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So far the only thing I've downloaded in the way of books to my iPhone is a free version of Aesop's Fables - those short tales of the animal world meant to teach us a moral lesson.  Though it is doubtful that many of the fables now claimed to be by Aesop were actually his, whatever the origin the lessons taught still apply over 2000 years later.  I particularly enjoyed this little tale of a dog, who like one other puppy I know, was a trifle unpredictable.

The Mischievous Dog

A Dog used to run up quietly to the heels of those he met, and to bite them without notice. His master sometimes suspended a bell about his neck, that he might give notice of his presence wherever he went, and sometimes he fastened a chain about his neck, to which was attached a heavy clog, so that he could not be so quick at biting people's heels.

The Dog grew proud of his bell and clog, and went with them all over the market-place. An old hound said to him: "Why do you make such an exhibition of yourself? That bell and clog that you carry are not, believe me, orders of merit, but, on the contrary, marks of disgrace, a public notice to all men to avoid you as an ill-mannered dog."

Notoriety is often mistaken for fame

A lesson for not just a few people in the news today?

03 giugno - San Kevin di Glendalough

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To honour (?) the birth of William Shakespeare (April 23 is the date set by tradition) my friend Jenn posted a YouTube clip by Rowan Atkinson on Facebook .  Now I am probably in the minority amongst my friends in not fully appreciating the talent that is Atkinson.  I don't mind him in small doses but after a while find him irritating beyond all belief and playing mostly on one abrasive note.  In the Black Adder series he did what any sensible comedian who had pretty much one tune to his fiddle does - surrounded himself with actors who had a few more strings to their bows:  Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Tim McInnerny, Patsy Byrne, Hugh Laurie (I fell in love with Hugh Laurie when he appeared as the Prince Regent in his bath) and the brilliant Tony Robinson as his faithful dog's body Boldrick.  All exceptional performers - more actors of comedy than comedians.  Yes I know the fiddle, tune, bows thing was a stretch but I've been away from writing for the past while so give me a chance!

You will notice that I have not posted the YouTube clip, even if it does feature Colin Firth; a pox on Mr Atkinson I say, but you can find it here.  The premise is that Shakespeare is responsible for all the deadly dull days we spent in school listening to his work being murder by droning pedants who strove to enlighten us whither we wanted to be or not.  Now I don't know about anyone else but I had a wonderful English teacher during my high school years.  Mary Firth was one of those educators who knew that you had to capture the imaginations of a student to make plays, poetry, literature and language a living thing.  Certainly in my case she succeeded.

Though I admit that I loved Shakespeare long before my high school years and the influence of Miss Firth. My father took me to my first live performances - The Tempest followed by The Taming of the Shrew the next week - back in 1957 or 1958. And I saw much of what was performed at our Stratford from 1959 onward - a young Christopher Plummer as Benedict that year!  Lately I've attended performances mostly in Italian - there is after all a school of thought that says Will was actually Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza from Sicily. It should be noted that there are more performances of plays by Shakespeare/Crollalanza or what you Will than any other playwright during the theatre season here in Italy.  Whereas, I might also mention, very few people here know who the hell Rowan Atkinson is.

All of this by way of introducing a quote I came upon from Bernard Levin the witty, wise and highly quotable British journalist/writer/broadcaster.

"If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare."

Sorry Jenn, and I guess Mr Atkinson, but  I think that's a more suitable way of celebrating William Shakespeare.

25 aprile - San Marco Evangelista

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My friend Michael in Washington, DC passed this on:

"Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." -George Orwell

One of the wonders of reading of my childhood - yes we had books back then - were the tales spun by Wells. I haven't looked at anything of his in years - I wonder if he is still read?

25 settembre - San Nicolao di Flüe

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Every year or two I sit down with my thumb-worn, coffee stained anthology of the Lucia stories by E. F. Benson - starting with Page 3 (Nancy Mitford's preface is short, she knows she could never compete with Benson) and Queen Lucia, the first of the Mapp-Lucia novels and arriving several weeks and 1119 pages later at the last, Trouble for Lucia. Several of the books were made into a wonderful LWT series which was extremely popular on PBS back in the 1980-90s and I will admit that it was that series that introduced me to Benson. It was the wonderful performances of Geraldine McEwan, Prunella Scales and Nigel Hawthorne that encouraged me to explore Benson and his little world of Tilling with its enchanting assortment of eccentrics. In Tilling a simple walk across the garden room of Mallards can lead to a universe shattering event - well maybe not for the Universe but certainly for the world of Tilling - and really as Lucia would remind us that is the only place that really counts.

This year there will be a little twist as I am also reading several of Benson's non-Lucia books - he wrote some 63 of them plus many short stories. He was also known as one of the premier ghost story writers of his period. Though it is difficult to get a hold of his "spook stories" I have been searching around for a complete anthology that was published back in 1992 and has since gone out of print.

Benson was known for a waspishness, certainly in his Lucia books, and often in a short paragraph he sums up his characters with a witty turn of a phrase. I always found this passage from Miss Mapp summed up Elizabeth Mapp to a T!

Miss Mapp went to the garden room and sat at her window....
It was a warm, bright day of February, and a butterfly was enjoying itself in the pale sunshine on the other window, and perhaps (so Miss Mapp sympathetically interpreted its feelings) was rather annoyed that it could not fly away through the pane. It was not a white butterfly, but a tortoiseshell, very pretty, and in order to let it enjoy itself more, she opened the window, and it fluttered out into the garden. Before it had flown many yards, a starling ate most of it up, so the starling enjoyed itself, too.

Miss Mapp fully shared in the pleasure first of the tortiseshell and then of the starling ...

Epilogue - Miss Mapp
E. F. Benson - 1922
Harper Row

I am so looking forward to my Bensonian Summer with some familiar friends and the possibility of making some new ones.

06 maggio - San Lucio di Cirene

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While in Windsor last week my friend Peg and I stopped by at Waterstone's on the High Street. Most of the stores were having sales and they were not exception: a fine selection of books: "3 for 2 - Offer applies to stickered items only." Peg was able to find two books of a series she had been reading that were unavailable in Canada and generously offered me the third. I wandered through the stacks and finally settled on a slim 120 page novella by Alan Bennett.

I've adored Bennett since I first saw him in Beyond the Fringe as the "My Brother Esau is an hairy man" vicar. And as a playwright and author he is - IMHO - one of the living greats. His Talking Heads series of monologues, The Madness of George III*, History Boys, 40 Years On et al have delighted with a wry sense of humour, the pure joy of language and the penetrating insight of a society gloriously (and often ingloriously) in decline.

"The Uncommon Reader" tells the apocryphal tale of Her Majesty's sudden passion for reading; a passion that turns both her world and the world around her upside down. As much as it is a wonderfully entertaining comic read, it is also Bennett's manifesto on the power of reading to change lives.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something lofty about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually,she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing quite what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer. All readers were equal, and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night, when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognized with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she, who had led a life apart, now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognized.

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
Profile Books - Faber and Faber

Its Bennett at his finest - funny and wise - and being Bennett the very last sentence is a glorious punch line.

*I am reminded that a Hollywood bigwig insisted that the title of the movie version remove the "III" as he felt people might not come to see it if they hadn't seen George I or George II.

14 aprile - Santa Liduina

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My friend Larry over at Amoroma suggested that John Dickie's Delizia! was a good read - and as always with Larry he was right.

These pictures are from a wonderful lunch at a little restaurant in Pesaro. Being by the Adriatic the menu was big on seafood. To start an incredible antipasti of frutti di mare - shrimp, marinated salmon, fresh sardines, crayfish, squid and a type of smoked trout.

Dickie's Cosa Nostra, a history of the Italian Mafia, is a best seller and I can see this one, subtitled The Epic History of Italians and Their Food, going the same way. His premise, and in my mind rightly so, is that Italian food is not good old fashioned country cooking that tourists - and many Italians - believe it to be. It is a urban cuisine based on the taste buds and pocketbooks of the city dweller.

These clams had been cooked in a tomato-zucchini-garlic broth and tossed with penne - pasta con le vongole is a favorite all over Italy.

History tells us that people in the countryside ate poorly - poverty does that.

The poverty of the peasant diet still echoes in a number of proverbs that have been handed down.

When the peasant eats a chicken, either the peasant is ill or the chicken is. Among the poor of the countryside, chicken was a costly rarity reserved for the sick. Peasants were often only able to eat animals that had died of disease.

Garlic is the peasant's spice cupboard. Spices were essential to sophisticated cuisine from the middle ages until at least the seventeenth century. But the rural masses couldn't afford them. Garlic, leek and onion, by contrast, stank of poverty. Which is not to imply the well-to-do refused to eat these pungent vegetables - just that they looked down on anyone who had no alternative when it came to giving food flavour.

St. Bernard's sauce makes food seem good. St. Bernard's sauce was the most important ingredient in the peasant diet for most of the last millennium. But happily the recipe* has now faded from memory. It means "hunger".

A history of Italian food written as the story of what peasants actually ate would make for a stodgy read. Many pages would be devoted to vegetable soup. There would be a substantial section on porridge. Bread made from inferior grains, and even from things like acorns in times of hardship ...

Delizia! - John Dickie
Hodder & Stoughton
http://www.hodder.co.uk/

The frito misto was piled high with octopus, shrimp, calmari and other seafood goodies. Lightly battered it only needed a few squirts of lemon to bring out all the flavours.

Dickie looks at Italian cooking in various urban centres over six different periods right up to the new prosperity of the past few decades. I'm particularly intrigued by the chapter entitled Faulty Basil - how great a wordplay is that?

The primi (pasta dishes) were so big that there was no considering a secondi (meat-fish dish)but there was room for a creamy coffee sorbetto. The whole had been accompanied by a nice wine from the Marche, aqua frizante and finished with a coffee and local amaro. And it cost half of what we would have paid for the same meal in Roma.

*Despite Dickie's comment I was able to find a recipe for St. Bernard's sauce but how faithful it is to the original I can't say.

04 ottobre - San Francesco d'Assisi

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I was remined by Ben Brantley's New York Times review of the London revival of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden of the following exchange that ends the second act.

There has been some discussion about a trial involving a woman found guilty of murder who may well be the current Governess of Laurel, the disturbed teen-aged granddaughter of Mrs. St.Maugham.

Laurel: Was she hung?

Mrs. St.Maugham: Hanged, my darling, when speaking of a lady.

Now that's the way to end a second act!

20 lulgio - Santa Marta

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I was chatting with my friend Yannis from Athens earlier this week and the subject got around to poetry. He asked if I was familiar with the poetry of C. P. Cavafy. I had to admit complete ignorance, so in a vain effort to educate me he sent links to a few of Cavafy's poems on a website devoted to the great Hellenic poet.

I was immediately captivated by the first poem he sent: Ithaka - Cavafy's thoughts on our life journey as filtered through the travels of Odysseus to his homeland.

Many of his poems are homo-erotic in nature and must have scandalized the society of his time. Gray, is an evocation of long-ago love recalled.

While looking at a half-gray opal
I remembered two lovely gray eyes—
it must be twenty years ago I saw them...

........................................

We were lovers for a month.
Then he went away to work, I think in Smyrna,
and we never met again.

Those gray eyes will have lost their beauty—if he’s still alive;
that lovely face will have spoiled.

Memory, keep them the way they were.
And, memory, whatever of that love you can bring back,
whatever you can, bring back tonight.

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems.
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition.
Princeton University Press, 1992

I found myself remembering for a few moments a pair of eyes from my past. Thank you Yannis.

26 giugno - San Virgilio

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I'm currently reading the 4th in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street series: The World According to Bertie. And I broke up when I read this passage:

'This story concerns Charmian Mao,' said Humphrey. 'He was said to have a very good sense of humour. He was asked once what he thought would have happened had it been Nikita Khrushchev rather than President Kennedy who had been assassinated. He thought about it for a moment and then said: " Well, one thing is certain: Aristotle Onassis would never have married Mrs. Khrushchev!" '

McCall Smith is the creator of the wonderful Precious Ramotswe, a woman of "traditional build," traditional values, owner of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Botswana's only Lady Detective. I have yet to see the BBC screen adaptation of the first novel (it was director Anthony Minghella's last project) which was aired on Easter Sunday in the U.K. The reviews were mixed with most critics finding that the sweet, gentle nature of the books just didn't make it to the screen. I'm hoping BBC World will get around to showing it - maybe instead of the 200th rerun of Good Neighbours - so I can see for myself.

14 giugno - San Eliseo