the names "Finzi" and "Contini," reminiscent of the Finzi-Continis of Bassani's novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. When I checked into the very comfortable B&B, Locanda Borgonuovo, the son of the owners insisted there was no such garden. Perhaps so, but the cemetery provides a restful, enigmatic tribute to these distant people, so many killed in the Holocaust. At one edge a plain building stands with doors wide: I pause and look inside. On a black table, scarred and old, stands a menorah, or am I not remembering correctly? It seems to me some object of devotion rests there. A line of chairs faces the table, where I imagine real people as well as ghosts sometimes gather to attest to a way of life practiced for centuries and memorialized in this park.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Margotlog: ltaly: Where They Talk of Walls and Sun
Where They Talk of Walls and Sun
My last stop in Italy was with my wonderful friends, the visual artist Patricia Glee Smith (born in Savannah, Illinois) * and her Italian husband Giangi Poli. Giangi used to create documentaries on science and politics for Italian public television; in fact, my first night there, we viewed some of his 1970 films made in the United States. The subjects were protest and the environment. Particularly powerful, I thought, was one about Staten Island where huge scows carried garbage from the other New York boroughs and dumped it. Giangi documented a fish kill along the shores of Staten Island where children flitted into the waves, nudging or lifting dead fish onto the beach, then kicking them around like beach balls. I had forgotten that along with protesting the Vietnam war, young Americans sang and marched for clean air and clean water. The legacy of that protest remains in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, still constantly under siege from various interest groups.
Over thirty years, Pat and Giangi have moved from the center of Rome to a hill town just inside the next northern province of Umbria. The town, Otricoli, exists on two levels: the ancient Roman city of Oriculum along the Tiber where the ruins are overgrown with vines and herbs, adjacent to vineyards, olive groves and sheep meadows; and the upper town, truly a hike from the river valley.
As I stroll around reconstructions of the upper walls, I pause by a placard describing the various stages in which the walls were built. The most ancient were constructed three or four centuries before Christ, as complements to the lower and much grander town--a kind of fortification. Those walls were made with huge blocks so well shaped that they rested together without mortar, imposing variations of the low New England walls made by carefully selecting and arranging stone upon stone. Later, in Otricoli, when the barbarians arrived in the 800s and the Tiber changed its course, the inhabitants abandoned the river site and moved up into the hills. There, medieval walls still ring the oldest part of the town--with its grey stone buildings, inner courtyards adorned with low wide arches, outside stairways, and small windows. Truly another kind of architecture than the braver and more sweeping Renaissance style with its classical balance and bold facades.
Yet, when the inhabitants moved to safety, they made regular forays on the ancient Roman site, hauling up columns and bits of freize. I pause at a corner where a low marble column fits into a medieval wall; and another where a bit of marble frieze shows an enraged eagle. Pat and Giangi's three-story tower house sports no Roman marble, but one of its inner walls is shared with the outer medieval wall. Thus opposite their computer rises the heavy, mortared blocks of medieval protection. Once cleaning and reconstructing this outer/inner wall, Giangi unearthed a battered metal vase filled with ancient coins, probably stashed there during a siege or famine or plague.
Today the threat is global warming. Friends across the valley in San Vico face a huge, newly installed field of solar panels.
"Wonderful," I say. "I just read that Italy may soon become one of the most important producers of photovoltaic energy in Europe." None of these Italians and Americans living in Italy are thrilled by this. The field of solar panels blights their view of plateau and hills, of tiny stone chapels catching the sunsets.
"These panels should be installed in industrial sites," they argue. "This is a power grab to make money." Yes, I think, they are probably right about where the panels should be situated. But what's wrong with individual efforts to make money? Isn't that exactly what the United States is based on? Of course, but in cases involving elements of sky, air, earth, water, land, which are held in common, national or even international regulation are crucial. Do I or these friends in Italy truly believe that regulation will trump commercial effort? No. Regulation will probably come later, piecemeal, fought over again and again, like our Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. What curious and interesting parallels and differences exist between the U.S. and the incredibly old and compelling Tiber Valley with its hill-top towns, inhabitants with ancient lineages and more modern American residents who love its history, views, food, and companionship.
* Note: to find out more about Pat's art visit her website. Google Patricia Glee Smith.
My last stop in Italy was with my wonderful friends, the visual artist Patricia Glee Smith (born in Savannah, Illinois) * and her Italian husband Giangi Poli. Giangi used to create documentaries on science and politics for Italian public television; in fact, my first night there, we viewed some of his 1970 films made in the United States. The subjects were protest and the environment. Particularly powerful, I thought, was one about Staten Island where huge scows carried garbage from the other New York boroughs and dumped it. Giangi documented a fish kill along the shores of Staten Island where children flitted into the waves, nudging or lifting dead fish onto the beach, then kicking them around like beach balls. I had forgotten that along with protesting the Vietnam war, young Americans sang and marched for clean air and clean water. The legacy of that protest remains in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, still constantly under siege from various interest groups.
Over thirty years, Pat and Giangi have moved from the center of Rome to a hill town just inside the next northern province of Umbria. The town, Otricoli, exists on two levels: the ancient Roman city of Oriculum along the Tiber where the ruins are overgrown with vines and herbs, adjacent to vineyards, olive groves and sheep meadows; and the upper town, truly a hike from the river valley.
As I stroll around reconstructions of the upper walls, I pause by a placard describing the various stages in which the walls were built. The most ancient were constructed three or four centuries before Christ, as complements to the lower and much grander town--a kind of fortification. Those walls were made with huge blocks so well shaped that they rested together without mortar, imposing variations of the low New England walls made by carefully selecting and arranging stone upon stone. Later, in Otricoli, when the barbarians arrived in the 800s and the Tiber changed its course, the inhabitants abandoned the river site and moved up into the hills. There, medieval walls still ring the oldest part of the town--with its grey stone buildings, inner courtyards adorned with low wide arches, outside stairways, and small windows. Truly another kind of architecture than the braver and more sweeping Renaissance style with its classical balance and bold facades.
Yet, when the inhabitants moved to safety, they made regular forays on the ancient Roman site, hauling up columns and bits of freize. I pause at a corner where a low marble column fits into a medieval wall; and another where a bit of marble frieze shows an enraged eagle. Pat and Giangi's three-story tower house sports no Roman marble, but one of its inner walls is shared with the outer medieval wall. Thus opposite their computer rises the heavy, mortared blocks of medieval protection. Once cleaning and reconstructing this outer/inner wall, Giangi unearthed a battered metal vase filled with ancient coins, probably stashed there during a siege or famine or plague.
Today the threat is global warming. Friends across the valley in San Vico face a huge, newly installed field of solar panels.
"Wonderful," I say. "I just read that Italy may soon become one of the most important producers of photovoltaic energy in Europe." None of these Italians and Americans living in Italy are thrilled by this. The field of solar panels blights their view of plateau and hills, of tiny stone chapels catching the sunsets.
"These panels should be installed in industrial sites," they argue. "This is a power grab to make money." Yes, I think, they are probably right about where the panels should be situated. But what's wrong with individual efforts to make money? Isn't that exactly what the United States is based on? Of course, but in cases involving elements of sky, air, earth, water, land, which are held in common, national or even international regulation are crucial. Do I or these friends in Italy truly believe that regulation will trump commercial effort? No. Regulation will probably come later, piecemeal, fought over again and again, like our Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. What curious and interesting parallels and differences exist between the U.S. and the incredibly old and compelling Tiber Valley with its hill-top towns, inhabitants with ancient lineages and more modern American residents who love its history, views, food, and companionship.
* Note: to find out more about Pat's art visit her website. Google Patricia Glee Smith.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Margotlog: The Land of Eels
Margotlog: The Land of Eels
In Ferrara, Italy, not far from the Adriatic Coast, my friend traveling with me recounts the eel festival in Commachio. In Ferrara, the streets are paved with small stones worn smooth by the huge Po River which brings agricultural wealth to the middle of northern Italy. The stones, called ciottoli, make walking rather hard, but they give an antique appearance even to the streets of Ferrara. Ferrara founded in the middle ages and enhanced by the d'Este family in the Renaissance wears a lovely brick warmth; even its cathedral tower is covered in warm pink and white marble. It is a quiet old city because motorized traffic is prohibited. Everyone rides a bicycle or walks. And the bicycles are adorned with woven or wicker backets, bells, soft seats, and leather covers over their wheels, which I puzzle out and decide help to keep the tires from getting wet. But even as I write this, I realize it's probably not correct.
In the Archaeological Museum, we wander through rooms of vases and amphora, plates and other serving dishes dug out of preChristian tombs in the Po Delta. I'm particularly taken with the flat fish dishes adorned with various kinds of fish, especially cuttlefish, a kind of octopus; flat flounder-type fish and many other kinds whose names are given in modern Italian. Generally, signage in Italian museums leaves much to be desired: there is a lot of arcane information, but almost nothing that makes sense to the casual observer. True in this case except for the fish bowls, wonderfully explicated; for the tombs themselves which are represented by skeletons drawn in fake sand with the amphora and dishes presented in the same positions as originally found. And for the amber necklaces which the placard tells us came originally from the Baltic.
I love best the two piroques which were first unearthed from the Po Delta in the 1920s or 30s, but almost immediately recovered with muck, then fully excavated in 1946. For two years archaeologists worked to preserve them--difficult to do with wood which would normally disintegrate if left to the air. Now these long log boats, from the 2nd or 3rd century after Christ, are housed in their own dimly lit room. As I study the placards I think I hear the cack-hoot of a heron; then the cries of gulls. Actually I am hearing these bird calls because just beyond the piroques is showing a slide-show accompanied by sounds of the Po Delta. In this watery world, the piroques would ride easily across the shallow water; flamingos still step their strange backward-jointed legs--they're not pink like the ones we see in Florida but mostly white since the shrimp that contain the agent that colors their feathers isn't always available in the Po Delta.
This dreamy flowing water, dotted with strips of land, makes me feel enchanted. "The next time you come to Italy," friends here insist, "you must go to Venice. From there it is easy to take a tour into the Po Delta." I know, it's time I visited Venice, but even more, I am drawn to this watery world, more water than land, flowing quietly and insistently into the ancient seas across which very early Italians ordered vases from Greece, glass from the Phoenicians in Sicily or North Africa, and amber like clotted gold from the frigid Baltic.
In Ferrara, Italy, not far from the Adriatic Coast, my friend traveling with me recounts the eel festival in Commachio. In Ferrara, the streets are paved with small stones worn smooth by the huge Po River which brings agricultural wealth to the middle of northern Italy. The stones, called ciottoli, make walking rather hard, but they give an antique appearance even to the streets of Ferrara. Ferrara founded in the middle ages and enhanced by the d'Este family in the Renaissance wears a lovely brick warmth; even its cathedral tower is covered in warm pink and white marble. It is a quiet old city because motorized traffic is prohibited. Everyone rides a bicycle or walks. And the bicycles are adorned with woven or wicker backets, bells, soft seats, and leather covers over their wheels, which I puzzle out and decide help to keep the tires from getting wet. But even as I write this, I realize it's probably not correct.
In the Archaeological Museum, we wander through rooms of vases and amphora, plates and other serving dishes dug out of preChristian tombs in the Po Delta. I'm particularly taken with the flat fish dishes adorned with various kinds of fish, especially cuttlefish, a kind of octopus; flat flounder-type fish and many other kinds whose names are given in modern Italian. Generally, signage in Italian museums leaves much to be desired: there is a lot of arcane information, but almost nothing that makes sense to the casual observer. True in this case except for the fish bowls, wonderfully explicated; for the tombs themselves which are represented by skeletons drawn in fake sand with the amphora and dishes presented in the same positions as originally found. And for the amber necklaces which the placard tells us came originally from the Baltic.
I love best the two piroques which were first unearthed from the Po Delta in the 1920s or 30s, but almost immediately recovered with muck, then fully excavated in 1946. For two years archaeologists worked to preserve them--difficult to do with wood which would normally disintegrate if left to the air. Now these long log boats, from the 2nd or 3rd century after Christ, are housed in their own dimly lit room. As I study the placards I think I hear the cack-hoot of a heron; then the cries of gulls. Actually I am hearing these bird calls because just beyond the piroques is showing a slide-show accompanied by sounds of the Po Delta. In this watery world, the piroques would ride easily across the shallow water; flamingos still step their strange backward-jointed legs--they're not pink like the ones we see in Florida but mostly white since the shrimp that contain the agent that colors their feathers isn't always available in the Po Delta.
This dreamy flowing water, dotted with strips of land, makes me feel enchanted. "The next time you come to Italy," friends here insist, "you must go to Venice. From there it is easy to take a tour into the Po Delta." I know, it's time I visited Venice, but even more, I am drawn to this watery world, more water than land, flowing quietly and insistently into the ancient seas across which very early Italians ordered vases from Greece, glass from the Phoenicians in Sicily or North Africa, and amber like clotted gold from the frigid Baltic.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Margotlog: THe Moon's Fingernail
Hanging in the night sky and scratching at the window, the moon's fingernail insists upon entering. What exactly it brings--fear, loathing, cold distance, even a brief respite from self-absorption with its reminder of a pearl, a shell--the moon links me to absolutely encompassing night thoughts.
I've been listening to George Guidall read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Even from the next room with a door closed, my husband comments the next morning, "He has an amazing voice." It's true and more. The voice entices, strengthens, seduces, terrifies, evokes pity. And though it's in the lower register of male voices, in the voice box of this master interpreter, it can evoke the Christ-touched Sonia, the harlot, as well as this fiction's version of the grand inquisitor. Not to mention the murderer at the heart of the novel: Raskolnikov.
The voice also hangs a sliver of moon outside my imagination, memory. I read Crime and Punishment for the first time in my 20s. Too young, my husband and I agree, to fully appreciate both the absolute encompassing penetration of the author, and the range of human experience he depicts. When I think of truly great literature, works of words that take the time to evoke the beggar boy sweeping the street for a pence and the faltering aging lord whose wife will ultimately die against the pauper's grave whom she has never forgotten (Dickens in Bleak House), or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Melville's Moby Dick, or Mary Gaskell's North and South, I have to return to the 19th century.
Time, and a willingness to elaborate, to carry the reader deeper and deeper into a voice--such as the minor inquisitor who has Raskolnikov in his pudgy clutches as I turn off the CD player and try to close my eyes. We sit there inside Raskolnikov's fevered brain, waver with anger, fury, despair, intelligence while the inquisitor spins himself like a billiard ball, says the author, around his tiny office, weaving a web of little laughs, distractions, assurances, all the time coming in tiny steps toward some kind of revelation.
Enough of this: I don't want to warn you off the book. Because it contains characters of clear mind, moral discernment, beauty of heart (Raskolnikov's mother and sister, for instance; his best friend)--each in his or her own pugilistic or shrinking or careful behavior. Perhaps it's the range of humanity these works offer that compels me to remember and praise them long after I've "listened" to them.
There are works of fiction in the 20th century which aim at such largess. James Joyce's Ulysses; Proust's seven temples dedicated to memory of pampered, distracted childhood and adulthood. Another that comes to me probably because I'm heading to Italy is Elsa Morante's History: A Story, set in World War II Italy. Let's add Catch 22, for an American view of that global infliction.
I know: there's a lot to be said for smart, snappy narratives. Tinker, for instance, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is far more than smart and snappy, though it's relatively short, and the narrative veers off all the time from anything like chronological development.
Yet, after penetrating to its business, appreciating its set pieces and the compassion of the author for the characters (epileptic tinker, for one; his wife driven to distraction for another), I found myself putting it aside, not furiously compelled to hear it out.
This judgment strikes me as so limited on my part--as the sky begins to lighten with the promise of a sun returning to brighten us after all--that I refer to you, dear readers, whoever you are: remind me of more modern works which have taken you in their grasp after scratching at your night window.
I've been listening to George Guidall read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Even from the next room with a door closed, my husband comments the next morning, "He has an amazing voice." It's true and more. The voice entices, strengthens, seduces, terrifies, evokes pity. And though it's in the lower register of male voices, in the voice box of this master interpreter, it can evoke the Christ-touched Sonia, the harlot, as well as this fiction's version of the grand inquisitor. Not to mention the murderer at the heart of the novel: Raskolnikov.
The voice also hangs a sliver of moon outside my imagination, memory. I read Crime and Punishment for the first time in my 20s. Too young, my husband and I agree, to fully appreciate both the absolute encompassing penetration of the author, and the range of human experience he depicts. When I think of truly great literature, works of words that take the time to evoke the beggar boy sweeping the street for a pence and the faltering aging lord whose wife will ultimately die against the pauper's grave whom she has never forgotten (Dickens in Bleak House), or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Melville's Moby Dick, or Mary Gaskell's North and South, I have to return to the 19th century.
Time, and a willingness to elaborate, to carry the reader deeper and deeper into a voice--such as the minor inquisitor who has Raskolnikov in his pudgy clutches as I turn off the CD player and try to close my eyes. We sit there inside Raskolnikov's fevered brain, waver with anger, fury, despair, intelligence while the inquisitor spins himself like a billiard ball, says the author, around his tiny office, weaving a web of little laughs, distractions, assurances, all the time coming in tiny steps toward some kind of revelation.
Enough of this: I don't want to warn you off the book. Because it contains characters of clear mind, moral discernment, beauty of heart (Raskolnikov's mother and sister, for instance; his best friend)--each in his or her own pugilistic or shrinking or careful behavior. Perhaps it's the range of humanity these works offer that compels me to remember and praise them long after I've "listened" to them.
There are works of fiction in the 20th century which aim at such largess. James Joyce's Ulysses; Proust's seven temples dedicated to memory of pampered, distracted childhood and adulthood. Another that comes to me probably because I'm heading to Italy is Elsa Morante's History: A Story, set in World War II Italy. Let's add Catch 22, for an American view of that global infliction.
I know: there's a lot to be said for smart, snappy narratives. Tinker, for instance, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is far more than smart and snappy, though it's relatively short, and the narrative veers off all the time from anything like chronological development.
Yet, after penetrating to its business, appreciating its set pieces and the compassion of the author for the characters (epileptic tinker, for one; his wife driven to distraction for another), I found myself putting it aside, not furiously compelled to hear it out.
This judgment strikes me as so limited on my part--as the sky begins to lighten with the promise of a sun returning to brighten us after all--that I refer to you, dear readers, whoever you are: remind me of more modern works which have taken you in their grasp after scratching at your night window.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Margotlog: Facebook, Twitter, Social Change and How to Save the Planet, etc.l
Facebook, Twitter, Social Change, and How to Save the Planet & Ourselves
Yesterday I read a startling article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about "weak" and "strong" connections (Oct. 4, "Small Change"). According to Gladwell, the young African American students who started the wave of lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 knew each other personally, face-to-face. The first four from North Carolina A.&T., in Greensboro had stayed up late in the dorms of their all-black colleges, arguing the tormented questions of segregation and racism. Young, radicalized by the pressure and degradation of racism, they eventually "dared" each other to take seats at an all-white drugstore lunch counter and attempt to order coffee. What began in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, spread to other North Carolina and S. Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee communities, and within a month sit-ins were occurring across the south, where thousands of young black people challenged the status quo.
It was dangerous business, and the young protesters dressed up as if they were going to church--suits and ties for the young men; nice dresses, hats and heels for the young women. They were harrassed by police, by teams of thugs (sometimes football teams from neighboring white high schools or colleges). But the movement spread because, Gladwell argues, face-to-face personal relationships sustained these daring young people.
The Civil Rights Movement was tightly organized around black churches. For example, the MOntgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 sustained a year-long alternate transportation system for black people in Montgomery because black churches from ministers down to "captains" to "troops" kept private cars running to transport black workers throughout the city, day after day, week after week. Such an effort demanded frequent, personal accountability which centered around the huge black churches in the city. The drivers, their organizers and their passengers knew each other; if they let each other down, they would suffer the personal disgrace and humiliation of witnessing their failure before God and their entire congregations.
Facebook, Twitter and other so-called "loose" connections, argues Gladwell, cannot sustain such dangerous, personal, daily commitment to change. He cites the studies of social scientists to back him up. Imagine, for a moment, putting yourself among the traffic on highway 94 to leaflet, pester, try and convince. These are the long lines of cars I see daily stalled, going east day after the working day. There are simply too many cars for the highway capacity, for this ironically termed "rush hour." Because there is no rush possible. Too many vehicles, driven by single people, clog the roads for any single car to rush anywhere.
I don't know how long it takes for each car and driver to reach its destination, but I can tell you, I wouldn't want to sit in that traffic after working all day. I'd do quite a bit to avoid it. But obviously many many people either cannot or will not make necessary changes to prevent this. Necessary changes such as mass transit, including buses that carry perhaps 50 people per vehicle; or trains, light rail, for instance, where hundreds are transported by one carbon-spewing engine. Or better yet, light rail and buses fueled by electricity created by wind or solar.
What would it take to educate these drivers, to bring them to the point of making or at least accepting change? One person couldn't do it. I couldn't, by myself, go car to car, trying to convince the drivers stalled there, that this mode of exiting the city for the eastern suburbs is harmful to themselves and to all of us because it contributes to huge carbon emissions, which up the carbon in our atmosphere and contribute to global warming (euphemistically called "climate change").
Facebook, Twitter, and this very medium I'm using now, Blogging, can present ideas, notions, tidbits; they might gather poets at a reading, they might encourage readers at "the click of a button" to protest this, that, or the other, but they will not rouse groups of people to risky, face-to-face encounters necessary for change. Neighborhoods, perhaps, can organize, especially if they have an already existing structure of organization like a church or community center with a leader, a site and a cadre of lieutenants. I know, the war metaphor isn't the greatest, but it does convey the need for discipline, commitment of time, energy and risk, plus something the military also creates sort of by default: a personal attachment to one's buddies, to saving lives if they are hurt in the contest. To being in this together for the long haul, my arm linked in yours, my ideas and hopes and fears and body beside yours. Despite its attraction, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. do not provide this lively contact.
One last, humorous example. One of my favorite graduate students was writing her final master's paper on internet dating agencies like Match.Com. One day as we worked together, she blurted out in frustration: "But we had such good chemistry!" She meant that the emails she'd exchanged with this failed guy had been witty and lively and enticing. As the flurry of on-line messages flew back and forth, her heart beat faster. She liked the guy's picture on the internet. She became very eager to meet him. This was the "chemistry" she was talking about.
"Darling," I said, "there can be no chemistry over the internet. Chemistry is about real, flesh-and-blood encounters. The scent of hair, flash of eyes, the swagger or slump--it's almost indescribable until you've experienced it face-to-face." It was no surprise to me that her on-line build-up didn't necessarily translate into whole body affection. Internet dating and whole body dating aren't the same thing at all. What anyone puts out in the privacy of their home on the internet doesn't have much to do with the way they behave when confronted by a real person, who will want real things that begin with coffee or a glass of wine but can go much further to commitment. Or to flight or embarrassed stammering, which is what she got across the coffee from her internet beau. No real chemistry face-to-face, was what she experienced. Real failed chemistry.
Yesterday I read a startling article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about "weak" and "strong" connections (Oct. 4, "Small Change"). According to Gladwell, the young African American students who started the wave of lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 knew each other personally, face-to-face. The first four from North Carolina A.&T., in Greensboro had stayed up late in the dorms of their all-black colleges, arguing the tormented questions of segregation and racism. Young, radicalized by the pressure and degradation of racism, they eventually "dared" each other to take seats at an all-white drugstore lunch counter and attempt to order coffee. What began in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, spread to other North Carolina and S. Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee communities, and within a month sit-ins were occurring across the south, where thousands of young black people challenged the status quo.
It was dangerous business, and the young protesters dressed up as if they were going to church--suits and ties for the young men; nice dresses, hats and heels for the young women. They were harrassed by police, by teams of thugs (sometimes football teams from neighboring white high schools or colleges). But the movement spread because, Gladwell argues, face-to-face personal relationships sustained these daring young people.
The Civil Rights Movement was tightly organized around black churches. For example, the MOntgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 sustained a year-long alternate transportation system for black people in Montgomery because black churches from ministers down to "captains" to "troops" kept private cars running to transport black workers throughout the city, day after day, week after week. Such an effort demanded frequent, personal accountability which centered around the huge black churches in the city. The drivers, their organizers and their passengers knew each other; if they let each other down, they would suffer the personal disgrace and humiliation of witnessing their failure before God and their entire congregations.
Facebook, Twitter and other so-called "loose" connections, argues Gladwell, cannot sustain such dangerous, personal, daily commitment to change. He cites the studies of social scientists to back him up. Imagine, for a moment, putting yourself among the traffic on highway 94 to leaflet, pester, try and convince. These are the long lines of cars I see daily stalled, going east day after the working day. There are simply too many cars for the highway capacity, for this ironically termed "rush hour." Because there is no rush possible. Too many vehicles, driven by single people, clog the roads for any single car to rush anywhere.
I don't know how long it takes for each car and driver to reach its destination, but I can tell you, I wouldn't want to sit in that traffic after working all day. I'd do quite a bit to avoid it. But obviously many many people either cannot or will not make necessary changes to prevent this. Necessary changes such as mass transit, including buses that carry perhaps 50 people per vehicle; or trains, light rail, for instance, where hundreds are transported by one carbon-spewing engine. Or better yet, light rail and buses fueled by electricity created by wind or solar.
What would it take to educate these drivers, to bring them to the point of making or at least accepting change? One person couldn't do it. I couldn't, by myself, go car to car, trying to convince the drivers stalled there, that this mode of exiting the city for the eastern suburbs is harmful to themselves and to all of us because it contributes to huge carbon emissions, which up the carbon in our atmosphere and contribute to global warming (euphemistically called "climate change").
Facebook, Twitter, and this very medium I'm using now, Blogging, can present ideas, notions, tidbits; they might gather poets at a reading, they might encourage readers at "the click of a button" to protest this, that, or the other, but they will not rouse groups of people to risky, face-to-face encounters necessary for change. Neighborhoods, perhaps, can organize, especially if they have an already existing structure of organization like a church or community center with a leader, a site and a cadre of lieutenants. I know, the war metaphor isn't the greatest, but it does convey the need for discipline, commitment of time, energy and risk, plus something the military also creates sort of by default: a personal attachment to one's buddies, to saving lives if they are hurt in the contest. To being in this together for the long haul, my arm linked in yours, my ideas and hopes and fears and body beside yours. Despite its attraction, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. do not provide this lively contact.
One last, humorous example. One of my favorite graduate students was writing her final master's paper on internet dating agencies like Match.Com. One day as we worked together, she blurted out in frustration: "But we had such good chemistry!" She meant that the emails she'd exchanged with this failed guy had been witty and lively and enticing. As the flurry of on-line messages flew back and forth, her heart beat faster. She liked the guy's picture on the internet. She became very eager to meet him. This was the "chemistry" she was talking about.
"Darling," I said, "there can be no chemistry over the internet. Chemistry is about real, flesh-and-blood encounters. The scent of hair, flash of eyes, the swagger or slump--it's almost indescribable until you've experienced it face-to-face." It was no surprise to me that her on-line build-up didn't necessarily translate into whole body affection. Internet dating and whole body dating aren't the same thing at all. What anyone puts out in the privacy of their home on the internet doesn't have much to do with the way they behave when confronted by a real person, who will want real things that begin with coffee or a glass of wine but can go much further to commitment. Or to flight or embarrassed stammering, which is what she got across the coffee from her internet beau. No real chemistry face-to-face, was what she experienced. Real failed chemistry.
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