An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
The last time I saw Venice I was older than 10 and younger than forty. What I remember: houses standing up to their doorways in water, boats navigating canals, a hotel room with incredibly high ceilings and windows draped in … Continued
Reading about Venice, before going for a visit, I discover in Jan Morris’ book (named for the city) that the Venetians have a dialect distinctly their own. Not only do they elide standard Italian–removing the ll’s in bello to become … Continued
My father used to complain that in my mother’s house, he walked on flowers, sat on flowers, ate on flowers and slept on flowers. My mother must have taken this as a compliment because she never changed the decor. It … Continued
Lately I’ve been smelling smoke. My heart is tamped down, the fire banked, but the melody lingers on. Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” (1920) comes to mind: Some say the world will end in fire;Some say in ice.From what … Continued
When Erskine Caldwell wrote the novel Tobacco Road in 1934, the southern United States was still mired in the agricultural decline that began way before the Civil War and continued into the 1960s. My friend Jill Breckenridge describes its beginning … Continued
A wonderful class of graduate students and I have started discussing how history and story intersect. We began with Doctorow’s Ragtime and the movie made from the novel. Next we read August Wilson’s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which the … Continued
We just saw the movie in a nearly empty, late-afternoon theater. I imagine it if were about a moose who’d lost its foot, the audience would be fuller, here midcontinent, with moose, so say the experts, edging off our U.S. … Continued
They couldn’t be more different in character, though two are quasi-calico, the third and youngest, Julia, is black and white, a tuxedo cat. My kidding quasi son-in-law informs me she’s a kitler or cat with Hitler moustache. Like humans,our cats … Continued
Cooking by instinct didn’t happen overnight. In fact, in that first tiny kitchen, New York City circa 1965, I’m not even sure I could hardboil an egg. But I knew what, among my mother’s rather bland fare, I could taste … Continued