Three cardinal virtues

Ca d’Oro – the house of gold – On Grand Canal is just the sort of museum I like to visit: small, unhurried, and unvisited. It has one famous masterpiece – Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, his last – and several unrecognized ones, among which several Dutch landscapes, a strange, fairytale-like, night-time adoration of the magi, and a Patener St Jerome in a blue-green landscape. One’s response to the paintings is primed and heightened by a half hour meditation in the courtyard/entry hall of the house, whose walls and floor are laid with the most beautiful marble mosaics outside of Saint Mark’s. This warm up always makes me more sensitive than I normally am in most other museums, with the result that every picture I then look at, however average and unextraordinary, pleases out of all proportion to its objective worth.

In the courtyard is a beautiful pozzo, or wellhead. These were usually displayed in some public space with which the owner was connected and used to say something important about the founder. This one, in red marble, with acanthus and classical heads, features three virtues: Justice, in the middle, with Fortitude and Charity to each side. Justice – the law – is the central virtue in all Venetian iconography; the law was the chief instrument through which the haves controlled the have-nots; it was buttressed by Fortezza – violence, essentially; the tool of compunction; and charity – the bones thrown to the poor. The republic had a vast system of almshouses, poor houses, hospitals and orphanages with which to buy loyalty of the masses. This pozzo says: it is just that I should own the palace and you squat in the poor house. But don’t worry, I will be charitable. Just don’t force me to be firm.

Indians and Italians

Of all places, Italy reminds me most of India. Both countries have an ancient history and are rife with monuments of glorious past. Both are fallen low by comparison with that past. Both have corrupt and inefficient governments who can’t perform the simplest tasks: organizing garbage disposal is equally beyond the means of each. Both have inefficient, complex legal systems through which cases wind for years and where most expire without issue. Both have economies tied up in red tape whose only functioning bits operate underground. Both are unsafe; in both the roman rule obtains, that homo homini lupus; in both there is a deficit of social trust.

The national character of the two seems to be similar as well: both Indians and Italians think themselves very important, lack sense of humor, love to talk and do not bother to read, with the consequence that they hold long perorations in which deliciously idiotic theories swim in the sauce of disarming ignorance. Both nations know next to nothing about the outside world.

Both nations also excel in aesthetic genius. Not by accident do Italians and Indians make some of the world’s most beautiful jewelry and clothes. Consider the debate which raged for years about Teatro Can Carlo in Naples, due for restoration. Should the restoration merely refresh the current, Sabaudian color scheme, dating to the period of reunification under the house of Savoy, dark red and gold? Or should it revert to the original design, the Bourbon silver and blue? After much debate, the Bourbons won. And when the theater is reopened, it will be clear, as it always is to all and sundry, that there is one thing Italians simply cannot do badly: beauty.

Vicenza, where they eat cats

Vicenza, where they eat cats, is a small town, unhurried and uncrowded, pretty and clean; the locals are helpful and friendly; the architecture, if you only take out the grossly overrated Palladio who seems to have butchered every third house in the center, quite satisfying. There are a few good paintings: Santa Corona has a beautiful Baptism of Christ by Bellini, a dusky, beautiful knock off of the Cima in Bragora in Venice. It would be quite a treat to see the two side by side one day. In another church, there is an equally dusky and equally successful sacra conversazione by del Piombo. And this month, at the Leoni, a freshly restored Crivelli triptych from Brera is on show. I had not noticed it last time I was in Milan, it had been covered by so much grime and soot. Now it shines in all its glory.

On Saturdays, there are concerts in the stucco room of one of the Palazzi which is today a government office. Last Saturday it was announced by a pretty girl playing a fife just inside the gate, accompanied by a cello across the courtyard. The fife sounded Japanese – like something from a Noh play. It turned out to be a Stockhausen, who, like most modern western composers has sought inspiration in non-western traditions. Going up the stuccoed stairs one left the piercing sound of the fife behind him and walked into the lukewarm waterfall of an equally strange melody on a husky flute, played by a beautiful tall woman on the half-landing. (The program named her: Giovanna Pescetti). Her instrument was answered by the piano playing through the open door, in the concert hall itself. Walking up felt like being in a beautiful surrealist movie.

The concert was of Stockhausen’s Zodiac, 12 polyphonic pieces without instrument indications, and with built in options for the players to expand the pieces and experiment with the performance. This the musicians – students of the conservatory – did with great gusto, playing while walking, or switching seats, from among the audience and so forth. The music was odd but beautiful. The Fish had a long section of seeming cacophony in which a confusion of strange bubbly swooshing sounds twirled around in the air, like a swarming school. Leo featured a long atonal section whose excitement was driven by relentless rhythm, like something from Prokofiev, only (if you can imagine it) odder. The twins had a beautiful duo for piano and violin. The Capricorn’s dense middle section was scored for a string quartet; and the Aquarius featured the soprano whistling -- with her hands in the pockets of her pants.

It was really quite beautiful.

Veronica

Veronica still works in Rome; like most young people fresh out of college, she earns what is the typical entry level wage in Italy, a thousand Euros a month, lower, reports the press than either Spain or Greece. (O, horror, said the Italians and cracked down on Roma immigrants: a surprising train of thought, given that the Roma are despised precisely because they do not work and therefore do not deflate wages).

With her salary, Veronica cannot afford to live where she works, in the Centro Storico, where rents for small studios start at 1200; and instead lives in Ostia where the rent is 600. It does not take a financial genius to figure out that her 1 hour commute, twice a day, 22 days each month, for a total of 44 hours of her life – a full working week – is worth 600 euros savings – 120 euros in transportation costs = 480 euros, or about 10 euros an hour. That’s actually better than her job, which pays her only about 6.25 an hour. If she could only commute all day.

Or sell herself.

The girls who work at the city’s edge, I am told, charge 50 euros and up; but, if recent press reports are right, it shouldn’t be difficult for a girl like Veronica to make a few hundred dollars for a single assignation.

Veronica is of course no common whore; yet, it does not follow that she does not sell herself. She lives in Ostia with her boyfriend. This is called variously “love”, “relationship”, or even “engagement”, but the economic fact is this: sharing the bed with her boyfriend, Veronica saves another 300 euros a month on rent. Relationships are like long term contract in dry goods shipping: contract rates are much below the spot rates.

Veronica’s position isn’t different from that of the working girls of Tokyo, or Bangkok, or Jakarta. It’s hard to make the ends meet and impossible at all not to compromise one’s sexual liberty: the girls either must live with mom and dad, and thus have no sex at all, or with boyfriend, and thus have only one kind of sex; or live alone and be constrained to – accept gifts.

The comparison between the developed world (Italy, Japan) and the undeveloped world (Thailand, Indonesia) seems to suggest that several decades of economic development and political progress have not really done anything to reduce women's dependence on sex to secure acceptable standard of living; certainly nothing to secure for them real sexual freedom.

Insularity

I know this feeling well. Cape Cod, where I once lived, is in some ways remarkably like Venice. It is a long spit of sand jutting out into the sea, dividing it into two areas, of sea and of lagoon. The lagoon is shallow, like this one, its color and waves are much alike, and so are the birds and the fish. And so is the combination of light and mist and colors of the sky. Like Venice, Cape Cod is a man made, or rather man-enhanced island: a deep sea canal cuts it off from the mainland at the base.

Like Venice, Cape Cod has a small year round population, with limited income opportunities, positively swamped by the summer time visitors, who bring with them trash, and traffic, and who elevate the prices for everything the locals must buy, from bistros to housing. As is the case in Venice, the relentless land grab by the nonresidents elevates prices of real estate far beyond anything the locals can afford, only to board it up for most of the year.

All these factors make the locals feel special, unique, and – under siege. On the Cape everyone always talks about blowing up them bridges; only the other day I saw a piece of graffiti here announcing, in Venetian, a similar sentiment: if the Bridge of Liberty were to be blown up, Europe would be cut off from Venice. Like Cape Codders, Venetians, too, feel that the rest of the world is a mere appendage. God knows they don’t go there much. Cape Codders confess to feeling sadness wherever they cross the bridge in the wrong direction, and a feeling of relief when doing so in the other. Venetians are contemptuous of the Campania. In Vincenza, they say, they eat cats.

The boatmen of Venice

The boat-delivery men of Venice are sun-burnt, unshaven, tattooed, badly dressed and be-bellied. They’re short-legged, too, no doubt the result of countless generations of natural selection – long legs are of no use on water; as a body part they are an afterthought.

They are permanently wrapped in clouds of cheap tobacco smoke. Like birds, they communicate by graceless yells and whistles from boat to boat.

Yet, on the water there is nothing more graceful than they. They maneuver their long boats with speed and ease which is a joy to behold. On the Grand Canal they move quickly, making sharp turns, turning round 180 degrees in one smooth motion, or coming to a full stop or reversing on the dime to exploit an opening between the gondola and the waterbus without once making a rude wave or ever bumping or even touching anything. Often, they nonchalantly steer using their bodies – the handle of the rudder stuck in their butts – while they use their hands to adjust the cargo or – pick their noses or gesture at passing boats. The other day I saw a boatman steer between a waterbus and a waterbus station – both shifting and bobbing on the waves – while standing upright on the boat’s edge, using his foot to throw gears and a long piece of rope attached to the rudder to steer – and keep himself in balance.

The piece de resistance is pulling in ashore, into a narrow berth next to a landing, nose to the wall. They do this with a broad turn – a 90 degree arc – taken at speed and throw the engine in reverse an instant before it crashes the wall, pull back a tad, bring the boat to a full stop, then use their hand to move the boat sideways – the last two inches – to make contact with the pier. One has the feeling they could do this blindfolded.

The pay is lousy, but then – they don’t do it for the money. The pleasure of performing challenging physical tasks with ease and grace, a show of consummate skill and accomplishment, gives equal pleasure to those who watch them and those who perform. I should not wonder if they were prepared to do this for free.

In fact, they do do this for free, their pay covering only the cost of shifting the goods in and out of the boats, while the bit on the water – no bosses, no wives, no supervision, no prohibition – is pure pleasure, 8 hours of freedom every working day of their lives.

Investment opportunities in cellular telephony

Everyone’s on the phone. The boatmen, the vaporetto drivers, the polizotti, the fishmongers, the buskers, the drunks. The passers by. The passers by: Venetians walk fast – this is a walking city – each with a phone pressed tight to his skull, talking as fast as he walks. (A few have earphones and appear to be talking loudly to themselves). I look at these people in utter disbelief: what on earth do they have to say that can possibly be worth saying? And who is listening, and – why?

Parole

Everyone’s talking, loudly, fast, passionately. With wild and creative gestures, with immensely rich facial expressions, intense modulation of voices, alert, intelligent gazes. A nation of geniuses. But, no, they are not talking about the 13^th bozon; or a new moral theory; or a financial breakthrough. Those two Einsteins there – they are discussing the most cunning manner of bamboozling the waterbus company into selling them a discounted monthly ticket to which they are not entitled.

Garrison don't get it

In Lake Woebegone, says Garrison Keillor, there were, when he was growing up, boys like that also. They were a great success with the ladies on accounting of being able to send 3 feet long tongues of flame from the exhaust pipes of their cars while accelerating. This, he suggests, stopped working because as we all grew up, it turned out that sending 3-foot long tongues of flame from the exhaust pipes of their cars while accelerating was the only thing they could do. By which he means presumably, that those fellows are not on the radio, or in the Library of Congress, or teaching at some liberal arts college.

Keillor is mistaken. Those guys are not quite so helpless. It turns out they have other tricks – Blackberrys, for example. Their tricks still work with the ladies, even if Keillor does not notice. That he does not notice tells you that Keillor doesn’t understand the game. To get the ladies – that’s success. Who wants to have their own radio program?

To them, Keillor’s success is like that of the fellow who used his superior brain to hack a Coca-Cola vending machine. A successful feat of skill and intellect, no doubt, but – who wants a bunch of canned soft drinks.

Land of giants

I can’t remember who wrote it, Byron, Shelley, or Trelawny, about living in Italy that the cities, with their magnificent churches and palaces, their campaniles and triumphant arches, could not possibly have been built by Italians. Italians, this writer wrote, seemed a nation of degenerate dwarves living in the ruins of a magnificent country built by a nation of giants who had once inhabited this land; giants to which the modern dwarves cannot possibly be even most remotely related.

Of Romantic lovers

Shelly’s widow, Mary, writes Burlington, tried tirelessly to interest the National Gallery in purchasing a painting of Count M., said to be a Titian, though it was probably a pretty run of the mill Bastiani, and which the National Gallery in the event wisely chose not to buy. Mary was trying to sell it in order to help a young Italian aristocrat and revolutionary whose only means of support were irregular stipends from Count M. When the sale of the picture did not transpire, the dashing cavalier blackmailed Mary, threatening to publish her letters to him. We don’t know what was in them, but her decision to buy the letters suggests Mary had not been very wise.

Contessa, the mistress of Byron, was obliged to go back to her husband when Byron left for Greece and died. Actually, when Byron left for Greece: the affair seems to have been over before he left and not cut short romantically by his death in Misolonghi, as it is usually reported. “Of the plague”, it is usually said, most romantically, without mentioning that it was, in fact, dysentery. The fellow shat himself to death. The Contessa, I am sure, thought that he deserved it.

Gang rape

There were 12 of them, well fed, strong, aggressive. She was much smaller than the rest of them; and had been hurt – one of her wings drooped down, perhaps it was broken. They chased her into a corner and took turns grabbing her by the neck with their beaks and raping her. The sexual act in the species is especially appalling: the male jumps upon the female’s back with his talons and crushes her to the ground. Perhaps the worst of it was the miserable, haggard old male, dull-colored and bald who tried to rape her after all the others have had their way and left. She backed into a corner and fought back with the remnants of her strength. The geezer was too weak to force his way, so he tried a different tack: backed off and attempted the courtship dance, turning around in circles, and dragging his sparse tail on the ground cooing. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work and, giving up, abruptly he just flew off, leaving her there, in the corner, exhausted and trembling. That they were pigeons, not men, made the spectacle no less revolting. One also got a pretty good impression that the female was terrified and – humiliated.

Some years ago a report of rape among ducks – drakes apparently are not shy about using the advantage their size gives them – caused an uproar of protests from the feminist lobby about presumed “anthropomorphizing” of animal behavior. I suppose the feminists were worried that evolutionary psychologists might conclude that rape, being universal in nature, is therefore natural, that is to say, commendable. The feminists, who tend to be into natural diets and natural healing, were mistaken. Evolutionary psychologists are not inclined to think natural behavior particularly admirable. There are hardly any natural food enthusiasts among them.

I had ordered Mustafa to feed the pigeons in response to a dire famine. That was occasioned, as most famines are (says Amartya Sen) by government mismanagement. In an effort to keep Piazza San Marco clean, and to get rid of some abuses – apparently the commotion of bird-feeding was taken advantage of by petty thieves – the city banned the selling of bird feed there. The sellers of birdseed were all up in arms, but eventually were forced to look for other tourist bamboozling tricks. The real losers were, of course, the pigeons: for days they swooned around the Piazza, exhausted, forlorn, in daze. You could read the disbelief on their faces: what, no food? No food?

So we began to put out leftovers of breakfast for them.

The feeding soon became an opportunity for another observation of ornithological anthropomorphism: the event was quickly dominated by one particularly pushy and aggressive pigeon who attacked other pigeons whenever they dared to approach. He either rammed them with his huge chest at full speed, or grabbed the back of their necks with his beak and shoved them around. Having chased them away, he’d then stride the ground proud, among the scattered food, carelessly pecking at it here or there – letting it fall out of his beak, or just throwing it up in the air, while his hungry companions sat around and watched with chagrin.

In school I had known boys just like that.

So, today, I have ordered Mustafa to stop feeding the pigeons. I keep remembering Kurtz’s words: “Exterminate them all!”

Apparently the city is thinking about it.

In Scuola dei Schiavoni

In the Scuola dei Schiavoni there hang portraits of shaven-headed, mustachioed men with curved sabers. They are Balkan gentlemen, Croats and Bosnians, warriors, sailors and merchants, most, presumably from the Dalmatian possessions of the Venetian Republic. Several cities in Dalmatia, including Ragusa – today’s Dubrovnik – had once competed with Venice for the control of the Adriatic trade and, having lost, ended up as Venetian possessions. Today there are many reminders of the Slavic connection in the city, not least the very common Venetian girl’s name – Marisa.

The scuola’s most famous paintings are by Carpaccio. They show events in the lives of various saints associated with the East and thus create the opportunity to paint pretty Croatian girls with good skin and in national costumes. The longest cycle here is of St Jerome.

The best known story about St Jerome reports that while living in the desert the saint once met a lion with a wounded paw. The saint healed the paw and the lion became his faithful life companion. St Jerome is usually represented with a lion, but in the Scuola dei Schiavoni the lion is the central element of the story; one of the largest paintings being of St Jerome returning to his monastery from the desert, with the lion in tow, and his fellow monks fleeing in panic every which way, arms akimbo.

The symbolism should be easy to read, even if no one seems to have noticed. The lion, is of course also St Mark’s lion, the symbol of Venice. The Schiavoni have tamed it and it did them no harm. Others, back in Dalmatia or Bosnia, might think the lion terrible, but in fact, for the Schiavoni of Venice, the lion was but a pussycat.

Psychology

I do read some investment boards. In fact, I get my best ideas there. That there should be good ideas there it is not surprising: a lot of those people are really quite smart. But by and large they aren’t successful. Their biggest problem is psychological: the inability to resist the urge to sell. First, people seem psychologically unable to withstand temporary adverse market movements. This leads them to take losses, when what they should have done is bide their time and waited for the price to recover. If you have done your research and have come to a firm opinion as to why something should go up, and nothing has happened to change your opinion, why should you waffle just because it goes down instead? (Presumably people waffle because the price movement seems to indicate that other people disagree with one’s own analysis. But then other people just could be fools – the same fools who had made the asset cheap in the first place are perhaps now making it cheaper yet). Second, people seem too eager to take profits. They buy something at 60 convinced that it should go to 120; but as soon as it goes to 70, they sell. I have seen many of these guys press the sell button after a 10% gain on things which I sold several months later 50 or even 80% higher. Things about which one is pretty sure they will go up this much are really rare – they are a gift – it is a waste to dump them for a 10% gain.

Eremites

St Paul the Eremite was a young aristocrat in Thebes, near modern Luxor, in Upper Egypt, sometime in the third century AD. During one of the periodic persecutions of Christians he fled into the desert, and having tried the life, decided he liked it. One could say, I suppose, what a 60 year old hippie once told me – that he “took a trip and never came back”. St Jerome tells us that St Paul wore a skirt of palm fronds and ate herbs and – the necessary miraculous flourish – bread which a crow brought to him daily.

Meanwhile, another eremite lived nearby: St Anthony the Abbot. His reason for solitude was probably schizophrenia. He lived among ancient tombs, feeding his feverish mind on the images of gods with dog’s heads and such and imagined that they came to frighten him at night. Bosch painted several versions of these “demonic torments”; the paintings have been great crowd-pleasers ever since. Pietro Liberi, a Venetian painter, on the other hand, imagined St Anthony being tempted by six healthy naked girls, standing around the saint in a circle and mooning him with their smooth pink butts. (Which would be your preferred type of torment?)

When very old St Paul was near death, an angel appeared to St Anthony in a dream and said: “Unbeknownst to you another saintly eremite has lived in this desert these sixty years. Get up, gird your loins, and go to him.” It is said that on the day on which St Anthony visited St Paul the crow brought a double portion of bread, enough to feed both saints. The visit, too, has been frequently painted. In all versions St Anthony appears to be talking – about his torments, perhaps, though it is possible that he was enquiring about some method to deal with the problem of painfully dry skin – dry skin being a the occupational health hazard of the eremites – while St Paul listens in silence. He appears to be thinking: will this bore never leave?

Yawn

Perhaps the ultimate luxury of living in Venice is the ability to turn one’s back on the city’s beauty – to close the doors and stay in. It’s like owning a prime lot on the Grand Canal and not building a palazzo on it with an obnoxiously showy façade, but instead – a garden. (Only four landlords have had the bronze to do that). My garden – no, not my garden, my hosts’ garden – does not face the canal. It is in the back of the house, and not too large, maybe half an acre in all. Typically of Venetian gardens, it is surrounded by a tall wall – 3 meters high – topped with strategically placed bits of broken glass and three crumbling stone urns. There are several trees, some bushes gone wild, and three chipped statues, of which one is overturned. If you look up, you will see a new yorkian kind of view: a small patch of blue sky at the end of a canyon of rooftops of the other tall palazzi which crowd in all around.

Luxuriously, I spent the day in the garden today, reading an Egyptian novel. If it weren’t in French, a language I know poorly and wish to improve I probably would not have gotten as far as I have. The Egyptians of 1966 seemed to me no different from the Indians of 2006: sex-starved single men, living under the thumbs of mom and dad, striking pathetic cool poses and perorating knowingly about matters about which they know little and even that generally incorrectly. But I enjoy reading French and made it as far as chapter four, in which the prospective female love interest (you can tell this from a mile off, novels are so damn predictable) has been described. She is a modern Egyptian woman, American University educated, a journalist whose radical articles in leading press have been causing much stir. That sounded vaguely interesting for a moment (even if radicals tend to bore me) until I was told that she was – twenty five!

Oh, come on.

I suppose one has to be no more than twenty five to play the role of Juliet, but then one can’t possibly be a highly regarded radical journalist in a third world country with patriarchal values. And besides, twenty five year old women are goats: all they know is come si fa – and not even come si fa bene. (As a man says in an American movie about his much younger girlfriend: “She likes to sc**. She ain’t no good at it, but she likes it.”)

And a radical article written by a twenty five year old is good for only one thing – but only if the paper is not too rough.

Life is a struggle

Or so it seems in Venice where everything is an object of competition: the seats on the vaporetto, the free newspaper (2 pages of news, 8 pages of sport, 10 pages of advertising, chiefly of deeply discounted junk and pawnshops, who, for gold pay IN CASH), the lines in the supermarket. The struggle is constant and relentless. Hence the smoking; but also the premature aging: an average 40 year old Venetian looks 60. The ordinary life is hard.

My parents lived such a life. My father was under my mother’s constant verbal attack for being insufficiently “capable”, by which she meant nonsense like getting into the shorter line, or securing the better seat. I know I am not “capable” but, unlike my father, I can afford not to be. If I end up standing in line longer, well, while I do not love it, indeed find standing in lines quite stressful sometimes, I have the time to spare. And if the boat is too packed, I don’t need to take it: there are plenty of water taxis in town. A 70 euro charge may seem like a lot to some, but is much preferable to having to brave the crowds to those who can afford it.

Some people never quite figure this out. Susanna, who has had legal problems with her neighbors for years, was incensed when I suggested that she pay them off. Susanna’s rich – I’d guess they take in 20,000 a week – but could see no reason why she should pay 10 grand to make the problem go away. They take in 20 grand a week, but she cooks and does the dishes herself, the maid being, she says, too expensive. When I borrow her phone, she asks me to be brief since airtime is expensive. Susanna may be out of the ghetto, but her mind isn’t.

Wellbeck

Wellbeck – it isn’t how he spells his name – describes in his Extension of the Field of Struggle – it is not what it is entitled in English – the torments which a man denied the opportunity to mate undergoes at the sight of partial female nudity; and he fulminates at the ideology of women’s lib which allows females to flaunt their bodies in the name of freedom. Their entitlement, he says, is to tantalize me: show me the wares but not give them. Grrr, he growls.

I think a more relevant discussion of the same problem – of partial nudity – can be made from another, and more obvious, angle. Namely, that most of the partial nudity (low-riding pants, underblouses worn instead of blouses, etc.) is not tantalizing but offensive.

Oh, I don’t mean to some sort of mores. Most sexual mores are nonsense anyway. No. I mean – offensive to the eye.

For example, on the train several days ago I was forced to sit across from a remarkably ugly woman. Everything in her physique was just wrong – wrong without being perverse. One could not exclaim over her charitably, as one might over the Elephantman, “you poor creature!” She wasn’t fat, or sick, or misshapen: she was just horrifically ugly in the most ordinary sense of the word. Merely looking made me wince.

All the same, as if to say that she didn’t care, or that she at any rate found her body beautiful, or perhaps in an attempt to make up for lacking graces with sex-appeal, she – showed. Oh, boy, did she show.

The train was packed and there was nowhere to run to. I tried looking out the window, but the sights were not much better (Mestre); then I tried wearing sunglasses; then I tried taking my glasses off. I even tried sleeping: but the train shook too much (Italian rails, probably not maintained since the Austrians were forced to quit back in the 1860’s). And at any rate, as soon as I closed my eyes the horrible memory of what I had just seen floated up before my eyes.

It was, for me, the most painful 45 minutes of the last 12 months. (And that’s including the Tibetan third-eye-opening surgery).

Now, I am sure the woman is intelligent, sensitive, charming, loyal, and decent. Unfortunately, any virtues she might posses are simply overwhelmed by her ugliness. Her readiness to show only adds insult to injury: it cries from the rooftops precisely that which she should work hardest to hide. (Really, has she not looked in the mirror?)

The creature, like most people, really, would benefit from a publicly enforced dress code. (A burka would not be a bad idea, actually).

Now, mind you, you will never hear a peep of complaint from me about skimpy clothing on pretty girls. In fact, when it comes to pretty girls, really, the skimpier the better and Canova had it about right – an unruly piece of silk, or an a few olive leaves in the strategic area are plenty enough. But the sad truth is that most people– men and women – who show should not. In fact, showing appears to be counter-proportional to one’s looks. The better they look, the less they show; the worse they look, the more of their anatomy we are obliged to see.

Which is why, unless Wellbeck’s standards are different from mine – I mean, seriously lower than mine – I can’t see what there is to be tantalized by. But I imagine that in the long term, visual exposure to all this god-awful stuff can be psychologically crippling. There are probably public health grounds for enforcing minimum dress codes.

Forgiveness

It is no longer shocking to write that one hates one’s mother, advises Magazine Litteraire, meaning that it has already been done: don’t count on selling that first novel on mother-hate.

But hate seems to me such a trivial feeling. I do not hate my mother. Why should I? To hate her would be to concede victory to her: hate would amount to admitting that she managed to hurt me and that I still smarted from that hurt. The truth is that I no longer do. In fact, I rarely think about it.

But, contra popular ethics, forgiveness does not follow. Why should I forgive a crime for which no apology has ever been made? And, besides, even if one were forthcoming, why should I have to accept it? “Because she’s your mother,” says everyone. So? That logic did not weigh with her then, why should it weigh with me now?

Besides, is she really my mother? A mother is someone who shows kindness to her child. A woman who does not, is not a mother, whatever her anatomical relationship to the subject. This is why those who advise me to forgive my mother on the grounds of past anatomical events, might as well say “because she wears shoe size 36”: both arguments are equally meaningless.

Finally, is forgiveness a virtue? Christian ideologues (not a particularly forgiving lot) make a lot of it, but their forgiveness seems to be a kind of transaction: Lord, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And that’s fine if one wants to heaven, but what if one does not want Lord’s forgiveness for anything? What if one does not intend to go down on the knee or kiss anything? Every action in life has its consequences and I have always been prepared to take the consequences of my actions: it seemed to me only fair that I should. Shouldn’t everyone?

No, I don’t hate my mother, but I will not forgive her.

The Magazine Litteraire would probably see a first novel in this. But someone else will have to write it: 350 words is about the maximum I am prepared to concede to the topic.

(That’s the thing about novels, is it not: people use them to deal with problems which still bother them; problems, in other words, still unresolved. But if you have solved a problem, well, there is no need for a novel anymore, is there?)

The weather

The weather has been rotten. It’s been cold and damp, even up on the piano nobile where I live – 8 meters above the water level. I was recently in one of those student hovels near the old beccarie (i.e. slaughterhouses) by San Giobbe, with thick walls and tiny windows facing a blind wall, dark even at noon, and it was like walking into a Turkish bathhouse – a wall of thick, wet air hit me in the face, like a dirty rag – only it was ice-cold. The girl who lives there has to iron every item of clothing before she puts it on.

The rotten weather exacerbates the Venetian housing problem.

People live crammed in hovels, because it is all they can afford: Italy’s wages have fallen behind Spain’s and Greece’s, but Venice properties have been rising parabolicly and are among the highest in Europe. Between rich foreigners who buy up vacation properties, only to board them up for eleven months of the year, investors in holiday properties (which rent short term at hotel-like prices), and just plain old speculators, prices have become whimsical. 70 square meters in a nice area, 1^st floor, but certainly no piano nobile, and certainly not anywhere near the Grand Canal, asking price: 1.7 million. Euros. Try that with a twelve thousand a year before tax.

So, they live in hovels here, packed like rats. In the winter, the homes become unbearably damp and moldy, yet there is nowhere to go to. There are virtually no indoor public spaces – in bars – very tight spaces – one stands at the counter to avoid the coperto, or better yet, outside, so that he may smoke. There are no malls, no gyms. The museums are free for the residents, but residents would not be caught dead in a museum, would they? And, in any case, they have no sitting spaces, perhaps for a reason.

This adds to all the other frustrations Venetians have to put up with. Lousy government, stupid bureaucratic procedures, inconvenient retail, unreliable public services, high prices, crowds of tourists blocking your way in the narrow passage ways, beggars, touts, thieves. Small wonder then that everyone is angry and rude and everyone smokes up a storm.

Life at the ground level isn’t much worth living, really. It’s surprising then to hear how low the suicide rate is.

Sausages

It came in the mail. A photo. How odd, I thought to myself. A sausage? Somebody sent me a photo of a sausage? If so, it was none too appetizing: sickly pink (all those nitrates), wrinkled (old), and covered with a sickly gleam (putrification).

Alas, no. Not a sausage.

A baby.

Yes, another of my here-to-do-it-all acquaintances, having done everything else, smoked dope and tried same sex, done the backpack-round-the-world thing and the macrobiotic diet (it makes you feel worse, but it's good for you), having set up and bankrupted a tech start up and volunteered for two years in Africa, has finally turned, in the physiologically last possible moment, to what is billed as the ultimate experience of a lifetime.

Yes, he has had a baby.

And now the whole world has to see it and admire it. Myself included.

Now, I understand that parents find it constitutionally impossible to be objective about their productions, but, for crying outloud, surely, they must see that

a) newborns are ugly as all hell -- enough to spoil your lunch if you were planning a salsicia -- and that, in any case,
b) they all look the same.

Besides, I do not send out to all and sundry photos of my own ordinary physiological productions. Why should they?

And what am I to say in reply to this photo?

Another childless acquaintance says he has figured out the perfect reply to these "look at what we have laid" messages. He writes: "Now, that's a baby!!!". None of his addressees has apparently ever noticed -- which any 12 year old would -- that the reply means nothing. Instead, everyone seems somehow to assume that the intent of the message is to say that their particular baby is somehow really real while all other babies somehow are not.

Clearly, giving birth makes you stupid.

What the photos tell

I sent a disk of photos of Venice to Atlanta. She wrote back to thank me and observed that in none of them are there any people. Is Venice that completely deserted? she asked. The answer is, of course, that no, it isn’t entirely deserted. There are parts which constantly swarm with people – especially on weekends, and especially in the summer, tourists, mainly. And while there are swathes of the city which are not densely populated – most buildings in them having been abandoned; or merely boarded up during the absence of their absentee owners; there are small pockets which are lively with real, untouristic life: like Campo Santa Margherita, the favorite watering place for the students, or Campo dell’Orio where hoards of kids always ride bicycles and play ball. I do not avoid these areas. In fact both are my favorite places for a midmorning aperitif.

But Atlanta is right: there is something about my photography which studiously avoids people. And not only, perhaps, because I do not wish to intrude upon people by surreptitiously stealing their images. Rather, I suspect, I prefer an indirect study of mankind. As I looked at the photos again this morning, I noticed that a certain theme repeated among them, not so frequently as to be obvious, but precisely because of its infrequence, telling. They were photos of shadows or reflections of passers by on buildings, or pavements, or water. I suppose photographing buildings and art works is really in the same vein: it is photographing the shadows cast by men who have passed away. An attempt to reconstruct them, or perhaps rather, to construct imaginary constructs of them, life-like and convincing, but which could be like them, or not: their exact verisimilitude does not seem to me of much interest. It is thus that an artist like Givanni Bellini seems closer to me than my neighbor; and his saints more interesting than any living person.

Living nobly

I keep thinking of my host family’s decision to live, during their stays in Venice, in the cozy-cramped side-wing of the palace instead of the main house. There seems to me to be something symbolic about that decision, something – well, like their chosen quarters – small. To my mind it simply isn’t noble of them. To live nobly requires perhaps some sacrifice. I am reminded of the father of the hero of the Manuscript found in Saragossa, who delighted in living in his ancient family seat precisely because it was drafty and its roof leaked: its discomfort reminded him of the time when he had to stand for a week immersed up to his neck in ice-cold water during the siege of Breda. I am also reminded of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Leopard’s hero – prince of Salina, the last of the grand feudal landlords of Sicily – whose companion was a great dane, Bendico. His grandson, writing about him with love and admiration, as if to preserve his grandfather’s towering figure for posterity, also had a dog. It was a small bitch named, ridiculously, Pop. Tomasi confessed to having reluctantly come to like her. Perhaps he found an emotional attachment to a small dog as ignoble as I find my hosts’ preference for the cramped south wing.

A tale of two brothers

Just how does “San Luigi di Tolosa” become “Alvise”? Is it one of those impossible Venetian contractions which make Checo out of Francesco, Ferigo out of Federico, Titi out of Giovanni Battista, and, my favorite, “San Marcuola” – a single name – out of two – “Santi Ermagora e Fortunato”? Or was Alvise a popular pre-Christian native name, perhaps Venetian, perhaps Lombard, to which in time a patron saint had to be, out of necessity, assigned?

Alvise is a traditional Venetian name: it has been common here for centuries, while it remains unknown elsewhere. The name symbolizes Venetianness. To call your son Alvise is an act of patriotism. By tradition, the first son is named after his paternal grandfather; the second by someone from the mother's family; but the third must be, it seems, and three out of four times is, Alvise.

Alvise’s patron saint, Louis of Tolouse, is a heart-break: he is a young, beautiful bishop, with royal cape and insignia. No one has painted him more beautifully, or more dreamily, than Bellini in his last work. This hangs in St Giovanni Chrisostomo, near Rialto, and I drop in to worship whenever I pass by. The saint is incredibly graceful; sad; and possessed of a most endearing feature, the inclusion of which, bordering on blasphemy, was the painter’s masterstroke: a wondering eye. (Only one eye on this world, my friend).

San Alvise was the grandson of Louis IX, king of France (Saint Louis, to you); and the eldest son, and heir, of the King of Naples. As a young man he was sent to Aragon as a hostage, in place of his father. As is typical with prisoners in the Franco-Spanish wars, in captivity he’d undergone a religious conversion. He dedicated himself to the life of the cloth, joined the Franciscan order, and abdicated his royal rights to his younger brother, Robert. (“Look”, his muscle-bound brother Bob (of strong b.o.) had kept saying to him, “this is a rough and tumble life, full of noise, anger, passion. Do you really want it? Would you rather not live the life of peaceful meditation? Be closer to god? Away from all that juvenile horseplay?” “Yes, I would”, whispered Alvise. “Yessss!” exclaimed to himself Robert pf Anjou, future King of Naples, in the secrecy of his soul, where he also performed a rude cheerleading gesture. Bob, you see, was personally not into that religious stuff).

Now consider how some people just have it coming to them. Alvise’s grandfather was a saint. So were two of his aunts, one of his uncles, and a second cousin. Clearly, all Alvise had to do was show the slightest interest in things religious for the Pearly Gates to swing wide open. And thus, upon becoming consecrated priest, he was made bishop of Tolouse. Immediately, he set out for Rome for the canonization proceedings of his saintly grandfather, but, on the way, quietly died of fever. Miracles, which he had had no time to perform while alive, now came thick and fast and the inevitable canonization swiftly followed. Not surprisingly, at least some of those miracles involved faint-hearted ladies being cured of illness while seeing, in their dreams, the vision of the beautiful bishop with a sadly wondering eye.

A polyphonic motet was composed for the occasion of Alvise’s canonization, possibly by Philippe de Vitry. It starts:

Flos ortus inter lilia
Celsa cedrus ysopus effecta
Quam magna pontifex

(A flower has sprung among the lilies…)

This was almost certainly paid for by Robert of Anjou. Brother Bob, like most action-oriented guys, just luved music.

(8/7/2008: For example, the church of San Alvise, on the back of Canareggio in Venice, which had once been St Christopher's (patron saint of boatment) was refounded as San Alvise when the foundress, a menopausal matron, saw the youthful saint in a dream).

(9/11/08: The derivation is apparently Germanic (Longobard?) Louis -> Alois -> Alivise).

Spitzer The Wise

I do not think that there was any particular moment at which I consciously decided to give up on women. But in the last several years whenever I find myself meeting an attractive woman, I can’t help finding her – well, unattractive. She may be pretty, or sexy, or witty, but I keep thinking to myself how dull she will be in conversation in the longer term, all the things she does not know, all the things I shall have to explain; and there comes that other nonsense, too, about falling in love, relationships, not being able to live without and so forth. Not to mention the other nonsense about age and money. This simply can’t possibly be worth the sex – especially since so little sex out there is actually worth having.

I have been lucky once to make love to someone who matched me in that way like a glove. I thought then that such sex was worth committing a great crime for; but the crime did not get committed. And perhaps that’s just as well: whenever I talk to her now, I find it hard not to stifle a yawn: not only at her intellectual limitations, but also at the stupidity with which she continues to mismanage her life. I am polite in all this and I think I manage to generate the impression that we get along well and have a great friendship. But the truth is that I do not let the conversations go on too long and each time when we hang up I exhale a sigh of relief. The sex was great, but for it to continue, I’d have to have this sort of conversations daily. Blah, honestly, I think I’d rather not have the sex.

The governor had the right idea. (Really, the governor's solution is a win-win-win situation, is it not: he wins, wife wins, Cindy wins).

What I like to do most is watch beautiful women in animated conversations with others, preferably conversations which I cannot overhear. Outdoor cafes can be a good place for it. You can see how beautiful they are, and sense how intelligent, and witty, and passionate they are; but you do not need to hear the nonsense upon which they expend their precious wit and passion.

Don't need to to that anymore

We were treated again recently to that ancient American ritual: a politician apologizing for his sexual misconduct. Per the requirements of the dramatic genre, his wife stood by his side, looking longsuffering and dignified. But then was she? A connoisseur of the female psyche – an Euripides, say, or a Flaubert – may have read in her expression something other than hurt, humiliation or forgiveness. He may have read boredom with the whole nonsense. Look, she seemed to want to say, I did not go to Harvard Law School and work these twenty years to get to where I am – a respected professional, a woman with her own considerable income and social standing in her own right – to do in bed the sort of stuff he likes having done. Besides, he was never a looker and with time things have taken a turn for the worse. Just look at him: doesn’t he look like an overripe fruit? As far as I am concerned, it is just as well that there is someone – some Cindy, or Candy, or whatever her name – prepared to do this work for a few thousand bucks. Why should I? You are not suggesting I should do my own dishes, too?

In Padova

I like visiting the Basilica del Santo in Padova. Artistically it is quite a treat: there are many very beautiful objects, most by artists of whom even the most stalwart Italian art aficionados have never heard, providing for that delicious sense of participating in a conspiracy. Many are safe to remain undiscovered: the technically astounding wrought iron gates of the chapels behind the presbytery (with delicate roses and tempting pomegranates) are, well, too “artisan” to make it into art books; and the beautiful neogothic ceiling is surely too “derivative”. There are three delicious cloisters in which one is invited to picnic as well as – a rarity in Italy – a comfortable set of public toilets. There are crowds, but not the usual Venetian sort: most visitors here appear to be pilgrims, and pilgrims of the good sort, reverent and subdued, neither loud, nor bossy. No one tells you to pray. In fact, no one tells you to do anything.

The tomb of St. Anthony of Padua (who was actually if Lisbon) is normally enshrined in a large chapel in the left nave, with walls decorated in large high relief panels of the miracles of the saint (by someone famous, for once – Sansovino). Though I find the beautifully restored chapel on the opposite side, jewellike with the frescos of the life of Saint James by Altichiero da Zevio more pleasing, the Sansovino reliefs are fascinating in their own right: all of the saint’s miracles are miracles of healing. Most pilgrim’s pleas have to do with hopeless medical cases.

And herein lies an important clue to the mystery of the church’s rapid decline since 1945: in 1945 the first antibiotic was invented. Since then the demand for miracles has significantly declined.

Among the more forgettable objects of art here is a modern bronze figure of St Anthony interceding between flying baby Jesus and the faithful beneath. He stretches one empty hand down to us while with the other he swings a terrified baby overhead, as if about to smash it against the floor. The overwhelming impression of impending infanticide does not seem to occur to the pilgrims, who love to pose holding the outstretched empty hand of the saint (they appear to find the proposition simply irresistible) thus creating an ideal opportunity for virus propagation. Within 48 hours many of the pilgrims will begin to feel the onset of flu. “I should have worn a sweater the other day”, they will say to themselves through their sore throats. (The germ theory of disease is not widely accepted: we really do learn nothing in school).

The murky holy water in the otherwise wonderful fonts in alabaster (it is a pair: the one on the right has the figure of St John the Baptist, the one on the left, of Christ being baptized) is another conduit of disease. People dip their fingertips here, cross themselves, then reverently kiss the fingertips.

Since the church has benefited from disease, it makes sense it would seek to promote it. Religion does not ride parasitically on disease. Disease and religion live in a kind of symbiosis.

Ghebberty

The ghetto is to many minds a symbol of everything that was evil: the Jews were imprisoned here. They were free to leave the island by day, but had to be back on it by nightfall. At night, the bridges to and from it were guarded by Christian guards (though the Jewish community was free to choose them). Population density was very high: the buildings of the old ghetto have the most floors of all in Venice.

Which makes it puzzling why Jews should be moving back here. There is a kind of sentimentality for the ghetto, and the shtetl, a sense that Jews could only be properly speaking Jews when separated from the general population, by walls, bridges, outfit. I was watching a small Hassid boy on the waterbus today; it was hot and he felt uncomfortable in his black, heavy clothes. He also seemed to feel geeky and estranged – perhaps even apologetic – children generally want to be like other children, specialness and difference are not something they treasure.

I was thinking to myself: what kind of a god would want this horrid outfit on this child? Can it possibly be true that god – any god – wants it? And I reflected that the obverse of state persecution of minorities – of the majority’s insistence that they assimilate – is the permission expressly granted by the state to the leaders of the said minorities to oppress their own members, to require them to wear strange clothes and engage in strange religious practices. It is a point well made by the life stories of several high profile Portuguese Jews in Holland in the sixteen hundreds, Spinoza among them; and the novels of several Galician Jews of the 19th century – like Joseph Roth – whose central point was the attempt to escape the shtetl: not the state which confined them there, but the community of the holy men, family, neighbors and priests.

I managed my escape. From a different ghetto, but, of course, in some ways, all ghettos are the same.

A ghetto by any other name

There isn’t much to see at the monastery of San Lazzaro. In the church there are some paintings by a painter who was, in the words of the guide, abbastanza famoso – sufficiently famous – about right, too; and in the museum a pretty ceiling roundel by Tiepolo the elder, a well preserved Egyptian mummy, and about five rooms of stuff whose significance lies in their having been made, or perhaps made, or owned, or gifted by an Armenian. There is also a gallery of mostly horrible portraits of Armenians who have done well, mostly successful doctors. (Though there is one who’d become an Ottoman government official in Egypt).

The tour quickly deteriorates into what any encounter with an Armenian always and quickly deteriorates: a pitch about the greatness of the Armenian people, all the famous people in the world who are, were, or could have been Armenian (Casanova, maybe – a disconcerting point of pride in our guide who is a Catholic priest), and, of course, the heinousness of the Armenian genocide.

Armenians cannot understand why the Jewish genocide can be such a big thing and the Armenian genocide – not. They do not understand that in the public mind – a very small, crowded space – there can be only one of each: one Miss Universe, one Pope, one love, one home, one mother, one winner of a TV program who married a millionaire, and one holocaust. They also do not realize that all nations who exist have both experienced and dealt holocausts of one sort or another; indeed, all nations who have ever existed. Armenians themselves have once conquered Armenia from a people who lived there before them. Historical records of that event are lost, but is it just possible that they have had to kill to conquer? The guide at San Lazarro insists that that conquest was peaceful but offers no evidence to support the surprising claim.

In any case, when a large body of the middle and upper middle class in the west – the Armenians – spend so much effort on publicizing the Armenian genocide of 1915 but do nothing whatsoever to prevent similar action in Sudan or Rwanda or Bosnia today, it becomes clear that their interests are not noble but self interested, not universal but particular. An Armenian friend once explained: there is a house in Istanbul I could claim. Which is precisely the reason why the Turkish family who now live in it will never admit to any genocide of anybody by anyone. The genocide turns out to be a property dispute.

The island of San Lazarro has a beautiful campanile – tilting like all campanile of Venice. It also has a pleasant sun deck by the water’s edge where one can kill a few hours waiting for his boat. From here, other islands on the lagoon, most abandoned, each with some trees and a ruin of a monastic institution can be seen and the incredibly busy boat traffic between Venice and Lido: white boats, gleaming in the sunlight, slithering on water like snakes. It is peaceful, but not quiet: there is a great, constant hum of engines that hangs over this part of the lagoon. It was not like that when Byron lived here, studying Armenian. Later, he published the first Armenian grammar in English.