Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
At Language Hat‘s, a link to and discussion of Alexander Blok in Dialèt Bresà, a translation or “transplantation” of Alexander Blok’s famous poem, Night, Street, Lamp, Drugstore, into a Gallo-Italic language, by Valentina Gosetti. The language is her native dialect,…
Via Arts and Letters Daily, an introduction into Futurist Cuisine by Ayun Halliday. The culinary-minded Futurists in question were Italian, not Russian: they attacked pasta and wished it replaced with meat. Bread against meat is an ancient dichotomy. My interest…
In 2007, Monica Napoleoni was the head of the “homicide squad” in Perugia (Umbria, Italy). Lorena Zugarini was a senior member of that unit. They were both active participants in the railroading of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the…
This could be a very good article if it weren’t so angry and consequently sloppy and misleading. Consider this quote by a Diana Darke, introduced as “Middle East specialist”: “Notre-Dame’s architectural design, like all gothic cathedrals in Europe, comes directly…
I’m going to make this photograph the first in a series provisionally entitled Uncharacteristic photos from well-known or touristy places. Here’s an old shot taken in one of the busiest tourist locations on Earth, slightly photoshopped – fotoxx-ed, to be…
Back to where I left off last time. In his comments to Propertius III:15, John Kevin Newman remarked: Propertius is sentimental, but evidently sentiment does not exclude cruelty. To this observation, Newman supplies a footnote quoting from The Brothers Karamazov:…
Suetonius recorded this theatrical incident in Caligula 57: In a farce called “Laureolus,” in which the chief actor falls as he is making his escape and vomits blood, several understudies so vied with one another in giving evidence of their…
Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1933 in Conversation about Dante: Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to…
The latest comment from Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary: I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President. I wish she’d added “stable” but the comment is immeasurably amusing…
Judging by various Russian sources, yesterday’s rally – officially permitted by the city authorities – numbered 50,000 to 60,000 thousand. That’s probably the maximum possible turnout during this dead season of summer vacations and dachas. When an officially authorized rally…
Georges Barthouil on Leopardi’s attitude to travel: Leopardi was not a great traveller. In fact he imagined his foreign travels… Surely he had long wanted to escape his ancestral prison at Recanati in the Marches: However, escaping from a prison…
In 2010, Yuri Lyubimov, then 92, directed a production based on Tonino Guerra’s long poem Honey (Il miele). Guerra, who had turned 90, traveled to Moscow and opened one of the first performances with a brief talk. If memory serves,…