Coming back I wanted to try to write again and I began to isolate phrases, strategically placing dots. I understood that the dots were crucial in the process but I didn't know why. What is their exact meaning? I had the feeling that the sentences were actually being written because I had searched for that state of deliberate consolidation. So this was how it worked after all. Afterward I was sure of their coming to be. The written phrases.
The thing is I don't know where exactly they ended. In what form. In what time layer?
-- preview from one of pun's next posts

I started a new project. I have been thinking about this for a while... I have been wanting to do this since when more that a year ago I wrote a very brief series of vaguely sci-fi posts on this blog. That series died as soon as it had started. I hope this project will go a bit further, and that it will not interfere with anything else, this blog included.

There isn't much on it right now. It is called Pun.

The Pope will be infallible like the Pope.
The novel will be fantastic like a novel.
The movie will be unreal like a movie.
The needle in the haysack will be hard to find like a needle in the haysack.

-- Peter Handke, Prophecy

While I am on this trip, it's pretty improbable that I will write about Italy, just in case you wonder. So for new readers, this blog's title will sound a little off topic the next months. It is not a problem because I am almost never in topic.
During this stage updates may or may not be infrequent, but there is always going to be an update at some point. And if you get tired of coming around to check, just subscribe to the feeds, they're useful.

...more excerpts from deleted or discarded drafts.

// Well, I always hated that novel not just for its content, which is quite trivial although beautifully written, but for the title: the so sad, simplistic idea that there is someone who "is not a man" like you are, and it's your enemy. Pathetic, because Vittorini actually defends the idea: some are not men for him, and that's why you ought to fight them. Maybe he hated women? who knows.
My feeling about this book is always: being 'not men'? what's so relevant about men? Why are men the touchstone for everything? When he wrote that book the world was just coming out of years of tragedy, and it was all men's idea! //

// I bet insomnia is related to that. When we sleep less and less, even leading a very quiet life, it's also because probably we have few things or no thing significant to remember in the arc of the day; that means, our brain couldn't learn nothing really of importance. Our mind of course recorded a lot of things, but they probably were too similar too other things already recorded in the past. So, the brain says, let's stay awake until something significant possibly pops out. //

// I shrug. I said something out of tune like "you mean, in our lives actually?" I look at her perfectly oval face and her dark eyes. Her hair shimmering sporadically by the low golden light. She has a small gleaming line of skin that moves from the base of her nose to the side but I can see it only when she doesn't talk. I try to imagine her breasts under the green cappotto. See, when you don't know what to do or say, you can always imagine the breasts. //

// banal as a jumping rope / does not need no funny dope / to get you higher than a tope / (five hours of sleep are all I can hope) //

// The point won't ever be, pick the right thing for me, but, pick the right thing to trigger a rewarding mechanism from them. For example, it is often desirable to pick a career near to at least one of the parents' careers --or failed ambitions-- in order to trigger rewarding mechanisms from them more easily. Also, if punishment and misunderstanding is more frequent than rewards, going in the opposite direction and doing everything to disappoint them still means that your story depends on choices made by someone else. and it's screwed just the same. //

// It's for the intense metaphor it seems to stage, the vast desert of our lives, into our heads our hearts this society, among the others who are not there, without any tool good to help us with maybe a friend around, as inept as we are, ending up taking the worst decisions when it's not even necessary to take them anymore.
And, is there any actual way to leave this recurrent, obvious, vast desert? To reach a different place? It doesn't really seems so... //

One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually, 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it', and what follows is a rationalization. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non literary reaction is 'This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.'
-- George Orwell, Writers and Leviathan, 1948

If you google Amarilli Caprio today, you can find a lot of new interesting and ridiculous stuff. The most surprising of all items is undoubtedly the one on the website of left-wing magazine il Diario, where is reproduced Amarilli's poem (about which I wrote the other day). What's surprising is that not only Amarilli's poem is reported as it is, and linked from the top of the home page, like it was a regular contribution to the magazine: as you can see in the picture, they also suggest to their readers to buy the anthology from which the poem is taken, and that's about all the comment they give to it.
Haven't they noticed that Amarilli's poem is, well, corny and, to put it bluntly, kind of sucks? I don't know, maybe the criteria to decide when a poem sucks are lost. And maybe it's a good thing.
Still. I've been saying myself that Amarilli Caprio, member of the Red Brigades and occasional poet, should be less obvious as a person because she writes poetry. But this doesn't make her poetry automatically interesting, right? Self standing? Only because she's a fucking terrorist?
And what about the good poets who aren't political activists, or criminals, or who don't have some other kind of equally unrelated quality about them?
I guess they're still expected to sign below the paper where on is indelibly printed "everything is politics": or some other similarly depressing indelible thought.

The wordpress dashboard says I have 72 drafts, which means snippets of unfinished or discarded posts. I want to do away with this stuff 'cause 72 is a big number when it comes to things you hadn't the guts to publish nor to erase. Before I suddenly die-- and someone can read the stuff in its entirety-- I feel I have to get rid of it. And while I proceed with the liquidation, I'm saving bits of it because I'm a weak person.

// ...the problem is that a personality is a very complex thing, larger than the world itself, it has all the colors of the rainbow and no color at all.
--On a given day it can show you any unpredictable, insufferable face and leave you with a fist of flies.
Physical beauty instead decays only in time, and evidently much more resistant and reassuring --because it is less complex-- is what you are left to wish when your gracious girl makes you mad with her personality.
The solution? dive into the personality until it feels warmer again than the cool outside. Or vice versa. (i.e. no solution) //

// ..."I know Milan's cathedral is so huge," she says. "This must look like a small toy to you."
"Actually I hate Milano's cathedral," I says. "I think that the larger the church, the less religion is in it. That's why the largest church in the world is in Rome, you know?" //

// ...reading a news item like this one, refreshed the mother-daughter threesome fantasy in my mind . The fantasy had been planted there a long ago by Sade's novels and certain comics and other erotica, of course, and was never completely silent (...) --but I'm sure one would come up with it even without the help of all those who came before--
Then it mixed up with recent readings like Elfriede Jelinek's "The Piano Teacher" and developed into this threesome fantasy where the daughter, to find the strength to undergo all the perversions of the man (which is you) begs her mother to mistreat her and insult her and force her in various ways to do the things (...) because that's their menage and you, being the man, cannot but follow their game, you're not guilty or anything //

// ...The city was so calm and windy around, the streets emptied and dark against the glowing lights of the open restaurants, and the synagogue was outlined, the gigantic tribunal in the back, the silent trees around the hospital where my sister was born, Liceo Berchet, Philippine church, the front yards of via Orti, the graffiti, the avenues, it was all there, beautiful as it is when there's almost nobody around using it. The air was cool, and the noises remote in the blinking of the unseen semaphores, and I think Milano could have lighten that walk, so heavy and paranoid as it was. Typically I wasn't really cooperating //

For those of my readers who may have noticed (I doubt there's any), I'm changing the way this blog handles first names. I'm not using those J. and S. and F. initials anymore. They are confusing and lame and ultimately also too revealing, I am using proper names now (not the real ones, doh.)
So, S. is Libi now, and E. is the just mentioned Nina. My former loved one A. is Leni now. My friend (and also formerly beloved) F. is Gisa and her man M. is Loris (their daughter E. is Biba). J. is Jawa and her son M. is Piero, her husband A. Ernesto and so forth. I know you're following.

(Honestly, I am writing this down so that I have a reference myself for the next time I have to write about all these people. At least until I get them automatically on my fingers, when they finally will turn as they should into their sheer characters. Incidentally playing the leads in my life.)

It is with amounts of dizziness, shame and a little pride that I can announce that I "cured a day" at Dennis Cooper's blog today.
I did so by achieving what a long time ago was called "make yourself beautiful with another bird's feathers", basically presenting and translating a number of great Italian pieces of modern poetry in the english language (please note: The poems are distributed on seven different posts, for seven different poets).
For my italian readers, and probably also for most of the others, some of the names will be known and possibly slightly nauseating classics of our history, like Montale or Ungaretti or Pasolini. There are others that aren't equally known anyway, so it can be interesting anyway, or so I hope.

The same battery of translations and introductions is also available here on my blog on a special page called 7 italian poets. I opened this replica only because I plan to periodically expand it with new names and poems (the poets here are already eight, actually).

Anyway, I recently learned that I enjoy translating poetry very much. It really puts me inside the poem, in the words and the music of it, it puts me under the illusion of being for a little while partially good as the poet, only for mounting on his shoulders, and it is very exciting (yep, and you pretty much can figure out the standards of the excitement I get in my life by this).

--in picture above: with another bird's feathers, etc.