Some women appear to be getting crazier than average.
I was wondering the other day if the slow disappearance of Christianity from public life has been bad in particular for women. Women were and are always more emotional than men, but, years ago, it seems that they could canalize those excessive emotions into more productive ends, such as taking care of numerous children, artistic pursuits, or the religious life.
But, increasingly, women appear to get more excited about political movements, protests, social media posturing and just obnoxious behaviour in general.
A case in point was the recently deceased blogger Julie Powell. I mentioned her strange death in a recent video, but I don’t want to talk about that here. I want to talk a little bit about her life.
She was married, but she didn’t have any children, I don’t know if as a personal choice or for some other reason.
Her Twitter seems to have been full of aggressive posts. More than once, she wished for the death of “anti-vaxxers” and of white people in general.
She became famous for writing a blog about cooking, but she didn’t seem to be particularly interested in cooking for cooking’s sake — more in becoming famous. Julia Child (the cooking author on whom she inspired herself) reportedly didn’t like her blog, which was full of swearing and did not show a real interest in learning about French culinary traditions. Supposedly later on she wrote another book about her extra-marital love affairs which was not so well received by the critics — and, I imagine, by her husband, but I doubt his opinion counted in any way.
All in all, she seems a sad representation of many modern Western women.
It may not be the end of the West, but it may be the end of something
When I was a child, my mom still used to darn socks that had holes in them. She would also sew old sweaters. Old shoes were taken to the shoemaker to be mended or have their soles changed. And my dad fixed lots of things at home. We were no poor by any means — not that we were rich either — but it was still customary to mend and fix any things that could be mended or fixed. And if you could do it yourself at home, and spare the repairman costs, all the better.
This didn’t last for very long. For a few decades now, it costs less to throw away old socks and buy a new pair, and the same is valid for shoes, or even computers or refrigerators. It’s not worth trying to fix anything. Just buy a new “made in China” product and get on with your life.
And with smartphones and tablets then, it’s worse — you have to buy a new one every year or so, even if nothing is wrong with it, because the apps or the operating system simply become outdated and stop working after some time.
For the last 30 years or so, most people in the West have been living in an age of abundance, at least in what regards certain more material aspects, but there are signs that this is coming to an end. Inflation is now a real issue — things are noticeably more expensive at shops or grocery stores, even if the quality of the products hasn’t really improved. Energy costs have skyrocketed and the tendency is for them to increase even more.
Some items, such as lots of cat food or certain brands of pasta, have disappeared from the supermarket shelves in many European countries — whether this is due to the current war in Ukraine, or some other reason, is anyone’s guess. Toilet paper has not yet disappeared as it did during the early period of “Covid”, but it seems that some softer brands did. I’ve read somewhere that the softer toilet paper is made from Russian birch wood, and that this is now unavailable because of the sanctions. Rough times ahead.
There may be some positive aspects to the end of this consumerist paradise. At least part of the problems in the current Western world are caused by the excessive materialism. People just don’t have enough to worry about, so they create imaginary problems for themselves. But when securing food, heating and clothing becomes again the main issue in most people’s lives, no one is going to be pushing for “carbon taxes” or transgender surgeries for children or throwing soup at paintings. At least, that’s the hope.
On the other hand, perhaps it’s silly to hope that the the end of the “age of abundance” and the coming of a new age of poverty could bring some kind of enlightenment or moral improvement. It is certainly possible that it could bring just poverty.
And yet, somehow the idea of people darning socks and old sweaters again, and fixing refrigerators instead of throwing them away and just buying new ones, fills me with a certain type of hope. Perhaps it doesn’t have to do so much with a rejection of excessive consumerism, as with the idea of permanence. I like the idea of things lasting longer in time.
Perhaps this is why I like old, vintage objects such as film cameras, pocket watches, fountain pens? Technology, and in particular communication technology, has changed so much in our own lifetimes, that it almost incredible that people used to have any objects that lasted for ten, twenty years or more.
Reflections on beauty, handwriting and a new fountain pen
I haven’t been writing here so much, perhaps because I wanted this space to be a more personal blog, not so concerned with political or social issues, even if those are increasingly hard to avoid in the complicated times we live. But even as we patiently wait for World War III and economic crisis and a winter of discontent with cold and hunger and other calamities, there is always time to do something more cheerful instead — to think about beauty, for instance.
I recently bought a new fountain pen. Well, not exactly “new” — it’s a vintage fountain from the 1950s, a Parker Duofold made in England, which I got for a cheap price on eBay. The pen doesn’t have any mark with its exact year, but this particular model was roughly produced from 1953 to 1959. I always liked fountain pens, and I like Parker pens — I had another Parker pen, I believe from the 1970s, that was a gift from my father when I was still a child and which I unfortunately seem to have lost years ago, in one of my many movings (that pen might have been like this one, a classic Parker 51).
Now, my idea with this purchase was to improve my handwriting, which was always been awful ever since primary school. Perhaps I won’t write in perfect Copperplate or Spencerian calligraphy, but just improving a bit my handwriting would be nice. Of course this takes a lot of practice, and will I have the time or the energy for that?
I’ve heard that many schools in the U.S. no longer even teach cursive handwriting to children. They just learn to write in print and no one cares if it looks ugly or sad. Everyone is using phones, tablets or computers, so what’s the point of cursive handwriting, right? After all, who writes handwritten letters or postcards these days? All authors now use computers, and this text is also being written in a computer, of course. So it is fair to ask: should we really be teaching handwriting to children, instead of more practical things?
My answer would be that, in this case, being useless is really the point. As Oscar Wilde wrote in the famous preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray: “All art is quite useless.” He was likely inspired by French poet Téophile Gautier, who had written earlier: “Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly for it expresses a need.”
Beauty is ‘useless’, but we seem to crave it, if only to remind us that it exists. One of the problems of the modern world is that so much is focused on the useful and the practical, and not so much on beauty for beauty’s sake. We can see this clearly in architecture: most modern residential buildings (i.e. basically anything built from the 1970s until today) are just functional square blocks without almost any kind of decoration (and I’m not even mentioning the monstrosities of some contemporary “starchitects”). Just compare to any residential building constructed in the 1930s, and you will see the difference, even in the little details, such as the windows or a stairway or the doors. Even the elevators were beautiful back then: I remember a wonderful 1920s Art Deco elevator I saw in Prague. There is a reason why tourists visit old European towns, and why they should be preserved.
But I think you see the same thing in cars — modern cars are not necessarily ugly, but they seem to have no personality, and all of them look more or less the same to me. Just compare them to any car built in the 1950s or 1960s, and you will instantly know what I mean.
Of course, creating beauty takes skill and effort. Even just learning basic, good-looking handwriting takes a lot of practice and work. I think one of the problems of modern art is the same — there’s too much focus on “originality”, and not so much on skill and effort. Originality can be interesting, but beauty is not always original, and beauty counts more in the end.
I don’t know if that focus on the practical at the expense of the beautiful has to do with our increasingly technological-oriented society, or if it attends to other, deeper reasons. But it would be a pity if beautiful handwriting — or even writing itself — was lost just because people now only type on their phones.
My bisnonna left Italy with only 4 years of age, in 1889, in a ship called “Rosario”, which travelled from Genoa all the way to Argentina. It was a steamship (vapore or piroscafo in Italian), 282 feet long, with a speed of 14 knots, that could carry 48 people in first class, 40 people in second class, and up to 1,065 emigrants in third class. A third-class ticket from Genoa to Buenos Aires costed 350 Lire and the journey took 23 days. In this case, it is known that the ship arrived in Buenos Aires in 11/02/1889, but I don’t know which day it left Genoa. The final destination was probably Rosario, where they would have arrived at a later date: many ships had previous scales in Barcelona, Santos, Rio de Janeiro. Rosario, up the river from Buenos Aires, would be the last stop. You can see the usual itinerary below.
(The old steamship and its long journey reminds me a bit of Fellini’s film “E La Nave Va”, although the story there takes place at a later date, 1914, and the ship is not a migrant ship.)
The list of passengers, which can be consulted here, here or here, indicates also the age of each passenger, their profession, and whether they could read or not. Ida’s mother, 41, was listed as housewife, and could not read. Neither could her father and Ida’s older brothers, also travelling in the same ship.
Yet, in a later record, the Argentine census of 1895, Ida is already 11 years old and can read (her parents still cannot). Her brothers, 12 and 16, can also read and are already working — as “talabarteros”, or saddlers. Ida would marry at 17 and become a housewife. She gave birth to my grandmother, her third child, when she was 25. She never went back to Italy.
Immigration is a complicated issue, then as today. I do not wish to say that all migration movements are the same (and there are reasons to believe that the current massive immigration under globalism is much more harmful than that old-time immigration), but it sure caused many changes in society, then as now. In a relatively short time, Buenos Aires and Rosario became heavily Italian cities. Rosario, which was also my birth town, was a small village until the mid-19th century and it developed exactly because of immigration. In 1832, Charles Darwin, in his famous Beagle journey to South America, passed through the town and calculated the number of inhabitants as around 2,000.
But in 1889, the year my grand-grandmother arrived, the population was already at more than 50,000 people, and at least 20% of those were Italians — that is, people who were born in Italy, not counting their descendants. Another 20% were immigrants from other regions, mostly from Spain. In total, at least 40% of the population, and probably more, was of migrant origin.
The ship? Built in 1887 England by Wigham Richardson & Co in the Neptune Yard in the Tyne river, it was first sold to an Italian company, Fratelli Lavarello, under which my bisnonna and family traveled. After the bankruptcy of that company, it was sold to the more famous Italian company La Veloce, which kept the ship with the same name and roughly the same route. In 1898, the ship was sold to a French company, Companie Mixte de Navegation, and started doing the route from Marseille to Algiers; it was also renamed “Djurjura”. Below we see it in the port of Marseille, around the turn of the century.
In January 1915, during the First World War, it was requisitioned by the French Army to transport French troops, mostly to the failed Dardanelles expedition against the Turks. In a return trip, in December 1915, empty except for the crew, it collided off the coast of Malta with a Canadian ship, Empress of Britain, another passenger ship requisitioned for military uses. Two French stokers died in the collision, the rest of the crew (62 people) were rescued. Almost cut in two by the larger and more powerful ship, Djurjura, the former Rosario, the piroscafo that took my ancestors to Argentina, sank to the bottom of the sea. Sad, perhaps, but I suppose that at least it’s a more romantic ending than a junkyard.
I had my bicycle stolen earlier today. I suppose it is my fault, as I left it unattended and unlocked for five minutes in front of the building. And yet, I had done the same thing other times, for longer periods, and nothing had happened. I guess it was unlucky that a thief was just passing by just at that time, protected by the anonymity of a lazy Sunday morning, as most people around were innocently going to church or taking their children to the park nearby.
I don’t know how many bicycles I had stolen from me along my life. I suppose something between 5 and 10, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were more than 10. At least two bicycles were stolen inside private property (my building’s parking lot or garage). The worst one was a brand new $ 500 bicycle stolen from inside my garage when I lived in Los Angeles. Since then, I took care to only buy cheap, used bicycles costing lest than $ 50, so they could be easily replaced, and the pain of the loss would not be so harsh. It was the case of the recent one, which had costed $ 40.
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Bicycle theft is an international business. I had bicycles stolen in Brazil, in the United States, in Canada and in Germany (at least three just in Germany!). According to an article, one bicycle is stolen every 30 seconds in most major cities in the world, and the number of stolen bicycles is constantly increasing. It only seems to get worse every year — apparently, bicycle theft exploded during the pandemic. More than 200,000 bicycles are stolen every year just in the United States, and those are the reported thefts. Since most thefts are unreported (and, let’s face it, reporting is pretty useless: it’s not as if the police will have detectives working in shifts to find your bike), the real number is two or three times that.
Part of the problem seems to be that it is relatively easy to steal bikes — even if they are protected by locks, since most of them provide little actual protection against a determined thief — and there is minimal punishment. Most bicycle thieves are never caught, and most stolen bicycles are never recovered. It is a crime without punishment.
The classic Italian neorealist film “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) paints a sympathetic portrayal of a poor man, during the hard times of postwar Italy, who has his bicycle stolen and therefore becomes unable to go to work; desperate, he finally tries to steal another man’s bicycle and ends up being caught.
The film, by Vittorio De Sica, is a deserved classic, but I think it paints a faulty portrayal of bicycle thieves. I really doubt anyone, especially these days, becomes a bike thief because he had his own bike stolen and could not go to work anymore.
No, far from being desperate poor men who just want support their family, bicycle thieves are deeply amoral and psychopathic individuals, who are constantly on the prowl for suckers who leave their bikes unattended or secured with cheap locks. After they hypocritically carry or ride your own bicycle through town as if it was their own, those appalling criminals sell it cheaply for parts and use the money to buy drugs or booze. Only this can explain why my own bicycle, an old, defective piece of junk purchased at a second-hand shop for 40 euros, could have been taken away.
In some Islamic countries, thieves are punished by having their right hand cut off. While the punishment seems to me exaggerated as a general rule, it might be adequate in the case of bicycle thieves. Perhaps they should also have one of their feet removed, so they can never ride a bicycle again.
Everything has an upside, however. The shift system in my bicycle wasn’t working, and the light system also needed to be changed. I remember that I was bothered thinking that I needed to work to fix those problems (just buying the parts needed to fix those issues would probably cost more than the bike itself).
But I don’t need to worry about it anymore, and it is a load off my mind. Now that’s a problem for the thief. Perhaps he will be kind enough to fix it himself before selling it to someone else, or perhaps he will have a deserved bike accident as he rides away with the product of his crime.
And I just need to buy a new $40 bike, until it is stolen, once again.
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After two years of failed tests, with that terrible procedure of nostril rape (I wonder, why didn’t they use simple saliva samples from the mouth? It seems to work just as well, at least, it worked for the home self-test), I finally managed to test positive for “Covid”. This was two or three weeks ago — this despite the fact that masks are still mandatory in public transport, but didn’t seem to have done much.
Anyway, I made an amazing discovery — Covid is just the flu in reverse. Wait, hear me out, the Science supports me. The symptoms of the flu usually start with a running nose and cough, then evolve to fever and body pain. Well, corona is just the opposite. For the first three days, I had nothing but fever and body pain. In fact, it was remarkable mostly by the absence of symptoms. I had no cough, no sneezing, no sniffling. Just mild fever, a dry sore throat and body ache (back and legs mostly). An aspirin, or perhaps just time, took care of that in the third day. Then, for the next seven days, I no longer had any fever or pain, just a mild sore throat and then cough and a running nose. The sniffling was the last thing to go. Then I was “negative” again, after 8 days. So, basically — a flu with reversed symptoms.
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It’s unclear why you should take it easy if you start with a running nose then have cough and fever, but panic and mandate lockdowns and mRNA vaccines and destroy the world economy in the process when the symptoms are the other way around, but then again, I am not an epidemiologist. I still believe that the whole thing was overblown in order to promote mRNA vaccines and a lot of technologies of control such as digital passes and tracking apps, as well as a myriad of social and economic changes that benefitted billionaires and damaged the middle class. Lockdowns, mask mandates, “vaccine passports”; none of those things had any significant effect on the disease itself, even if they destroyed a lot of people’s livelihoods and damaged society in thousands of different ways.
Anyway, after more two years, you’d think that pretty much everyone was sick and tired of hearing about “corona” and “vaccines” and all that crap, but you’d be wrong. While the mainstream media starts to stupidly talk about new “variants”, and Djokovic has been forbidden to enter the U.S. to play in the U.S. Open for not disclosing his vaccine status (even though it is now clear that also the vaccine doesn’t seem to have a lot of effect on the spread of the disease and certainly doesn’t stop contagion), on the ‘anti-Covid’ side, things are not much better. Alternative bloggers such as Eugyppius or Igor Chudov keep talking about vaccine side effects and the latest stupid idea by politicians to control us.
Look, from my perspective, it is time to stop obsessing about Covid, from one side or the other. The hard fact of the matter is that we lost two years talking too much about something that shouldn’t have taken so much of our attention. It should have been treated just like any other flu season, more or less. Even for SARS-1 we didn’t do any of that pandemic theatre and social changes, and SARS-1 was arguably much more dangerous than SARS-2 or COVID. Perhaps the first wave of COVID was worse than the current one, I wouldn’t know. But, at this point, Covid is so mild for most people than it really isn’t a big issue, and all mandates and changes should be reversed. It is time to go back to normal life.
Of course, I know that it is actually the other way around, which means this is also a pandemic in reverse. It is not that they did lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates “to stop Covid”, they used Covid to be able to start doing those things. The disease itself was and still is mostly just an excuse for the social and technological changes they want to implement one way or another, disease or no disease. So this theatre will probably go on, unless they change it for some other excuse, if too many people get tired of it.
I guess we will see in the Fall…
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Today is the 4th of July, and I am for the moment still in America, (although I fly out today), so I thought it would be a good moment to jot down some notes about the good old USA.
Many people, and in particular Americans, like to say that the U.S. is the “land of freedom”, and in many ways, that is exactly right. But what kind of freedom? There are so many contrasting freedoms in America; sometimes they are so contrasting that they do not get along very well.
Politically, it is said that the country is divided between Republicans and Democrats, but that’s not exactly true. It is divided between two different ways of seeing and understanding the world, and even the word “freedom”.
Both camps talk constantly about freedom. But Democrats, or progressives, see it as basically sexual and social freedom. Freedom to identify as any gender you want. Freedom to have sex with whomever you want, and to abort the child if you or your partner get pregnant afterwards. Freedom to dress and behave as you want.
For Republicans or conservatives (it’s not really the same thing, but let that slide) “freedom” is better defined as the lack of state interference on property and on life. That’s why guns are so important to this group — something that Europeans do not seem to understand. In America, guns are a metonymy for freedom. Freedom from state tyranny (it is stated in the Constitution that citizens should be able to form an “armed militia” to resist any government encroachment on their rights), but, more practically, freedom to protect yourself from crime and violence without depending on the police or the state.
America is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious country, and all those groups do not always get along. Violence is in the American DNA, and part and parcel of its colonial and multi-cultural origins.
America is also a very unequal country. It offers incredible opportunities, and it is, still, very prosperous. But that prosperity lives side by side with uttermost misery and poverty. This is also related to “freedom” in a way. In America, and this is increasingly more so, you are on your own. The country offers opportunities for advancement, but if you fail, tough luck. You’re just a loser and you deserve what’s coming to you.
You can be very rich, or you can have a comfortable middle-class life, but you can also become a homeless derelict living inside your car — that is, if you have the luck to still have a car.
In America, wonderful cities and amazing views can live side by side with awful public services. Public transportation in particular. This is also something that Europeans do not understand. But in America, everything is about the individual, and, by extension, about the car. The car is for current Americans what the horse was to cowboys. I remember reading once about an American teenager who had killed himself because, after an accident, his parents forbade him to drive the family car. The boy took a gun — that other symbol of American freedom — and shot himself in the face. “Without a car, I have no social life, I am a loser, I am no one”, he wrote in his suicide note.
Everything is centred in the car, even long-distance travel. American airlines are probably among the worst in the world in terms of service. Their train service is pretty bad too, at least when comparing it to Europe or Asia (although there are a few routes in the East Coast that are not completely terrible). And buses… Buses in the U.S. are the worst. For inter-city service, there’s Greyhound, which is perhaps the closest to Hell that you can find on this Earth. A few years ago, a young man was decapitated inside a Greyhound bus. That’s the level of Greyhound for you. If you want to travel around the US, my advice is to rent a car.
Many say that America is right now in decadence, and in a lot of ways this is true. Looking back, its heyday was probably in the 1950s: a country coming from victory in the Second Word War and with the Great Depression having become only a distant memory. It was still a 90% White European country, and it didn’t have such a large population as today.
A few decades later, massive immigration, several stupid wars, demented plans of social engineering and the offshoring of manufacturing to China have completely changed the country, making it a shadow of what it once was.
And yet… America is still very prosperous and very beautiful in some of its parts (the parts are better than the whole), and, more importantly, it still captures the imagination of the world. American culture is everywhere. It seems almost as if, the more the country slides into decadence and corruption, and, at least domestically, disappointment grows among its population, the more its dream-like culture spreads abroad. Hollywood still dominates worldwide cinematography, and, all over the world, T-shirts with American slogans or brands are sold and worn everywhere, from Germany to Vietnam.
In this recent travel to the U.S., I spent a few days in New York City, but mostly I spent the time in the countryside. And, let me tell you, it is like being in two different worlds. I think that to fully understand America, you need to go to the countryside, to its small villages, to its farms. That’s where the “real America” lives, and, if there is any hope that the United States will survive into the future, and that it will ride out into the sunset after the many catastrophes that are probably coming, you also have to look at the countryside.
Never mind New York, L.A., Chicago. America is still a cowboy country at heart.
Some people are leaving the big city for the countryside
I am here in upstate New York, somewhere in Sullivan County, about two and a half hours (northwest) from the hustle and bustle of New York City. I came to visit family and ended up staying for a few more days in the countryside, where my brother has a restructured barn turned into house and art studio.
He’s not the only one. Since the pandemic, many people have been escaping from New York City and moving towards the countryside or to smaller towns. Covid regulations, the rise of crime — NY seems to be slowly inching back to the bad old days of the 1970s — inflation, higher rents, or just the growing stress of living in big cities have made people reconsider their living arrangements.
I wrote before about the difference between country people and city people in the context of Sweden, but here, it’s like two completely different nations altogether. The little country village nearby (population: 389) is only two and a half hours from New York City, and is still in the same state, but both places couldn’t be more different. While NYC is mostly Blue or Democrat, up here it is definitely Trump country. There are already several “Trump 2024″ and “Fuck Joe Biden” bumperstickers and American flags all around, and I doubt many people around here lost sleep over the recent Roe vs Wade abortion overturn.
People in the country tend to view people in the city as smug, annoying liberals, while people in the city view those in the country as ignorant rednecks or reactionary bumpkins, but the truth is more complex than that. From what I’ve heard and seen, there are quite a few lesbian or gay couples in the area. There are even Democrats. But you won’t see many “Pride” flags. What people around here most object is the politicization of issues, but country people are much more open-minded than they are given credit for. Of course, if you come up with a Biden T-shirt and say that you support gun control, you may get a few angry looks. But — probably — you won’t get shot.
Guns are a hobby, and may be a necessity for many around here. After all, there are wild animals around. Bears, foxes, coyotes, eagles, snakes, to name just a few. Most are not dangerous. Perhaps the most dangerous ones are the bears, but they are black bears, which usually not as aggressive as the brown ones. I haven’t seen any yet, but a few neighbours have reported close encounters with them.
But most of the dangers are imaginary. A strange shadow in the forest… Is it a bear? No, it’s just a tree stump with a weird shape. Something is moving behind the bushes. A coyote? No, just two chipmunks, you shouldn’t worry, unless you’re Donald Duck. A green shape moving in the water. An alligator? No, we’re not in Florida, dummy, it’s just a beaver carrying a mossy piece of wood.
Mostly, the main worry are bugs. Living in the country basically means daily encounters with bugs of all kinds. Big flies, little flies, microscopic flies, butterflies, bees, wasps, spiders, beetles, mosquitoes, ticks — perhaps the most dangerous ones, as they may transmit Lyme’s disease — and a whole lot of other insects, many of which may not have been officially discovered yet.
It’s just a different way of living. The worst dangers in the city come mostly from other humans: contagious respiratory diseases, robbers, shooters, a crazy guy pushing you into the metro tracks. In the country, it’s perhaps more likely a bear, a snake, a car accident, a hunting accident, drowning in a river, a gun going off by mistake.
Because so many people left New York City in the last two years during the Covid pandemic, the demographics of a few towns have changed a bit. In Callicoon (population: 3,057), about 20 miles from here, there are quite a few former New Yorkers that have moved in and brought a bit of their “city culture” with them. The town now holds film, literature or music events, and a couple of more “sophisticated” furniture or wine shops. They may even sell good European wines! So it’s not all black and white. Even in terms of people — sure, the countryside is on average whiter than NYC, perhaps even 90% or 95% white, but there are a few black, Latin American or Asian families too.
There is certainly a lot of division currently in America — political, economic, social, sexual, racial — and some of it lead to resentment or violence, but here in the countryside you don’t see it so much yet. People tend to be friendly, and although perhaps some may be a bit suspicious of strangers, when you explain to them that you’re the brother or the cousin of someone who lives here whom everybody knows, all is well.
New York City still has a lot of appeal, for sure. And, for certain jobs, you may have to live in the big city anyway, even in this age of remote work. But country living, as many are discovering, also has its charms.
For the past two years, I have been publishing “Geist“, an independent magazine of literature and art. We have now reached the fourth number. It is in printed paper and not online, which I suppose is something very old-fashioned these days (although we do make the pdf available for free online). It is printed in a very small edition and has an even smaller number of readers. After all, who reads an independent magazine of literature and art these days?
I say “these days”, but literature, and, even more, independent literary magazines, have always been an affair for just a few. I wonder, how many people at the time have read any of the only four numbers of “The Exile”, Ezra Pound’s 1925 literary magazine, who nevertheless published important writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway? How many copies were printed? I doubt more than a few hundred, if that. And Jorge Luis Borges’ first literary magazine in 1921, “Prisma”, had only two numbers and didn’t even have individual printed copies —- it was a mural magazine, posted on the city walls. How many people read that? (Now one of the few remaining copies is being auctioned at a price starting at 22,000 dollars).
Of course, my little magazine has no such pretensions of achieving literary or artistic fame. I prefer to see it as just a reunion of friends. After all, most of the collaborators are people I know personally, or people whose work I know.
Is it just a vanity project? Well, I certainly do no expect to obtain any profit from that, as it runs at a loss. But I think promoting art and literature these days may be a noble endeavour in any case. We are bombarded with text and images every minute of the day in our computers and smartphones, images and texts that we soon forget second after seeing them. But a printed magazine with short texts and art, well, perhaps it can offer some repose for the eyes, the mind, or the spirit — “Geist” means spirit in German, of course.
Now, this blog is perhaps a little bit strange for some people. Most blogs are specialized in certain fixed subjects, but I tend to publish about different topics without a specific focus. I would write only about film, art and literature, if I could, but people tend to be more interested in politics or in social issues, so I try to balance things, and also add some travel articles to the mix. Also, I get bored easily if I write about just one subject.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox“, inspired a phrase of ancient Greek poet Archilocus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The idea is that there are two kinds of people in the world (I hear now the voice of Tuco from Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in my mind: “there are two kinds of people in this world, my friend.”) Some people focus on one subject and devote their whole life to it. I remember, for instance, someone who dedicated his whole life to study potatoes and wrote several volumes exclusively on that subject. Others — like me, as you’d have guessed — have many interests and little focus, and tend to jump, like a quick fox, from one thing to the next.
Well, I think this is enough promotion. Check out the magazine if you like. Next post will be about politics, or perhaps about travel. See you, and thanks.
In a harbinger of bad things to come, France has prohibited outdoor events due to a heat wave, which according to the media is being caused by “climate change”. There is no way to prove the causality, of course — anything can be “climate change” (except when they are actually changing the climate by bombarding clouds, I suppose).
In continuing the process of infantilization of the public that started with the “Covid” measures, governments now are declaring that people are too stupid to realize that it is too hot just by themselves. Everything has to be done by mandates and regulations.
Meanwhile in Germany, politicians are proposing masks to become mandatory again for everyone, starting in October. Because of “corona”? No, just because of the simple flu this time. They argue that less people get sick when wearing masks, something by the way that has never been proven, and most studies say the opposite in fact. (Masks are still being used in public transportation even now, in the middle of summer.)
EU leaders Mario Draghi (Italy), Macron (France) and Olaf Scholz (Germany) — is it a coincidence that all three come from banking/financial backgrounds? — have recently visited the Ukraine and proposed sending even more weapons and financial assistance to the beleaguered country. “Europe must help”, they say. But no one asked European citizens what they think of sending their tax money to fund wars, especially at a time of crisis. Shouldn’t they have been consulted before?
Why have “democratic” leaders become so openly undemocratic?
They do not even pretend to believe anymore that they care anything about the thoughts of the people they rule over. It’s all about pleasing Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Business — or anyone, except the voters.
Justin Trudeau from Canada is perhaps the worst of the lot. Even as Canadian police was trampling old ladies and people were being arrested or having their accounts frozen while having committed no crime, but simply legally and peacefully protesting against vaccine mandates, he has babbling something or other about “democracy”. He has also recently complained that Canadian media being banned in Russia is “undemocratic”, but somehow, banning Russian media in Canada is “democratic”.
It is not clear anymore what these people even mean by “democracy”. It is not as if anyone is ever consulted for any decision that these supposed “world leaders” take. Almost everything is decided by decree. And, by they way, they are supposedly the elected leaders of democratic countries, but is there anyone who actually likes them? I couldn’t find a single person, either left or right, who likes Mario Draghi in Italy. Everybody along the political spectrum seems to hate him equally. Granted, the Italian political system is so bizarre that it is not clear for me how he even got to the position anyway, but I doubt anyone voted enthusiastically for him.
In America, Joe Biden has now one of the lowest popularities ever on record. And yet, we are supposed to believe that he is also “the presidential candidate that has received the most votes in a U.S. election in the whole history of the United States” (While this can be partially explained by mere population growth, I doubt such high number of votes is even real – Biden was never in his life charismatic or popular.)
What is happening? Is democracy ending? Or it was never real to begin with?
Whatever it is, what we have seen in the last few years, starting with Covid measures (or maybe even before with the “war on Terror”) and continuing with current economic measures, is certainly a worrying trend, and all those who care about personal freedom and about the accountability of the democratic leaders should be rightly concerned.
