There’s too much politics to think about. And that’s kindof an avoidance because calling waves hands what has just happened and what bleak anniversary just occurred, and the scars almost lining up, politics is not politics. There’s just too much to think about.
I’m losing track of the time I’ve been here. I had thought about it in phases but now it seems to just be. I’ve never been great with remembering Important Dates (I still am not sure and haven’t come up with a mnemonic for when Memorial Day and Labor Day occur, one is before and one is after?) but I’m now and so quickly reducing Genoa to the permanence of now.
And that permanence brings with it it’s flaws with the potential of a casual blindness to the new. When Lisa visited, her questions constantly reminded me of the lazy side of that sense of permanence when I didn’t know the lineage of some obviously-historical building, or the right-and-wrong with regard to (per quanto reguarda) local etiquette. This has been an expected threat that has fulfilled its threat: I get comfortable with what I know and then adhere to those pathways. That expectation is how I came up with The Rules:
- Interact with someone every day
- Visit a new part of the city every Friday
Number 1 is at once easy and difficult, useless and useful. You can try to interact but there are only so many ways and the most common–shopping for groceries and ordering coffee–have their limits in the limitations of an unwilling and unsympathetic companion who does not want to teach the Italian language and understandably instead wants to serve the next customer what they ordered. Problematic. Number 2 resolved that by accident when I visited museums or took the evening to go to a concert of some sort. Those who work as docents and ushers are the same type of saint as those who teach, which I guess is kind of obvious. And an instance to illustrate: one Friday Visit rule consisted of a small museum where one room, I noted, had a baby grand piano that was out-of-character stylistically for the works on display. I decided to fumble through my Italian and ask about it to an abundantly-willing attendant, and they graciously gave me information about the chamber music concert season that they hosted and that soon, the next week, had its next recital.
It’s a really basic social activity to engage in–talk to someone–but an activity whose basics does not translate when adrift.
I’ve started using Nextcloud to host my social calendar (shut up I do things) to replace USA-based, Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley-adjacent companies, much like most of Europe is moving towards and away from. I adopted it as a calendar of limited theme and was naively surprised that it was so much more, and basically FOSS Office365 with email, contacts, interconnected accounts. There’s an entire essay to write about the unintended-and-long-needed consequences of the current too-much-politics. The collapse of an empire means the growth of new non-empires.
My spare time has been obsessed (“obsessed”? consumed) by my new mono-mania: Guido Crepax’s Valentina. As I was documenting the Valentina publications it became very obvious (is there “slightly” obvious?) that I needed a universal index and the website I created for Barbarella represented such a universal index. I believe of myself that I can communicate information to others in a way that they will understand it; I think that the navigation and presentation in that website is done well to achieve that. (I am too often wrong.) I understand my obsession to document and graph Valentina publications, but my obsession to collect them is a different mania. Wait. A different aspect of the same mania: I want to organize and possess?
I hadn’t intended or at least felt that I could resist collecting the different editions, a key point being that I am living in an apartment in another country and have no sense or means of moving a library.
Am I running away? That, like other questions, is a full essay. I think about it as I watch Andor or the protests against… everything, or think of my own fuck-the-police instincts. But I also trust my instinct and know the best time to leave is when you wonder what the Germans thought when they were considering leaving Nazi Germany. Today, the best time to leave is when you ask the question: what did the Germans think when they were considering leaving Nazi Germany. Consider what an ominous flag that is.
And I think of this–with a great caution of egotism–it was the intellectuals who left early. And those who could. But the lesson I take from the former is that when you know you know. The tears and screams we shed and made That Night were such a realization. And such a core-breaking realization. I think I’ve written about this before and now and will later, and I’ll continue because my thoughts might change or they might become stronger. Or more despondent with those who can’t.
