One of my favorite political commentators slash Canadians slash humorists is Jeet Heer. Also: cool name. His podcast is “The Time of Monsters” and the title references a quote from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. To my shame I had never heard of it (quote) or him (author) before Heer’s reference and it is these happy necessities or current events (wtf, “happy”?) that present such introductions.
It’s an absolutely beautiful quote that is, in Engliush:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.
The Wikiquote entry for Gramsci says that it is a misattribution in the most confusing way possible by attributing a similar phrase from his Prison Notebooks. The quote can be found in context in the Italian Wikisource for those notebooks:
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.
The crisis consists precisely with the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum morbid events occur with greater variation.
It’s a less punchy but more analytical sentiment.
Maybe a month ago the doorbell rang and I was greeted by a couple of communists; one spoke no English–and this is not a conversational subject I could manage–but the other did. “Giulia the Communist” as she is in my WhatApp contacts. We swapped a copy of Lotta Comunista–warning, that is a very bright red website–and a small donation and she invited me to their toy handout event in centro storico that weekend (this being before Christmas). I need more interactions and want to help the Genova community and so decided to go. (When I joked to my landlady about communists visiting she scolded me a bit). The event was nice and a lot of kids left happy, though some were forced by their parents to also take a book along with toys. There were too many volunteers and so I mostly hung around idle listening to an impromptu group of random musicians improv through the few common songs they had in their respective repertoire. Herbie Hancock’s Watermellon Man amongst them.
After that, Giulia was gracious enough to invite me to the upcoming celebratory conference for their 60th anniversary, which was last night. It was very well attended by around 1,000-1,200 people and had several speakers over a 2-hour period. One was the oldest surviving member at 75 (?) and another an extremely eloquent 18-year-old girl. The Lotta Comunista party originated in Genova and now has member groups located across the larger cities in Italy along with several European countries. I need to read more about them since they are part of the history of my adoptive city.
There were no English-speakers in the crowd and, of course, the speeches were in Italian of which I understood maybe less than half. When I first came here I went to the nearby Mondadori bookstore in hopes to find some easy reading material and, well, it’s a book store! One book the attendant felt would be at my level was a giallo called La psicologa. It’s above my level and reading it is like walking through fog: I recognize the general shape of the story and most of what’s happening, but everything’s a little blurry and unfamiliar. It’s a very unusual sensation. Listening to the speakers was similar but with a thicker fog. I did however understand them much better than people on the street. Prepared statements, repetition of ideas, and clear diction helped. However, two hours of listening to a language you speak only enough of that you’re forced to pay close attention throughout was exhausting. I wish I had the opportunity to try to talk to others, it was the same at the toy event, but I just don’t know how to manage that in these situations.
After I left, on the bus ride home I read the news that ICE had assassinated another citizen.