Just turned my out of office maternity notice on. Eep. Except my main preoccupation is that Ren still won't come out for two weeks and I'm squandering this expensive, expensive time where my mat leave benefits are something like a third of my big girl salary. Not that it'll happen . . . pretty sure there's no way I'll be going the standard two weeks over. I'm still getting some pressure to have an induction Tuesday, but I'm still feeling in the driver's seat about it . . . nevertheless Ren's head's engaged now and I've been having some contractions, so I'm getting a little less unamenable to the suggestion. I guess I'm hoping he or she just pops out on her own. We've made dinner plans I'm really looking forward to tonight, so hopefully that will do the trick.
Spent a vicious fuckload of time waiting to be seen by the obstetrician yesterday, which let me get most of they way through Christ Stopped at Eboli, one of those books I'd been meaning to read for ages. This morning's appointment let me knock it off. I've been reading tonnes, in part thanks to waiting around for medical people, and in part in panic, anticipating that soon I won't be reading at all . . . or that the reading I'll be doing will be kid's book to a kid for, oh, eight years or so? Anyways, I got to knock off Christ Stopped at Eboli and it was pretty great.
It didn't speak to me too directly in terms of my own cultural experience of the South. We're mountain Calabrian and I suspect have always pretty culturally distinct from how the Basilicatesi are described in the book, with the main difference being how much nicer they all seemed. Seems legit. I've met a lot of people from Basilicata, indeed one supremely unamusing weekend I spent fending off a really, really nice boy from there who'd spontaneously decided he was my new boyfriend - not in the stereotypically macho woppy way, but like something straight out of some sort of doctrinaire Catholic romance novel if such a thing exists, determined to save me from myself because I liked oral sex and smoking cigarettes - and they've all been really nice. Calabrians aren't. We're just not very nice people. Not particularly horrible, I mean not Venetians or anything, but not nice.
You can get the experience of this just by crossing the straits of Messina on a ferry in 20 minutes or so; you're no more or less likely to get your purse snatched in Messina or Reggio Calabria but people will be nicer to you in Messina. Everything cultural in Rome and south of it I've experienced in Italy has been really nice in a somewhat Spanish style, bar Calabria. I love going, of course, because I have family there, so they're nice to me, and so are the other people in the village, because I'm not a stranger. But it must be hard going for tourists.
Anyways, all that having been said, while I didn't feel at any point like I was reading a description of my cultural experience of the South, it's a terrific book that really resonated with me in political terms, in terms of my experience of the South. Carlo Levi's political incarnation was Communist, but the book is a war cry against the spiritual dominance of the nation in all its standard political forms over the region, and that rang true. Calabria is probably more violent and mafiaed up than anywhere else in the country, but I'm reasonably sure that's because of and not despite the role of the national government and the economic dominance of northern investors over the past 60 years or so.
But no time to get into that today. What I really wanted to express was how happy I am that I decided to read it in English instead of Italian. My Italian is good, maybe better than my French once it gets warmed up, but I fucking hate reading in Italian while it's safe to say that French is a damn good time to read. I hate Italian literary expression. I hate the literary verb forms and I hate the flowery fancy flouncy roundabout way Italians write when they're writing something erudite. French literary language is also artificial relative to spoken language but the literary tenses are transparent - usually resembling the present or infinitive - and French writers have been expressing themselves with perfect clarity for a good four centuries.
This real dislike of Italian literature may be a failing of aesthetic feeling on my part, but fuck, does it ever make me want to throw whatever I'm reading across the room. I can still read the old poetry without getting pissed off; you just read it out loud, and the beauty of the sounds outweighs the opacity of expression. Indeed Petrarca and Dante have a real spareness to their expression that's beautiful. But anything from a fucking novelist - ergh and nope. I think the only exception I can think of offhand is Alberto Moravia, and all I've read of his in the Italian was The Conformist, so I don't know if that's generally true. The big tip-off was hating The Name of the Rose in Italian a few years ago and then loving it in English last year or something. Now I've just given up trying.
Spent a vicious fuckload of time waiting to be seen by the obstetrician yesterday, which let me get most of they way through Christ Stopped at Eboli, one of those books I'd been meaning to read for ages. This morning's appointment let me knock it off. I've been reading tonnes, in part thanks to waiting around for medical people, and in part in panic, anticipating that soon I won't be reading at all . . . or that the reading I'll be doing will be kid's book to a kid for, oh, eight years or so? Anyways, I got to knock off Christ Stopped at Eboli and it was pretty great.
It didn't speak to me too directly in terms of my own cultural experience of the South. We're mountain Calabrian and I suspect have always pretty culturally distinct from how the Basilicatesi are described in the book, with the main difference being how much nicer they all seemed. Seems legit. I've met a lot of people from Basilicata, indeed one supremely unamusing weekend I spent fending off a really, really nice boy from there who'd spontaneously decided he was my new boyfriend - not in the stereotypically macho woppy way, but like something straight out of some sort of doctrinaire Catholic romance novel if such a thing exists, determined to save me from myself because I liked oral sex and smoking cigarettes - and they've all been really nice. Calabrians aren't. We're just not very nice people. Not particularly horrible, I mean not Venetians or anything, but not nice.
You can get the experience of this just by crossing the straits of Messina on a ferry in 20 minutes or so; you're no more or less likely to get your purse snatched in Messina or Reggio Calabria but people will be nicer to you in Messina. Everything cultural in Rome and south of it I've experienced in Italy has been really nice in a somewhat Spanish style, bar Calabria. I love going, of course, because I have family there, so they're nice to me, and so are the other people in the village, because I'm not a stranger. But it must be hard going for tourists.
Anyways, all that having been said, while I didn't feel at any point like I was reading a description of my cultural experience of the South, it's a terrific book that really resonated with me in political terms, in terms of my experience of the South. Carlo Levi's political incarnation was Communist, but the book is a war cry against the spiritual dominance of the nation in all its standard political forms over the region, and that rang true. Calabria is probably more violent and mafiaed up than anywhere else in the country, but I'm reasonably sure that's because of and not despite the role of the national government and the economic dominance of northern investors over the past 60 years or so.
But no time to get into that today. What I really wanted to express was how happy I am that I decided to read it in English instead of Italian. My Italian is good, maybe better than my French once it gets warmed up, but I fucking hate reading in Italian while it's safe to say that French is a damn good time to read. I hate Italian literary expression. I hate the literary verb forms and I hate the flowery fancy flouncy roundabout way Italians write when they're writing something erudite. French literary language is also artificial relative to spoken language but the literary tenses are transparent - usually resembling the present or infinitive - and French writers have been expressing themselves with perfect clarity for a good four centuries.
This real dislike of Italian literature may be a failing of aesthetic feeling on my part, but fuck, does it ever make me want to throw whatever I'm reading across the room. I can still read the old poetry without getting pissed off; you just read it out loud, and the beauty of the sounds outweighs the opacity of expression. Indeed Petrarca and Dante have a real spareness to their expression that's beautiful. But anything from a fucking novelist - ergh and nope. I think the only exception I can think of offhand is Alberto Moravia, and all I've read of his in the Italian was The Conformist, so I don't know if that's generally true. The big tip-off was hating The Name of the Rose in Italian a few years ago and then loving it in English last year or something. Now I've just given up trying.
3 commenti:
I think Ezra Pound was great...and he was Eye-talian.
The regional issues in Italy (and Spain) come up a lot in our own discussions. I've always had a simple understanding of the relationship between Northern and Southern Italy...seems like a very familiar situation on the surface.
Suggestions for an English language history of the Risorgimento would be much appreciated...so long as the pages aren't Pink..Pinko.
I can think of a few parallels offhand myself, not all of them edifying.
You could try "Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento" - a collection of essays edited by Ascoli and Von Henneburg. It's a broadish overview with a section by a guy called Nelson Moe specific to the South - I can't think of any other Anglo scholars who addressed the topic, and I know he wrote a whole book about that specifically, which I haven't read.
It's a little pink, but frankly you're not going to find any decent histories of such a poor place whose authors aren't motivated by a bit of a heart-bleed. The Lega Nord might have something sociologically interesting out about it though . . .
I appreciate that.
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