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

– Jago Noja

Still laying in bed I browsed the new messages on my bogus, always discharged cell phone. It was Nina and I knew it. Outside it was dark and raining stronger and I was hungry.

Nina: Don’t look for me anymore. This is the usual repetition compulsion. You are a big cute fuck-about. I am tired before even beginning. In spite of all I said I am not interested in such a thing. One kiss. PS. the fact remains that whenever you’d wish to have a cosy chat, well this cannot be denied to anybody.

Nina studies psychology, and criminology, and something else I don’t remember. Thereby she meant something precise with ‘repetition compulsion’ I didn’t focus on to.
I only thought something like how we all get aggressive in matters of love and such, it’s a sort of general rule, we can be bitter and harsh or despicably disloyal and it doesn’t matter as long as the discourse goes on. When the dialogue ends, the cold potatoes left on the dish are the starting point from where all the story will be told. So I never fiddle about harsh words. I just keep the dialogue on. As hard as it gets. Facing the guilt and the reproaching, I’m the classic mouthy coward.

ME: All I have done is to give you what I could. Whenever I was avaliable I tried to reach you but no way. I know it’s scary, again is someone engaged in your life, but it happened so. I know I am not innocent because I just let it languish there instead of reviving it and keeping it up. After all we’ve been together only twice, but you know how things get in your way. I still think we can have our time together. Hostility may not lead to that though. More likely to more big fuck you, too.

The hotel corridor was deserted now and dark. I reached for the bathroom striding over the stinky carpet floor, once there I felt how much I was disappointed with my message.
I had had this mad desire for the small thin boyish body of Nina (still have it somewhere), for her cynic pliancy in bed, her witty smiles on it all and the easy humor we had together. But yet I felt I was not completely taken by her or ready to fight for her as she pretended she needed, and that she felt that too. She was right, I was a big fuck-about all right and my message was lousy weak.

I looked at my face and naked body and thought maybe it was all because I was getting old and unable to be driven by emotions. I shivered, “I was never been able of that anyway”, I thought.

I felt the vibration of another message running under the showers of rain in the streets, looking for a restaurant, under my soaked green cap in my jeans jacket and corduroy brown soaked pants. At Guido’s restaurant later, I skipped Nina’s message and wrote to Libi how I was waiting for a bean soup and antipasto, and how it was raining, and was she fine. Then I got to the other message, the waitress came to me with food and she was warmly polite.

Nina: When you once said you felt a crave for life, as it was hunger, well, I died of envy. It’s because of it that you don’t stay with me, because you sense there’s only melancholy and a feeling of death around me… And I don’t blame you because as a matter of fact it is so. Still it turns into a vicious circle. And I’m scared of not being able to get out of it. And you? What are you scared of?

Oh, dear Nina, you are so young under your solitary rugged surface … You envy me? My need for life? Me who spent years running away from life? And, staying with you? Just don’t…
I had to eat two entire plates of soup and end the whole dinner and pay for it and say goodnight to everybody and get outside under the continuing rain before I felt I had to actually find the words to reply to her message once back at the hotel.

ME: I don’t stay with you because I am with another person. And my fears are just as strong as yours. I don’t have any negative feelings staying at your side! Believe me! I only feel the obstacles, because you’re withdrawn as I am withdrawn. Just let us see each other a little more, a little better. That’s all I can do too. I kiss you.

Was I worth of my dinner, my sleep, my ramblin’ now? I knew I was not.

E: Enough, don’t look for me, don’t ask for me, I don’t want to hear from you again. Not because of any cliche of the lover that wants to be a wife, I just cannot endure all this once again. Goodnight.

Once Nina said it was all right with me because I was brusque and outspoken and the truth stayed awake so.
She already knew of Libi! And when we first met the three of us were there together. I recalled how Nina insisted to give us a ride home then, and that I refused, and me and Nina kissing on the cheeks not so far from the lips and how the thing was there when we both turned back for a last glance.
Yet I was not going to play dumb and taunt Nina for this game of ignoring Libi . It was as it was, just not bearable now, because of all the wasted occasions of seeing each other we had had. Wasting occasions does mean wasting it.

Oh, was my experience or my supposed cynicism helping in anything?
What an ass I was, wanting to be loved and admired for my weakness.

Why do we seduce each other when we know we’re far from reaching one another? Why all this looking and showing? It is so easy to be suddenly someone else and reach another person and make love and forget having been someone else. Too bad when it all turns into a repetition compulsion, because the game is spoiled from the beginning, and you already know how it ends. Or something like that.

Horrible news (if true, ’cause you’ll never know what is propaganda and what not. but plausible) from Afghanistan as reported by the Telegraph, via Free thoughts.

Talibans executed a teacher in front of his pupils because he insisted in educating girls too.
No portrait of a teacher is more perfect and beautiful than this: “He had received many warning letters from the Taliban to stop teaching, but he continued to do so happily and honestly – he liked to teach boys and girls.” (Read the news here)

Oh, I wish Ceronetti is right and it’s true we all get reincarnated. And that those talibans, after a million of lives passed as bugs, worms, and every kind of possible terrified prey by the short, painful miserable life, will all be reincarnated into those little girls whose life was screwed up by their pathetic hatred against anything not penis-driven.

That said, I have my doubts that “these are the people some wish be freed from Guantanamo” as Free thoughts said. I don’t think anybody worried that much for these kind of criminals in Guantanamo as for the innocents that are crushed by the mechanism and have no means to defend themselves. The point is to respect basic human rights for everybody period. The moment you start to contravene this rule, you’re on the wrong side, or whatever we want to call that side.

(Reasoning in ‘sides’ will always be ugly, at least until it won’t be finally official that the right side it’s just the one that makes the biggest amount. But that’s another story).

Outside is the strongest wind, shaking and scattering and slamming through the sun ablazing, and I am dying for a walk into it all, not being here reading about fucking hymenoplasty surgery and Italy seventh in Europe for murders and all, or monday we’ll be six billions and a half on our round blue earth and the christmas tree lightened up or all the Plasma TVs underneath. The most popular items list on the Amazon makes me vant to vomit on the keyboard of my 2002 notebook for good.
I wonder why wearing mountain boots for a walk in the neighbourhood makes me feel more receptive or unchained, how ridiculous, and the obsession I have with the idea of gettin’ in touch with my father for christmas, didn’t see him in twelve months, I’d say to him reproaching a son is like reproaching toothache, it makes no sense, I spoke, go.
I’m not going out just because I know I’m too tired for this after the n^th too long staying up fatigue and I don’t want to go to bed because my wake/sleep cycles are still there to be studied by some team of scientist miners – or magic rebus solvers. Meanwhile I made this sketch out of an elaborate phone call and didn’t know when to stop. I want to be looked into the eyes now but she’s not here.

Translation of the following excerpt is provided by Italy is falling as always. In picture (below) is writer Giovanni Comisso on the fishing boat ‘Il gioiello’, The Jewel, in Chioggia, near Venice, around 1925.

“Here, make your choice.” Hans said.

“The third one” Said Alberto, desperate as in a revenge. Hans gave an order to his bearer who let out a whistle and the young boy followed the wheelcabs at a distance. They reached another garden next to the sea, the high palms rising up to the sky and they stopped. Hans dismissed the bearers. High trees wrapped up by climbing plants made the shadow on the dusty trail to look murkier. Among the branches it could be heard the quarreling of roosted birds. Hans said:
“Here you can do anything you want, I’ll mount guard.”. Alberto got closer to the boy, took him by the hand and next to a tree.
Those wild and exuberant trees were the forest of his countryside games, with Mario painted black on the face, among the brushes to the creek.

They didn’t get back to the ship. The night was so warm they could feel the closed oppression of their cabins. They laid down on the dust near the sea that soundly was moving over the stony beach.

Alberto was thinking:
“I lived in a sublime laze then, and the more I moved far from that time the more I am convinced of it”. Then placated he dozed until the first dim of dawn. The light appeared amid the palms agitated by an inperceptible wind. Alberto stood up. On the beach some natives were shoving the boats awash to the sea.
“My pleasures”, he said to himself, “were nothing but a continuation of my childhood games.” He felt Time.

“A day will come”, he also said, “that someone will take me down the stairs of my house, closed in a coffin, but I will have had my childhood game entirely performed.”
The light was increasing vehement along with the wind between the palms and the sea. On the boats, the natives raised the small sails and left.
The order of every thing appeared unalterable.

This was the last page of the novel Gioco d’infanzia “Childhood game”, by the italian writer Giovanni Comisso (1895 – 1969).

The book novelizes in bits part of Comisso’s long trip by ship to Egypt and India and then China in 1929. He wrote it in 1932, after two other books about that same trip.
I personally consider it ravishing delightful, and one of the highest point of italian literature in its times. Nothing like this will ever be published in Italy after WWII and until the last two decades of the last century.
Whatever the reason, books like this were to be considered not enough politicized, and pornographic, and thereby banned or ignored, in our very free catholic-communist-americanized Nation.

The hotel was in an old stony street in the center of Ferrara. It was single starred and that was what I was looking for. Moving from hotel to motel to B&B to hotel during solitary trips in the last years, I ended up elaborating my personal theory, and that is that the higher the ranking of the hotel and the prices of the rooms, the worse is what you get in the end. Weird theory, of which I am not that sure of, and still, it can be verified. Probably this comes to me because I don’t care for: TV, personal bathroom, breakfast, room service. And because I never stayed in the same hotel more than two or three nights.

After driving for hours in the Padana praire, strolled the streets of Ferrara for a couple of hours, visited the beloved interiors of the Schifanoia palace, I was very much tired and it was about to rain again and I had slept just a couple of those hours in the car.
The door of the Centro Storico Hotel was closed but lights were on inside. Before ringing the bell I heard from the ground floor window snippets of a conversation between a mother and a kid daughter. They were both laughing at a kid’s classmate expenses in a sympathetic way, but it felt completely unrelated with the Hotel business. And what if I was the classmate happening to have a walk outside here I thought. I have of these thoughts.

As I rang, the voice of the mother said, who’s ringing now? quite annoyed and so, I tried to look less tired and more smiling. My stomach was aching ’cause I get very emotional when I have to get in touch with my fellow humans in these situations. I am not at ease in the adult world, even though I am a sort of adult person, so my stomach started to cringe and squeeze the void into there, slightly emotional only for this simple task of having to obtain, or risking to have a hard time obtaining, what I needed from some unknown person, and – you know – I can hate how they act behind a reception desk.
She was a nice little young blond mother, looking at me surprised, and after the deal was done and the keys in my hand, she was still looking at me surprised, and smiling me only in bits. Dry brusque blonde.
– Can I pay in advance? So that I.. – You have to. – Oh. Fine, then.

The room was a piece of small rectangular cell worth twenty of my bucks, single bedded, window facing the roofs over the town, mixture of new fake furniture and old residual objects, a table to write, a little lamp, old ceramic sink. I slept in it all afternoon long, voices faded in and out my coscience and finally woke me up around dinner time, too loud voices of Hotel residents, and listening to their phony friendly conversation I realized there where only long-term guests in the hotel. Possibly people from Ferrara and vicinity left without a house. Tourism was probably not going that well then.

What if I was living here too, I thought. They would probably make me a better deal. It could be affordable. I would probably ran into fights with everybody about the noise or the music. I can’t stand loud music. I would have affairs with guest ladies acting as Blanche, and quarrels about soccer with the old men. I would be despised behind my back and considered a bum. Could be fun. At the end the dry blonde would fall in love with me and cry as Circe at my departure outside the enchanted ring, towards home.

The scene is, any subterranean bookshop in the center of Milan (there’s a bunch of them, they’re all sad and stinking). The main character is ico, me.

I approach the scaffolds of poetry. I try to focus the titles quickly.
I don’t like the first authors I read of, nor the titles. My mind struggles to convince me not to indulge in any time-consuming irrational negative feeling towards these poets. Just pass, ico, please.

Then, in a sudden rush of sympathy and enthusiasm, among books with titles such as “Plural word” “Air of the memory” “Inspections”, I spot one little colorful book, entitled “Il fanculo mistico” (The mystical Fuck Off).

Oh! pleasant congenial brave author, who are you?

I read: Giovanni Pascoli. This can’t be. One of the most trite moral authors of the many trite ones they teach you at school. That’s impossible. He comes from the Italian XIX° Century Literature where Fucking Off was definitely out of the question.

And so it is, as the actual title recites “Il fanciullo musico” (The musical infant).

Oh boredom! swallow me in your cavernous gloomy mouth! Step on my crumbled bones and sink me in your voracious mud!

I leave the scene frowning. End of story; then comes the moral.

Dyslexia is a brief blessing. It betters the world, but it comes and goes as a wild animal in the woods.

The most beautiful fog enfolds Milan this morning, mixed with the deadly steamy unloads of the chimneys over the roofs.

Thousands of hot showers are running in the apartments, countless coffee machines muttering, piles of computers booting, of pigeons cooing, of dogs crapping in the barren isles, the grassed one in the middle of the tram’s tracks, aside of walkers and runners complaining for something, or the shop tenants who scrupulously are sweeping their own few meters of sidewalk, the municipal policemen giving tickets around, the bus drivers lazily muttering their answers to the ladies clinging to the driver’s booth, and in the houses again, smeared cups are left in the sinks, eyeglasses are wiped and worn, teeth brushed, children commanded, unsatisfied glances are given outside the window, Shit look at the fog now, you can see nothing, But isn’t it nice, It will last until noon maybe, No it won’t, too bad.

This morning I have a feeling towards this city, but I am not able to tell you how the city herself this morning is restive to be told.

Banker Giampiero Fiorani intensely smiles at the camera while he is taken into custody.
What that smiles means, is obvious to anyone who knows how to read such a situation. The smile means: if I go down, you all go down with me.

Who ‘you all’ can be, we leave it to the readers’ imagination.

Let’s say he’s not smiling to his own Bank’s small unaware customers, whose savings were allegedly used to bribe a wide range of italian politicians. Who in turn illicitly protected the bank from the acquiring bids of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO.

Here the new story begins: qui comincia la novella storia. Where – obviously – nothing is new.

© some rights reserved

In picture: Luigi Tenco few days before his death (1967)

Beppe Grillo, the most famous italian blogger and popular comedian, like most of us write on his blog like about everything. His blog is beppegrillo.it, but you already know that.

Recently a magistrate reopened the case for the death of the great italian folksinger Luigi Tenco, who allegedly killed himself in his hotel room in Sanremo forty years ago, and Grillo jumped on the case, publishing a letter from folksinger Gino Paoli (it’s a folk story, yep). Here:
http://www.beppegrillo.it/2005/12/vedrai_che_camb.html
(You can read more on the reopening of Tenco’s case here, and also consider the interview with folksinger Lucio Dalla. Both in italian, sorry about that).

Paoli’s letter basically says: leave Tenco resting in his grave, justice in Italy sucks, we should not reopen this 40 years old case, there are more important things to do, etc. A nice bar-chatting nonsense, were completely different and trifling things are put toghether with no other reason than to be published by Grillo.

Grillo completely agrees with the letter (another typical italian thing: he would not have it published at all if he did not agree with it in the first place) and adds:

Luigi Tenco commited suicide 39 years go in San Remo. In one of his songs/poems sung:
“This /it’s not the Life for sure / you dreamt one day for us / You’ll see, you’ll see / You’ll see it change / maybe not tomorrow / but one beautiful day, it will change / maybe not tomorrow / but one day it will change”
Tenco dreamt already then – Grillo goes on – a different Italy. Like us. You’ll see we are going to make it. (Translation by Italy is Falling)

Oh, what is worse than politics smeared all over poetry like a scattered paint of crap?
This is enough, you megalomaniac Grillo ass. Yes I am addressing you, like you do with the big guns.

First thing: Vedrai, vedrai (“You’ll see”) is not a political song at all.

Grillo, please, pay attention. Not everything is politics. Not all the stuff that drives you emotional agrees with your idea of the world.

Vedrai, vedrai is a great, moving, bitter love song in french style, as most of the songs by Tenco are. Bitter love songs. The bitternes is often confused with a political stance against the establishment, but as a matter of fact Tenco never did such statements.
The fact that you are referring to his verses as political, means you don’t care no shit about Tenco himself. You only want to pile up arguments in support of your heroical position in a supposed fight against the establishment.
Shame on you, mr. Grillo.

(I removed from the post second, third and fourth “thing” because I felt they were not that much interesting. They were mostly about why Tenco died in San Remo, why reopen the case today, and how Paoli is a big mafioso all but uninterested in the story and should just shut up. I may post this things in the comments later for all my morbidest readers)

“Prisoner number C29300 had been sentenced to die”. More than fifteen minutes of agony were necessary to take him away.

International defenders of militarized human rights, preachers of police freedom and technological democracy, hypocritical viril Terminators: I’m addressing you, here’s looking down on you, with all the possible, vain contempt at hand.

You killed him because he was not remorseful enough.
Are you?

I won’t even ask you how do you sleep at night.
I know you sleep better than I do.