Personal – An Echo That's Reversing

Fix It Again Tony

On 10 Apr 2023, I started taking Italian lessons on Preply with my instructor Marina. That was over two years ago.

Tuesday night was my last lesson before her summer vacation and my anticipated work visa and move to Italy. I don’t know what the next few months will be and if Italy will grant me a visa or if-and-when I restart lessons with Marina, but the current moment is emotional.

Buona Festa della Repubblica

This past Monday, 2 June, was the 79th anniversary of when Italy, post-World War II in 1946 after the Fascists were defeated, voted to become a republic instead of a monarchy. Similarly, 6 June was the 81st anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, when the Allied forces began the liberation of Western Europe from the fascists. Also on the 6th: I had an interview at the Italian consulate in Miami to apply for my Digital Nomad Visa (Visto per Nomadi Digitali). In the meantime, our government has accelerated it’s move towards fascism in an increasing number of ways.

By Federico Patellani, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118602953

Although the adventure is not over for me (and really doesn’t have an “over”) this is a huge milestone. These last five-or-so months have been the longest two years of my life. A timeline:

Barbarella the Smuggler–Carving from a block of stone

I’ve used this approach–or I guess mental construct–for a while. Since the second string quartet probably, when I started adopting a compositional style from Finnissy’s music. I’ll write on paper lengthy, lucid polyphonic phrases that are intended to stretch for many measures (several minutes) with each note elongated. I’ll enter them into the Dorico app with only a suggestion of aligning note changes across staffs. Precision is not important.

The Year of Italy

I started at some point to give years names. This may have/probably has been inspired by the completely unfortunate aspect in the novel Infinite Jest where the US sells years to corporations in order to make money. After corporate purchase years would become: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, etc. It’s a bleak mirror within a literary conceit of pretty much what we’ve become.

So, less bleakly, I started to give my years themes. This, 2025, is The Year of Italy.

No title

(it’s been almost a month)