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

– Jago Noja

because I like the strain that came out with it, all pissed off, I decided to quote myself from a comment I just made here. Always in defense of commentators:

…I never read Genna’s blog… but I read the post you talk about. I totally disliked it. Patronizing and bossy. And really exaggerated. He wants us not to do this way, he wants us to do the other way… typical italian famous blogger. He seems convinced that the simple fact of deciding to have a role as “the one who writes the posts” vs. “the one who writes comments” makes you special. What an ass. The point is not “creating content”. It all depends on the quality of the content you create. Or the honesty of it. And if your posts are dishonest, they can still give you many readers and many comments. Or not. So what that proves? Nothing. If you’re dishonest you can get a lot of pointless comments that sneer at you. In that case the comments are probably better than the content. (Comments are a different kind of content too, so the whole pretext is stupid anyway.)
I think he’s putting those who provide content on a pedestal only because he’s one of them.
And he compares writing comments to vomiting! He can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.
And anyway. Nobody seems to conceive spontaneity as something more than anarchy to be regulated. That’s so wrong. The way I see it, spontaneity is the only decent fertile common ground we should try to preserve, and let be. Montessori wasn’t on the mille lire for nothing.

ps. thanks to maateo for providing the occasion. Hell, in a vomiting comment.
pps. In a totally unrelated issue, I want to notify that I have worked it out with the “write” page. Now it actually serves the purpose to write to me. Oh, and there’s also a “phrases” page now. Always just in case you were interested.

The apartment is silent. I finished writing a political thing about the supposed terrorism, posted it, and as always I’m depressed and sad. Politics depresses me. What I write in that realm always leaves me unsatisfied and dubious. Worried for everyone’s reaction. I would mind less if I had to write about my intestinal habits or my kinky dreams or whatever. I wouldn’t mind at all actually. I wish I had the time or better the urge to draw today. To post a drawing would cheer me up, it usually does…
Eat a yogurt, read some blogs. Admire a number of them. Avoided DC’s again for fear of being annoying for mysterious reasons I wouldn’t get –or to write something toady or silly (I’m crazy). There’s a mountain of dishes in the sink I should wash, piles of books around the small green table. Today after I worked out I looked at my sketchy muscles in the mirror and made faces. This makes me smile if I think about it now.
No sex today, yesterday. Masturbation upon awakening, mixed in the dreams. Jawa, Rulla, made appearances today in it. I should translate some poetry, find the room to write some. Should finish a website and the logo for Libi. Tomorrow open mouth to the dentist. Tragically tired… And yet is life that empty?
Maybe tomorrow will come the courage to go to Jawa’s and talk. With my luck she won’t be home. I have been thinking about Piero and them every day since the last time we met. Wished I had someone, anyone to talk to about that. Because I don’t know if I am crazy or not. Or what. I played all the possible outcomes of the conversation over and over in my head. “…You’ll think I am crazy…” “…do you remember one year and ten months ago when you said you were pregnant? I asked you, wait, there’s a little chance that I might be the father? And you said…” “Jawa, don’t worry. Don’t be scared of me…” “fuck, let’s talk blood types. You guys are physicians after all…” “…I don’t even imagine this could change anything: it couldn’t. I just… would like to know, I guess…” “…I don’t want to barge in your lives… I’d never…”

And what if I’m wrong? Should I be ashamed, and how could I avoid the shame? After all the first time I saw the child I felt he looked like his father. I said that out loud. The first impression should be the right one. He looked like his uncle actually. But maybe I was deliberately trying not to see that he looked like me. I remember that day, me and Jawa where waiting at the railroad crossing behind the little church next to Naviglio Grande, and the bascule lifted and the cars began moving next to us and we were on the sidewalk and in the rumble I said, to the five months old thing in her knapsack, I said, let’s go my child. It was inadvertent, but Jawa didn’t say anything, not even, yeah, right. She deadly serious looked away. I am still thinking at that and wondering. I thought, shit, I wish it was something one could talk about. And, incredible, it still is something you can’t talk about. But I shouldn’t complain for it– after all I so obviously enjoy having secrets, don’t I? They’re the freedom I wasn’t allowed to have as a child I guess. Or some other bullshit.

Since I must do something, I think I’m removing the fucking political post. It took me one hour to write it… that should make me feel better. To end with a similitude, I’ll say that politics are just like italian coffee. No lasting. Overrated. Poisonous in the long run. Easily bitter as gall in the wrong hands. Needs rubber to work his way through. Chauvinist. Obscure. Needs sugar to be swallowed (end of the post.)

Great catch from Giorgio (Caporale Reyes), about the young lady who was arrested the other day for belonging to the terrorist group Red Brigades. Giorgio searched for her (indeed peculiar) name, “Amarilli Caprio” on Google, and found what very likely is a poem she wrote that got into an anthology of a certain “club of the poets prize”, in 2001.

I personally don’t like the poem very much: rhetoric, corny or too lyrical is what it says to me (the “tireless waves of unknown destinies”, “onde instancabili di destini ignoti”, are kind of too much for my taste) but it is certainly the product of someone who is young, loves poetry, and is sensitive enough. “Icaro mio impazzito” (“my madden Icarus”) is actually a beautiful unexpected line there at the end.

Assuming the poem was really written by the brigatist (which given the peculiarity of her name is very likely but not certain), Giorgio is reasonably left to wonder how poetry and yearning for political murder can be put together.

The thing is, poetry is often a sign of absolutism and idealism, of radical feelings storming the soul of a poet: and often it can be associated with a desire for destruction and violence. Nothing strange about it. Our history is punctuated by characters of revolutionaries and criminals and radicals who were also poets: some of them were great poets. Many were mediocre talents, but their urge to write verse wasn’t any less powerful because of that.
Poetry is definitely not only that sacred and intellectual thing, to be learned by heart, they taught us at school: it is also the bizarre tool many young souls pick to say out loud or in a contorted way how disgusting is the world around them, and how reality isn’t necessarily there to be described, but instead to be totally re-invented in few idealistic or musical or imaginative lines.

Anyhow… this discovery of Giorgio made me think that it was kind of stupid of me yesterday to label all those wannabe terrorists just as stupid morons.
Sure, this supposed terrorist group once again came as the old-new incongruity landing on our country like a martian; sure, their political dream is the stupidest thing ever imagined by people, and the better one to make things worse for everybody but the establishment itself; sure, the way by which they pick “exemplary” victims between the groups they want to hurt to (supposedly) scare all the others and show to the people who the “real” enemies are is something totally mafia-style, and coward to say the least; sure, their language and twisted arguments are a clear sign of deranged thoughts and moronic choices.
But still: hidden behind the mugshots and the stories served by the newspapers there are actual persons, who out of frustration and displacement and some evil weakness that got into them in a way or another got there, to that crazy point. And maybe they were persons who longed for poetry and a sky where to fly into, for corny that dream or poetical image is. Undoubtedly this should make them slightly more interesting as individuals. At least should be so for Amarilli Caprio.

Big news on the italian media, for the arrest of a bunch of “new” supposed members of the red brigades, the communist terrorist group that so many favors already did to past italian governments during the seventies and eighties. Among their targets, once again were politicians, managers, journalists, Berlusconi, etc.
This is really a corpse resuscitated, since this senseless and imbecile experience of our history was already dead few years after its beginnings, and have been resuscitated so many times since then. But I guess the supply of criminal idiots for these acts is always large.

I am now expecting without the slightest enthusiasm the gigantic pointless debate that will soon be sparkled by the fact that some of the arrested where also members of the largest left-wing trade Union organization in the country.
It’s not a surprise to me. There is something about working for a trade union organization in Europe that drives you mad. I’ve seen it in certain persons I know (i.e. my father’s wife). Endless meetings, pompous speeches of the leaders, constant fighting about the pettiest smallest things, the fact that the rulers rule no matter what you do, the fact that you get to manage a lot of power and yet this power goes nowhere but to nourish the organization itself: all these things can cause enough frustration and longing for action to bring the idiots to grab the gun and make silly plans of revenge. Shake the world in ten days and all that.

It is really absurd, almost comic, how these people can call themselves ‘revolutionaries’: when all they always come out with is to go and kill or kneecap some politician. How this is supposed to make a change in a rotten society already based on criminal political revenges and mafia-style intimidations really goes beyond my ability or desire to see.

My fears never really leave me alone. They barely get quiet, when I’ve banged their heads long enough against all the corners. They fade into the shady background of the rooms behind my back. The silence of the bathrooms where the time is in the dripping. In front is the red table, and the light pointed upward. The white walls, the dark terrace and the cold barren small trees into the pots. Wary or tired and anxious to be good to each other, me and Libi Talk. I get nervous for one or two petty things said, and we raise our voices and struggle to make our points, glares of disappointment and urge to reach and shake the other, and after a while, even after the moment when we get along again, one is left to wonder what all that commotion was about? What was it, if now I enjoy the sound of our voices in the quiet apartment, glad to be here? Delighted at the way we can be closes and still distant. And all the time, this thing in my stomach, beneath the read table, this thing with tentacles and an engine of sort that buzzes and warms up and messes up everything inside. And every fear has its double in the anxious looking forward to the same thing. Expectations for the day I’ll get on the plane, dread for that day getting inevitably nearer– worried of the separation –so much I feel I don’t want to be separated at all –and long awaited feeling of liberation from all the bonds and ties and obligatory faces of me. Fear to be a coward and hide behind money, terror of the violent places, where I won’t know how to defend myself or where to run, the places where everyone will be more aggressive and ruthless and weaponized than me– and yearning for the moment when I finally will be out of the nest and far from the security and the fears that thrive in the security.
And also the other fears, always there, of decaying of bodies and waning of time, expecting the parents to be dead, and how the world will be then, lighter, larger, smaller, heavier. Etc.

Oh, I had my little share of moronic commentators (just one actually) who a while ago depressed me so much that I had to close down the blog. Actually that wasn’t the real reason why I did it. Anyway the commentator really disturbed me and made me sad, so I can understand how Babsi can be frustrated by her commentators now and then. For example, I am frustrated that I don’t get that many comments. Aside of the two or three sweet souls that drop their lines not dreading the void that surrounds them, usually it is pretty silent around here. I have no idea how certain bloggers must feel when they open their blogs in the morning to find tens and tens of new comments, all giving a new life to the recent posts. Must be great. Or not.

Babsi maintains that the comments she receives are often “off-topic, empty”, and have no purpose (“they are an end in itself”). She wonders if her blog “really deserves the commentators it has.” “I can’t have a blog with comments that make me happy when I read them”, she says. Then, quite incoherently, she mentions a number of commentators who write good comments that make her happy.
(So, Babsi, what’s the deal?)

It is none of my business, but honestly, from the way she presents it, I don’t really see what trouble Babsi has with her commentators. You’re not and you can’t be in control of what people comment on your blog. End of story. Is it really useful to inhibit your commentators by pointing out your discontent?

I think that when it comes to commentators you must appreciate what you are happy to have and don’t bother with what you’d rather do without (or, like in my case, what you don’t have). There is no other decent way around this: complaining out loud for “off-topic” comments is… well, what a teacher would do. A bad teacher at that. Sure, by doing so, that teacher could obtain more coherent papers from the pupils: but (I think we all remember this from school) certainly less spontaneous and original and authentic ones.
Anyway, the teacher can be excused for this choice because of the supposed pedagogic purposes. But a blog isn’t school, right? What good all the rules can do here? Besides, what you write and what is commented are two very different things. I am not saying one can’t be disappointed, or offended by a comment or another: and you can close everything down if you need it. But to what authority exactly can you complain for the “bad” comments? And what would be the charge? People not being what I expected them to be?

I don’t know, maybe it is even unfair –or inelegant — to put your commentators down, to demolish them, in such a general way from a post of your blog: since your commentators are there for you and for what you write and all they can do is to say what they think, while you get to decide and give the directions and make things happen.

Supposedly we all enjoy the freedom of the net (although, alas, it is pretty frequent in the italian blogland to find people complaining about it): well, these are its inconveniences. But they can’t seriously harm you, because freedom works both ways. It sets you free, too.

To put an end to this post, I’ll say that this story reminded me of that scene in a Milan Kundera’s novel (I think it was Immortality) where a good looking girl in a salon in Paris gives her indignant speech about how dreadful it is to be an “object” of the attention of the men, and how horrible it is for a woman who walks down the streets to be whistled at, etc. Everyone in the salon agrees with the girl’s indignant speech, because she is obviously right. Then someone, not an adept of social rules apparently, notes how not being an object of the attentions of anyone can also be terrible: maybe even ten times worse. Because not being desirable it is one of the outposts of solitude, and as such it should be kept in mind as a possibility (or better, as a probability), when we dismiss as wrong the attentions we receive.
I guess this is even truer when we talk about fame and respect and readership than when we talk about good looks, since nothing, not even immortality, lasts forever.

I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin’s family.
I woke up in the dream a member of Rasputin family and thought, my last name is now almost the same as the president’s.
I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin’s family. I belonged to his house. I knew all the faces there, of the servants and the followers and the other family members. I knew the neighbors and the purveyors and the doctors.
I dreamed I was walking through Rasputin’s house like I was in my house, but it wasn’t my house, it was nobody’s house.
It was a clear day of spring, the snow outside was melting under the white sky and the polished wooden floors where shiny and fragrant of wax. All the carpets where rolled aside against the wainscoting. I entered this big room where Grigori Rasputin sat alone, surrounded by few pieces of dark furniture, a table, a chair, a stove, the room was large and had barren walls. A teapot was enveloped in a red and white rag and steaming on the stove. He was reading. There was sweet smell of tobacco and a scent of urine and rotten wood.
I said, may I have some of your tea, father?
Grigori looked at me and said, you’re not a member of this family. Get out of this house. He made this short speech keeping one of his fingers straight between the pages of the book to keep the place. He barely glanced at me.
His eyes where proverbial clear, almost gray as the sky outside. I said, fine, I was only dreaming it.
I walked the long corridor to the front door –nobody seemed to be in the house. I got out under the porch and to the garden where my father was standing, rake in his hands. He looked at me, sad and tired, and said, so you chose Rasputin against me and turned his back at me and went past the fence and away.
There was also a girl in the garden, hanging long robes and pants to many long lines of wires.
I ran to her and touched her shoulder. She turned to me and said no, you can’t make love to me unless you are a member of this family. Then she picked up the basket of clothes and disappeared behind the white curtain of Grigori Rasputin’s hanged long robes and pants –and I woke up. That girl looked just like my sister, by the way.

I first met Rulla in Venice, on a day of exams. We were both waiting to give one of the many at the department of fine arts. She used to wear certain kinky tigerish glasses back then and always a black short skirt, obviously her long curly straw-yellow venetian hair were all about her. She was fun and carefree and lighthearted. I was already this grave boy but more sociable back then. I think we fell for each other, life was about to give us a great passion… we ended up moving together in a little apartment in St. Polo where we lived for almost three years, although the real passion was alive for the first six months at most, before we even moved in together.
Later the passion developed into something different, equally intense but totally self-destructing and perverse and crazy. There were fights, objects thrown, threats, cheating, promises, cries, fake suicide, slaps in the face, reconciliations, kinky stuff and more cries and resentments and self-destructing choices. We were always broke and always behind with the exams and always sad and unsatisfied and stupefied by all the unhappiness. It dates to those times the insane habit I grew to bury myself into the computer to overcome my sadness and the feeling of being out of place.

I finally got the job at the university of Milan and left Venice, because of Rulla– and I knew the city wasn’t going to be a place for me anymore.
As often happens with the wrong habits me and Rulla never really completely moved on… we sort of kept in touch in the following years. Mostly it was her calling me, and since I was –like her, but in a different way– badly wounded by our story and weary and selfish, sometimes I ignored her calls, worried to get more of her cries and reprimands and desperation.
But we never really let go the thing. The sexual attraction never really faded, and instead placed itself into a particularly scary and sometimes attractive place inside our minds. For a while we also had moments of getting together to fuck every now and then– as sometimes happens.

Then strangely all the mistakes and the things never told faded into the past and left nothing but the pipes and wires of some sort of edifice we once had had and that was now nowhere to be found, like a razed construction site, footprints of the old structure squashed and deformed in the dirt by the following plans, as we loved and re-loved other bodies, and our bodies were loved, declaring different things with similar words and tones, making new errors and choices above the old ones.

Recently me and Rulla started to hear from each other more frequently. Now one can call the other, normal day, and we just talk about our lives. I learned to listen to her without being scared or self righteous as I used to and I finally saw, how strong and brave and generous she had been during her difficult years. How in different ways we both managed to overcome the worst aspects of our characters, and all the craziness that we experienced when we were together and afterwards. I came to feel that it really had been one of those unique things in life to witness, this twisted path we had jointly followed and separately.

Today Rulla called and said she was pregnant of her boyfriend, with whom she has been living for a year or so. Because of some surgery she had to undergo in the past the news were two times shocking, and the minute she said “I’m pregnant” I wanted so badly to hug her and make her feel how happy I was for her, how great it was and it was going to be, so much that I felt my eyes on the verge of tears. I mean, I think it was sheer happiness for her –I still can feel it right now as I write, if I only think about it– although I can’t rule out other kinds of feelings I might have felt (maybe I stupidly wanted her to hug me too).
The more evident of these feelings could be that our paths are really separating now. Our two lives are going to be growing so differently and on not contagious levels now. This is “right”, and inevitable and this rightfulness is what makes it sad on a certain level, I guess.
Also, many of the women I have been with and loved are becoming mothers, so much that I am becoming an expert on the matter. But I am a man, and I can’t be a mother no matter what I do. This is no little thing. It is one of the many way life actually has to tell you that your gender not always works for you. At most I could become I lousy father, and the only time I got close to that, with Libi, it was hell at first and then unbearable pain and later on only a memory hard to swallow.

Libi… she came home that I was still talking with Rulla on the phone. She found me in the bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub rambling about names and silly fears. Later me and Libi got to the mall and I told her about Rulla and after a while Libi said she had nausea all day. I thought it was ridiculous. I hoped life wasn’t going to be that ridiculous. Or maybe I didn’t hoped, I just wondered if.

still deleting old drafts…

// (…) I think it’s endearing of her to say it. And then it hits me, while those thoughts that I have end within the boundaries of what is me, what I think it’s being me, it’s this kind of things, done together with no apparent reason nor necessity and totally mundane, to make two persons a couple, whatever a couple is. It is just not obvious to me why, nor whether I like this or not. //

// (…) Later they watched together the Ozu movie in color, just downloaded illegally, called An Autumn Afternoon, that made them both hungry for japanese food and beer. He asked how was it possible, that so sensitive and intimate people never touched each other, if not for some occasional shoulder-patting on the way, not even in the most sorrowful situations? It probably was the same in Italy years ago, rural life and all. But at least there were the recurrent beatings and rapes and clashes, wives against husbands, husbands against wives, parents against children, brothers against sisters against brothers, friends on friends, everybody against dogs, donkeys, cows. In japanese movies, no palpating whatsoever. Sex was awesome then I bet, she said. //

// (…) When asked of this strange behaviour, he then will defend himself saying: “They both were wrong.”
“Do you have any idea of who’s right, then?”
“I don’t care, really!” he will answer with a smile.
“What do you argue for, if you have no idea, then.”
“’cause! I enjoy to be different, and I want to be admired for it.”
“But you don’t get much admiration going to argue with people who have such strong opinions.”
“I just want to be admired by the majority of a minority of the other side,” he will answer.
That’s how I am. It all goes back to when I was a teenager stuck in a too political family, and was usually considered “too much politically indifferent and substantially from the right” from my father his wife and my stepbrother, “just too much of a leftist” from my mother, and simply a misbeliever from my sister. Great days were those, I’m sure they’re being kept somewhere to be repeated for me for my eternal damnation in hell. Not that the members of my so called family ever changed their mind about me in the meantime. But at least I don’t get to talk with them much anymore. //

Many have commented on the news item about Gorbachev and Microsoft. The story is known. A russian school principal bought and used for his school a number of machines with a pirated copy of Windows Vista installed (in case you don’t know, Vista is the latest, more power-sucking, more invading and ugliest version of windows). The principal in question now risks up to seven years in a camp in Siberia since apparently the pirated versions he was using called Microsoft and said “hey, we’re pirated, save us!!”.
And then, arrived super Gorbachev: coming in to help a new victim of cynic capitalism.
(Silly Question: do they really still send people off to Siberia? I thought it wasn’t that tough a punishment anymore now that we have global warming.)

However. I haven’t read a single blog or news item doubting the essence of this story they way it is presented to us. Gorbachev getting interested in this guy destiny. Microsoft playing tough and not backing off. The dismayed Russian government. The moral being that the Law is Law : etcetera.

Now, when people are going to learn to open their eyes and stop bolting down every single candy is sold to them?
Isn’t it obvious that this is all a act?

First of all : like if Gorbachev wasn’t well known for being a guy who’s commitment to a cause can be bought out at will. He’s notoriously “on the market”, for anything from movies to commercials to political battles. Gorbachev is the ultimate icon of a good and honest and disarmed fighter against any evil (even though he screwed his own country bad), and he clearly earns his living out of this.
So, who bought his interest into this story anyway? And what kind of act are we witnessing here?

With my great pleasure I’ll have to quote Sergei Dovlatov on the matter… Unfortunately this is going to be my translation of a italian translation I happen to have of Dovlatov’s “La marcia dei solitari” (The march of the solitaries) and if you know or have the original version of this book, please forgive the inaccuracies.

Let’s imagine that you find yourself with a KGB inquirer. He’s yelling and stamping his feet on the floor. He’s accusing you of being a spy of the FBI. Threatening you to send you off to jail or to smash your head to pieces.
Suddenly a door is opened. Another KGB official enters the room. Usually, of a superior rank. He enters and slowly says to the first inquirer:
“This is not good, comrade Sidorov. The times of the purges are over. Why raising your voice? Comrade Dovlatov here is willing to tell the whole story of his own accord already…”
(…) this bait is swallowed by the stupid. The two KGB officials are acting with one accord. They are counting on your fears, your idiocy, and your credulity.

As you see, in this old article Dovlatov is telling the known story of the good cop and the bad cop, proving how this kind of interrogation tactic was well known in Breznev’s USSR too.

Well, all I’m saying is that nobody forgot that tactic. It is still used today, in all sorts of situations. Evidently in Russia too. Only difference, the two partners can be all kinds of improvised partners, provided that we remain the victims. The objective is always the one of scaring us down into submission, obviously. One can be submitted to all sorts of products nowadays.

To make it short, it is obvious to me that in this story Microsoft needed a good cop to get the chance to show to the world and particularly to the largest most pirating country in the world that the bad cop was bad indeed.
Gorbachev is just giving a hand, that’s all. This is all a set up and is in fact publicity, and a hell of a good one.

Think about it: the entire logic of a operating system like Vista is that the moment you install this baby onto your pc, you accept a situation where you are going to let the baby call home every now and then to check on the legality of the situation. You are going to let the baby to put you in trouble, to disable your pc, ruin or cripple your activity, basically to spy on you and to control your computer whether you want it or not.
Microsoft clearly wants everyone to know that in the long run there is no escape from this situation, and that, even in a country where everyone uses pirated software, with pirated copies of windows, even in that situation one gets caught.

That’s the perfect story to be sold to all the newspapers and the blogs, to show to the world how Vista’s new set of rules is going to be implacable just the way they want it.
After all, there’s isn’t a thing like bad publicity in this case, because everyone is already prejudiced against Microsoft, and they know it but to well.

Now the question is: am I being paranoid or I am really going to be the only blogger in blogland to see through this?

— in picture, above: image courtesy of stuff.co.nz