“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

Three days ago I suggested that the fall of Prodi’s government and his subsequent coming back was a staged operation to move the balance of power more to the center (or to the right) and make Prodi actually stronger than before. Well as you probably know the things seem to be developing just like I said.
Without modesty, I must admit that I haven’t read an equally credible and accurate interpretation of the events anywhere else but here on this blog. Not that I am expecting to be applauded for this like a political expert or anything. But if you happened to read around it was all “oh, the bastards that betrayed Prodi”, “now we really have to accept the vote of the right-wing christians”, “I was so scared that this government could fall”, “what good can make a ideal point if it makes your government fall”, “look how that louse Prodi has to run to get the votes from the right to save his own ass”. Etcetera.

I mean, many of us passed through these emotional stages, I sort of did it myself. But to understand politics means also to progressively detach ourselves from the feeling of the events as they unfold, and to try to look at them a little more cynically. Not because we must be cynical in our outlook, but because things, politically-wise, are cynical.

Now, I can understand non-italian blogs because, let’s face it, what can you make of the italian politics from abroad?
Given the ineradicable, aged, backwards class of oligarchs that has been ruling the italian politics for decades with cosmetic enemy factions and all sorts of secret alliances and pacts and conspiracies, it isn’t particularly easy for anyone here: it must be pretty difficult from the outside. You can deduce your considerations from what the media tells you and that’s all. What could I really make of the Russian or Chinese or Vietnamese politics? You can’t really be expected to sniff the air and smell the smoke from such a mental and physical distance, only using the cooked-up shallow interpretations of the mainstream media.

But I think the italian average observer should have performed a little better.
Because sure, maybe I am being wrong, maybe I am paranoid, conspiratorial and all that. Maybe the political scenario is really that ideal or shallow battle they want us to believe it is. Maybe it is really impossible to set up or push in the wrong direction a couple of confused extremists and make yourself a big favor. Maybe.
Still it is pretty surprising that nowhere in the whole blogland (as far as I know: I’m expecting to be contradicted here) no one ever suggested that the whole thing could actually not be what they were telling us it was. That it could be something ran from backstage, in a risky, adventurous, but well-prepared way: so as to look as if there wasn’t any other chance for the left-wing supporters but to accept the idea that their government was moving to the right.
It seems such a pretty obvious interpretation to me! especially considering that:

1) both the two extreme left supposed traitors of Prodi come from very disciplined parties;
2) both the two life-long senators supposed traitors of Prodi supported very warmly an opening of Prodi to the right;
3) Berlusconi never really worked against the operation and never really wanted elections, which means that since the beginning he was taken care of (no law against his conflicts of interest in the new government plan?);
4) Prodi had a weak government and he knew it;
5) the better way to demolish your own weak government is to do it yourself –so to remain in control of the whole process –and do damage control.

But I guess our blindness to possibilities and schemes like these is precisely the reason why such operations are possible.

— in picture, above: Prodi being shy

To live between terms, to live where death
Has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto’s catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tyranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.

— Delmore Schwartz

These are shitty days. Nothing is clear in my mind. My life and Libi’s just dab each other and doesn’t even seem to be related anymore. I wake up at six or five, have my breakfast, set up hers, open the computer. Invariably I wish I could go out for a walk in a city that still makes me curious, but the city repels me. Its activity, its rudeness. The tragic solitude of the truancy walks in the parks in the morning–
Solitary birds now sing in the empty hour above the terrace, when the sun is still behind clouds and my plants seem to shiver for the cold, the dirt dried and hard stamped by the hungry pigeons. But the young leaves, small on the branches are still bright green and pointing upward, close to the bark, the first flowers are blossoming and ready to receive the visits of unobtainable hymenoptera with wings. Like church bells the birds remind me of the summers on the Lugano Lake, and the heart skips a beat for all the days that are gone by–
I daze myself in a computer stupor, keeping the fears asleep, when I should go ’round and fix a number of things before I leave –the things that everyday I postpone– passport, fines to pay, travel books to get, presents. I am eroded by absurd sudden worries, triggered by things I should never read –like that I’ll have Alzheimer because there’s aluminum in the crowns that cover my teeth, and mercury in the fillings– and I grab my ears and shake my head and moan in the secret of the orange bathroom whining for my Alzheimer years to come–
Later Libi wakes up and we smile to each other but she doesn’t come to me to hug me like we used to do. I don’t tell her how attractive she is, ruffled like a cat — then she goes to bed to read and finish her coffee and I only hear the noise of the leafed pages.
“Do you like this book?” I call from one room.
“Quite” she answers from the other. I gave her the book–
Oh, dear friend, dear lover, I know how complicated and lost I am sometimes– it’s like I feel that you can’t reach me, and that you don’t even want to try anymore because I’m leaving anyway.
I wonder what Libi is talking about with her therapist. And I am never going to have one, I swear to myself once again.
Every house in the city contains habits and words not visible in the picture– everything that goes on in the shape of the unsharable habits, like everyone turning its back to you–
I wanted to be closer to Libi these last weeks before leaving for three months, or more– instead we are nervous, irritable, defensive. Libi seems to be tighten up in her world, full of hours at the atelier, going for shops and suppliers, trams to get and the theaters at the end of the day –Every moment is like the negative of the separation, somewhere where the separation hurts but it’s not told or visible and this makes it all the more hard and wrong–
She said she was worried that I might not come back– I don’t know if I’ve done enough to, I don’t know, reassure her–
Sometimes, often, Libi goes to the movies alone, sits in the first seats and sinks herself in the marvel of the the loud voices and the gigantic pictures –and I think of her, there, following a story and shedding few tears or laughs. We are never so much apart like in those moments –and not because I’m not there. Sometimes she falls asleep and snores in the theater and someone notices her, but no one wakes her up. I wouldn’t wake her up either– I wish I could give her a similar sense of wonder and protection, or carry her away instead of being the one who’s deserting the nest and leaving her alone– but we are past that moment and perhaps I didn’t wish hard enough.

And finally to get out –and let the city beat its drums all around you, the shops to yellow up your face in a sudden glow, the people on the sidewalks to walk past you forever– to forever mistake everything about you in a glimpse– it’s reciprocal– let your indelible suicidal thoughts to mix up with all the other feelings and let ’em get lost for a little while, in the annoying feeling of the city, the smell, the babies carried in a rush, the dogs dragged away from the smell of feces and death– the conversations through the earpieces smaller than a finger, punctuating the solitude of the souls in all the mirrors– etc.

Prodi is preparing himself to play a game which doesn’t contemplate a tie: “This time it’s winning or loosing”. The plan of attack is ready, maybe it has been ready for months. Few, but precise reference points. A possible new term for Prodi could be accepted only at strict conditions, only if “I’ll have free hands”, only for a “strong and binding program.”
— From corriere.it, read more.

Ok, the fall of Prodi is starting to look more and more as a staged operation. Prodi had a weak government and needed an excuse to get new forces into it –taking them from Berlusconi’s front. This had to be done without offending Prodi’s left-wing partners, the communists and former communists (OK, I’m kidding: it had to be done without offending their supporters. Italian politicians are never “offended”.)
So, a emergency situation had to be set up, where Prodi had to either enlarge its coalition or die and bring everyone down with him. I immediately kind of had the feeling the whole thing was staged (ten years ago Prodi was PM and got stabbed in the back in just the same way: how can you make the same mistake twice?)– but I didn’t believe Prodi could actually remain glued to the chair despite it.
Instead the situation will probably develop like this: Prodi will get from the President a second chance to form a government, on the grounds that members or former members of the UDC democratic christian party will pass on his side. The new government will be formed and he will finally have the strong coalition he needed, ranging from neo-communists to right-wing christian democrats.
It’s impossible to say for sure with italian politics so, we’ll see. But finally –at least for a short while– things are going to be disgusting enough to be fun again.

note: Since Follini seems to be one of the oligarchs of the right who could change side in the next days and pave the way to others, I wonder now if it was a coincidence that in the last weeks there were huge billboards around in Milan –and probably other italian cities– with Follini’s face and name on them, despite the fact that no elections were taking place, anywhere.

so Prodi’s government just fell on the intention to prolong the mission to Afghanistan which the government defended. Incredible although was probable although possibly staged although will end in a mess anyway. One way or another, it’s probably the end for Prodi. It’s the second time in his political life that he fails this way, stabbed in the back by less than five votes of the same stock of communist and christian senators, and you can’t survive that twice.
Anyway, it is so obvious that it’s not fault of the mission to Afghanistan, nor of the small pack of lousy senators who betrayed: I happen to know in fact that the fault is all of the new logo that the government presented yesterday: the logo that was supposedly meant to relaunch the italian “system” of tourism, localisms, heritage and governance.
It is known how ugly design can be fatal for pretty much anything, but this particular logo is so ugly and meaningless (almost bad as the design of the mascot for the world championship 1990, “Italia ’90”, whoever remembers that) that it had to be bad luck: a old-fashioned “i” next to a green blob out of proportion? c’mon! They can say it’s a “t” to make a “it”, but it’s either a smeared blot or as airos says a zucchini. I’d say it’s an eggplant. But anyway: It’s such a classic case of wrong design… only a stupid slogan could make it worse.
Well, of course there’s also a stupid slogan. “L’Italia lascia il segno”, “Italy leaves the mark”, which seems more a mafia threat than a anything else (maybe marks left on faces cut with Sicilian knives?)
But it’s true, it’s true. Italy does leave the mark on you. When you fall it does.

…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… //

music: Maurice Ravel, Trio for Piano in A-minor– as far as I can hear it while keeping my ability to concentrate on what I’m writing. noise: drills and bangs coming from yet another apartment renovation in the complex; muffled rumble of the city; rattling of trams in the avenue: (the usual)

Yesterday I tried to get in touch with Jawa again– apparently they’re away for the entire week. I steered to Gisa’s and managed to talk with her about the situation, and it was useful, I guess. She was so surprised to hear the story. After all it all happened in her apartment, when she lend it to me for few months and I had that affair.
See? I said to myself. You lead a interesting life.
Then we agreed that every possible outcome was going to be either unsatisfactory or unjust, or painful. Whether Jawa happens to “know” that their son is actually “our” son, and she deliberately is hiding it from me; or she doesn’t want to know and gets evasive; or Ernesto knows too and it’s the way they decided to live this thing (the fact that they’re both quite rational and science-minded individuals can be a factor); or it is all a fantasy of mine; or she realizes the possibility as soon as I tell her: in all cases what happens next is the same thing, which is, nothing.
I list to Gisa all my fears and obsessions. I say that maybe they both know, and are hiding it from me because they’re scared that I might want to barge in, if only on a given hypothetical day far in the future. This can be disappointing –people not trusting me and all– but understandable: and the consequence could only be not to see them anymore, for ever, for life: To reassure them that I am willing to spare the child a shock tomorrow that only a misunderstood idea of science or nature (what being a “biological” parent means) may consider necessary.
“Talk to her” says Gisa.
“I want to, believe me. But she seems to be sneaking away from it all the time. Why is she avoiding me anyway?”
“Oh, she probably thinks that you want to fuck her again– and with the baby and all she doesn’t want to have to tell you that it is not going to happen” Gisa answers.
“What?” See, I haven’t thought of that.
“Why do you want to know it so much? What can you really do with it?” she asks.
Nothing, I know she’s right. “Maybe Jawa knows for sure that this is not the case. Blood types, DNA, whatever. She can reassure me. Or maybe I just want to know what happens next with the story, you know. Describe it to myself as it happens. I can’t keep that part frozen.”
Skeptical look from Gisa.
“I know I have lied many times in my life” I say. Hell I have been lying to Gisa too, she knows me.”Still, I hate to hide things when it’s not my choice: I hate to know that there’s this sort of terrain I cannot walk on. At least I would like to know that Jawa knows that I am willing to do whatever it takes to make her or them more happy with the situation.”
“I bet they’re happy with the situation.”

Gisa is tidying up the apartment. I follow her around as she piles up stuff and takes toys out of the way, throws away stuff. Little Biba is taking a nap in the other room, Loris (the rockstar) is about to come back from a sound check. There’s white light pouring in from the high windows, smell of budino and hanging clothes.
“Funny” Gisa says then.
“What?”
“You telling me about this, and I reading Dostoevsky’s the eternal husband these days. It just is a very similar story. Have you read it?”
“No”.
“Well is about this guy who receives a visit from a friend who recently became a widower. The guy and this friend’s wife were lovers until 9 years before, when she abruptly put an end to their relationship without an explanation. Later he meets the daughter of the widower and from the moment he lays his eyes on her he is convinced that she is his own daughter. The little girl is 9 years old, and the age makes it possible if not probable for her to be his daughter. More importantly, there is something with her that makes it even more obvious, some affinity and special bond that they have.”
“So how it ends?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t finished it yet. But you said you felt some connection with Jawa’s son.”
“Well, I thought. But probably the boy is too little to say.” I know you can’t cling to something so irrational, you’re not supposed to.
“Man, I really would like to know how the story ends.” I mumble. “Please let me know.” Like anything depended on that.

“Since Pig-type people have more peaceful lifestyle than others, they are therefore luckier.”

yesterday, new year of the pig. I don’t know if my secret animal gets along with the pig, so i don’t know if only being a pig is really going to help this year. I mean, aside of what the others may think of me, because I look like a lucky pig to them.

Today I realized that I have to get me a new chipped biometric passport and I have only three weeks left to get it. The sheer idea of having to be biometrically scanned makes me want to cancel my trip. It is creepy, to use a teenagerly word. It’s fascist, to use a enraged one. It’s dark, to go with Philip Dick. I can’t stand the idea. It’s disgusting the way my government caved in so easily and already adopted the biometric electronic passports.
I thought of it as something shameful that was going to happen in the future, but as far as shameful things go, evidently the future is today. I was so naive to hope somehow that these changes weren’t really going to happen.

So today we’re in the year of the pig. Yeah I believe in astrology, why not? I only wish I knew how to handle it.

Seriuosly, Kundera was right. We are so living in the age of the terminal paradoxes. They say ‘globalization’, and yet never like today to travel is a challenge, and a limitation to your liberty. Until 1914 you could travel everywhere in the world, except maybe for Russia, without a passport. All you had to do was to put enough money together to buy yourself a passage on a ship. Any destination. Then came the age of the plane, the radio, the atomic bomb, the television. The rhetoric and propaganda went on bragging how small the planet was becoming and how traveling was now so easy when it was all the contrary.
The peak of this process, stemming from the two world wars, is supposed the be the globalization of present times, the borderless world etcetera. As with any good terminal paradox though, never before globalization and large scale immigrations borders, and difference of cultures, have been so relevant, and dividing. Not even in Italy during the middle ages, when banners dived city from city.

So the real point is not being favorable or not to ‘globalization’… but to understand what the hell ‘globalization’ is supposed to be. As far as my understanding goes, is not ‘globalization’ –as in: freedom to travel and be whatever you want– if A and B and C citizens are formalized on papers, if the flow of money keeps going upward and upward, if you have to acquiesce to fingerprinting and biometric scanning to take a trip across the atlantic on your own planet.

I’m worried for Britney. I can’t help to feel a sort of protective instinct for this wandering soul.
Oh, I know it’s not hip not to despise Britney, not to laugh at her or at the other one called like a hotel. Well these girls are laughable, that’s true. Although nobody laughs that much at men, the always forgiven.
Now, maybe the case with these pictures isn’t even that bad. She shaves her own head because no one wants to do it. This might as well be a big fuck you to all the expectations of those who don’t understand. It certainly took courage and impudence and some idea, precise of vague, that shaving one’s own head ought to have a meaning. Perhaps a positive one.
Still the implacable force by which Britney’s life is being judged and weighted and frowned upon and inquired is hard to witness. It is not voyeuristic anymore. It is another step forward into the uninterrupted ritual scapegoating that makes the energetic spirit of the world.
One feels so much he wants to save the victim: this probably is a feature, the feature of scapegoating.
The ritual weapon is the well tested continuous exposure of all the weaknesses, all the mistakes. The big-brotherly life that only concentrates on your faults and shames. Inviting you to make a better show of them.

People say, why caring for a person like this? She’s loaded with cash, she has no fucking real problem.
Thing is, I look at the pictures and that’s not what I see. In the pictures the shadow of her smile appears under eyes that cried, the calm attitude of one who doesn’t expect to be helped or stopped anymore, pictures that she has no power or intention to escape, taken by people like you and me who find it natural to help the scapegoating.
You know, I read stories of the showbiz like everyone else, because tragedies and weaklings are all over the place there. And we need tragedy.
Britney, I don’t know squat about this girl. But in general, I don’t really care for money, that someone “has a lot of money”: How not seeing that money is a burden? Look at her. Don’t you see the burden? She’s calling for help from under it (and fine, there’s nothing I could do about it: but I’m not so lifeless or dumb not to hear her calling.)
I see a person, yet another one, by the piercing eyes and a lively character and the many trivial hopes and the evident solitude, crushed, or so it seems, by the world of show business and the wolfs of the headline news.
And it’s not that you don’t know that worse species of suffering are always going on, every day in every city of the world, breaking the backs of millions of strangers of which we don’t know anything about.
But like few others Britney’s story is everywhere, instead. One can’t ignore it, not after seeing pictures like this one. On every newswire, in every tube. And I cannot avoid to read it or to see it.

25, lived five lives already, single mother, two kids that the fascist CPS will soon take away from her, large house, three cars, two pools, rage and displacement, misunderstandings, selfishness and generosity, never left alone a single moment by the blind eyes of the crushing machine, the blind eyes of the millions who innocently eat her alive watching. It is known the witnesses are always innocent.
It’s not just for her, this laughable girl, this strong and not yet lost person. But is also for her.
To say it with Peter Handke, this is one of the cases where the witness of a humiliation, if still is a human being, feels exposed, and humiliated too.

On a given day my father would stop in front of the house to pick us up. He would ring the bell, and wait for us on the sidewalk in his teardrop sunglasses and checkered shirt and jeans. Me and my sister would come out with a number of bags, boxes, plushes firmly hugged with one hand, all the stuff would be loaded in a rush by my father onto the car. My parents would say hi to each other, and barely nod and away we’d go.

However sad and disorienting and sometimes scary, moving was also some kind of feast because of all the expectancy both my parents had– to get rid of the kids for a while, or to welcome them. To us kids moving every given months was what the obscure ways of the world had conceived for our lives. It wasn’t questionable nor it was possible, since we had no past experience to compare our lives to, to imagine different ways to deal with our “separated parents”. It was not our call so there was no resistance from our side.

Milan was pretty much the same back then. Granted, some of the buildings now don’t exist anymore, and some of the streets have changed line of march. All the shops have changed their signs and many have changed name, and there’s more advertising around and much less people speaking with a milanese accent. There were kids running around freely back then, on bicycles and skates and with dogs, and less people and activities from around the globe, and no african or indian shops that I remember of. There were no cell phones and cars were less shiny and smaller.
A part of little things like that, it was the same city. Traffic was all around, the cars honked, the orange buses hissed and puffed tilting forward at the stops, unbalancing the folks on board. The air was just as dusty to breathe, and tall plane trees stood in the dark long avenues wet of shiny bodies of parked cars described by the wires of the trolleybuses. The city was busy doing, not caring to show and explain and give a meaning to anything else, pretty much like it is now.

Back at my mother’s there was a small garden in the back. When my parents split up the garden quickly deteriorated, since my mother had no feeling or interest or patience for the plants and things like that. So up to where my memory goes, I recall that garden as a sort of adventurous wild mess, where plants grew disorderly, insects thrived, the dog defecated, the cats of the neighborhood fought, and occasionally some thief threw in a emptied purse just snatched from one of the many prostitutes that worked on the streets in that area. Later junkies started to climb in at night for a fix and left used syringes after them, dirty of blood and lost in the grass. But nobody used the garden anymore by then.

Anyway, there was nothing like it at my father’s. He lived with his wife and my stepbrother in an apartment at the sixth floor, connected to a long common balcony-like area, upon which all the apartments had their entrance. They said it was the typical milanese behind of a condominium, it was called a “ballatoio” and was to be considered something very beautiful and vernacular and democratic because shared. But it wasn’t very joyful as they seemed to imply. It was strange to see all the other families from there, how they lived, and how they all had fights almost every night. My father and his wife had fights too so it seemed a characteristic. It was like if the unhappiness was going to be always visible from the ballatoio– like in a mirror of your own domestic unhappiness, but the joy was hidden instead.

It was strange to have our bathroom outside of the apartment and also the fact that us three kids slept in the same room, and had breakfast together and in the early mornings walked together over the bridge across the shunting lines of Garibaldi F.S. to catch the bus to school, and did homework together and all the rest. At my mother’s a timeline didn’t existed, all the habits and activities were your own, but at my father’s all the events of the day had their moment, unmistakably on time. And he was scary and crazy where my mother was inoffensive, although crazy her own way, like when she brought men over to sleep and we could hear everything when they fucked or when, on summer nights, she suddenly cried for help because a big dark moth had entered her room and us kids had to save her from it.

One day in my ten or so years old, we were probably at the end of a meal at my father’s and I started one of my occasional spontaneous moments of public consideration about something that I had just realized. I said that both kinds of life that me and my sister were leading in the two apartments were annoying after a while, for one reason or the other. I really said “annoying” or maybe, “heavy”, or “ugly”. Who knows what my vocabulary was back then? It was good for us, I went on, to know that a way out was always possible, at the end of the period of stay. I was pretty sure I was saying something obvious, and positive in its acceptance of the state of the things. I thought my parents knew how unbearable they were.
But my father felt otherwise. He didn’t know or wanted to know. At my words he looked disturbed, and disappointed, and then enraged. He took it personally and wasn’t convinced of my good intentions at all. His rage mounted, words were barked. Doors were slammed. I got scared and confused. I wasn’t sure of what exactly disappointed my father so much but I knew I had to feel guilty about it.
And since I had to feel guilty about it, I wasn’t so sure about my consideration either anymore. Maybe it was bad to know to have a way out. Or it was bad to feel the annoyance of a certain kind of life. It was bad anything that made my father go crazy anyway.

Today when I think about family episodes like this one, I know what’s the nastier thing about them: that stupid sense of guilt tied to feelings of liberation and independence and acceptance. That really ruins everything.
( And that’s not even what I wanted to talk about. I only wanted to talk about the feeling of the city during the trips from one place to the other– instead I came out with one of those family-story-post that seem to always need too many details and explanations. It’s the end of it anyway. )

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.