Roberto Saviano in NYC
Roberto Saviano, author of the best selling book Gomorrah, spoke last Thursday at the Festival of International Literature in NYC. Gomorrah, a chilling account of the Camorra’s deep connections with the “legal” Italian economy, sold more one million copy in Italy and has been translated in 33 languages.
Alexander Stille, professor at Columbia University and author of Excellent Cadavers, an analysis of the Sicilian Mafia, says about Gomorrah:
What the book does so well is to remind people, as if it needed reminding, that a third of the country is essentially condemned to a state of permanent underdevelopment because of the persistent, and in many ways increasing, dominance, of organized crime.
Roberto Saviano is 29 years old and has received repeated threats by the Camorra. He has no regular home and lives under police protection.
An almost love letter to Haruki Murakami
Dear Mr. Murakami,
the first time we met, I was very angry at you. I had just finished reading the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which I had received as a Christmas gift. I’m a slow reader in English, but a mysterious force pushed me to go through the 607 pages of the Vintage International paperback edition like a maniac, turning page after page as if a gang of rabid dogs were chasing me, making me forget about my family, my work, and the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. And here I find myself, on the last page, out of breath, exhausted, sweat on my forehead and eyebrows. I’m puzzled. I look for the missing pages. Where are the answers to all my questions? What about of all those lose ends that I hoped to see neatly tied up?
“Who do you think you are, Mr. Murakami?” I cry. “What am I supposed to do now? Chase you in Tokyo to ask you what happened?” (I’m not the only one to feel this way, Mr. Murakami) This is it, I tell myself. The end. No more Murakami. Ever.
A couple of years later, my sister read Dance Dance Dance, and fell in love with your books. She created a website for you. Then one day, I walked in a bookstore, I saw Dance Dance Dance, and I bought a copy. It was winter; a cold, dark, rainy, and unforgiving New York winter day. I found myself reading the book and sipping hot black tea in a coffee shop in the West Village. The handsome young man sitting at the next tiny table noticed the book and said: “I read all Murakami’s books. Dance Dance Dance was the last one. It’s different from the others, almost hopeful.”
I had my laptop with me and I showed him the site that my sister had created for you. He smiled. “It’s fate,” he said. “You had to read this book.”
“People fall hopelessly in love with you, Mr. Murakami,” I thought. They don’t just read your books, they spend hours and hours with you. There is something in the atmosphere you conjure in your books that captures us and keeps us prisoners. There is something in your characters that we want to hold with us. We love their company.
The truth is, we love your company. When we are reading your books you take care of us. You cook for us and make sure we are never hungry or thirsty. You create soundtracks for us to listens. You clean up and prepare our space. And you surround us with an irresistible sense of longing—the sweetest, saddest feeling of all, the feeling that most closely resemble devastating love.
I’ve just finished reading Kafka on the Shore and I’m experiencing the Murakami’s after-effect: a languid, slightly sad feeling that follows me everywhere. I can’t read any other book, because I’m still trapped in the Murakami experience. Beauty, nature, art, cats, people with half shadows, and the pleasure of reading. You held my hand and brought me in your world, a world that I would have never visited without you. Your world is sometimes frightening and unsettling, but you reassured me: “I’m with you, I’m not going to leave you alone. Trust me, follow me, and I’ll take care of you. You won’t regret the experience.”
There are some authors we just want to spent time with. We forgive them for their shortcomings, we let them get away with things we wouldn’t bear in others. There is something about the quality of their presence we crave for.
This is what I feel for you, Mr. Murakami. You have your faults. You create characters you don’t love enough and abandon them (but the ones you love, you love deeply). You start stories and plots, then forget about them. You drag your stories too long.
But, really, it doesn’t matter. Reading your books is like listening to music. Sometimes it’s not about the lyrics and it’s not about the melody; it’s about the mood that it triggers in us. We want to stop reading anything else, experiencing anything else, to hold on to that feeling. Because we feel that in all our loneliness and separateness, we are all inextricably connected.
Well-behaved women seldom make history
I’ve been tagged by Nick Barrowman at Log base 2, with the historical figure meme. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to pick a historical figure and list 5 random/weird things about this person.
I had to think really hard to pick my favorite historical figure. I don’t think I can name my favorite ice-cream flavor, let alone a favorite historical figure. I thought about William James, because when he was at Harvard he was a buddy of Charles Pierce, which is the historical figure chosen by Nick.
But–sorry Bill–it ought to be a woman. A crowd of bad-behaved women came to mind:
- Emmeline Pankhurst (”Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.”)
- Rosa Parks (”When they stood up and I stayed where I was, he asked me if I was going to stand and I told him that ‘no, I wasn’t,’ and he told me if I did not stand up he was going to have me arrested. And I told him to go on and have me arrested.”)
- Anaïs Nin (”I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy.”)
- Josephine Baker (”I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”), and
- Rachel Carson (”The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”)
I wonder why I thought of them. I suspect that it’s because women need to be good to the point of sanctitude or quite bad to become historically famous. And bad girls tend to be more interesting.
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So I picked the baddest woman on the block, Mary Jane West, know to the world as Mae West. I’m pretty sure she counts as an historical figure. She was born two centuries ago–exactly on August 17, 1893. And everybody who is still famous after so many years deserves her place in History, wouldn’t you say? [or shall I say Herstory?].
If you think that Mae West got famous just because she was sexy, thing again. She became famous because she wrote her own material, both in Broadway and in Hollywood. Between 1926 and 1931, she wrote six plays that were produced on Broadway (Sex, The Drag, Wicked Age, Diamond Lil, The Pleasure Man, and The Constant Sinner) and she rewrote many of the scenes in her early movies, until censure got in the way.
- After 375 shows, her play Sex was shut down because it was “calculated to excite in the spectator impure imagination” and Mae West was arrested for “corrupting the morals of youth.” She spent 10 days in prison on Roosevelt Island and became famous. Mae West wrote about prostitution (Sex, 1926), homosexuality (The Drag, 1927), castration (The pleasure men, 1928), and interracial relationships (The Constant sinner, 1931), and she had to deal with censure and police many more times. For example, her play “The Drag” was closed after only 2 preview performances and the entire cast was carted off, some in full drag, in a police van.
- When she starred in her first Hollywood movie, Night after Night, Mae West was already 40 years old.
- She is the only actress to have her name featured in the Webster’s Dictionary. A Mae West is “an unflatable life jacket, originally issued to pilots during World War II.”
- Mae West is famous for her double-entendres, so much so she once said “If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.” Among the most famous:
- When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.
- I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
- I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
- Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
- Love thy neighbor - and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.
In a 1994 message to the Berkshire Hataway Shareholders, Warren Buffett quoted Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
And so we remember you, Mae. Way too much of a good thing.
My turn to tag.
The rules of the meme:
- Link to the person who tagged you.
- List 5 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
- Tag 5 more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
- Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.
And I hereby tag:
- Andrew Hinton at Inkblurt
- Troy Worman at Orbit Now!
- Karl Martino at Paradox1x
- Tony Green at Mere Cat.
- Erik Marshall at A Memorable Fancy.
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara at the premiere of War Made Easy
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara listen to Norman Solomon, founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Solomons’s documentary, War Made Easy, premiered tonight at the Quad and will be playing through March 20.
Feeling Nude these days
I’ve never paid too much attention to Radiohead until In Rainbows, and now I’m obsessed with it.
Don’t get any big ideas
They’re not going to happen.You paint yourself white
And fill in the noise
They’ll be something missing.And now that you’ve found it, it’s gone
and now that you feel it, you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.So, don’t get any big ideas,
They’re not going to happen.You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.
Obsessed, I assure you. Can’t do anything about it.
[By the way, have you noticed the slick interface of the YouTube player? Pretty cool.]
Technorati Tags:
Radiohead, Nude, In Rainbows
Technology is not good for my social life.
In a previous post, I mentioned how YouTube tried to undermine my sense of security about my social life. Now it’s Wordpress’s turn.
This morning I was reading Andrew Hinton’s blog. Andrew has just published a great article on personas on Boxes and Arrows where he quotes some of my thoughts on the subject. So, I read a few older posts, and I notice one on Wordpress comment notification fix, which talks about a bug in Wordpress that prevents new comment notifications to be sent.
I go back to my blog and check the comments tab in Wordpress and horror! There is a bunch of true comments stuck in the moderation queue together with the usual series of comment spam. (By the way, Andrew has a link to the fix, from Mark’s blog MeAndMyDrum. It worked for me.)
Dear commenters, forgive me for neglecting you. I just thought that people had stopped commenting on my blog, not that I was not receiving notifications for your comments. I apologize. I love your comments, really.
Cool Readings
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