tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17134171531494841102024-03-13T09:07:12.387-04:00FORTE E GENTILEReflections on the motherland, the state of being Italian-American,
and literature Italian-American and otherwiseB.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-1896290949797658112021-12-20T18:46:00.001-05:002021-12-20T18:47:27.051-05:00Recent Posts on Updated Forte e Gentile Site<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Friends and readers, let me share some newer pieces posted to my updated version of <a href="https://forte-e-gentile.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Forte e Gentile</a>:<b> <br /></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgJNgCPTy4i9pzVDFHwTwbYU_k5VhDEX5wSPH3G_ilx2ImNUg4giRwbO9DMoSwX6DIiXifUc7zF_r3oBvrD4028Ch7kd4h0tnZcL_1rtUog8rYlpULQBWA4f718qc6-gOPyzhpUYz29oOMopINgON5Ulx6CZVuqTS7usYNl9Uqqho1UpuJVVcQWhGe=s1440" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="1440" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgJNgCPTy4i9pzVDFHwTwbYU_k5VhDEX5wSPH3G_ilx2ImNUg4giRwbO9DMoSwX6DIiXifUc7zF_r3oBvrD4028Ch7kd4h0tnZcL_1rtUog8rYlpULQBWA4f718qc6-gOPyzhpUYz29oOMopINgON5Ulx6CZVuqTS7usYNl9Uqqho1UpuJVVcQWhGe=w341-h161" width="341" /></a></b></span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>"As only an Italian can": <i>The Grand Gennaro</i>, by Garibaldi M. Lapolla: </b>a <a href="https://forte-e-gentile.com/2021/12/19/as-only-an-italian-can-the-grand-gennaro-by-garibaldi-m-lapolla/ " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">reading</a> of this novel, first published in 1935.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKeiMGqGccxLLJtN2hrXejZoN-CYgNnSgHP0OcMGqRwgl0KTBlHY9AER7wEs2YCkM4iXUVQvw8wLqf9B9d49f4NGb9Fy5N2Fu5KAzSWxb2MnE5N89rQf6RDvcgrgFR7Bf5SBbcrzX3Q3HTtfwEA4vD9RMjZ16SflCw3kwyt9hgRmfsqr5MRXOWWwvv=s1224" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="1224" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKeiMGqGccxLLJtN2hrXejZoN-CYgNnSgHP0OcMGqRwgl0KTBlHY9AER7wEs2YCkM4iXUVQvw8wLqf9B9d49f4NGb9Fy5N2Fu5KAzSWxb2MnE5N89rQf6RDvcgrgFR7Bf5SBbcrzX3Q3HTtfwEA4vD9RMjZ16SflCw3kwyt9hgRmfsqr5MRXOWWwvv=w357-h171" width="357" /></a> <br /></span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WOP! or: You Talkin' to Me?: </b>a <a href="https://forte-e-gentile.com/2020/07/14/wop/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">discussion</a> of <i>WOP! A Documentary History of Anti-Italian
Discrimination in the United States,</i> edited by Salvatore J. LaGumina. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> As always, thank you for reading!<br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRUj-IUGU9Bty7X5dVjxBRc8aJknXqbV1vB0ewNPg2XCrefvx2A94IrT8qJ8SwI2SClv9ot_lT6ZCwQ-fPE2ZXDL63HALb4Bnh6KT9r6xkdxcyQ1hhGwYuQ4EYZrc0TQPf8wJDd71fQY9GLor2f7WH4y-BfPZ2jHjuiR0PVcywV6NCCt8Mymv8yKW1=s744" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="499" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRUj-IUGU9Bty7X5dVjxBRc8aJknXqbV1vB0ewNPg2XCrefvx2A94IrT8qJ8SwI2SClv9ot_lT6ZCwQ-fPE2ZXDL63HALb4Bnh6KT9r6xkdxcyQ1hhGwYuQ4EYZrc0TQPf8wJDd71fQY9GLor2f7WH4y-BfPZ2jHjuiR0PVcywV6NCCt8Mymv8yKW1=w269-h400" width="269" /></a></div><br /><p></p>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-12769339138333848972020-07-14T20:56:00.001-04:002020-07-14T20:56:15.528-04:00Continuing Forte e Gentile at a new site<br />
My thanks to all of you for reading my blog for the past eleven-plus years (and driving up the page views to more than 200,000). As of July 2020, I've moved over to a new site and will be continuing this blog from there:<br />
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<a href="https://forte-e-gentile.com/">https://forte-e-gentile.com/</a><br />
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Many thanks to Blogger for hosting me all these years. I'll be keeping this archive up for the foreseeable future. <br />
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<i>Ci vediamo presto!</i>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-87841416842433466072020-02-18T21:05:00.001-05:002020-02-18T21:05:53.766-05:00Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace Returns to the American Folk Art Museum
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to report that my grandfather’s great labor of love, the Encyclopedic Palace,
is back at the American Folk Art Museum as part of the show “<a href="https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/american-perspectives/" target="_blank"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection</span></a>.” </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">The show looks to be <a href="https://folkartmuseum.org/content/uploads/2020/02/FINAL-AP-Label-Booklet-spreads-copy.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">full of riches</span></a>: work by Nella Mae Rowe, Sister
Gertrude Morgan, Consuelo “Chelo” González Amézcua,<span> a beautiful Freedom quilt by Jessie Bell Telfair, paintings by my longtime
hero Ralph Fasanella, and </span>plenty of other artists whose names have been
lost but whose work endures. <span>The show
is up through May 31, 2020. </span>F<span>or
a nice piece about it <a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2020/02/13/american-folk-art-museum-american-perspectives-curator-stacey-hollander" target="_blank">on NY1</a> by </span><span class="css-901oao">Juan Manuel
Benítez</span><span>, go <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">here</span>.</span></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">
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<a href="https://www.thirteen.org/programs/nyc-arts/nyc-arts-full-episode-february-6-2020-umpbc6/" target="_blank"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">link</span></a> to the
February 6th episode of NYC-Arts will take you to a re-broadcast of a 2015
interview that curator Valérie Rousseau gave about the Encyclopedic Palace (that clip</span> comes in toward the end, at about 21:26).</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">And here are my earlier
posts about the Encyclopedic Palace—<a href="http://www.forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2012/02/io-vivo-encyclopedic-palace-rises-again.html" target="_blank">its journey from <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">a storage locker</span></a>, where it sat for twenty-two
years, to the Folk Art Museum when my family donated it in 2003; and three posts from 2013 (and early 2014) when the Encyclopedic Palace <a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-encyclopedic-palace-at-2013.html" target="_blank">miraculously</a> became the
<a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2013/06/" target="_blank">centerpiece</a> of the <a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2014/01/dreams-resurrected-encyclopedic-palace.html" target="_blank">55th Venice Biennale</a> curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Finally, a <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/the-backstory-of-the-venice-biennales-encyclopedic-palace-59370/" target="_blank"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">piece</span></a> by Leigh Anne
Miller about that “backstory” from <i>Art in
America</i> in 2013. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">Thank you for
reading. And thank you for dreaming with me. </span></span></span></div>
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{page:WordSection1;}</span></font></span></style>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-41909684664650694032018-12-28T09:22:00.000-05:002018-12-28T09:29:50.426-05:00Two Excellent Books about Italian-American Radicalism<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940, </i></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">by Marcella Bencivenni </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">a Brief Sidebar about <i>The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, </i></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">edited by</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">published by <a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9780814791035/">NYU Press</a> (2011).</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What a terrific book! I
stumbled across it at the Mulberry Street Library. Besides being a concise
overview focused on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">culture</i> of Italian-American
radicalism from the beginning of the era of mass Italian immigration to the
U.S. up until WWII, it’s a heroic act of research, reconstruction, and
reclamation on the part of its author, <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://marcellabencivenni.com/" target="_blank">Marcella Bencivenni</a></span>. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bencivenni first provides a
general background on Italian radical movements in the U.S., then a sort of
collective profile of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sovversivi</i>—a
group, far from united, that takes in anarchists, socialists, syndicalists, and
later communists and anti-fascists—and then focuses successive chapters on the
radical press, the stage, and literary radicals. The final two chapters discuss
the all but forgotten poet Arturo Giovannitti and a political cartoonist who
was unknown to me, Fort Velona. Many other intriguing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sovversivi</i>, from revolutionaries to <em><span style="font-style: normal;">littérateurs</span></em> (and sometimes both) were also barely known to me
until I read about them here, among them the Abruzzese poet <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://ita.anarchopedia.org/Virgilia_D%27Andrea" target="_blank">Virgilia D’Andrea</a></span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Indeed, <i>Italian Immigrant Radical Culture</i> touches on many people who could
be said to have fallen into relative oblivion—at least in the mainstream—while
also being an excellent corrective to the annoyingly tenacious notion of
Italian-Americans always tilting conservative. In
Bencivenni’s own words, “In part I wrote this book to rescue these untold
stories from historical oblivion, and challenge the highly generalized view of
Italian immigrants as a compact block of conservative, apathetic and apolitical
peasants.” Bencivenni’s book is in a way
a continuation and distillation of ideas put forth in the rich, overflowing essay
collection<span style="background-color: white;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism</span>,</i>
</span>edited by Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer—a book that’s the wellspring for so much Italian-American radical history.
These books are like catnip to me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are some revelations in
Bencivenni’s study that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere. One is the evidence
that, as early as the late 19th century, anti-colonialist critiques of Columbus’
“discovery” of America had been formulated and discussed in the Italian-language press. As Bencivenni writes: “In a bold
article published in 1892, <i>Il Grido degli
Oppressi,</i> for example, labeled Christopher Columbus ‘a pirate and
adventurer,’ arguing that, far from being ‘Italy’s great glory,’ his discovery
of America marked the beginning of Europe’s ‘colonial politics,’ launching ‘a
series of terrible massacres and usurpations against the native people and the
Africans.’” What an enlightened analysis for the time—I was amazed to read this. Bencivenni
also adds up the evidence and gives us the depressing news (certainly supported
by studies of individual anarchists and radicals I’ve read elsewhere) that so
many of these otherwise informed men of the left were also the most wretched misogynists:
“For all their talk about emancipation and equality, when it came to gender it
is fairly obvious that the <i>sovversivi</i>
regarded politics as a male, public sphere and family as a female, private
sphere. They were also notoriously known as womanizers.” And later, in the
chapter that looks at the radical stage: “Radical Italian men, in particular,
seemed incapable of truly questioning male authority, even as they advocated
gender equality.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Another revelation, this one on the
positive side, was the sheer number of Italian-language radical papers that were
published back in the day. There were not only the short-lived <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Il Grido degli Oppressi</i> and Carlo
Tresca’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Il Martello</i> but, among many
others, the anarcho-syndicalist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La
Questione Sociale</i>, “the major organ of Italian revolutionary socialism” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Il Proletario</i>, Luigi Galleani’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cronaca Sovversiva </i>and its successor<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="https://www.bibliothekderfreien.de/lidiap/eng/index.html#adunata" target="_blank">L’Adunata dei Refratti</a></span></span></i>—which, incredibly, lasted until 1971,
remaining “a powerful, if lonely, voice of anarchist protest.”<i> </i>Perhaps nothing shows both the decline
of Italian-American radicalism, and the degree of the population’s assimilation
into the American mainstream, quite so much as the gradual extinction of the
Italian-language radical press. </span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YssY9mmzS2U/XCUBe9upXfI/AAAAAAAABWU/KAjMCqRoMzcl62-9h3xRvTwdAuLkJDgugCEwYBhgL/s1600/Cronaca%2BSovversiva%2Bbanner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="1600" height="105" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YssY9mmzS2U/XCUBe9upXfI/AAAAAAAABWU/KAjMCqRoMzcl62-9h3xRvTwdAuLkJDgugCEwYBhgL/s400/Cronaca%2BSovversiva%2Bbanner.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>The wonderful old banner of </i>Cronaca Sovversiva.<i> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Thrilled to discover
that the Library of Congress </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">has made available </span></i><i><span style="font-size: large;">for download what looks to be </span></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/2012271201/" target="_blank">the complete run (1903-1920) of Galleani’s paper</a>. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bencivenni’s study also
contains plenty of random, fascinating, micro-level New York City history
stuff. One example among many: in 1908, when the Catholic Church was
cracking down on purveyors of “anti-clerical literature,” one of the
booksellers arrested was the owner of S.F. Vanni over on West 12th Street. That
store, which first opened in 1884, persisted into this century, and I remember years
back (in the ’90s?) poking around inside of it, and being mystified by the dusty crumblingness of it, and its almost Miss Havisham–like level of
spooky neglect. What was going on? Much later I learned that Dr. Olga Ragusa,
the formidable Italian studies icon (and author of the ubiquitous and
personally indispensible, if not exactly pleasurable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Essential Italian Grammar,</i> published by Dover), owned the building
and lived upstairs. After a brief and heartening moment in 2015 when the <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://primolevicenter.org/" target="_blank">Centro Primo Levi</a></span> </span>revived the
store, sadly, it closed again, for good. It is now a gallery specializing in super-fancy
French design. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1NEwHJSybKE/XCUBTuTWgYI/AAAAAAAABWM/bk9baVq7cEsndKl51jySEIFU3vvz_bZZwCEwYBhgL/s1600/SF%2BVanni%2Bstorefront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1NEwHJSybKE/XCUBTuTWgYI/AAAAAAAABWM/bk9baVq7cEsndKl51jySEIFU3vvz_bZZwCEwYBhgL/s400/SF%2BVanni%2Bstorefront.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">S.F. Vanni in <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://ourlifeincommon.blogspot.com/2009/04/blog-post_28.html" target="_blank">2009</a></span>. </i><i>Go <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="https://www.lavocedinewyork.com/en/people/2018/01/09/in-memory-of-olga-ragusa-an-italian-studies-icon-in-new-york/" target="_blank">here</a></span>
for an article from</i> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">La Voce di New
York <i>about Dr. Ragusa and </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>a terrific
short video with Centro Primo Levi’s </i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Alessandro Cassin about S.F. Vanni’s brief
revival, </i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>or <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/italian-hours-ink-alec-wilkinson" target="_blank">here</a></span>
for a related article from the </i>New Yorker.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Meanwhile, John Pucciatti’s
Spaghetti House, some blocks over on East 12th Street, which apparently took
out ads in the radical press calling itself “the favorite meeting place of free
thinkers of all nationalities” is of course still in operation. Today it’s
called John’s of 12th Street, and I’d say one would be hard-pressed to find any
vestiges of that radical history there, though the pasta remains reliably
old-scho<span style="background-color: white;">ol. <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://evgrieve.com/2013/12/out-and-about-in-east-village_18.html" target="_blank">Here’s</a></span>
</span>an interview from 2013 on EV Grieve with the John’s then-owner, with some great brief anecdotes about the old East Village.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What I’ve written here is a
very glancing appreciation that can</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">t begin to do justice to the level of scholarship
and dedication shown in Marcella Bencivenni’s book. I can only reiterate what a
welcome addition to radical history studies</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Italian
Immigrant Radical Culture</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">is—and hope that it will, in turn, beget more of
its kind.</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qw7nsHQO2Mw/XCUBTRvdvyI/AAAAAAAABWM/AMwuHDTBewMy9v5SUYsLRGOn1rI3wG58gCEwYBhgL/s1600/Lost%2BWorld%2Bof%2BIA%2BRadicalism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qw7nsHQO2Mw/XCUBTRvdvyI/AAAAAAAABWM/AMwuHDTBewMy9v5SUYsLRGOn1rI3wG58gCEwYBhgL/s320/Lost%2BWorld%2Bof%2BIA%2BRadicalism.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Go <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="http://sdonline.org/38/the-lost-world-of-italian-american-radicalism/" target="_blank">here</a></span>
for a brief, informative review </span></span></i><i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">by Paul Buhle </span></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">of </span></i><span style="font-size: large;">The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism <i>(2003).</i></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And for those who haven’t read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism</i>, it’s a treasure. Among the
essays in it that spoke to me most were Mary Jo Bona’s generous and insightful
“Rooted to Family: Italian American Women’s Radical Novels” (which discusses,
among other writers, Carole Maso, always an inspiration to me), Edvige Giunta’s
powerful “Where They Came From: Italian American Women Writers as Public
Intellectuals,” Gil Fagiani’s essay on Mario Savio, Donna R. Gabaccia’s
conclusion, and Nunzio Pernicone’s “War among the Italian Anarchists: The
Galleanisti’s Campaign against Carlo Tresca.” Dr. Pernicone’s essay begins: “A
cursory history of the Italian American Left might easily promote the
impression that immigrant radicals … spent more time and energy squabbling
amongst themselves than they did fighting the ruling class.” I can certainly
hear his singularly erudite and exasperated voice in these words—as well as hearing the echo of this idea in the many factional quarrels that play out today, too
often, among what I’ll imprecisely call the American left. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In her book, Bencivenni
cites Pernicone as a mentor and, indeed, she gives him the last word: “The Italian
American Left failed to reproduce itself,” she quotes him as writing, “and with
its demise ‘a unique breed of dreamers and rebels also passed into
extinction.’” Such melancholy truth to these words. I briefly had the pleasure
of knowing Nunzio by email, and what a delight he was. An engaged person, full
of opinions, humor, and heart; and also a scholar always ready to help. Dr.
Pernicone died in 2013, another dreamer who passed into extinction, but his
work lives on, as does the work of so many dreamers whom Bencivenni pays homage
to in her admirable book. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Esr73f0q5vo/XB-7dpOcBLI/AAAAAAAABVo/Ionk2FwEy98MnKFVfRzm9r-VbPZW9VF4ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Nunzio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><img border="0" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="356" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Esr73f0q5vo/XB-7dpOcBLI/AAAAAAAABVo/Ionk2FwEy98MnKFVfRzm9r-VbPZW9VF4ACPcBGAYYCw/s400/Nunzio.jpg" width="400" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>The much-missed Dr. Nunzio
Pernicone </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>in the<span style="background-color: white;"> 2006 documentary, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><a href="https://www.kanopy.com/product/sacco-and-vanzetti-0" target="_blank">Sacco and Vanzetti</a></span>. </span></i></span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-80519013149462613502018-08-22T12:45:00.003-04:002018-08-22T12:45:56.801-04:00On Tina De Rosa’s Novel, Paper Fish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RhUulGKJq9c/W32SSnlDvBI/AAAAAAAABVI/VGHWwf5pCIk2AjRjFaX_qa-EVgfw8OF0wCLcBGAs/s1600/Paper%2BFish%2Bimage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="878" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RhUulGKJq9c/W32SSnlDvBI/AAAAAAAABVI/VGHWwf5pCIk2AjRjFaX_qa-EVgfw8OF0wCLcBGAs/s400/Paper%2BFish%2Bimage.jpg" width="327" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’d resisted Tina De Rosa’s <i>Paper Fish</i> for years, picking it up and
then putting it down again because it felt like a closed system. Something
about its fragility put me off as well; there was so much New York City noise
in my head that the prose almost felt like scraps of lace to me. Finally I
committed to it—having finished a manuscript, I was able to be still for a
moment—and found it a rare, beautiful work. Melancholy and elegiac, but also
intensely disciplined, its words chosen with the precision of a poet. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">It strikes me that De Rosa’s
prose slows down time. There’s nothing predictable about her language (nor its
cadences, even with the stream-of-consciousness comma-spliced sentences).
Because it’s so singular, it’s as if the prose is also making a larger point about
assumptions people might bring to Italian-American narratives, blasting clichés
to hell—by its very form, proving that the people in this story are specific, consequential,
and deserving of respect. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">Briefly put, this slender
novel is about a young Italian-American girl called Carmolina coming of age in
Chicago’s West Side in the 1940s/1950s, but so much of the book is about its
mood. It evokes a kind of childhood dream state; the time is fluid, the tenses
are fluid, and it washes from present to past to a further and further past,
and then washes back again. Throughout, though, there’s an intensity of
description, of the smells and textures and tastes—it evokes a lost Chicago of
horse carts, straw streetcar seats, vegetable wagons, drafty cold-water flats,
the seedman who blows a metal horn to summon the children with their nickels to
buy his pistachio nuts. Even when the point of view floats into the heads of
other characters, there’s a powerful subjectivity about it, and the dream state
of the book seems to be only broken in a scene at the police precinct, where
the prose becomes much more conventional—Carmolina has run away from home, and it’s
as if the prose marks her absence. For me, there’s also much bittersweet
familiarity in the way the grandmother’s speech is rendered (“Her face, she so
beautiful”) and in forgotten things from another era, like your grandmother
making you a bowl of pastina, or odd bits of folklore, such as how drinking
something cold might make your teeth melt. Or “folktales” woven around
disabilities that do not rob the disabled of their specificity and worth, but
reframe them with a mysterious dignity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">There’s such a beautiful will
toward communicating this lost world in the book, and for all its poeticism,
very little preciousness. The last pages, which recall a memory of Carmolina
with her grandmother Doria at the circus, are tremendously moving. I was sad to
see this book end, but it didn’t seem to end so much as recede into my memory. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Times;">Paper Fish</span></i><span style="font-family: Times;">
all but disappeared shortly after it was published by a small press in 1980,
and it came back into print again in 1996 through the Feminist Press and, from
what I’ve read, because of the personal ministrations of Fred Gardaphé—praise
them all. My edition has a rich, authoritative afterward by Edvige Giunta.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tina De Rosa died in 2007. I
wish I’d read this book while she was still alive so that I could have
written her a note of appreciation. As it is, it’s a great pleasure to
recommend this extraordinary, heartfelt book.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-7466441420520979982018-04-26T21:23:00.000-04:002018-04-26T21:26:03.127-04:00A Wonderful Night at Book Culture<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o5OeQy6X140/WuJ3lNQ8kPI/AAAAAAAABUw/LaYreq6FyowTl3Sv7EAHOLzcM3vjicDPgCEwYBhgL/s1600/4%2BFROM%2BBARNARD2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="504" height="152" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o5OeQy6X140/WuJ3lNQ8kPI/AAAAAAAABUw/LaYreq6FyowTl3Sv7EAHOLzcM3vjicDPgCEwYBhgL/s400/4%2BFROM%2BBARNARD2.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">It
was my great joy to read with Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Sigrid Nunez, and Susan
Daitch at Book Culture on Tuesday! <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">My
thanks to all of the great folks who came out to be there—and to
Cody Madsen and Adam Fales at <a href="https://www.bookculture.com/"><span style="color: #0000e9;">Book Culture</span></a> for helping organize such a
wonderful night. </span></span></div>
B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-27921675198405116222018-04-16T16:20:00.001-04:002018-04-16T16:20:11.837-04:00Four Barnard Alumnae Writers Reading at Book Culture on April 24th<br />
<div id="yiv1339176028ydp2d4fe804yiv2332227955ydp81eae7cdyiv6919129019ydp9046a7ddyiv3830921141yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1523314931235_55705">
<div class="yiv1339176028ydp2d4fe804yiv2332227955ydp81eae7cdyiv6919129019ydp9046a7ddyiv3830921141msonormal" style="background: white;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-four-barnard-alumnae-writers" rel="nofollow" shape="rect" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="259" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-U9dxG-NLDQg/WtUCl1P2D6I/AAAAAAAABUQ/ZrEuJP4HIcsbBheqbyP3CwDhYTdPrX1XwCLcBGAs/s400/fourbarnardalums.jpg" width="258" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<div class="yiv1339176028ydp2d4fe804yiv2332227955ydp81eae7cdyiv6919129019ydp9046a7ddyiv3830921141msonormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I'm thrilled (and quite nervous) to be reading with three wonderful writers and fellow alumnae whose work I admire so much: <a href="http://www.lynnesharonschwartz.com/">Lynne Sharon Schwartz</a>, <a href="http://sigridnunez.com/">Sigrid Nunez</a>, and <a href="https://www.susandaitch.net/books">Susan Daitch</a>. </span></div>
<div class="yiv1339176028ydp2d4fe804yiv2332227955ydp81eae7cdyiv6919129019ydp9046a7ddyiv3830921141msonormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="yiv1339176028ydp2d4fe804yiv2332227955ydp81eae7cdyiv6919129019ydp9046a7ddyiv3830921141msonormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We'll be reading Book Culture at 536 W. 112th Street on Tuesday, April 24th @ 7:00 p.m. Please join us! For more details, go <a href="http://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-four-barnard-alumnae-writers">here</a>.</span></div>
</div>
B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-47487174209169216332018-03-28T13:41:00.002-04:002018-03-28T13:41:49.741-04:00Time's a Thief out in Paperback on April 3rd!<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-974qGFAe8mc/WrvSdS-fPMI/AAAAAAAABTw/eCtLIXks9BU9h2SJcEqiMQQcGcr7jSMawCLcBGAs/s1600/FIRMANI%2BPAPERBACK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-974qGFAe8mc/WrvSdS-fPMI/AAAAAAAABTw/eCtLIXks9BU9h2SJcEqiMQQcGcr7jSMawCLcBGAs/s400/FIRMANI%2BPAPERBACK.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I'm thrilled to report that my novel, <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546530/times-a-thief-by-b-g-firmani/9780385541862/">Time's a Thief</a></i>,
will be out in paperback on April 3rd from Penguin Random House's Anchor Books. My thanks again to everyone there. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Lovely blurb from Dana Spiotta: "This bittersweet, funny, and bighearted book is also a beautiful, precise elegy to a wilder, more alive New York where anything seemed possible." </span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-56784363802394711622018-02-10T17:44:00.001-05:002018-02-10T17:44:32.514-05:00“Tell us about your Italianness, and how it’s influenced your writing journey”<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1ixH4jXuhlo/TzB5lV8CMCI/AAAAAAAAAzI/8QnATH01SM4zCv38jIkhfnyf0R2tRxw1ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Kennett%2BSquare%2Bcirca%2B1976.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="518" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1ixH4jXuhlo/TzB5lV8CMCI/AAAAAAAAAzI/8QnATH01SM4zCv38jIkhfnyf0R2tRxw1ACPcBGAYYCw/s320/Kennett%2BSquare%2Bcirca%2B1976.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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<i>At my grandparents' house in Kennett Square, </i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>many, many years before I published my first novel.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">What a pleasure to be interviewed about my novel, <i>Time's a Thief, </i>by Sonya Chung for Bloom, a website “devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older.” My thanks to <a href="http://sonyachung.com/">Sonya</a> and everyone there. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Read the interview, “False Starts, Restarts & Dreaming: Q & A with B.G. Firmani,” <a href="https://bloom-site.com/2018/02/06/false-starts-restarts-dreaming-q-a-with-b-g-firmani/">here</a>.</span><br />
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-70367600809834649842017-09-23T12:53:00.000-04:002017-09-23T12:54:39.075-04:00The Encyclopedic Palace at the Outsider Art Fair<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w8Ua3m8lvoA/WcaGdcm5ulI/AAAAAAAABSo/-BxESfQXflAChbH0ogpTWcT67n5LsaCJQCLcBGAs/s1600/Marino%2BAuriti%2Bwith%2BEncyclopedic%2BPalace.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1172" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w8Ua3m8lvoA/WcaGdcm5ulI/AAAAAAAABSo/-BxESfQXflAChbH0ogpTWcT67n5LsaCJQCLcBGAs/s400/Marino%2BAuriti%2Bwith%2BEncyclopedic%2BPalace.tif" width="291" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #101214;">Marino Auriti's</span><span style="color: #101214;"> <a href="http://selftaughtgenius.org/artworks/encyclopedic-palace-marino-auriti">Encyclopedic Palace</a> will be in Paris at the <a href="http://www.outsiderartfair.com/artist/1645">Outsider Art Fair</a>, October
19-22, 2017. I doubt he would have had any use for the label "outsider"; but he would have loved the architecture of Paris. The backstory of my grandfather's great work can be read </span><a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2012/02/io-vivo-encyclopedic-palace-rises-again.html">here</a><span style="color: #101214;"> </span><span style="color: #101214;">in my 2012 post about the Venice Biennale. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #101214;">He'd have been amazed to read that his was</span><span style="color: #101214;"> "</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">an eccentric if touching case of
postwar America's imperial mentality (i.e. an encyclopedic palace </span><i style="color: #1a1a1a;">of the
world</i><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> in the capital of </span><i style="color: #1a1a1a;">the United States</i><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">)" as whoever wrote this on </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Encyclopedic_Palace_of_the_World">Wikipedia</a> put it. As someone who fled the Fascists and lost his homeland, he'd have found this baffling. And likely not "</span></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">touching," since he wasn't someone who dealt in condescension. </span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-16324241841083087492017-07-06T20:54:00.001-04:002017-07-06T20:55:06.891-04:00Thank You, Head House Books!<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GhdAw30ZuEM/WV7bRtIQmsI/AAAAAAAABSI/EwXs9ji2MogyH3SLh5zpCs7BjMrm1wizACLcBGAs/s1600/With%2BVicki%2Band%2BJen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="302" height="323" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GhdAw30ZuEM/WV7bRtIQmsI/AAAAAAAABSI/EwXs9ji2MogyH3SLh5zpCs7BjMrm1wizACLcBGAs/s400/With%2BVicki%2Band%2BJen.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Vicki and Jen are cracking me up.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Thank you, </span><a href="http://www.headhousebooks.com/events-NEW" style="font-size: large;">Head House Books</a><span style="font-size: medium;"> in Philadelphia, for hosting my reading on June 29th. My huge thanks to Carla
Spataro for the Q&A and for Head House's Vivienne for keeping the store open late while I ran my mouth. And to everyone who came and showed me such warmth: it was a real joy for me. </span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-59955374959166069712017-06-11T20:12:00.001-04:002017-06-25T22:17:40.205-04:00Reading from Time's a Thief at Head House Books in Philadelphia <br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-li4kD5Fkgq0/WT3Xnn1deDI/AAAAAAAABRo/iVkjFaxAqhAG0qCpHvPArjlt61ysijnqwCLcB/s1600/Christian%2BStreet%2Bc%2B1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="480" height="275" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-li4kD5Fkgq0/WT3Xnn1deDI/AAAAAAAABRo/iVkjFaxAqhAG0qCpHvPArjlt61ysijnqwCLcB/s400/Christian%2BStreet%2Bc%2B1920.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Christian Street in Philadelphia, c. 1920. My grandmother was born Maria Rachele Di Sipio somewhere on this street in 1906, before her mother took her back to her hometown of Pretoro in Abruzzo as a child. She married my grandfather <a href="http://selftaughtgenius.org/artworks/encyclopedic-palace-marino-auriti">Marino Auriti</a> and later came back to the U.S, living out her years in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. But I think her heart was forever in Abruzzo. Great photo from a <a href="http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/threads/a-bunch-of-old-photos.23662/page-153#post-696542">thread</a> on <a href="http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/">www.philadelphiaspeaks.com</a>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm delighted to be reading at <a href="http://www.headhousebooks.com/events-NEW">Head House Books</a> in Philadelphia on Thursday, June 29th at 7:30 p.m. I'll be joined for a Q&A by <i>Philadelphia Stories</i>' editorial director and Rosemont College MFA program director, Carla Spataro (thank you, Carla!). Very much looking forward to it, and my thanks to Head House Books.</span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-92008423820697141392017-06-11T12:14:00.002-04:002017-06-11T12:14:29.193-04:00Thank You, Bookstore in Lenox<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aKaR06M8oQU/WT1rLik2nuI/AAAAAAAABPw/L2bioi8DAlM6YxKxyPViRrWJ6DeSD4KvACLcB/s1600/BG%2BFirmani%2Band%2BColin%2BHarrington.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aKaR06M8oQU/WT1rLik2nuI/AAAAAAAABPw/L2bioi8DAlM6YxKxyPViRrWJ6DeSD4KvACLcB/s320/BG%2BFirmani%2Band%2BColin%2BHarrington.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">My thanks to <a href="http://www.bookstoreinlenox.com/">The Bookstore in Lenox</a> for hosting me on June 4th, and for everyone who came out for the reading! Huge thanks to the lovely Colin Harrington (the nice fellow with me in the photo above) for a great Q&A, and to the one and only Matt Tannenbaum, bookman extraordinaire. </span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-14927899861181541852017-05-31T20:52:00.004-04:002017-05-31T20:52:43.339-04:00Reading from Time's a Thief at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VdKlMsgZPHk/WS9j7xIbKtI/AAAAAAAABPg/RNhWVC5zIDoqI0ujp7Z0Sueqcb_3aC6cgCLcB/s1600/thebookstore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="633" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VdKlMsgZPHk/WS9j7xIbKtI/AAAAAAAABPg/RNhWVC5zIDoqI0ujp7Z0Sueqcb_3aC6cgCLcB/s320/thebookstore.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm thrilled to be reading from <i>Time's a Thief </i>at <a href="http://www.bookstoreinlenox.com/">The Bookstore in Lenox</a> on Sunday, June 4th, at 3:00 p.m. The reading will be blessedly short and followed by a Q&A with the poet Colin Harrington. Colin's very generous review of the book for the <i>Berkshire Eagle</i> is <a href="http://bit.ly/2nOD3D1">here</a>. My thanks to The Bookstore in Lenox for hosting me!</span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-35291425521081854462017-05-21T12:59:00.001-04:002017-05-21T12:59:22.127-04:00"...and good old Italian-American nostalgia."<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vqzCroWOAxc/WSHGsdXirLI/AAAAAAAABOw/Q6aDAMTwc2ceIpZj6r8SH_qJCxSiwBkHwCLcB/s1600/9780385541862.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vqzCroWOAxc/WSHGsdXirLI/AAAAAAAABOw/Q6aDAMTwc2ceIpZj6r8SH_qJCxSiwBkHwCLcB/s1600/9780385541862.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It was a real pleasure to be <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/city-as-campus-a-conversation-with-b-g-firmani/">interviewed</a> by Pete Tosiello about my book, <i><a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546530/times-a-thief-by-b-g-firmani/9780385541862/">Time's a Thief,</a></i> for the <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>. My thanks again to Pete and <i>LARB!</i></span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-77474806271705782372017-05-01T13:22:00.001-04:002017-05-01T13:22:22.953-04:00Time's a Thief Book Launch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7US4KKDNS4E/WQdt1eCeQCI/AAAAAAAABOU/49wMzMcFBDQrug9tW8ZQvme16ruhn_PKACLcB/s1600/BG%2BRooftop%2BApril%2B29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7US4KKDNS4E/WQdt1eCeQCI/AAAAAAAABOU/49wMzMcFBDQrug9tW8ZQvme16ruhn_PKACLcB/s400/BG%2BRooftop%2BApril%2B29.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My pleasure to invite folks to my book launch for <i>Time's A Thief </i>tomorrow, May 2nd, at 7:00 p.m. at the <a href="https://www.powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-times-a-thief-by-b-g-firmani/">Powerhouse Arena</a> in Brooklyn. <i>Grazie!</i></span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-69595759402723471632017-04-06T22:27:00.000-04:002017-04-06T22:27:12.837-04:00My Novel, Time's a Thief<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FcFESc1Rq0o/WObybc_usKI/AAAAAAAABN4/Kga2foDKFOU6fRyRKyol9jBRo2-0jEhwgCLcB/s1600/BG%2BFirmani%2BTime%2527s%2Ba%2BThief2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FcFESc1Rq0o/WObybc_usKI/AAAAAAAABN4/Kga2foDKFOU6fRyRKyol9jBRo2-0jEhwgCLcB/s400/BG%2BFirmani%2BTime%2527s%2Ba%2BThief2.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Friends, I'm thrilled to share the news that my novel, <i><a href="http://bit.ly/2lMtvo3">Time's a Thief</a></i>, will come out on Doubleday on May 2nd. My love to everyone who inspired me and helped me along the way, especially to my great friends Kim Sullivan, Thomas Glave and Sarah Hill, my sister Colette "Poogy" McDonald, my beloved editor, Gerry Howard, my inspiring teacher from graduate school, Carole Maso, and my husband, Damian Van Denburgh, who has given me more than I can ever express. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>F</i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>inchè c'è vita c'è speranza.</i></span></span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-69165780581544110442017-02-25T21:35:00.000-05:002017-02-26T19:05:55.893-05:00The Dreamlife of Pascal D’Angelo<a class="twitter-share-button" data-show-count="false" href="https://twitter.com/share">Tweet</a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Pascal D’Angelo wants
to break your heart.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">He’s largely
forgotten today as a poet, or even as a writer of an immigrant narrative. His
memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy,</i> first published
in 1924, was not reprinted until 1975, and can be found most readily today in
its 2003 <a href="https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781550710984">Guernica Editions version</a>, which unfortunately has one of the dopiest
cover illustrations ever to come down the pike. But among the small circle of
writers interested in a certain finely tuned type of Italian-Americana, one
that deals in secret histories (myself guilty), D’Angelo inspires a kind of mania.
He is our brother, our grandfather, our father, our son. He’s operatic,
foolhardy, hardheaded, clumsy, passionate. He’s “big and elemental and simple,”
in the gently racist words of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brooklyn
Daily Eagle</i> writer from 1923. He is maybe our best self, the writer who
never—do people say this anymore?—sold out. He wrote and he wrote and he
starved and he suffered and, against the most miserable odds, he never gave in.
And then he abruptly departed the planet, dying at Kings County Hospital at the
age of 38.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The poet at the time of </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Son of Italy<i>’s publication.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s quite a life,
the story of this man called the “pick and shovel poet,” and D’Angelo tells it
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy</i> in idiosyncratic self-taught
English and with plenty of heart. He was born Pasquale D’Angelo into a peasant
family in a hamlet near Introdacqua, a town in the Abruzzi, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">provincia</i> L’Aquila, in 1894. The family
was poor. Everyone slept in one bed—this reads like a comedy routine in the
memoir—and the family’s goats and sheep were stabled downstairs at night, in
the rooms that served as living room, kitchen and dining room for the humans during
the day. Young Pasquale always worked, pasturing the goats and sheep on Monte
Majella and helping his parents cultivate fields they did not own, where they
“received a small pittance for wages” (25). At one point, as a
fifteen-year-old, he’s helping “a neighbor at harvest for two cents a day” (44).
Pasquale went to school intermittently from the age of seven until twelve—and
that was the extent of his formal education.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">D’Angelo’s birth home in
Abruzzo, from <a href="http://www.terzaclasse.it/storie/pascal.htm">TerzaClasse.it</a></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">.
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Trying to better
the family’s conditions, the father borrows money to rent “two large pieces of
arable ground on which he [toils] almost every minute of daylight” (49), only
to suffer a disastrous season. He finds himself worse off after paying back the
loan at exorbitant interest, and decides to go to America to join a work gang
and seek his fortune. Pasquale, sixteen years old and already “a broad, husky
lad” (59), decides to go with him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">They sail from
Naples—this is the first time Pasquale has seen the sea—and come in through Ellis
Island on April 20, 1910. Pasquale, his father, and the small group of men from
their village are met at the Battery by their foreman, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">paesano</i>, who whisks them off to their first job. D’Angelo’s memoir
captures the crazy newness of the experience, the confusion, the sensory
overload of the big city. He’s also funny. He thinks a father and son chewing
gum must be “afflicted with some nervous disease.” He sees “Ave.” written on
the street signs and thinks, “How religious a place this must be that expresses
its devotion at every crossing” (60). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">They are taken
to, of all places, a forest—in either New Jersey or on Long Island, depending
on whom you read, and the muddle over this mirrors Pasquale’s confusion at the
unfamiliarity of his situation. He has no context for any of this, not even for
the tallness of American trees. That first night the crew beds down on planks in
a shack and, the next morning, D’Angelo writes, “We set to digging and handling
our picks and shovels. And I have been handling them ever since” (65). The crew
would be digging its way through a hillock, flattening the land for a paved road.
For this they are each paid two dollars a day; after deducting payments for
money advanced them for passage to America, D’Angelo would be taking home less
than 79 cents for a day’s labor (Jim Murphy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pick & Shovel Poet: The Journeys of Pascal D’Angelo,</i> 67).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In his memoir,
D’Angelo delights in stories about his early bewilderment over English. He comes
here not speaking the language at all, but in the first few months picks up
words like “bread,” “gloves,” and “milk.” He’s sent to buy a dozen eggs, and
the Polish shopkeepers offer him many things, including a dozen axes, until
young Pasquale begins to “cackle like a hen” (69). He mutates the words “fall
down” into “You damn!” and accidentally curses out people asking about a black
eye (70). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Then, after the
specificity of these stories, the narrative collapses: and four years, “a
monotonous repetition of laborious days” (70) is compressed into a handful of
paragraphs. The work crew toils up and down the East Coast, from New York to
New Jersey to Virginia to Maryland and back to New York again, all of the work thankless,
miserably paid, and anonymous: “Who hears the thuds of the pick and the
jingling of the shovel?” (72). D’Angelo interrupts this section with an
extended description of his first real acquaintance with New York City—a night
out on the town in 1914—when he’s at once dazzled by the city and amazed by the
jadedness of New Yorkers (and it’s not clear if he’s joking or not when he
mistakes a prostitute for “a lady of the aristocracy,” 78). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xRGH3LXjlhM/WLIwEmjZa-I/AAAAAAAABLY/E6m11LervIQQELjNg926KXyHLdp0AFfEwCEw/s1600/260-268%2BElizabeth%2BSt%2BMarch%2B1912%2BLewis%2BHine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xRGH3LXjlhM/WLIwEmjZa-I/AAAAAAAABLY/E6m11LervIQQELjNg926KXyHLdp0AFfEwCEw/s400/260-268%2BElizabeth%2BSt%2BMarch%2B1912%2BLewis%2BHine.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A Lewis Hine photo of
Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, 1912, from <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/44?size=_original#caption">Shorpy</a></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">.
D’Angelo and crew rented “a few dirty beds” from “an old Abruzzese woman” a blocks
west, on Franklin Street, around the same time.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">From there it’s
more toil—in upstate New York, Connecticut, and on up to Massachusetts and
Vermont—until the work dries up. The crew of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">paesani</i> decides to go back to New York City, to “the slums where
people of ill repute are not difficult to find,” and lay low until they can get
another job (81). The trouble is, no one has work for eight men, and the crew
doesn’t want to be broken up. Meanwhile, the money they’ve saved is running
out, and “it hurts the conscious of honest people when they have to live on
borrowed money” (90). At last, an opportunity is found: if they can each pay
the five-dollar fare, there’s a big job waiting for them in West Virginia, “the
land of summer and flowers” (98). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The reality they
find is very different. The train lets them off at a freezing-cold platform;
they must walk miles in the slush to get to their camp; their baggage with warm
clothes and cooking gear gets mistakenly sent to Pennsylvania. At the job site,
they’re grunted at and sent to a tarpaper shack with a weak and stinky coal
stove to bed down for the night. The next morning, hopping around in their damp
clothes to warm up, they’re greeted coldly by the foreman and Mike the
commissary man, who eye them as if they’re “pigs in our sty” (103). From here D’Angelo
goes into an explanation of the exploitative commissary system—how workers are
forced to spend most of whatever money they make at the commissary, buying
things at prices that “would make a New York profiteer green with envy” (104).
They’re effectively enslaved, owing their souls to the company store. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The job is hellish,
if confusingly described—they’re building a railroad, clearing rock after controlled
blasts. They must work quickly among huge machinery, steam shovels and steam
drills, and beneath immense derricks. Weeks pass, and they’re miserable and
ill-used; there’s talk of leaving, but they stay on. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And things go <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">di male in peggio.</i> A cable that holds
one of the massive derricks snaps, the derrick collapses, and two of Pasquale’s
work crew are crushed. One, the giant of the group named Andrea, is still
alive. The crew tries to raise the derrick, “but we were too excited; and as we
raised a ponderous weight, in spite of our taut muscles, it slid down the
embankment. With a horrible grinding sound of flesh and bones it crushed the
last life out Andrea” (106). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The crew does
break up now—they have “lost all heart.” Back in New York City, Pasquale’s
dispirited father wants to return to Italy. But Pasquale, now twenty years old,
wants to stay:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Something had grown in me during my stay
in America. Something was keeping me in this wonderful perilous land where I
had suffered so much and where I had so much more to suffer. Should I quit this
great America without a chance to really know it? Again I shook my head. There
was a lingering suspicion that somewhere in this vast country an opening
existed, that somewhere I would strike the light. I could not remain in
darkness perpetually. </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(106-7)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Pasquale gets a
job in the Erie Railroad yard in New Jersey, near the Fort Lee ferry. The pay’s
not great—$1.13 a day—and the work is dangerous. Men are crushed to death under
freight cars and in coal dumps or they suffocate in the steam house. “It was a
war in which we poor laborers—Poles and Italians—were perpetually engaged”
(108). Pasquale and the other men live in an unheated boxcar in the center of
the rail yards. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In time,
Pasquale is lured north by the promise of $2.25 a day working on state roads in
northern New Jersey, and sets off alone, spending the last of his money on the
fare. He joins a concrete gang—backbreaking work, with bad conditions
exacerbated by a tyrant of a foreman named Domenick, who speaks in a “weird
Calabrese dialect” and has it in for Pasquale (112). Domenick criticizes him incessantly
and, one wet day, browbeats him into taking an overloaded wheelbarrow of cement
down a slippery plank. The inevitable happens—Pasquale slips, the wheelbarrow
plunges into the foundation and, trying to save himself from falling, Pasquale jams
his hand through a rusty nail. The foreman runs at him shrieking, “Get out, you
fool!” (114). There’s nowhere to get his injury treated, so Pasquale walks in
the rain to buy a bottle of peroxide to “medicate” his hand … and then there’s
nothing for it but to lie around, in the cold bunkhouse, “like a hurt dog who
slinks off to some dark corner where it can lick its wounds in silence” (115).
The next day, his ballooning hand tied up in a handkerchief, he goes back to
work, expecting to be given a less demanding job. But Domenick, unmoved, shouts
at him to pick up his shovel. Pasquale drags himself back to the camp. That
night the other workers eventually stream back home to cook their dinners.
Pasquale can only watch. But instead of an extended lamentation for himself, surprisingly,
this is what he writes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The night was beautiful. The stars were
like exquisite, happy, living spirits giving their bright laughter to the
silent night. A few [of the workers] were beginning to munch their food. The
rest were moving about or waiting. In spite of the soft weather they all seemed
to be in ill humor … it seemed that the balmy summer night had awakened deep in
their hearts the vision of another land, lovely and balmy and calm. A land that
doesn’t know any such things as foremen, in small towns where one is never
among strangers and people help one another.</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (119)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And, indeed, one
of them helps Pasquale by sending him off to seek work on a different crew.
Pasquale sets out and, of all things, runs into a drunken, vulnerable Domenick.
Terrible fury flashes up in Pasquale. He hurries toward the man; he pauses. And
then he feels a hand on his shoulder: It’s “old Michele,” an Abruzzese who works
with another crew. “‘And where are you going, boy?” Michele asks him. Pasquale
explains about his hand, the injury, the unfairness, his rage. Michele says to
him: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“Boy … a stupid world drove nails through
other hands—other hands.”</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
(121)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And perhaps here
old Michele has saved Pasquale from committing murder. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Weeks later, Pasquale
is back in New Jersey, living once again in his old boxcar. But something has
changed. He’s become weirdly light-hearted, laughing at foremen when their
backs are turned. It’s as if the worst has happened, and he has nothing left to
lose. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">A group of
Mexican workers comes to the yard and he becomes friendly with one man in
particular, “a wiry young man, who had been with Villa and had been taken
prisoner by the Americans.” The man (alas, never given a name in D’Angelo’s
narrative) subscribes to a weekly Spanish newspaper, and Pasquale is amused to
see how much time the man spends reading it—Pasquale had “gotten to think of a
newspaper as something to start a fire with”—but then he also becomes
interested, looking at the paper to pick out words that look like the Italian. Soon
enough he’s buying English-language newspapers. He puzzles over them for hours,
struggling to read them, and when he learns a new word he writes it “in big
letters on the mouldy walls of the boxcar. And soon I had my first lesson in
English all around me” (129).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">A friend takes
him to see an “Italian vaudeville show” on the Bowery—and Pasquale decides he
can write a better one. Somehow, he begins <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">writing
</i>in English. He reads his first attempt aloud, gets some laughs (whether
they’re with him or at him, he can’t tell) and then he’s off and running. He
becomes known for his joke-writing in the train yard. “Several good-natured
lads” even bring him writing paper. He buys himself an old dictionary for a
quarter … it’s “half-torn. But I thought I had gotten a treasure for the price.
And I proceeded to memorize it” (132). He becomes “that queer Italian laborer”
who knows so many big words in English that he’s challenged by a group of young
American brakeman who want to put him in his place—but he defines all the words
they throw at him, and even stumps them in turn with “caballine,” “anorexia,”
“phlebotomy.” After so much wretchedness, it’s a delight to read this passage,
with its strutting, boyish glee:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The defeat of these educated youths was,
is and will be an eternal one, because there is no other pick and shovel man
that can face them.</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
(135)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s when he makes
his way to Brooklyn to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aïda, </i>which
is “to be represented in the open air” at the Sheepshead Bay racetrack, that
his life changes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">… all at once I felt myself to be driven
toward a goal. For there was revealed to me beauty, which I had been
instinctively following, in spite of my grotesque jokes and farces … There were
parts of such overwhelming loveliness that they tore my soul apart. At times,
afterwards, when on the job amid the confusion of running engines, car screams,
and all kinds of bad noises, I heard those supreme melodies around me. </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(137-8) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">He has found his
lodestar: beauty. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape
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</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-veTM-UN1TWQ/WLIxbeChW6I/AAAAAAAABMQ/rmeWX6Fcy4QiTT9zWJXVoaZEBXnHfqW9wCLcB/s1600/Aida%2Bat%2BSheepshead%2BBay%2B7-27-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="336" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-veTM-UN1TWQ/WLIxbeChW6I/AAAAAAAABMQ/rmeWX6Fcy4QiTT9zWJXVoaZEBXnHfqW9wCLcB/s400/Aida%2Bat%2BSheepshead%2BBay%2B7-27-1919.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">What D’Angelo saw at
Sheepshead Bay, from the </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">NYT<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, July 27, 1919. Turns out it was a benefit to help victims of an earthquake in Florence. This
past year, 2016, central Italy saw two devastating earthquakes. My paternal
grandmother’s hometown in Le Marche, just north of Abruzzo, was one of the
<a href="http://www.ilmessaggero.it/primopiano/cronaca/terremoto_arquata_del_tronto-2053562.html">worst hit</a>: </i>“Arquata del Tronto non esiste più”:</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> “Arquata del Tronto does not exist anymore.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">D’Angelo makes
some stumbling attempts to learn music, and then he begins writing poems. He
writes and writes. He goes to the public library near Edgewater, and is “kindly
received in spite of [his] broken English and the ragged appearance of [his]
working clothes” (and God love that nameless librarian). In the library he
discovers Shelley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus Unbound. </i>In
it he finds the same beauty that he has found in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aïda, </i>but while “music was impossible” for him, he could “proceed
to emulate [Shelley] almost immediately” (144). And then, one November morning
in 1919, he decides to quit the laborer’s life entirely and devote himself to
writing poetry. “I reflected: what was one little starvation more or less in a
man’s life, especially in that of a self-appointed poet?” (147). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-STrd3JsW_vk/WLIzVjGNzwI/AAAAAAAABMg/XknXlO9P0yEw6a_tdWCzzMXFWsMXcoSAQCLcB/s1600/Prometheus.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-STrd3JsW_vk/WLIzVjGNzwI/AAAAAAAABMg/XknXlO9P0yEw6a_tdWCzzMXFWsMXcoSAQCLcB/s400/Prometheus.gif" width="240" /></a></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Inspiration. <br />
Image from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Unbound_(Shelley)#/media/File:Prometheus.gif">Wikipedia</a></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Pasquale moves
to New York City to write, probably becoming Pascal along the way, and eventually
finds cheap quarters for himself in “the slums along the Brooklyn waterfront”
(148)—and good luck with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> today.
He lives cheaply; he writes and writes; he sends his poems everywhere but finds
no takers; he loses heart and finds a job in the dockyard. “But the Enchantress
would not let me free” (152). He finds the cheapest, most miserable housing
available, an unheated hovel that used to be a chicken coop with an entrance
“through a toilet which served ten families besides unwelcome strangers and
dirty passers-by” (154). He lives on stale bread, rotten bananas, thin soup. He
perseveres. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">These are some
of the most thrilling passages in this brief and ardent book, how he keeps
going through his despair, through his disappointment, through his hunger and
wretched physical discomfort, through what must have been all sorts of mockery
and derision, to achieve his heart’s desire. And he does it. He does it. He
writes an impassioned, impossible, ridiculous, beautiful letter to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nation</i>’s Carl Van Doren—the journal
is holding a poetry competition and Pascal believes he should win it, if only
on heart alone—and Van Doren hears him. As Van Doren would go on to write in
the introduction to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">If this was not an authentic cry, I had
never heard one. It drowned out the loud noises of Vesey Street; it seemed to
me to widen the walls of my cramped office. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Van Doren meets D’Angelo
and is taken with him: “He came with the mark of his hardships upon him … yet I
found him full of that quiet patience which is the underlying quality of the
peasants of his race, and capable of gaiety.” He writes a profile of D’Angelo
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nation</i>, and D’Angelo becomes
something of a sensation. The work of the young poet is picked up by leading
journals—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Literary Review, The
Bookman, The Century</i>—and he’s published alongside the likes of H.D. and
Carl Sandburg in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bookman Anthology of
Verse</i> in 1922. Van Doren urges him to collect his story in a narrative—and
the book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy</i> is born. As D’Angelo
writes in the final pages of the memoir, “The literary world began to take me
up as a great curiosity and I was literally feasted, welcomed and stared at.” He
receives letters “from Boston to ’Frisco”; he is celebrated by his fellow
workers; and, perhaps most meaningful of all, his fame spreads across the sea
to his homeland: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And sweeter yet was the happiness of my
parents who realized that after all I had not really gone astray, but had
sought and attained a goal far from the deep-worn groove of peasant drudgery.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And
there ends his narrative—on a high note, and one that not only reflects the
reality of D’Angelo’s experiences, but that’s also, perhaps, driven by the
swell that accompanies the moment when one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">finally
finishes</i> a book: the angels do sing. Sometimes falsely, but that’s what
revisions are for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hmdROOpNaCA/WLIwF0YFHRI/AAAAAAAABME/0qq9ge3ktCoR5Ui0tyHJu310L7M2kKZBACEw/s1600/Son%2Bof%2BItaly%2Bfirst%2Bedition.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hmdROOpNaCA/WLIwF0YFHRI/AAAAAAAABME/0qq9ge3ktCoR5Ui0tyHJu310L7M2kKZBACEw/s320/Son%2Bof%2BItaly%2Bfirst%2Bedition.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
first edition, which would remain the only one for 50 or so years. You can order up a lovely, decaying copy of it at the NYPL and read it in the Main
Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street—perhaps at the very table where
D’Angelo had his few last pennies stolen from his coat pocket during the cold
winter of 1921, forcing him to walk all the way home to Brooklyn: “My clothes
became bright and studded with the frozen rain.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7nv29d6fj4w/WLIwFVgoYsI/AAAAAAAABME/1R_wCNMqXYkCmZHTBHrgMduBl0cMz4MXACEw/s1600/Literary%2BDigest%2BInt%2527l%2BBook%2BReview%2BV4%2BIMAGE.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7nv29d6fj4w/WLIwFVgoYsI/AAAAAAAABME/1R_wCNMqXYkCmZHTBHrgMduBl0cMz4MXACEw/s640/Literary%2BDigest%2BInt%2527l%2BBook%2BReview%2BV4%2BIMAGE.png" width="308" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">From
one of the wholeheartedly <a href="http://bit.ly/2iPNeDe">positive reviews</a> of </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Son of Italy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">written by Elizabeth Stead Taber, which ran in the Literary Digest International Book Review</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Was
the book well received? I’m not sure I have the answer to this. It was reviewed
in the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> New York Times, </i>and nearly
anyone who writes about D’Angelo cites some version of the beginning of this
piece, where the unnamed reviewer tells us that D’Angelo is:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">… one of the few
Americanized immigrants whose success has been non-worldly yet decisive. Edward
Bok, Jacob Riis, to mention but two of our best-known national conversions,
stand for the practical, solid achievement that constitutes mundane success.
Pascal d’Angelo is one of that class of men, rare in America, whose success is
so spiritual as to be almost entirely devoid of material embellishments. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But read this
more closely—and keep reading—and one finds a review that’s actually quite sour
and condescending. It’s filled with jocular contempt for the big, striving
yokel, and peppered with “funny” phrasings (“the paraphernalia of Italian
peasant life” is described “with a candor that is disarming, even if a bit
affected”) that dismiss D’Angelo’s struggle. “One gladly passes over his
account of the privations on which he prides himself”—words that could only
have been written by someone who’s always had a full belly. </span><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";">Perhaps
snottiest of all, in response to D’Angelo’s moment of insight that comes toward
the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy</i>—“without
realizing it, I had learned the great lesson of America: I had learned to have
faith in the future”—the reviewer writes: “This apparently was not enough, and
so he learned the second lesson of America: ‘It Pays to Advertise.’” </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">And the reviewer wonders aloud: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";">… what percentage of [D’Angelo’s]
subsequent</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #656565; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";">success is due to the mental laziness that makes people judge a
work of art by its source rather than on its merits, plus the inverted snobbery
which leads one to admire the “dancing dogs” of Dr. Johnson’s well-worn simile.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #040404; font-family: "times new roman";">Remember the origin of that simile? Dr. Johnson was talking
about the spectacle of a woman preaching: </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“Sir,
a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done
well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” What is this attitude besides
the power group’s unwillingness to share the power? God forbid an Italian
peasant attempt to write poetry in 1920s America. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-udA5x1Y0a1Y/WLI0_JIEaZI/AAAAAAAABMs/cEX0as0rB78JLp8WZ532OmYeZ2CXjRjwACLcB/s1600/BROOKLYN%2BDAILY%2BEAGLE%2B3-25-23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-udA5x1Y0a1Y/WLI0_JIEaZI/AAAAAAAABMs/cEX0as0rB78JLp8WZ532OmYeZ2CXjRjwACLcB/s400/BROOKLYN%2BDAILY%2BEAGLE%2B3-25-23.jpg" width="305" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Brooklyn Daily Eagle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loving on D’Angelo, March 25, 1923. You can
go <a href="http://www.lasepolturadellaletteratura.it/pascal-dangelo-un-emigrante-si-racconta/">here</a></i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> for a heartfelt appreciation of D’Angelo’s poetry, written just last year (in
Italian).<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Dig
around in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brooklyn Daily Eagle</i>
from that era (click here for a terrific, <a href="http://bklyn.newspapers.com/">free resource</a> from the Brooklyn
Public Library </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">) and you’ll find plenty of similar
amazement—in this case, however, it’s tempered by appreciation for D’Angelo the
human in a way that only a populist daily paper would have it. Lost in all of
this seems to be any kind of real discussion of the quality of the work. Am I
having it both ways when I say that, as far as the poetry, does it even matter?
It strikes me as serviceable, Romantic-inflected stuff, deeply rooted in the
land, with moments of beauty, moments of terror, plenty of near-misses, and
very often a frustrated striving toward grandeur. It’s young writing that needs
nurturing to keep growing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But Abruzzesi
are notoriously hardheaded. We really don’t want to hear it at all! In Van
Doren’s introduction (which, frustratingly, isn’t included in the Guernica
reprint) the reader learns that D’Angelo at the height of his fame was offered
all sorts of assistance—everything from money to editorial jobs—but, “after
paying so high a price to be a poet, he was not willing to take his reward in
some meaner coin.” So what happened next? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son
of Italy</i> came out in 1924 and D’Angelo died in 1932, and every source I
found said that he died destitute, with no money even to pay for his funeral. What
went down during those eight years? What did he write? How did he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">live?</i> I wanted answers to all of these
questions, and I couldn’t help but fixate on something else. In all the
mentions of his death, I found none of where he was buried. <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/">Find-A-Grave</a>, a
pretty encyclopedic resource, didn’t list him at all; and far as I could see
not even those notorious baptism-of-the-dead Mormon folks seem to have claimed
him online. Where were his bones?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Jim Murphy’s
young adult book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pick & Shovel Poet:
The Journeys of Pascal D’Angelo,</i> offers some interesting ideas about his
last years. He conjectures, for example, that perhaps it was D’Angelo’s
embarrassment over his lack of education and thick accent, rather than pride,
that kept him from taking a job as an editor. But I was looking for something
more concrete. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The answer was
actually very close at hand, in a book published just this past year. Tyler
Anbinder’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><a href="https://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/City-of-Dreams/9780544104655#body1_0_productInfoTab">City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York</a></span></i><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> has a terrific, engaged section about D’Angelo. He follows
the poet’s trail, filling in the blank stretch from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy</i>’s publication to D’Angelo’s death eight years later. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Anbinder
writes that a few months after D’Angelo’s memoir was published, he dropped off
the map, disappearing from the New York literary scene entirely. Maybe he was
suffering from writer’s block? What’s clear is that, after a reprieve from his
wretched living conditions, he’d gone back living near the Brooklyn waterfront,
in what the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herald Tribune</i> would
describe as an “incredibly bare and cold shanty.” Drawing from accounts
published in papers at the time of D’Angelo’s death—and I’m indebted to Anbinder’s
book for leading me to these sources—Anbinder writes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">He stopped answering
letters from his relatives… They wondered if “the strain and deprivations of
his struggling years had affected his mind.” Indeed, his landlady reported that
“he sometimes acted strangely.” Among other oddities, he decided that despite
his desperate circumstances, he had to teach himself Chinese. The onset of the
Great Depression must have made things even more difficult … By [1932] D’Angelo
had pawned his typewriter and could not even afford paper. He continued to
write, however, scrawling his poems in the margins of old newspapers, on the
backs of calendars, and eventually on the walls of his apartment.</span></i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"> (City of Dreams, 388-9)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">By the time D’Angelo began suffering from terrible stomachaches,
likely he had waited too long. “From his neighbors it was not possible to learn
much … except that he had been out of a job for some time,” a reporter writes
in a contemporary account in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brooklyn
Daily Eagle</i>. Those neighbors had to call for the ambulance that took Pascal
D’Angelo to Kings County Hospital, where he died on March 13, 1932, after an appendectomy.
No doubt his health was compromised from so many years of subsisting on trash.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NneCTWC7Euo/WLIwFq-1LaI/AAAAAAAABME/HE8SjRb4c1EIKUM_Utdp9kmEh6xNPiPhwCEw/s1600/Pascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Blast%2Baddress%252C%2Bfrom%2BGoogle%2BMaps.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NneCTWC7Euo/WLIwFq-1LaI/AAAAAAAABME/HE8SjRb4c1EIKUM_Utdp9kmEh6xNPiPhwCEw/s400/Pascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Blast%2Baddress%252C%2Bfrom%2BGoogle%2BMaps.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">D’Angelo’s
last address, the “incredibly bare and cold shanty,” from Google Maps. </span></span></i><i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Zillow it and
you’ll see that its sale price is zestimated, God help us, at $1.74 million
today.</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Trolling
through those newspapers of 1932, you read on as all the lamentations pour in. This
is by turns moving and strange and corny and infuriating, with plenty of
handwringing, plenty of sensationalism. Who will bury him? A brother, John, is
found in Paterson—who knew <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he</i>
existed—but he’s a jobless laborer, in equally dire straits. A cousin, Arthur, turns
up in Philadelphia, and he says he’s “an automobile salesman and that’s just
like being out of a job at present,” in a cheeky-sounding assessment quoted in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Herald</i>. Arthur calls
MacMillan to see if any royalties are due from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Son of Italy,</i> and finds out that the poet’s estate is entitled to
$4.60. The paper also checks in on Van Doren, who remembers D’Angelo as a
“peasant boy who spoke English badly.” He recalls that he was “‘inert in
conversation’ but then so are lots of poets.” He describes D’Angelo as “the
only extremely unlettered immigrant I knew who wrote pretty good poetry without
rising above the level of a day laborer.” Van Doren seems to want to keep an
even tone, not dive into the sensationalism, but the effect is dismissive, as
if he regretted his earlier enthusiasm. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herald</i> reports that strewn around the
“two mean rooms,” besides an uncashed money order for fourteen dollars, are
manuscripts that, if stacked, would reach two feet high. Many contain “formless
snatches of unfinished poems.” Ten days later, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brooklyn Daily Eagle </i>reporter and the poet’s brother are digging
through the garbage, attempting to retrieve these very papers. Among the things
they find is Pascal’s beloved 25-cent dictionary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">Hometown
sensationalism from the </span></i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">Brooklyn Daily Eagle<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,
March 20, 1932.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">However, if the
landlady wasn’t so much a fan, it turns out that—pace <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Humboldt’s Gift</i>—there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were</i> fans of modern poetry <o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">at the morgue.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, </span></i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">D’Angelo’s huge booster a
decade earlier, rallies on the dead poet’s behalf—and helps raise money to save
him from a burial in New York City’s <a href="https://www.hartisland.net/">potter’s field</a></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">. The coverage is lavish, excessive,
self-congratulatory (and in one instance, no doubt rushing to meet a deadline,
the typesetter has mashed up an article about Pascal’s burial with a wholly
unrelated one about a St. Patrick’s party—just after we read that “the body of
a romanticist whose reward for his ideals was only humility will rest in
dignity in a Catholic cemetery,” we discover that Mrs. J. Frank Fanning has
received “a large cocoanut pie last night as a gift”). The paper makes good,
and through its intercession D’Angelo is given a proper burial, where many seem
to have come to pay their respects (among them apparently was Garibaldi
LaPolla, who would publish <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grand
Gennaro,</i> a touchstone of Italian-American fiction, the next year). Some
months later, the grave of Pascal D’Angelo is given a headstone—donated, who
knows why, by a now-closed girls’ school in Cooperstown, New York. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4LxzvBfdwgw/WLI2bO_DARI/AAAAAAAABM8/rZekxmS_p08bnuXqXd4cJPew0e14MqdgQCLcB/s1600/knxsch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4LxzvBfdwgw/WLI2bO_DARI/AAAAAAAABM8/rZekxmS_p08bnuXqXd4cJPew0e14MqdgQCLcB/s400/knxsch.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">These good women
paid for D’Angelo’s headstone.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";">And then, the man buried, his life celebrated and lamented, the
coverage peters out. The last mention in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eagle</i> I found is from </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">May
30, 1934, in an article titled “Grave of Poet Spared Poverty Plot Decorated by
Idolators”—fire <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> headline writer—which
is a short item describing how members of the Pascal D’Angelo Society placed a wreath
on the poet’s grave. It must have been a slow news day. By now, it seems that Pascal
has learned English through a “ten-cent dictionary,” losing a full fifteen
cents and, I suppose, gaining that much more in pathos. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s
a funny thing, the monolithic entitled-white-guy tone of so many critics of D’Angelo’s
day. I know, it’s unfair to criticize from our vantage point, but the unchecked
condescension is breathtaking these 90 years on. John Farrar—yes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> Farrar—hits a typical snide tone in
the introduction to D’Angelo’s entry in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Bookman Anthology:</i> “Convinced he is a poet, excited and pleased by each new
bit of public acknowledgement, he will come to you displaying his trophies: a
picture in an Italian paper, an article in a Sunday magazine, a new poem in
‘The Century.’” I wonder on Van Doren’s dismissiveness after D’Angelo’s death, on
the tendency of so many around him to see him as a sort of freak. Maybe to all
of these tastemakers, D’Angelo was ultimately more interesting as a story, not
as a person. Maybe it’s actually best of all if he’s dead, so that he can be
ruefully lamented—and finally out of their hair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And
maybe the poet was not as dumb as they all thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Was
he reading those reviews? As his English got better, was he getting hip to all
that snark? Did it burn his peasant ass? Did he tell himself that he’d quit the
public poetry scene, lock himself away, sharpen his pencils and write his heart
out in his Gowanus hovel? That he’d perfect his poetry until he was finally
ready to come out perfect—not only mastering English, but speaking Chinese,
just to show everyone else how stupid and lazy they were? Once again I’ll deal
in some pretty subjective tribalism here and say that Abruzzesi are nothing if
not tenacious. We’re stubborn, we’re great fixators. But we’re also great
dreamers. D’Angelo had to cling to his beliefs, crazy as they might have seemed
to others; they are what made him, and what kept him going. Book people
criticized him for “advertising” his poetry—but would he have gotten anywhere
at all if he hadn’t come knocking on their doors? He recognized the mobility possible
in America, the opportunity to take his chances and make himself a new self—a poet,
which would have been impossible in Italy, even if he did grow up a stone’s
throw from Ovid’s native Sulmona, even if there was an actual tradition of
Abruzzese shepherd poets. The U.S. destroyed D’Angelo, but it also made him a
poet. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">While the
Guernica edition doesn’t have Van Doren’s introduction, it does have an
absorbing and too-brief essay by Kenneth Scambray, who argues for a deeper
reading of D’Angelo’s book. Scambray doesn’t find it the Horatio Alger success
story that so many others do. He finds it “a countertext to the melting pot
theory that dominated American society at the time” (169). Not only was D’Angelo’s
assimilation unsuccessful but, he argues, he has nothing to do with “canonical
Italy.”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Scambray points out that Van
Doren doesn’t call D’Angelo an Italian at all but “a typical example ‘of the
peasants of his race’” (176). The triumph at the end of D’Angelo’s narrative is
negated by the wretched end of his real life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And yet
we have this lovely book to read.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">So,
double back for a moment here. Before I found <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">City of Dreams </i>and the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>many
answers it gave me, I was fixating on where D’Angelo was buried. He died in
Brooklyn—but was he buried there? Had they shipped his body home, to the land
he loved so much? Not likely; too expensive. I happened to be emailing about
something else <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGFIOE6FI94">with my exceptional uncle, Raymond Firmani</a></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">, a WWII bomber pilot, now 95 years old and fit as a fiddle and sharp as a tack, and he’d mentioned something about his
long-passed uncle Emil. Seriously, Emil, that was his name? Ray told me, No, it
was Emidio, but he changed it to Emil. Unsaid was that it was classier to be
French than Italian in those days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And then
I realized: Pasquale D’Angelo. In the death registers, he would be listed as
the peasant, not the poet. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And so I found
him, at last, in Queens:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V_fkQTLjFrY/WLIwFAFdeWI/AAAAAAAABME/qOtTEMTSKlIRx0MOohfdP_i8y97Y3bS6gCEw/s1600/Find-A-Grave%2BScreenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V_fkQTLjFrY/WLIwFAFdeWI/AAAAAAAABME/qOtTEMTSKlIRx0MOohfdP_i8y97Y3bS6gCEw/s400/Find-A-Grave%2BScreenshot.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The anonymous Pasquale
D’Angelo, buried in Saint John Cemetery.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s not two
hours out by train and bus and the briefest of walks to St. John Cemetery,
final resting place of Gerry Ferraro, Mario Cuomo, Robert Mapplethorpe, and
more mafiosi than you can jam into Umberto’s Clam House. We went out there, I
with my map in hand, looking for Section 25, Row Y, Grave 113. It was a
beautiful autumn day, lovely and balmy and calm. We walked the sections and
then the rows, counting down the letters, and then we walked the line of
well-kept headstones. And there he was. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TGq-V5WHiNs/WLIwFMPun-I/AAAAAAAABME/b3Ia9EGacTQnZGB2BZk7JgAOFMKthlInQCEw/s1600/BG%2BFirmani%2Bat%2BPascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Bgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TGq-V5WHiNs/WLIwFMPun-I/AAAAAAAABME/b3Ia9EGacTQnZGB2BZk7JgAOFMKthlInQCEw/s400/BG%2BFirmani%2Bat%2BPascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Bgrave.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I don't know—why
is it so important to me to find his old bones? Why does it hurt my heart to
think of Dawn Powell’s remains turning to dust in an unmarked grave on Hart
Island? They’re not suffering. They’re up there smoking cigarettes and drinking
gin and eating flapjacks and playing the harp. But we’re still here, I’m still
here. It will sound corny as hell but perhaps going and finding them is just a
way of saying: I have seen you. I have read you. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">You inspire me,
and I give you my thanks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QITnqwVjcrg/WLIwF78M4sI/AAAAAAAABME/RboJY2KsNII2kLU78ilAnFxDo7Kf3EJdQCEw/s1600/Pascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Bgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QITnqwVjcrg/WLIwF78M4sI/AAAAAAAABME/RboJY2KsNII2kLU78ilAnFxDo7Kf3EJdQCEw/s400/Pascal%2BD%2527Angelo%2527s%2Bgrave.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">“I am a poor worker,” D’Angelo
wrote, “but a rich defender of truth.”</span></span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<a class="twitter-share-button" data-show-count="false" href="https://twitter.com/share">Tweet</a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-1750272640868274822016-10-30T20:49:00.001-04:002016-10-30T20:49:20.529-04:00Remembering Francesca Rosa<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: large;">I wonder if it’s more miserable or more gentle to find out about a
friend’s death when an email you send her comes back as undeliverable. Well,
it’s done now, and with the passing of Francesca Rosa the world has lost one
lovely, amused, <i>engagé,</i> and deeply kind person. She wrote
as F.S. Rosa, and published a massive novel called <i>The
Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca</i>—which is how we met, when she sent me an
email after reading a blog post I wrote about <i>Carlo Tresca: Portrait of
a Rebel.</i> That book was written by Nunzio Pernicone—“the
leading historian of Italian anarchism in the United States”—another
large-hearted, committed, eyes-wide-open person I’d meet by email, and who
departed this planet in 2013. <i><span style="color: #0e0e0e;">Non averei
creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.</span></i><span style="color: #0e0e0e;"> Cancer,
in both cases; and also in both cases, if <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Author/Default.aspx?AuthorId=4183" target="_blank">Francesca</a> and <a href="http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/jdfpcc" target="_blank">Dr. Pernicone</a> were to show
up in Dante, once could safely bet the farm that it would be in <i>Paradiso</i>. </span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8E8Ekf9K0Hg/WBaM2DfKCeI/AAAAAAAABKk/BRgITHU4rA0NAf41Afb_89QMO5A5U-gHwCK4B/s1600/Francesca%2BRosa%2Band%2BBG%2BFirmani%2BSan%2BFrancisco%2B2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8E8Ekf9K0Hg/WBaM2DfKCeI/AAAAAAAABKk/BRgITHU4rA0NAf41Afb_89QMO5A5U-gHwCK4B/s400/Francesca%2BRosa%2Band%2BBG%2BFirmani%2BSan%2BFrancisco%2B2013.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Francesca Rosa and me at the Original U.S. Restaurant in North Beach, 2013. <a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2016/10/remembering-francesca-rosa.html" target="_blank">Here</a> is another remembrance of her, and an interview, on Robin Tremblay-McGaw's blog, X Poetics. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #131313;">What a sweetie Francesca was. She worked for
more than 30 years at the <a href="http://www.thearcsf.org/" target="_blank">Arc San Francisco</a>, working with people with developmental
disabilities while, from what I could see, always writing and keeping active in
her union and the larger community. She forever described herself as a “rank
and file union member,” and a longtime student of labor and left history, and
wore that both proudly and humbly. In emails that we wrote to each other I
joked that I was an “underperforming anarchist” and she called herself an “</span>anarcho-syndicalist
with bourgeois tendencies,” though I never saw the bourgeois part, unless she
was talking about liking a glass of red wine and a good plate of gnocchi. <span style="color: #131313;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #131313;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Just as she was a committed activist and
progressive, she loved the Italian stuff—the lore, the stories, the folkways. If
I remember this right, her people were Sicilian on one side, Neapolitan on the
other. Like in so many families, Italian or otherwise, there was plenty of
political strife. She told me in an email that when her grandfather on her
mother’s side, Joseph Mosarra, went to work at the Italian Center in Stamford,
Connecticut (which had been started by her paternal grandfather, who became “a
big fan of Fascism”), the first thing he did when he got there was “take down
all the pictures of Mussolini.” I shared stories about my grandfather, <a href="http://selftaughtgenius.org/artworks/encyclopedic-palace-marino-auriti" target="_blank">Marino Auriti</a>, fleeing Italy after the Fascists seized his family</span></span><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">’</span><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">s house in Abruzzo and then,
when I was a kid, how I was fascinated and confused by a great-uncle’s Fascist
armband that was, for whatever reason, kept in a drawer in my grandparents’
house in Pennsylvania. I assumed later this was some sort of Santayanan
reminder about remembering the past lest we doom ourselves to repeat it.</span><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Francesca and I met in person only once, over a
long weekend in San Francisco. We both had a feeling of instant and deep
familiarity, like we’d known each other forever. I remember we were in the
unlikely neighborhood of Union Square, having some kind of beverage, taking
about publishers, and I said something about </span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/among-the-bloodpeople/" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">a friend whose collection of essays</a><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">was coming out on Akashic Books. Francesca didn’t know the publisher,
but loved the name—“like the Akashic </span><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">records,” she said. I didn’t know what </span><i style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">that</span></i><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> was, and she told me that </span><i style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">akasha</span></i><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> was Sanskrit for “ether,” that
the idea was from theosophy (I think she might have used the words “old hippy
thing”) and that, to be super-reductive here, it was a collection of all
knowledge, all actions, and all desires, recorded in the astral plane. I joked
that it sort of sounded like the internet, only without all the freaky trolls. I
also said it reminded me of the notion of the Recording Angel, something that
gets many a young person through a long night: the idea being that you have
been </span><i style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">seen</span></i><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">, you have been </span><i style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">witnessed</span></i><span style="color: #131313; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">, and, because of this, some of
the loneliness of your life has been allayed. And so let me leave you with this:
the idea of Francesca Rosa in the ether, over the airwaves, in our hearts. </span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-24663720692458976172014-07-20T12:33:00.000-04:002014-10-19T11:51:28.291-04:00Short Story, "Sheetz vs. Purple Martins"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TtubwAgq_y8/U8vtM38tpeI/AAAAAAAABJg/AfKp1QLM1KM/s1600/rossetti_la_bella_mano_288.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TtubwAgq_y8/U8vtM38tpeI/AAAAAAAABJg/AfKp1QLM1KM/s1600/rossetti_la_bella_mano_288.jpg" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> "La Bella Mano," by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, <br />at the <a href="http://emuseum.delart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/5805/3/title-asc;jsessionid=21F0820F6AA8D71A3740C1F2DD8DA447?t:state:flow=bde6281e-4b33-4ebf-a4ee-bd2e559d0dd7" target="_blank">Delaware Art Museum</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My thanks to <i>Word Riot</i> for publishing my short story, "<a href="http://www.wordriot.org/archives/7082" target="_blank">Sheetz vs. Purple Martins</a>" in their July 2014 issue!</span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-47789054959233326602014-01-05T13:15:00.002-05:002014-01-07T22:06:04.364-05:00Dreams, Resurrected: The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it…”</i><br />—Italo Calvino, <i>Invisible Cities</i><br /><br />I’m looking at an advertisement where a woman stands looking over her shoulder at the viewer, and I know exactly where she is. She’s on the second-floor loggia of the Doge’s Palace and, behind her, across the Bacino San Marco, is Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. Years before I found myself staring deeply at an Absolut ad (“Absolut Venice”) that had pigeons arranged in the shape of the vodka bottle, and I was holding it very close to my face to see if any of the photoshopped pigeons had been repeated. That night I had a dream that I was with my sister in a fantastic circular flying machine that was spinning effortlessly along the edge of Dorsoduro, along the Fondamenta delle Zattere, hovering just inches above the water. I could see everything outside us with the utmost clarity. We crossed the Grand Canal and hewed close to the shore, passing the Piazzetta, the south-facing front of the Palazzo Ducale, the Riva degli Schiavoni. My sister and I, over our complicated blue-lit consoles in our pod-like flying machine, couldn’t believe our luck.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>The stuff of dreams. Ruskin called his beloved Piazza Ducale “the central building of the world.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
first time I went to Venice was in the early ’90s. Late one day I found
myself in Canneregio trying to get to the other side of Venice before
the Guggenheim closed. I was young and very much aware of the <i>fare la bella figura </i>phenomenon and so of course was too cool to walk with a map in my hand. So what I would do was find a dark, narrow <i>sottoportego, </i>pull out the map and memorize my path, put it away and then make my way through the maze of <i>calli</i> and <i>campi</i> until I needed the map again. I was dashing through a campo when something amazing happened. I heard a man call my name: <i>Firmani! </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i></i><br />I stopped in my tracks, and turned to see who it was. And there he was, some man, sitting at a table decorated with a red bunting, holding out a pen to me. My first thought was, <i>How does he know my name? My people are not from Venice.</i> It freaked me out and I took to my heels, and got to the Guggenheim before closing. Later, on my way back across town to our hotel, I went through the same square. Now it was deserted but the table was still there, its red bunting half-fallen off. On the wall behind the lonely table was a sign, white lettering against a red ground: <i>Partito Socialista Italiano.</i> <br /><br />What I’d heard was <i>Firmate, </i>not <i>Firmani. </i>He’d merely been asking people to sign something for the socialist party. <br /><br />But so uncanny is Venice—so dreamlike and yet indelibly familiar—that I was perfectly willing to believe that this unknown man knew my name. He knew my name, part of me understood, because I was <i>supposed to be there. </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Venice lived in my memory before I ever visited it, and yet I still can’t get my hands around it. I’ve chased it through many pages, of Mary McCarthy and Italo Calvino and John Pemble and Henry James, Andrea de Robilant, Jan Morris and John Ruskin. And yet the more I read the more it recedes from me, there but not there in a strange pink shimmer. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />Ruskin is no kind of easy to the 21st century ear, but his love of architecture and will to understand it</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span>and his fervor to explain his (often idiosyncratic) conclusions</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span>pulls me in. He is not at heart a systematizer, and yet he <i>tries to be, </i>which in a place as various and order-resistant as Venice (where, de Robilant writes, the centuries-old custom of wearing masks from October until Lent “added a little intrigue and mystery to everyday life”) seems a fool’s errand. “Picking the spot on earth most overgrown with art, he would find the order that must lie buried beneath,” the extraordinary architecture writer Robert Harbison says of Ruskin in <i>Eccentric Spaces.</i> “He gave up, of course, before numbering every stone, and by the third volume [of <i>The Stones of Venice</i>] talks about anything but buildings.” I read a pathetically chopped-down version of <i>The Stones of Venice, </i>but even so I could feel Ruskin’s ardor giving way to something like exhaustion in the course of its pages. Venice has suggested death and decay for many visitors for many years, but Ruskin might be unique in pushing back the starting date of Venice’s period of decline all the way to 1418</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span></span></span>when the Renaissance and the notion of man-made perfection began to encroach on his beloved God-centered Gothic. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ruskin
hated this building. Go <a href="http://venice.umwblogs.org/exhibit/john-ruskin-the-adopted-venetian/ruskins-the-stones-of-venice/">here</a> for a very well done discussion of </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
Stones of Venice </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">by Janice Daul in an online exhibit from the University
of Mary Washington. Also see the amazing Churches of Venice <a href="http://www.churchesofvenice.co.uk/index.htm">website</a>,
where I found this image.</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />In writing about Venetian <i>campi, </i>Harbison, who regularly stuns the reader with miraculous insights and meltingly beautiful sentences, makes the observation “…because every surface in Venice is built, every one has the capacity to fall into disrepair, hence the city’s mournfulness…” Sometimes walking the streets in the less travelled <i>sestieri, </i>I would turn my face to a broken window and the deepest, coldest blast of air would come out; in Manhattan I associate this with construction sites, but in Venice it feels like a <i>memento mori.</i> Everything in this city, where you can readily put your hand on a thousand-year-old wall, is to some degree a ruin. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">“Nothing
is quite symmetrical in Venice—the Piazza is not only irregular, but
also slopes toward the Basilica, and has a heavy floor pattern that does
not fit.” Jan Morris, </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The World of Venice.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It is also a place haunted by so much <i>looking.</i>
It’s as if so many years of this looking have left a trace on the thing
being looked at, physically worn it down not by touch but by the sheer
force of ardor. Conversely, the mere fact of its innumerable pleasures
to the eye</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span></span></span>the “loot,” as Mary McCarthy says</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span></span></span>embedded
in its churches and building walls and bridges can make you feel as if
you are the only person who could possibly have noticed and loved that
particular roundel, that cryptic patera, that ancient corroded shutter
dog shaped like a tiny man. Since you love it, maybe in your mind the
thing becomes uniquely yours. Harbison again on Venice, from <i>Eccentric Spaces: </i>“Because it is more intricate, it is more private than other cities, making everyone feel he knows her best.”</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Could
this postcard be commemorating the moment in the First World War when
the horses of St. Mark’s were “…shipped away in a barge for safety:
through the lagoon and down the dismal tributaries of the Po, watched
all along the route by sad groups of villagers, and eventually to the
garden of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome…”? Jan Morris wrote those words,
as well as a great many others in a style that is at times eye-closingly
delicious, with both a leisure and precision I’d imagine it impossible
to replicate by any American writer. Morris also wrote this warning to
the wise: “More slush has been written about Venice than anywhere else
on earth, more acres of ecstatic maiden prose.”</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Some years back I found myself at a party in a beautiful old classic eight on the Upper West Side, the home of a newspaper editor. It was during that often terrible period in a woman’s life known as one’s late 20s, and I was unable to make any kind of smart conversation, was tied in a thousand knots, and retreated into the empty living room to hide. There was an old engraving over the mantelpiece and, moving to look more closely, I realized it was San Zaccaria. I felt my heart flood. It was like this: I had been there—it had been wonderful—there was a feeling of newness then—that feeling was gone. And yet there was San Zaccaria, looking the same in this 16th century engraving as it looked when I had seen it in my lifetime. It remained the same over so many years, while I had changed, and—a piece of melodrama I very much believed at the time—for the worse, in a much shorter time. <br /><br />The host, nice as he was, had followed me into the living room. I turned to him and opened my mouth to say something of this, explain what seeing this image meant to me and maybe along with it apologize for my general wretchedness. But when I tried to speak I couldn’t say anything at all. <br /><br />“I know, dear,” he said, patting my arm sympathetically, “it looks just the same now, doesn’t it?”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7-TSiXNorqs/UsmTxeqRX5I/AAAAAAAABIU/VjLVeQQAanI/s1600/RIBA17001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7-TSiXNorqs/UsmTxeqRX5I/AAAAAAAABIU/VjLVeQQAanI/s320/RIBA17001.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The unthinkable: the Campanile collapses, 1902. <br />From RIBA's <a href="http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/PalladioAndTheVeneto/VenetianArchitecture/Geography/Campanili/Campanili1.aspx">website</a>.</span></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">And so for me Venice is about architecture, it is about memory, it is about an irreplicable experience of place; and it is also my own personal repository of dreams. Perfect then that this city, which lived in my heart in such a strange and singular way, should be the city in my grandfather’s homeland where his labor of love would be shared with the world. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />Years back I was talking with a composer about the Encyclopedic Palace, and he suggested that it might have owed its origin to the idea of the memory palace—a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci">mnemonic device</a> in which a person organizes thoughts or facts into an imagined structure, and visually walks through that structure to recall them. The Encyclopedic Palace would be a kind of realization of such a structure, idea made reality. </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Qks7VDPc2D0/UsmVfTuEmaI/AAAAAAAABIc/yvN2CbDNw4M/s1600/Emma-Willard-1846-temple.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Qks7VDPc2D0/UsmVfTuEmaI/AAAAAAAABIc/yvN2CbDNw4M/s320/Emma-Willard-1846-temple.jpg" height="218" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
Temple of Time, created by educator Emma Willard, “a three-dimensional
projection of historical chronography.” Image and <a href="http://blog.mnemotechnics.org/memorizing-historical-dates-using-a-memory-palace-1916.html">text</a> from
<a href="http://mnemotechnics.org/">Mnemotechnics.org</a>.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Architects Donlyn Lyndon and Charles W. Moore took the idea of a memory palace as their organizing principle in <i>Chambers for a Memory Palace,</i> an exchange of letters that contain their thoughts on the places that speak to them, organized into something like typologies with “nameable parts [and] ephemeral sensations.” I read the book wrongly, as if to find a key to architectural understanding (my own Key to All Mythologies), rather than reading it for the writers’ very specific architectural pleasures. I came across this sentence: “Memories lodge in places that are distinct.” My old officemate Michael and I, working in the World Trade Center on September 11th and both delayed in getting to the office that day for different reasons, both felt the need to make <a href="http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=22&boardid=40&threadid=1736">lists</a> of the things that were on our desks when the Trade Center came down. It was not a distinct place, and maybe we both knew our memories would quickly recede, that maybe all the media directed at the event, the endless replication of horrible images, would have the effect of obliterating our own very specific memories. <br /><br />When I think of Venice, I think of singularity, of the impossible vistas that come to you at every turn and stay so indelibly in the mind. I think of Damian and me sitting on a bench in Giudecca, after seeing Ai Weiwei’s <i><a href="http://www.myartguides.com/venice-art-biennale-2013/art-biennale/collateral-events/item/558-ai-weiwei-%E2%80%93-disposition">Straight</a></i>—a commentary on unethical and inhumane architecture—looking across the water to the Piazzetta as a huge cruise ship, like some insane floating apartment building, sails by, completely obscuring the city for one long minute. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It
was amazing to come out of the train station this last September and
see, down the steps and right in front on a bright red kiosk, a poster
for <i>Il Palazzo Enciclopedico. </i>I had to stop and stare at it,
touch it. The sight would be repeated across the city—on signs, banners,
advertisements, maps, guides. What’s impossible to explain is the crazy
dissonance that came from seeing what had been for my family for many
years <i>a very private combination of words</i> now written across an
entire city. It’s the name of the architectural model that my
grandfather built, but it’s also the name of the Biennale and the
organizing principal behind the show—and, in a way, it’s as if the
Biennale became a sort of realization of the actual museum that my
grandfather envisioned. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">And
so, I find myself out of words before I even get there. How can I
explain what it was to come into the Arsenale and be greeted by a wall
with the story of the Encyclopedic Palace written across it? <i>On November
16, 1955, self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti filed a
design with the U.S. patent office… </i>And then to step around the wall and
see, raised up on a dais in the middle of an enormous room, the
Encyclopedic Palace. </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GT1gcQbiMsM/UsmYriQOHwI/AAAAAAAABI0/-5acJq5osSk/s1600/BG+Firmani+Palazzo+Enciclopedico.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GT1gcQbiMsM/UsmYriQOHwI/AAAAAAAABI0/-5acJq5osSk/s320/BG+Firmani+Palazzo+Enciclopedico.jpg" height="320" width="254" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Of course, I cried.<br /><br />And again I struggle to think what my grandfather, a dour, anti-grandstanding, supremely un-whimsical man would have made of the whole thing. I loved the show, the thoughtfulness of the curation and the very smart ideas about visual progression—how wonderful it was to go into the room beyond the Encyclopedic Palace and see, suspended from the ceiling, Roberto Cuoghi’s <i>Belinda, </i>in size and massing a kind of inverted Encyclopedic Palace. The section curated by Cindy Sherman, her own “imaginary museum,” blew me away; for me, she defines what it is to understand the <i>punctum</i> in a photograph, haunting, funny or <i>unheimlich</i>—Linda Fregni Nagler’s collection of Victorian photographs, <i><a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2013/06/17/the_hidden_mother.html">The Hidden Mother</a>,</i> were sometimes all three—and the sculpture Sherman curated (Jimmie Durham, Mirosław Bałka, Charles Ray, among others) was just as uncanny. I could talk of many more great things throughout the Biennale, Lara Almarcegui’s piles, Nikolay Bakharev’s photographs, Guo Fengyi’s drawings, Kan Xuan’s video series, Eva Kotátková’s installation, Lin Xue’s drawings, A.G. Rizzoli’s visions, <i>Welcome to Iraq, </i>Ai Weiwei’s chairs, the artists of the Indonesian pavilion, those of the Chinese pavilion (particularly <a href="http://www.designboom.com/art/shu-yong-great-wall-of-guge-bricks-at-the-china-pavilion/">Shu Yong</a> and Wang Qingsong) the artists of the Latin American pavilion…many more. And how it felt to see my grandfather’s name in this continuum, one artist among many. <br /><br />Even if what he was at heart was an architect.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QKtXI7dptHU/UsmbrAe6zBI/AAAAAAAABJE/yUYESZNKmy8/s1600/Marino+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QKtXI7dptHU/UsmbrAe6zBI/AAAAAAAABJE/yUYESZNKmy8/s200/Marino+2.jpg" height="198" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">And that is maybe the closest I can get to it. The more tangible the idea of my grandfather being put on a world stage becomes, the more the actual story behind it feels like a fiction, something private and inexplicable. And so <i>perhaps I am afraid of losing my own experience all at once,</i> if I continue to write of it. Now I will just let it live in my mind, as images and sensations, and let the words disperse into the air. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-68462337973198501772013-06-23T18:34:00.001-04:002013-06-23T18:36:54.832-04:00The Encyclopedic Palace, Part III<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JwqReGcvQac/Ucdp85XRfdI/AAAAAAAAA3Q/oK9Am4tDcrE/s1600/encyclopedicpalace-promo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="188" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JwqReGcvQac/Ucdp85XRfdI/AAAAAAAAA3Q/oK9Am4tDcrE/s320/encyclopedicpalace-promo1.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Encyclopedic Palace at the Arsenale in Venice.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Francesco Galli, courtesy of <a href="http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/">La Biennale di Venezia</a></i></span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What a huge
outpouring of love my grandfather’s architectural model has received from all
over the world – from the time of the announcement that it would go to Venice
for the Biennale, to its trip there, to its reassembly and unveiling in the
Arsenale. The whole journey still seems like a miracle to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s my attempt to
bring together as many posts as possible about Marino Auriti and his great
labor of love. First, <a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2012/02/io-vivo-encyclopedic-palace-rises-again.html">the post</a> I wrote in 2012 about the Encyclopedic Palace’s course
from my grandfather’s garage to a storage locker in Delaware, where it
languished for 22 years, to the American Folk Art Museum. And then <a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-encyclopedic-palace-at-2013.html">the post</a>
about when we learned it would go to the Biennale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s a video from
the American Folk Art Museum that shows the art handlers packing it up so
carefully for its trip to Italy:</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/kLMrtz11x1k?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">An eblast from the
AFAM:</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--QvoJbPj9V4/Ucdq0KqfpTI/AAAAAAAAA3k/9IlL1n7dVYk/s1600/Venice_eblast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--QvoJbPj9V4/Ucdq0KqfpTI/AAAAAAAAA3k/9IlL1n7dVYk/s400/Venice_eblast.jpg" width="188" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A lovely, thoughtful
article, “<a href="http://thesmartset.com/article/article05241301.aspx">The Museum of Babel,</a>” by Stefany Anne Golberg in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Smart Set.</i></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“<a href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2013-06-04/the-backstory-of-the-venice-biennales-encyclopedic-palace-/">The Backstory of the Venice Biennale,</a>” by Leigh Anne Miller, who interviewed
my sister Colette (aka Poogy) and me, and did such a great job with it – a joy
to read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">An article by Alessia
Gargiulo from a Milan-based website called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swide</i>
– with some zany typos and factual errors, but <a href="http://www.swide.com/art-culture/architecture/encyclopedic-palace-venice-biennale-2013-palazzo-enciclopedico-marino-auriti-history/2013/6/1">a nice piece</a> nonetheless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The American Folk Art
Museum’s <a href="http://palaceonholiday.tumblr.com/">tumblr page</a> about the Encyclopedic Palace at the Biennale.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Another <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/marino%20auriti">tumblr page</a>
that someone set up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Marino’s biography on
his hometown’s <a href="http://www.guardiagrele.gov.it/marinoauriti.html">website</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A photo sent to me by
Sandro Salvi, the mayor of Guardiagrele – a banner hung across an entrance to
the town to welcome the cyclists of the Giro d’Italia:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EkqLATZA9oU/UcdreIOvM1I/AAAAAAAAA3w/J3hCDTHT0oc/s1600/Guardiagrele.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EkqLATZA9oU/UcdreIOvM1I/AAAAAAAAA3w/J3hCDTHT0oc/s320/Guardiagrele.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">A gazillion <a href="https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=marino%20auriti&src=typd">Twitter</a>
feeds. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/arts/design/massimiliano-gioni-of-venice-biennale.html?pagewanted=all">many</a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> articles about the show
and/or curator <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/05/26/arts/design/20130526-GIONI-4.html">Massimiliano Gioni</a>, with mentions of Marino’s work in just about
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/arts/design/a-contemplative-venice-biennale-with-less-financial-frenzy.html?pagewanted=all">all</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/arts/04iht-conway04.html?pagewanted=all">of</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/arts/design/venice-biennale-in-its-55th-edition.html?pagewanted=all">them</a>.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>
Living Australia’s <a href="http://blog.vogueliving.com.au/2013/06/03/day-three-venice-biennale/">blog</a>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://casavogue.globo.com/MostrasExpos/noticia/2013/06/o-homem-por-tras-da-bienal-de-veneza.html">Something</a> in
Brazilian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">A <a href="http://www.vogue.de/people-kultur/kultur-tipps/biennale-venedig-die-highlights-der-eroeffnung-2013">mention</a> in German <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">Something on <a href="http://www.vogue.it/uomo-vogue/cover-story/2013/05/massimiliano-gioni-cover#ad-image1">Gioni</a> in
Italian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">A <a href="http://www.vogue.fr/culture/l-agenda-de-la-semaine/diaporama/les-rendez-vous-culturels-de-la-semaine-du-27-mai-2013/13525/image/759011#%2155e-biennale-de-venise-2013">mention</a> in French <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">An <a href="http://www.style.com/stylefile/2013/06/beyond-the-arty-parties-a-look-inside-the-venice-biennale/">article</a> from
Style.com.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">A <a href="http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2013/06/massimiliano-gioni-venice-biennale">talk</a> with Gioni
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wmagazine</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">A video with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardian</i> art critic Adrian Searle on the
Biennale, with some great stuff about the Encyclopedic Palace toward the end –
just before he lays down on a bench and cycles his legs in the air. Lovely! Somehow
he reminds me of Mark E. Smith.</span></div>
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<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/f4Eesy1xyPA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And this really
cracked me up – “<a href="http://artasiapacific.com/Blog/FieldTripVeniceBeyondTheBiennale">two ‘soft’ (Oldenburg-like) versions of Marino Auriti’s ‘Encyclopedic Palace of the World’</a>” by Macau artist and architect Carlos
Marreiros – who has clearly read his <a href="http://architectureandurbanism.blogspot.com/2010/05/rem-koolhaas-delirious-new-york.html">Rem Koolhass</a>. With thanks to my talented
and beautiful niece, <a href="http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/people/adrienne-c-fitzgerald">Adrienne Fitzgerald</a>, for finding that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Yl2u3XxTG0w/UcdqqZGI9LI/AAAAAAAAA3c/Lv67aVDRiFQ/s1600/9780500340783.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Yl2u3XxTG0w/UcdqqZGI9LI/AAAAAAAAA3c/Lv67aVDRiFQ/s200/9780500340783.jpg" width="163" /></a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, a laconic
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marino_Auriti">Wikipedia entry</a> that someone (?) has written about my grandfather – which is perfect,
because Wikipedia might be the closest thing we have to realizing the dream of his
limitless place of knowledge. Or maybe that’s the internet itself. At any rate,
I give up! It’s impossible to achieve anything like completion. The internet is
too vast, the duplications and reduplications (and curious distortions) seemingly
infinite.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cFDT0U38TUQ/Ucd1BaAGxWI/AAAAAAAAA4k/HuRl0_BdCG4/s1600/Marino+1962.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cFDT0U38TUQ/Ucd1BaAGxWI/AAAAAAAAA4k/HuRl0_BdCG4/s320/Marino+1962.jpg" width="159" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And with that, it’s time
to go before I risk plagiarizing Borges.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">See you in Venice in
September.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKsZG1-eKLo/UcdvevWFINI/AAAAAAAAA4U/DHFoqlgFgTs/s1600/Marino+auto+body.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="259" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKsZG1-eKLo/UcdvevWFINI/AAAAAAAAA4U/DHFoqlgFgTs/s320/Marino+auto+body.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-62278478056537274592013-05-26T21:55:00.001-04:002013-05-26T21:55:56.329-04:00"Holy Land USA"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QNnPgXsjt3U/UaK6b6owE2I/AAAAAAAAA28/OTwsLN5yDSo/s1600/HolyLand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QNnPgXsjt3U/UaK6b6owE2I/AAAAAAAAA28/OTwsLN5yDSo/s400/HolyLand.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Image compliments of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Land_USA">Wikipedia</a>. </i></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: large;">My thanks to <i>The Brooklyner</i> for publishing my story, “<a href="http://brooklyner.org/2013/holy-land-usa/">Holy Land USA</a>,” in their most recent online issue. Nice people and a pleasure to work with!</span>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-43560435678209570732013-02-23T22:03:00.002-05:002013-02-23T22:03:36.583-05:00The Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Biennale di Venezia<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">Friends!</span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">I was so overwhelmed by the amazing news that the Encyclopedic Palace is not only going to the 2013 Venice Biennale but that </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">they named the whole ever-loving Biennale after it</i>
<span>–</span>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">pinch me! </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span>– that it's only now that I ca</span>n sit down and write about it with any kind of sense. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">The back-story of the Encyclopedic Palace’s journey from the workshop of my grandfather, Marino Auriti, to a 22-year stay in a lonely storage locker in Newport, Delaware to, finally, the American Folk Art Museum can be found <a href="http://forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2012/02/io-vivo-encyclopedic-palace-rises-again.html">here</a> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">on my blog. For the press release from the Biennale in English, look <a href="http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/news/25-10.html">here</a> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">(“...the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists...”).</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_BGhTpePCuU/USl7tZhdj3I/AAAAAAAAA1k/mBf_YcZb4X0/s1600/Marino+Maria+Auriti+inBrazil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_BGhTpePCuU/USl7tZhdj3I/AAAAAAAAA1k/mBf_YcZb4X0/s320/Marino+Maria+Auriti+inBrazil.jpg" width="202" /></a></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2559" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">
<i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2558" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Marino Auriti with my melancholy grandmother, </span></i></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2559" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">
<i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2558" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maria Rachele Auriti, n</span><span style="color: #232323; letter-spacing: 0px;">é</span><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2608" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">e di Sipio, in Brazil in the 1920s. </span></i></div>
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">The way this thing has exploded all over the internet is still making my head spin </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> and I send out my thanks to all you <a href="http://venetiancat.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-encyclopedic-palace-inspires-2013.html">kind strangers</a> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">who have <a href="http://alchimiablog.com/2012/10/25/the-encyclopedic-palace-the-55th-international-art-exhibition-la-biennale-di-venezia/">written</a> about it.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AI4GDpTHB5o/USl70fwFqfI/AAAAAAAAA18/fTjHCqkZg2k/s1600/Marino+Auriti+Carriage1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="198" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AI4GDpTHB5o/USl70fwFqfI/AAAAAAAAA18/fTjHCqkZg2k/s320/Marino+Auriti+Carriage1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>A carriage built by my grandfather in Guardiagrele, Italy.</i></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuyOj8Zagz0/USl7x_NH6FI/AAAAAAAAA10/jp61-X53ZRQ/s1600/Mail+truck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuyOj8Zagz0/USl7x_NH6FI/AAAAAAAAA10/jp61-X53ZRQ/s320/Mail+truck.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>A mail truck built by my grandfather in Guardiagrele. </i></div>
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<i>I remember my mother Colette being so proud of the breadth of </i></div>
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<i>the rounds it made <span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span> I think it went between Pescara and Chieti, </i></div>
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<i>but that seems pretty ambitious for the time.</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">My family and friends are all amazed and thrilled, and I’m still walking around smiling at the news. And yet I’m also left wondering what my grandfather, who died in 1980, would have made of all this. Would it have perplexed him? After all, the Encyclopedic Palace that he built in his workshop was only a model, one step along the way toward an actual building. As I was emailing to a young woman in Rome who’s writing her thesis on Simon Rodia of Watts Tower fame and my grandfather (will wonders never cease?), Marino Auriti might have been a dreamer, but he was also a pragmatist. He wanted the Palazzo Enciclopedico built. I imagine he thought “paper” architecture had its place, but that place had little to do with him. Utopian though he might have been, I think he was much closer in spirit to a <a href="http://www.bfi.org/">Buckminster Fuller</a> than an </span><a href="http://expositions.bnf.fr/boullee/index.htm"><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">Étienne-Louis Boullée</span></a><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">. </span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tjn0AqWl24Q/USl7Mv9pZ_I/AAAAAAAAA1Y/ILDGWl44Gqk/s1600/Marino+Auriti+CoffeeThresher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tjn0AqWl24Q/USl7Mv9pZ_I/AAAAAAAAA1Y/ILDGWl44Gqk/s320/Marino+Auriti+CoffeeThresher.jpg" width="247" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The
coffee thresher designed by Marino Auriti and a partner </span><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that would have produced untold wealth, so the story went, </span><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">had
Marino’s partner not beat him to patent.</span></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span></i><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">Or maybe my grandfather would have just been thrilled by the news. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">Back in April of last year, Stacey Hollander at the American Folk Art Museum had hinted that the Encyclopedic Place might be going to the Biennale, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I carried this in my mind for months, however, and in September, during the final days that the Encyclopedic Palace would be on display at the Folk Art Museum, I went up there to say goodbye to it. Who knew what would happen to it </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> as far as I knew, it might go back into storage. It was a crazy hot summer day, and when I got to the museum it was mostly empty. I walked around the Encyclopedic Palace, smiling like mad, and then did something I hadn’t done since I was a child </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> I crouched down and looked through its tiny celluloid windows, into the building. And I remembered how as a kid I was always outraged that it was empty inside. I fully expected to see all of humankind’s inventions already in there, in perfect working order, each of them shrunk down to 1:400 scale. </span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ETsZxiAdjA0/USl90v6iHYI/AAAAAAAAA2E/C0Q08jouCqA/s1600/Marino+Auriti+Spanish+Steps.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ETsZxiAdjA0/USl90v6iHYI/AAAAAAAAA2E/C0Q08jouCqA/s320/Marino+Auriti+Spanish+Steps.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><span lang="it" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Marino Auriti paints the </span></i><span lang="it" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">After I said my good-bye, I crossed the street to Lincoln Center, lay down on the hot grass on that lovely, tilty lawn by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">itself as utopian a piece of architecture as you can find in New York City </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>–</span></span><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;"> and I thought about my grandfather and the nature of miracles. </span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qfy0GDZg4mw/USl7vowiM4I/AAAAAAAAA1s/BOGDKA5LvVU/s1600/Marino+Maria+Auriti.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qfy0GDZg4mw/USl7vowiM4I/AAAAAAAAA1s/BOGDKA5LvVU/s320/Marino+Maria+Auriti.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1361672263267_2560" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My grandparents. </span></i></span></div>
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B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1713417153149484110.post-81635860314851955792012-07-01T19:12:00.001-04:002012-07-01T19:12:16.796-04:00Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman<style>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">First off, let’s all <span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;"><a href="http://www.giveforward.com/donationsfordianediprima">cough up some cash</a> </span>for
this lady, because as my pen-pal <a href="http://fsrosa.com/Home_Page.html"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">F.S. Rosa</span></a> wrote of Di Prima, “she is an American literary
treasure, but like a lot of older artists and writers who did not exactly have
a 401K in mind when they embarked on their life on the barricades of art and
lit, she is having a hard time right now health-wise and financially.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">In fact a link to the <a href="http://www.giveforward.com/donationsfordianediprima"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">Give Forward</span></a> site from <span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;"><a href="http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/">Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York</a>,</span>
which I’ve pretty much given up reading because it only makes me blue<i>,</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> is what got me to pick up my copy of <i>Recollections
of My Life as a Woman </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">and finally
read it. The memoir traces Di
Prima’s childhood and young life as a poet in New York City, at Swarthmore, in
California, and upstate, and ends – or more like de-animates to an exhausted
stop – with her leaving for “the West” in earnest, sometime in her
thirties. </span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ulFrb-6DeEU/T_DKv5j675I/AAAAAAAAA0Y/mrnfA5_2xc8/s1600/diPrima.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ulFrb-6DeEU/T_DKv5j675I/AAAAAAAAA0Y/mrnfA5_2xc8/s1600/diPrima.JPG" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"><a href="http://dianediprima.com/">Di Prima rocks the house.</a> </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Di Prima is one of the
few women who was part of the Beat Generation (and of such intersecting rings
as the New York School and the New York Poets Theatre) and moving through <i>Recollections
</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">are figures such as Freddie
Herko, Audre Lorde, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Hettie Jones, and LeRoi Jones
– a man who played a significant role in Di Prima’s life, for better or
worse. Along the way, the reader
is immersed in many vanished worlds:
in a stifling Italian-American Brooklyn; in a Manhattan where rent was
so cheap that all kinds of artists and writers could afford to live here and
fly their freak flag high instead of being dinned into submission by their day
job in the marketing department; in a pre-“Slouching towards Bethlehem”
California where, even if people were stoned, it was apparently never so much
that they didn’t notice the baby chewing on the electrical cord. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">I love this woman’s
fierceness, her kicking down of conventions, her hunger for life, her devotion
to her art. And so I just need to
say that this book drove me <i>nuts.
</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Why? To start, I realize that, though I’m no
kid anymore, I still read memoirs and biographies of writers in part – unfairly
enough – because I want to see How They Managed It. And on that count there was little here for me. Instead, watching Di Prima move through
her twenties and make so many disastrous and ultimately self-wounding choices
(such as deciding to marry an asshole who threw out boxes of her notebooks and
letters, and who gave little evidence of <i>liking</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> women, let alone wanting to sleep with them) was
like witnessing a slow-motion train wreck. I wanted to say, <i>Diane,</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> <i>WHAT were you THINKING?</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">She asks herself this a
number of times throughout the book and, even though she was writing <i>Recollections</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> in some cases thirty-plus years after the
incidents she describes – and since then had received the benefits of therapy
and what sounds like a deeply felt, meditative Buddhism – she very often still
doesn’t seem to have found an answer.
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;">To back up for a
moment. I think a prickly thing
for me – and the reason why I’m, in truth, a terrible candidate to write about
this book – is that Di Prima reminds me so much of someone I used to be very
close to, and who had a crazy-making knack for putting herself in harm’s way
for whatever magical-thinking reason she thought she needed to do so. This is some easy psychology, but both
of them seem to be re-enacting the childhood wound – which, in both cases, was
their father’s abuse. In Di
Prima’s case, this also had a sexual component: early in the book, she talks of her father beating her and
then getting aroused when he was “comforting” her. This, along with a mother who was too often no kind of ally
and not beyond hitting her children herself, is plenty for anyone to attempt to
overcome in one lifetime. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the first few
spiraling chapters, Di Prima approaches her subject, circling among many different
memories and modes: loving,
child’s-eye reminiscences of her maternal grandparents – who were clearly a
huge inspiration to her and seemed to have enjoyed a happy marriage, despite
being of the all-too-common </span><a href="http://www.forte-e-gentile.blogspot.com/2011/04/viva-tresca.html" style="background-color: white;"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">religious wife/anarchist husband</span></a><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>Italian variety; snippets from her current-day
life; narrations of her attempts to “excavate” family history; italicized
commentary; random scenes with relatives, many with a thick Italian-kitchen air
that sent me back to my own paternal grandmom’s house (deeply dissimilar,
however and thank goodness, was how often Diane had to rebuff creepy male
relatives who seemed to see her as young meat for the taking); and, most of
all, a working-out on the page of how to deal with her complex, wounded, deeply
unhappy mother. It’s the kind of
written incantation a writer does to get herself started, and which most major
publishing houses would have lopped off in a New York minute. It’s awkward and frustrating and
non-linear, but I like it – I like writing that has, as my <span style="background-color: white;">former teacher </span><a href="http://www.carolemaso.com/" style="background-color: white;"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">Carole Maso</span></a><span style="background-color: white;"> used to say,
“fingerprints” on it, and this has some mad fingerprints all over it. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Reading these pages, it
seemed to me that the shadow of the mother, as well as the abuse, loomed very
large over so much of Di Prima’s life.
Early in the book, when Di Prima is helping her mother cook even though
she’s “barely tall enough to reach the pan on the stove,” she gets burned by
spattered oil and is told by her mother:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>That</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> Women had to learn to bear more pain than
men. That was just how they were
made. <i>Women, mom went on to
tell my puzzled little self, had periods, had babies; even in cooking and
cleaning they got hurt more. I
would, she assured me, get used to it.
My fingers would get callused, and pots and fire wouldn’t hurt as they
did now. I looked forward to this
armor as a good thing; she described it as a blessing. </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">(26)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">At the same time there
was the strong charge from her mother to be neat and clean and ladylike: to be, of course, the Nice Italian
Girl. Young Diane couldn’t wait to
get out from under this oppressive and punishing household, and the degree to
which she rebelled – or, better said, lived her life the way she wanted to – is
pretty astonishing, especially for the time. It must have been a long psychological distance indeed from
white-ethnic Brooklyn to bohemian Manhattan, and taken a huge strength of will
to decide and plan to have a child on your own in the mid-1950s. (She would go
on to have five children, very often under the most precarious circumstances
and/or with invisible or actively harmful men, and keep writing all the while –
a fact I find nothing short of astonishing. Her description of the whole process of giving birth – from
the emotional needs of her body to how she was treated at the hospital – is
just the kind of fascinating, specific, “mucky women’s stuff” that I’m thrilled
to read and that, in my experience, rarely gets written about; maybe because it
would make a certain kind of male critic squirm.) </span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0ooTS45hSdY/T_DTsp-SNsI/AAAAAAAAA08/c3lvt2IBHs4/s1600/olsondiprima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0ooTS45hSdY/T_DTsp-SNsI/AAAAAAAAA08/c3lvt2IBHs4/s1600/olsondiprima.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> Diane with My Neighbor Totoro </span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">–</span></i><i><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>er, I mean with fellow poet <a href="http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/beats_and_beyond/intro.php">Charles Olson.</a></i><br /><i> Just how cute is this image?</i></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">While she kicked over
many of the mores of her class and time, what Di Prima seemed to have taken
along with her was her mother’s attitude of stoically bearing pain. Very often in the book, Di Prima talks
about how important it was to be “cool” at all times, especially in her
dealings with men, particularly her seemingly worthless husband Alan (the jerk
who threw out her notebooks and who regularly put their family in harm’s way,
often in the most elaborate and harrowing manner possible) and with LeRoi
Jones, who – just to go out on a limb here – will win no awards for reliable
boyfriend nor committed husband, and never mind what a treat it must have been
for Hettie that these roles were ever coexistent. (See <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/hettiejones/home"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">Hettie Jones</span></a>’ excellent memoir, <i>How I
Became Hettie Jones.) </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> So often in <i>Recollections</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">, after reading about some terrible treatment Di
Prima had to deal with from one of these men, I’d nearly cry out loud: <i>Why won’t you let yourself get
angry?</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> Looking back on her younger self, after talking about the
difficulty of opening up to a very loving female partner, Di Prima writes:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>My
mode had always been to tough it out, a shrug, a “what did I expect, after
all?” was how I dealt with loss, betrayal, general unpleasantness. </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">This suggests to me an
attitude that, again, goes back to the childhood wound, a response to the abuse
from her father coupled with the lessons of her mother’s martyr attitude: to admit anger means to give over power
(I think Di Prima says this somewhere, but foolishly I didn’t mark this). However, to not admit the fact that
you’ve been hurt, to not admit the pain, is only to further wound yourself by
creating a fiction that no “event” ever took place. It becomes part of the conspiracy of silence…which harms the
victim most of all. She continues: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>The
problem with that was it never discharged anything. Tons of remembered grievances, things I’d “never forgive”
even some of my dearest friends for, pain of being let down at the most crucial
moments – these cluttered the air, and tended to turn my muscles into a knot. </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">(196)<i> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Painful and perplexing to
read. Also painful and perplexing,
in a different way, are some puffy, self-aggrandizing passages, like this one
in which Di Prima writes of herself in the third person:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>Among
her peers, her immediate friends, there were no women with her certainty. No women writers who were </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">artists first,<i> who held to their work as to
their very souls. There were
writers and would-be writers among the women, but they held other, alien
priorities, assumptions. The
assumption that Art (always the capital A) was compatible with comfort, a nice
house in the suburbs; all this poverty and struggle was a kind of trial period,
something you passed through on your way to better things…. And then there were
the women who while throwing themselves utterly into their work threw
themselves concomitantly into drugs…. These women, while venturing further in
the work than their middle-class sisters, fell prey to the same delusion: that </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">there was something a man could do for them <i>that they couldn’t do
for themselves.</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> (223-224)<i></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Surely there was a peer
or two, here or there? Or is this
that tired thing, female exceptionalism – if they’ll only let in one female
poet, you bet your booties that it’ll be me? Di Prima definitely doesn’t suffer from that hobgoblin of
little minds, consistency, however. Because twenty-odd pages later she’s accepted an offer of marriage, in
this case from a gay friend who’s in love with her friend Freddie Herko. (Amazingly, this is not the gay man she
would finally marry – and the frequency with which Di Prima’s gay male friends
asked her to marry them made me sort of bummed out that none of <i>my</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> gay male friends have asked <i>me</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> to marry them over the years – jeez, what am I,
chopped liver?). She gives her
reasons, besides their friendship, for wanting to marry this man: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>There
was also the fact that Peter had money, a private trust of some sort. I wasn’t sure how much was involved,
but it seemed likely he could take care of me and </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">[daughter] <i>Jeanne, or at least pay Jeanne’s
private school bills. </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">(246)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">How does this not qualify
as “something a man could do” for you?
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">To switch gears and
reconsider the self-regarding third-person section for a moment (because it
really bugged me): as I read on
and Di Prima gets older and goes through more travails and losses, I realized
that when she was writing she was looking back at her younger self with
something like amazement: <i>I did
that. I was that fierce young
woman.</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> She’s celebrating her younger self, almost as if it were a
different person. And of course
neither of her parents, horrified by her life choices such as having a black
man’s child, would ever celebrate her.
Nor would the masculinist Beat scene, nor her male partners – many
passages in the book dwell on the depressingly low expectations she had from
husbands, which always contained the threat of violence (“…the basic fact of
married life: <i>if he was bigger than you, you couldn’t stop him from doing it</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">,” it being whatever pernicious thing that man got
into his head, 335). So she had to
toot her own horn, be the one-woman band.
It’s a shame that it seems to come at the expense of other women.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">The final pivot in the
book, and where everything starts to wind down, is with the suicide of her
friend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Herko"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">Freddie Herko</span></a>,
dancer and Warhol habitué. Already
killing himself with speed, homeless and increasingly incoherent and
“mystical,” he jumped out a sixth-floor window, a suicide at 28. These passages are painful to read, and
Di Prima’s love for him and grief at his death are enormous – she led group
prayers from the <i>Tibetan Book of the Dead</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> for him for 49 days, which seemed to me a miracle of determination
and devotion. This is also where
she comes to re-examine that eternal need to be cool. She writes, “…I had begun to feel that silence and coolness
was costing us our lives. Had cost
Freddie his” (403). Herko’s death
seems to have led to her changing many assumptions – one, I guess, being that
she and her tribe were immortal, which of course is so common when you’re young
– and eventually leaving New York.
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">One of Di Prima’s last
addresses in New York City, and a house beloved by her, was 35 Cooper Square, a
Federal-style townhouse dating back to 1824. This used to be right around the corner from me until very
recently when, despite all the petitions we signed (and <a href="http://www.thevillager.com/villager_406/coopersq.html" style="background-color: white;"><span style="-moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-size: auto auto; background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">rallies</span></a><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>with the likes of Pete Hamill), it
got razed to the ground so that some new hunk-of-junk piece of crap
architecture can go up. <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 255);">Claude Brown</span><span style="background-color: white;"> also lived
in that same building at some point, and Hettie Jones still lives very close
by. I’ve been introduced to her by
different people about three times over the years, and one can read in her
memoir about just how she felt when she first had the surprise of seeing Di
Prima’s child by her husband. (I
can only wonder how she felt about Di Prima choosing to move so close by). Painted on the side of 35 Cooper Square
used to be the only September 11th memorial I could stand, until
some genius decided to obliterate it with a coat of taupe paint; afterward,
someone would regularly show their disgust at its disappearance by
paint-bombing the wall with big splats of red, white, and blue. But now, ten years later, the whole
thing has vanished into the air. </span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mbSgMipV7lo/T_DMlUOmDCI/AAAAAAAAA0g/7d97OLEARbQ/s1600/WTC+memorial+2002-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mbSgMipV7lo/T_DMlUOmDCI/AAAAAAAAA0g/7d97OLEARbQ/s320/WTC+memorial+2002-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">In 2002, with t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">he September 11th memorial painted on the north side </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">of Di Prima</span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">s old house, 35 Cooper Square, behind me. </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M_jdG9k5N88/T_DMnV3xNJI/AAAAAAAAA0o/sFUXwnvfETE/s1600/registering+giddy+disgust.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M_jdG9k5N88/T_DMnV3xNJI/AAAAAAAAA0o/sFUXwnvfETE/s320/registering+giddy+disgust.JPG" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">In 2012, registering giddy disgust at how utterly ruined my neighborhood </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">has become. You can see the ghost outline of 35 Cooper Square on </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">the jutting-box portion of the idiotic piece of architecture </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond;">that is now the Standard East. </span></i><br />
</div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">Lots more to say about
this infuriating and fascinating book.
I was once again thinking about why so often it’s women who write with
incredible specificity about the “minute” stuff of life while men are more
likely (terrible, grievous generalization here) to paint with a broader
brush. I mean, we get information
in <i>Recollections</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"> such as how
much eggs cost in the mid-1950s (29 cents a dozen) and sentences like this,
concerning the effects of a flood at Di Prima’s small press shop on 4th
Street in the early 1960s: “Some
of the blank paper we had bought was ruined from the dampness in the shop, and
had to be discarded.” Why is she
telling us this? Because every
last thing was fought for. And if,
in general during that time, women were so often left holding the bag, they had
better know just what’s in that bag. </span><br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x7pYvHmC3NM/T_DSEYWPUQI/AAAAAAAAA00/9iUPxqyYXN0/s1600/1796+Ad%C3%A9la%C3%AFde+Binard,+%C3%A9pouse+Lenoir,Marie-Genevi%C3%A8ve+Bouliard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x7pYvHmC3NM/T_DSEYWPUQI/AAAAAAAAA00/9iUPxqyYXN0/s320/1796+Ad%C3%A9la%C3%AFde+Binard,+%C3%A9pouse+Lenoir,Marie-Genevi%C3%A8ve+Bouliard.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>Not a painting of a
young Diane Di Prima, </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>but coming across this image I was struck by how much </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>it could have been.<span> </span>A portrait of the
painter Adélaïde Binard, </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><i>painted by <a href="http://figurationfeminine.blogspot.com/2008/05/marie-genevive-bouliard-1763-1825.html">Marie-Geneviève Bouliard.</a><span> </span></i></span></div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;">If at times Di Prima’s
behavior mystified me, her grandstanding made me roll my eyes, or her uneven
and too-lightly-edited prose made me impatient, the candor in her book made me
feel like I know her. I respect
her strength of spirit, commitment to her work, and her willingness to show
herself to the world, warts and all.
And I hope this American Literary Treasure is busy writing the second
half of her memoirs, so that I can be fascinated and infuriated all over
again. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>B.G. Firmanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16812918462317459099noreply@blogger.com1