Sheep from the goats; mice from the rats

My house seemed alive with rodents, as I discussed on this blog three weeks ago.  I was then planning to resort to mass executions, by way of rat traps.

My traps, baited with delicious gobs of peanut butter, were haughtily ignored for the first two weeks.  It was summer.  The weather was warm.  The neighborhood was rich with falling nuts and fruits and other tasty rodent food.  Life was good, and the little guys preferred to dine al fresco at dawn and at twilight.   They turned up their rather prominent noses to peanut butter, served on an odd metal tab in the darkness of my basement.

But the seasons change.  The air became cooler.  The outdoor goodies became scarcer as our super-abundant squirrels and rabbits gobbled up everything in sight, with the squirrels also squirreling away provisions for the long winter.  As for an epicure who's missed a few meals and gobbles down a Big Mac, my peanut butter began to have an appeal.

A lethal appeal, as it turned out.

The first two casualties were not the rats I had anticipated.  They were two cute little mice who succumbed several days apart.  The first was still conscious when I discovered him, with the rat trap's powerful spring about his middle, rather than his neck.  The trap had obviously caused severe internal injuries, but he didn't struggle as I approached.  In fact, he seemed to look at me hopefully, as though I had come to rescue him.  I once again anthropomorphize.  In a sense, I did rescue him, by drowning him in the toilet rather than forcing him to die slowly and in pain. 

But I didn't feel good about it.

The second mouse was already dead when I discovered him.

But the scrambling in the walls continued until this morning.  I discovered a dead rat who had barely freed himself from a trap but had bled to death a few feet away.  He was a huge rat, larger than any I'd seen before.  He was quite ugly, a thug among rodents.  He was not a cute rat, like my nephew's pet rats.  I felt little sympathy for him.

And yet, I empathized with the cute mice.  Felt really bad about their deaths.  What had the rat done differently, aside from being larger and uglier and making more noise?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.

And I began thinking about my different feeling between the mice and the rat, and how that plays out in how we judge our fellow man.  When I see a photo in the newspaper of a cute child who has died in an accident I feel much worse than if it were a photo of an ugly adult.  Especially, an unshaved adult with messy hair.  And then I reflect on how studies show that employees who are tall and reasonably good looking succeed more often than those who are short and plain looking -- even when appearance has nothing to do with their job functions.

I try not to be superficial in my feelings about people, and yet I unconsciously judge those I meet that way all the time -- or if not "judge," feel sympathy for.  What about those who are less introspective than I am, and have even less hesitation to judge "a book by its cover"?

I admire folks who are able to, say, work in soup kitchens or provide free counseling to the homeless -- and while doing so are able to welcome each client as equally deserving of acceptance, of being treated and and respected as a fellow human.  To see an ugly rat as a potential saint and a mouse as a possible thug, however cute he may appear.

Philosophizing aside, I suspect my house is now rodent-free.  I'll be listening for any unwanted sounds inside the walls as the day passes. Whether from rat or mouse.

Never stop hiking

Hiking in the Val d'Aosta
Italian Alps

September 8.  We've reached the second week of September.  It occurs to me that not once this summer have I been hiking in the mountains.  A wonderful hike along the Cornwall coast, back in May, sure, but that's not mountain hiking.  And yet I live surrounded by the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, a hiker's paradise.

My friend Pat and I had plans to go for a day hike tomorrow, but we may have dawdled too long -- the weather forecast is for rain tomorrow and most of the week, and we've had to cancel.  We're now thinking about late September, but the days grow shorter and the weather becomes less predictable. 

Regret for my missed opportunities -- in a way, for a missed summer -- was reinforced by my reading for a second time Paolo Cognetti's novel about growing up in the Italian Alps, The Eight Mountains, a beautifully written work that I discussed in this blog in 2018.  The novel is the story of a relationship between father and son, and between the son and a friend, but it's also a loving depiction of life in the mountains -- climbing, hiking, walking, observing, exploring.  It was hard to read the first time, and equally hard this second time, without longing to head for the hills myself, to put on a pair of hiking boots and set off into the mountains.

Higher up again the vegetation disappears; snow covers everything until the beginning of summer; and the prevailing color is that of the gray rock, veined with quartz and the yellow of lichen.  That was where my father's world began.  After three hours' walking, the meadows and woods would give way to scree, to lakes hidden in glacial basins, to gorges gouged by avalanches, to streams of icy water.  The mountain was transformed into a harsher place, inhospitable and pure; up there he would become happy.

I'm old enough now not only to regret missing a summer's opportunity to hike and climb, but to worry about the number of summers I have left to do so.  Already there are climbs that I could have done ten years ago (or even five years ago) that today -- at least in a group of younger climbers -- I wouldn't attempt.  But much still remains open to me; I want to take advantage of my opportunities.

Cognetti's book, of course, especially suggests the Alps.  Not climbing the Matterhorn or Monte Rosa -- climbs I wouldn't have attempted at any age -- but simply walking up and down the lower hills in the area.  My nephew Doug and I did a traverse called the "Haute Route" from Chamonix to Zermatt about thirty years ago, and ten years later another nephew, Denny, and I did a similar walk around Mont Blanc.  Both were strenuous hikes, but they were strenuous primarily because of the pace we were attempting.  Similar routes wind throughout the mountains of Switzerland, passing through one Alpine village after another, with mountain refuges provided where villages are sparse.  The hiker can set his own pace. 

I'd love to do something similar in the near future, preferably with one or more hiking companions, but alone if necessary.  But I don't really need to fly to Switzerland.  The opportunities for mountain hiking around Seattle are boundless.  And the area between Snoqualmie and Stevens Passes hasn't been named the "Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area" for nothing.

I'm making a mental note, which I'll reinforce in the months ahead, to take full advantage of all my hiking opportunities in 2020.  I'm hoping to be able to hike for many years to come.  But why gamble? 

Perseverance

The itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out.

The wearisome travails of the common spider have inspired many observers. 

Americans, and even more the Scots, know the story of Robert the Bruce, who, while hiding in a cave from English forces, watched a spider trying to build a web.  Time after time the spider tried and failed to connect the web to a support.  But finally the spider succeeded, and then quickly constructed her web.  Inspired, the Scots king didn't give up.  He continued his struggle, and won the Battle of Bannockburn in 1306.

The past few days, I've noted a spider web strung between the driver's door of my car and the side view mirror.  A spider sits in the middle of the web, patiently awaiting prey.  The web is invisible from outside the car, and the spider is small.  But both spider and web are clearly visible -- and a bit distracting -- from the driver's seat.

Several days now, I've driven off, forgetting about the web until well underway.  Each time, I've been sure that the wind would blow the spider loose.  The web flaps violently as I approach 40 mph; the spider clings on for dear life, as though hanging onto a tree in a hurricane.  Today, I noticed that when I slowed down or stopped, she would work her way off the web and take cover within the framework of the mirror.  This happened twice -- going to and from my destination.

Logically, I know that the spider has minimal consciousness and sense of foreboding.  But she's not quite merely a little automaton; some sense of herself and of her surroundings are experienced within her tiny nervous system.  I hate to anthropomorphize, but it's hard not to ascribe feelings of terror and frustration to my little friend.

Some folks would either swipe her off the side of their car, or smash her into spider juice.  I won't.  She can stay there as long as she wants, with the proviso that I must use my car as a car.

As a young boy, my grandmother showed me a spider's web in her garden.  My grandmother repeatedly made small tears in the web, and the spider repeatedly repaired the tears.  Eventually, after a number of such repairs, the spider decided to cut her losses.  She ate up the web (thus saving its valuable protein) and went off in search of a less weirdly dangerous site to construct a web. 

I assume that my little friend, sooner or later, will do the same.

When children are dying in the Bahamas, being murdered in Central America, suffering from starvation in Africa, and being ripped from their parents' arms by Trump's legions here at home, it may seem perverse for me to worry about a spider.  But as William Blake suggested, how one relates to tiny pieces of creation may reveal how we see the created world itself.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Respect for the struggles of a small spider is a small step toward compassion for the efforts of the oppressed immigrant to seek a safe life, and of the starving victims of natural disasters simply to stay alive.

Scalped

In the Pacific Northwest, vegetation grows quickly.  Who can blame me for not keeping up with it?

Well, probably my neighbors, although they are too polite to say anything.  I see them out cutting and trimming and mowing constantly, in what seems to be a hobby, a constant frenzy of landscaping.  Or, if they can't bear to do it themselves, as is increasingly true as my neighbors get younger and younger, and more and more affluent, I see their gardening proxies arrive at regular intervals, in old pick-up trucks filled with implements.  These workers, speaking foreign languages, manage to make a full day out of basic landscape management.

I am neither a gardening hobbyist nor a spendthrift.  I also secretly like living ensconced in wilderness within the city.  My taste in landscape design is, as we say, informal.  The gardens of Versailles are fun to look at, but not to live in.

And yet, even I have my limits.  I can go two years, and usually do, with no attention to my yard beyond mowing the lawn.  But, as I say, in the Northwest Corner vegetation flourishes.  Even effloresces.  Takes over.  Overwhelms.

Even I prefer that portions of my house be visible from the street in front.

And so, about every second year, I reluctantly call a local gardener, or landscaper, or handyman, or whoever has recently sent me a brochure.  I show him what needs to be done.  He usually is polite and non-censorious.  He gives me an outrageous estimate.  I assume it's outrageous when I calculate it out to hourly wages for himself and his young assistant (who may actually be his son).  But I've been asked for more or less the same amount by other professionals in other years..

I call them "professionals," because their effective billing rate is about the same as that of many struggling attorneys.

They perform for a full day with various noisy tools, and at the end of the day my yard appears barren.  Like new construction for which landscaping has not yet been installed.  I cry a bit for the rich greenness that's been stripped away.  But at least I can now enter my front door without struggling past predatory vines wrapping themselves around my arms and legs and attempting to drag me deep into the steaming jungle.

And I know it will all grow back.  Before I know it.

It reminds me of childhood summers, when I'd go to the barber and ask for a crew cut.  The barbers hated crew cuts, but I'd insist, "Cut it off.  Cut it all off."  I'd go home, and my mother would gasp and get misty eyed for a moment, but then we'd all get used to it.  It grew back.  It took much of the summer, but it grew back.  And by the time school began, I'd once more have to anoint my hair with whatever greasy product we used in those days, and comb it back off of my face.

And thus will it be with my yard.

Her own private Idaho

The easiest way to visit my sister, traveling from Seattle, is to fly into Sun Valley airport in Hailey, Idaho.  Alaska Airlines provides the only direct flight from Seattle, once a day in each direction.  And in the off-season for either skiing or summering, like October, only three days a week.

Early last week, therefore, I found myself in that small airport, renting a car.  The odyssey had just begun.

There are basically three routes from Hailey to Challis, near my sister's home.  The fastest, according to Google Maps, begins with the "highway" heading east from Sun Valley (Trail Creek Road).  I've been on that road before, so I went into the drive with my eyes open.

Actually, it wasn't bad.  The day was sunny and warm and dry.  The road begins as a normal, paved two-lane highway.  It soon becomes gravel, although well-graded, as it winds steeply over the Pioneer range.  Virtually no traffic until you reach the intersection with north-south U.S. 93 at Chilly.  No cell coverage.  I've been warned, since my return, that rental companies generally prohibit use of passenger cars on unpaved roads, but how was I to know?

It's a fun drive, although if the traffic were heavy it would be a dusty nightmare.  And it's closed in the winter.  You don't drive fast.  Eventually, the road flattens out and becomes paved again, and you reach U.S. 93 about an hour after leaving Sun Valley (and an hour and a quarter after leaving the airport).  It's another hour north on U.S. 93, an easy and pleasant drive (in summer!), with little competing traffic, until you reach the "outskirts" of Challis. 

Challis, with a population of about one thousand, is the only community of any size you encounter after leaving Sun Valley, and the last community you would find if you continued north on U.S. 93 until you reached Salmon (pop. 3,100), some 59 miles farther north.  Challis is a small town with basic necessities, but it isn't your final destination.

But we're getting there.  Leaving Challis, I drive another 20 minutes on a winding road heading west into Challis National Forest.  Just before reaching federal land -- on the federal land border, in fact -- I reach my sister's house, sited on some fifty acres.  It took a while to get there, but once there I settled into a relaxing week, finding myself about as isolated from civilization as you can get in today's America (although wi-fi reception prevents total unawareness of the "excitements" of the outside world).

Your correspondent,
pretending he knows what he's doing.

It was a great week.  The house is far larger and more comfortable than you might expect for back country, and the land on which it sits is a combination of rolling hills, arid prairie, and woodlands irrigated by two creeks running across the property.   For a person like me, who likes to walk, there were plenty of walks, over various terrains.  There were two dogs, both easy to like even for a cat-person, and 25 or so pet rats pandered to by my youngest nephew.  There were horses, inquisitive and well-trained.

Also helping to prevent wilderness-madness, a couple my sister knows from Sonoma also have property about five miles down the road -- a couple who provide both good conversation and excellent food. 

So, no, I wasn't exactly roughing it.  My sister, by choice, loves isolation, but this isn't really "Little House on the Prairie."  If you don't mind driving twenty minutes into town every time you need something from the grocery -- and with modern traffic, drives of that length can happen even in Seattle, from my house to Safeway -- you can live a very pleasant life outside Challis.  And especially as a visitor with a ticket back to the big city.

But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

But in the tradition of the American frontier -- only a few years after escaping the creeping urbanity of Ennis, Montana -- my sister already feels the world closing in on her.  We spent a day driving on gravel roads deep into the national forest, to Copper Basin.  She had her eye on a house, 2¼ hours on gravel roads from Sun Valley.  The only neighbor within miles was a tiny forest ranger station.  The only concession to the modern world was a rough and overgrown air strip. 

"Ah, yes!  This is more like it!"   She's ready to light out for the territory.

Rat-a-Phooey

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. … When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
--H. P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls."       

I have rats in my walls.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, only one rat.  Singular.  But I don't know.

What to do? 

A number of years ago, I had a similar problem.  Well, I thought to myself, they're probably cute little fellows.  They're noisy scampering around, but they do no harm.  But it was winter, and food was scarce.  I discovered that they had been eating the bindings of my books.  A fatal step. 

With a single spring-loaded rat trap, I ended the lives of six rats within a two hour period.  They were hungry, and my traps offered peanut butter.  I made them offers they couldn't resist.  Unfortunately for them.

I was relieved to have them gone.  But I felt persistent remorse.

Rats, for most of us, played a benign role in our childhoods.  There was Ratty, of course, in Wind in the Willows:

When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlour, and planted the Mole in an arm-chair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing-gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time.

Rather pleasant chap, eh?

As kids, we had a couple of rats as pet.  They were affectionate, and loved to be handled.  Their habit of scrambling up the inside of our pants leg was, until one became used to it, somewhat off-putting, but eventually was accepted as a sign of friendliness.  One of my nephews even now has about 25 rats as pets, each named and possessing its own individual personality. 

And there was Stuart Little, who is usually thought of as a mouse, but whose illustrations by Garth Williams show him as more rat-like.  (In fact, at the outset, the book informs us that although Stuart had been born to human parents, he "looked very much like a rat/mouse in every way.")  Stuart was such a moving, sensitive rat-person that his trials and humiliations broke your heart.

And finally -- subsequent to my massacre  of The Seattle Six -- was the release of the movie Ratatouille.  It's hero, Remy, was sophisticated (in that French sort of way), intelligent, kind, ambitious -- and, ultimately, an acclaimed Parisian chef.  What's not to like?  I have no comment as to the on-line debate as to who would win in a fight -- Stuart Little or Remy.  These debators are the same primitive humanoids who would like nothing better than to see a fight to the death between a giraffe and a unicorn.

Moved by young Remy, and reinforced by my boyhood experiences with rats, both actual and literary, I decided to handle my own present rat problem humanely, respecting the ratness of my house's rats as I would wish them to respect my humanity.

For about $100, I bought a number of ultrasonic noise makers, designed to make life so noisily irritating for rats, mice, spiders, and flies that they would break their unilateral rental agreement and move elsewhere.  I plugged my devices into electrical outlets in most rooms of my house, and waited for the Great Exodus to occur.

Nothing.  Although the experience for the rats was supposedly like our trying to live inside a jet engine, the noises in the walls continued.  Amazon, for once, didn't bother asking me to write a satisfaction report on my purchase -- they probably knew I'd been scammed.

Next, I spent $16, again through Amazon, for a live trap.  Bait it with peanut butter, the door crashes down, and you have a live rat waiting to be released to the great outdoors.  How far away?  Not until I'd bought the trap did I begin reading on-line expert reports on how to transplant the little devil.  Apparently, rats have excellent homing instincts.  I would have to carry them 5 to 10 miles away, experts opined -- and ten miles would be far better than five miles.  Otherwise, they'll return, perhaps bringing newly acquired friends with them. 

Also, a rat accustomed to a comfortable home in Seattle is going to be totally confused if dumped in a field or forest somewhere.  If he can't find his way back, he very likely will starve to death, or, alternatively, end up some larger predator's meal.  His chance of survival is minimal, and rats in the wild live only a year under the best of circumstances.  The kindest thing to do, almost all writers said, was to kill the little guy humanely.  And an old-fashioned snap-trap of appropriate size for rats is as humane as a rat death can get.

So.  I'm not happy.  Aside from sharing my house indefinitely with a rat or rats, who do tend to multiply, my only real option is to kill it or them.  Once more I turned to Amazon, ordering three rat snap-traps at $1.99 each.  They will arrive tomorrow.

The executions (one or more) are scheduled for my basement tomorrow at an undisclosed time  They will be private -- I'm not selling admission tickets.  I bear my rats no ill feelings.  I do not demonize them, as Mr. Lovecraft did in his story.  Rats try to live their lives as best as they can, as I try to live mine.  We all face forces we cannot overcome; we all, ultimately arrive at the same destination. 

I commend their spirits to the gods of small creatures, and ask forgiveness for my own self-centeredness in placing my comfort above their lives.

Florence then and now

First view of the Duomo
at night

Forty excited university students stared out the windows as our bus wound its way through the dim, narrow streets of Florence.  It was April 2, 1961.  Our bus had carried us all the way from the Milan airport.  We were arriving in the dark at our new home, arriving in the early morning hours.

It was Easter.  We were shown our rooms at Villa San Paolo -- boys on the second floor, girls on the third.  As close to coeducational living as any university students had ever experienced in those days.  We collapsed in our beds only to arise again -- perhaps half the group, members of any or no faith -- three hours or so later to attend Easter morning mass at the small parish church around the corner, the church that in some way owned the villa. 

We walked out the gate into the early light of morning.  The first Florentine resident I saw was a small lady, dressed all in black, sweeping her doorstep with a primitive broom.  I really was in Italy.  My image of Italy.  My first travel outside North America.

Duomo

The church was surprisingly modern in design, and I was mildly appalled by the use of electric lights for candles.  But in those days, the mass everywhere was in Latin.  Everything, aside from a sermon delivered in excitable Italian, was quite familiar.

Last week, I arrived by rail from La Spezia at Florence's Stazione Santa Maria Novella.  I arrived not in the dark, but in the late dusk.  I wasn't delivered to a villa, or shown to what was in effect a dorm room.  Instead, GPS in hand, I walked less than ten minutes to a decent hotel room I had booked, half way between the station and the Duomo (Florence's famous cathedral).  Fortunately, although by then dark, it wasn't too late to go exploring, and I walked around the Duomo and down the avenue to the civil authorities' corresponding "cathedral," the Palazzo Vecchio (or Palazzo della Signoria).  The night was warm, the crowds were out, the streets were packed.  The floodlit buildings glowed in the darkness like ghosts out of the past.  Florence once again worked its magic on my imagination and on my soul.

Duomo seen at the end of
a quiet nighttime street

I had given my self the entire following day to revisit Florence, my train back to Rome not leaving until 5:30 p.m.  I made the pilgrimage I always make when in Florence -- the half hour walk back up toward Fiesole, to Villa San Paolo.  Florence really hasn't changed much, physically.  The buildings remain the same.  There are more traffic lights.  The buses are newer -- you no longer enter the rear entrance and pay your fare (30 lire, or about 5 U.S. cents) to a little man sitting at a small desk who gives you a flimsy ticket.  The local people are better dressed, but still conservatively dressed by today's standards.  The residential streets seem to carry less traffic than I recall from past visits.

Street approaching Villa
San Paolo

But the downtown streets -- the area where the tourists gather -- are much different in their usage (but not their appearance), from the streets I first remember.  Like then, of course, most of those streets have very narrow pedestrian sidewalks -- wide enough for only one person to pass.  But my memories are of streets crowded with motor vehicles, and of one's difficulty keeping on the sidewalk and out of the traffic.  The traffic flow around the Duomo was always heavy.  Mary McCarthy devotes much of the first chapter of her The Stones of Florence (1956) to the horrors of Florentine traffic.

Those who try to sight-see discover the traffic hazard.  The sidewalks are mere tilted rims on the edge of the building fronts; if you meet another person coming toward you, you must swerve into the street; if you step backward onto the pavement to look up at a palace, you will probably be run over.

Now, motor traffic is barred from virtually all of the downtown.  Necessarily so, I would imagine, because the tourist pedestrian traffic fills the streets.  The increase in tourism since my first stay in Florence is almost unbelievable.  Florence has always attracted tourists.  E. M. Forster wrote his novel about tourism in Florence, A Room with a View, in 1908.  But in 1961, tourists were still isolated individuals.  I was always surprised to hear an American accent; I was delighted once when an American approached me and asked me directions in halting Italian.  Today, the areas around the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio are beehives swarming with tourists, tourists with American accents, as are most of the nearby streets around them.

Villa San Paolo

And yet, move but two or three blocks even farther away, and the pedestrian traffic is minimal.  I'm not sure how the motor traffic was banished without serious inconvenience to residents -- there must be parking lots outside the city limits.  I would expect to see a large expansion of public transit, just to fill the needs of local residents, but the bus lines appear about the same as they were decades ago, with no more buses on the streets. 

But, whatever the sacrifice of convenience by the local people, from the tourist's perspective the abolition of motor traffic has been a great gift.  The magnitude of today's tourism would hardly be possible without it.

But I long ago digressed!  The walk to Villa San Paolo was much as I recall it as a student.  The villa itself has long ago been taken over for other uses, and since the last time I was in Florence, ten years ago, access has been barred with a locked gate.  I had to take my souvenir photos through narrow slots in the gate.  The church below the villa is still functioning, and still looks oddly modernistic.  The little tobacco shop, a block or so away, where we students bought our soap, toothpaste, and postage stamps, is now gone, but I could hardly expect the city to remain frozen in time circa 1961.

Parish church adjoining
Villa San Paolo

When I visit Villa San Paolo, I often continue up the road past the villa to the little hilltop town of Fiesole, but I had too little time this year, and the temperature -- although ten degrees or so cooler than I had experienced in Rome -- still deterred me from setting out on a long, uphill walk.  I returned downtown.

In 1961 -- and even much later -- the Duomo and other churches of historical importance were wide open to the public.  You just walked in and looked around.  On several visits to Florence, I climbed stairs to the top of the dome, enjoying the view.  Now, there are lines everywhere.  Church authorities finally concluded, I gather, that their churches are not only places of worship but also historical monuments.  And fees for admission are therefore charged.  Which is reasonable.  Neither the church nor the city has an obligation to provide amusement to their visitors without asking some compensation -- but it makes sight-seeing less spontaneous.

The Uffizi Museum, home of world-famous Renaissance art, has always charged admission, of course.  But you used to pay your minimal admission fee, enter, and wander about in the company of a small group of fellow visitors.  In 2019, on the other hand, the line outside the Uffizi was too discouragingly long to even consider joining.

Statue of "Fernando the Great"
staring down the street at
the Duomo

In one of Mary McCarthy's other books, this one a novel, Birds of America (1964), she has her protagonist, a teenage college student, vent his frustration with the crowds of tourists milling about the floor of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  He notes that the congestion simply means that no one is able to contemplate the art work in a manner that makes the visit worthwhile.  He suggests to an unsympathetic professor that admission to major architectural and artistic sites should be by competitive examination, with a certain number of places reserved for admission by lottery (to add a non-elitist element to the program).  Like the boy, I find the idea attractive in the same way that I find feudalism attractive -- by assuming that I myself would be one of the privileged few.

But, seriously, visiting a museum or famous church in the company of a few other visitors is a different experience from being forced to struggle your way through a crowd.  The decreased value of the experience is real, but I -- unlike McCarthy's young Peter Levi -- have no solution to put forth.


Quiet street in the Oltrarno

In my remaining time before returning to Rome, I followed the Arno river downstream, past the Teatro Comunale, where I saw "West Side Story" as a student, performed as part of Florence's annual Maggio Musicale festival.  I then crossed a bridge over the Arno to the quiet "Oltrarno" section of the city, hiked back on up to the Ponte Vecchio, crossed back, and collapsed into a chair at an outdoor café, where I lingered happily over a late lunch. 

Ever since I was a student, Florence has woven its way in and out of my life, each time I've returned to Italy.  We've become pretty good friends.  We plan to get together again soon.

Roamin' about Rome

Hadrian's Tomb across the Tiber

Impressions of Rome: August 2019.  My eighth visit to the Eternal City, from which I returned Thursday. 

The heat.  Good golly!  None of my prior visits have been this hot.  The temperature reached the high 90s virtually every day.  I took a siesta -- reading in my air conditioned room -- each day between about 1 and 5 p.m., after which the temperature dipped below 95.  Visitors to Rome have always complained about the August heat, and those Romans who can swing it take the entire month as a vacation.  They flee to the beaches or to northern climes, leaving the city to the clueless tourists.

The people.  As a corollary of the above, Rome in August is a city full  of tourists.  Largely American, judging from overheard voices and accents.  I've joked about American tourists in the past -- their ignorance, their lack of sensitivity, their loudness, their, well, American-ness.  Either I've grown more mellow with time, or there has been a real change in the typical American tourist.

Traveling alone, I had plenty of time to observe those around me, and I was pleasantly surprised by many or most of my compatriots.  They spoke quietly, they were good-humored, they seemed intelligent, they were interested in what they were seeing.  They were traveling on their own, not herded about in tour groups (nor were the Japanese tourists, of whom there were many).  They seemed at ease.  They brought their teenage and pre-teen kids, also a revelation.  The kids weren't whiny and bored, even when it was hot and they must have been tired.  They sat at dinner with their parents, joining in the conversation with interest and laughter.  I saw no eye-rolling at the follies of the "old folks."  Does Rome improve kids?  Or do only "good" kids come to Rome?

The major attractions.  Don't go to Rome in August -- or maybe anytime during the summer -- planning to check items off your bucket list.  The Vatican Museum, St. Peter's, the Colosseum, the Forum?  Maybe one of them, if you have the time, but not all of them.  How long can you tolerate standing in line in unshaded 98 degree heat?  Nor maybe should you count on visiting many of the other, lesser indoor attractions, such as certain churches -- a surprising number of which had lines.  Save those for another visit, if possible -- a visit during an off-season.

Lonely streets in the centro storico.  Don't get me wrong -- even in August, there are plenty of "lonely streets," plenty of quiet corners in which to sit and reflect.  But under this strange heading, I include a goal, which even I myself hadn't quite formulated -- to wander alone, pleasantly lost, in the centro storico -- the maze of ancient streets in the Campo Marzio between the Tiber and the major arterial called the via del Corso.   I'd wandered into that area on earlier trips, but without quite understanding the area's history.  But I had since read André Aciman's atmospheric reflections:

This warren of old alleys goes back many centuries, and here sinister brawls, vendettas, and killings were as common in the Renaissance as the artists, con artists, and other swaggerers who populated these streets. … Getting lost -- the welcome sense that you are still unable to find your way in this maze of side streets -- is something one never wishes to unlearn ….
--André Aciman, Alibis, "Roman Hours."

In August, the maze of streets and piazzas remains magical, but not really sinister and not so conducive to daydreaming while one wanders.  I still was lost, constantly, but the maze is full of your American countrymen, and every tiny trattoria or café has extended its tables and chairs out into the streets.  The magic is real, but it's a more immediate and contemporary magic than the echoing sounds of old duels and brawls and the clashing of swords suggested in Aciman's writing.

So those are some of the reasons not to visit Rome in August.  But if you can't go in, say, June -- by all means go in August.  Neither the heat nor the crowds could overcome my conviction that there were few places on earth better worth visiting, and especially visiting as a solo traveler.  And especially, if walking is for you a pleasure, and not an unavoidable chore.

I was in Italy for only one week, and out of that week I spent only 3½ days in Rome itself.  But in that 3½ days, I walked 53 miles.  Rome's a big city, but a very walkable city.  It has three subway lines, which are sometimes useful, but the subway doesn't cover the tourist's city in the way New York's does.  I used it most frequently as a quick way to move from my hotel, near the railway station, to the Spanish Steps, which served me as a launching point to the centro storico, the Tiber riverbank, and the Vatican area.  But taking the subway in Rome was like driving to a trailhead in the Pacific Northwest -- the walking had yet to begin. 

And more frequently, I just started walking from my hotel.  Either walking down the via Nazionale to the Victor Emmanuel monument, and from there following the Corso directly to the Spanish Steps.  Or, more interestingly, walking south past the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran, looping back to the Colosseum, around the Palatine Hill, past the Circus Maximus, to the Tiber.  (I provide these details only because they're fun to write down.)  As the days passed, I discovered (or remembered) alternative streets leading from the railway station area, but those were the two principal routes away from my hotel toward "tourist" Rome.

Days before I left Seattle, newspapers carried the startling news that the police were banning tourists from sitting on the Spanish Steps -- something tourists had done for generations.  Rome is one large museum, went the argument, and no one allows tourists to sit on the floor of the New York Metropolitan Museum eating sandwiches and ice cream.  And, like it or not, no one was sitting on the steps, although the police didn't interfere with a minute or two of sitting while a friend took a photo.  At the top of the steps, past the church (Trinità dei Monti), one enters the Borghese Gardens, an enormous park full of museums, amusement rides, a zoo, a lake, and playing fields.  I had often skirted the edge of the park, but had never really explored it.  Like New York's Central Park, it was a green haven made for walking -- but less crowded.  It made the city's heat more tolerable at mid-day, and some of the museums sounded worth exploring on a future visit.

I also had passed the famous Hadrian's Tomb (aka Castel Sant'Angelo) on many past occasions, but had never gone inside.  It was well worth the visit, with informative panels explaining the intricate history of the tomb/fortress/palace, and with an excellent view of the entire city and the Vatican from the top. 

Long walks along the Tiber were irresistible, because of both the views and the shade from the sycamore trees planted along its entire length.  Meals at cafés -- mainly but not always -- in the centro storico -- were always good, and never rushed.  (It's a common theme among travel writers that Italian waiters are always available and helpful -- until it's time to pay the bill.)  People watching, while hanging around squares like Piazza Navona and the Pantheon was a source of free entertainment --  watching the buskers, as well as the antics and interactions of my fellow travelers.

One week is not long enough for a trip overseas, but travel creates a form of time dilation.  My visit to Italy was just underway a week ago, but that time feels far more distant.  Aside from my 3½ days in Rome, I spent another two days traveling by train to Levanto on the Ligurian coast for a very brief few hours visit, and then to Florence for a night's sleep, with the following day devoted to the city that was my very first experience with Italy.

I will offer a few thoughts about Florence in a later posting.
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PS -- Another problem with Rome in August is that all of the city's music series seem to end in July or the first week of August, including the open air opera series at the Baths of Caracalla. Operas performed outside obviously don't have the best acoustics going for them, but I saw Aïda at the Baths of Caracalla many years ago, and it made up in drama for anything it lacked in musical fidelity. Fun experience.

PPS -- Gelati! Another reason to visit Italy. A good temporary antidote against 98 degree temperatures!

Print journalism

The Internet is a wonderful invention; after all, it permits me to "blog."  But not all changes that the internet brings us are contributions to our cultural well-being.  One such change has been the increasing disappearance of the print newspaper.

Yesterday's New York Times (still in print, thank god) contained an entire section devoted to disappearing newspapers, one of which was Seattle's own Post-Intelligencer.  I subscribed for years to the P-I, which at the time was Seattle's morning paper; the Times was delivered in the evening.  But the P-I's first edition hit the news stands around 4 or 5 p.m. the night before its official date, actively competing  against the Times on the Times's own turf.   "Read the P-I, stay ahead of the Times" was  the P-I's clever slogan.

But the Times had the last laugh.  The Post-Intelligencer was a Hearst paper, better than many other Hearst papers, for what that was worth.  It was the senior paper, having been published under one name or another since 1863.  The Times was (and is) owned by the local Blethen family, and had been since 1896.  The P-I gave up competing in 2009, and now publishes only an on-line edition.  The Times switched to a morning paper, once the P-I was gone, recognizing that evening papers were disappearing across America.

Seattle, like most other cities, thus became a one-newspaper town.  The P-I joined the dust heap of history along with Portland's Oregon Journal, San Francisco's Examiner and its Call-Bulletin, and Los Angeles's Herald-Examiner.  With print readership down, one newspaper per city may make financial sense, but it makes reading the paper less fun.  Especially for people like me who, even as a student, managed to read the P-I each day with breakfast, and the Times before dinner. 

Paralleling the decline in metropolitan newspapers has been the decline in student newspapers.  At the university level, I'm now most familiar with the University of Washington Daily which, despite its name, since 2018 has come out only once a week in print format.  My undergraduate school's paper, the Stanford Daily, on the other hand, still publishes a daily print edition with weekly supplements for entertainment and for sports.  Its circulation is 8,000 and it is distributed at 500 locations on and off campus.  Its motto, at least when I was in school, was "The Peninsula's Only Daily Newspaper," although "daily" meant five school days per week.

But the newspaper that has meant the most to me died long ago.  My high school paper was the Lumberjack Log ("log," get it?  haha).  It was published every two weeks on the presses of our city's daily newspaper, and its distribution was eagerly awaited by a student body anxious to see their names and the names of their friends in print.

When I ask myself what aspects of high school were most meaningful to me -- meaningful in the sense of igniting my interest and having some impact on my future life, as opposed to merely providing me with credits needed for graduation -- I have no hesitation in pointing first to editing the Lumberjack Log and, as a somewhat distant second, taking part in school theatrical productions.  Work on the paper taught me not just how to lay out a page or copyread stories or act as a reporter, but how to meet deadlines, deal with the hopes and egos of fellow students, and produce a product that I could both take pride in and be held accountable for.  I still have a bound copy of all the Logs published my senior year.

The Log staff exchanged papers with a large number of other high school papers in the state.  Many were inferior to ours -- little more than mimeographed newsletters -- but many were much more impressive.  I used to pore over the papers from large Seattle high schools, marveling at both their technical superiority and at the more sophisticated student body their writing seemed to represent.  I will now give special recognition to the Kuay Weekly, a now defunct publication of a now defunct Queen Anne High School.  Queen Anne's building, high atop Queen Anne Hill, was converted to condominiums back in about 1981, when it seemed that everyone with families was moving out of the city.  Perhaps Queen Anne may someday be reconstituted in a new building -- if so, I hope the Kuay Weekly is revived.

As I say, at some point -- I have no idea when -- the Log, which had been a school institution since the founding of both the high school and the city in 1923, simply ended publication.  Probably from lack of interest from students who had grown less apt to read newspapers and less apt to be interested in extracurricular activities.  I assumed until today that high school journalism was essentially dead in all high schools.

But I see that all of the Seattle high schools in my part of town, at least, still publish school papers.  The Garfield Messenger, the Roosevelt News, Ballard's The Talisman, and Nathan Hale's Sentinal.  I can't tell whether these papers are all published in print format, or merely on-line, but both Garfield's and Roosevelt's do seem to be.  Their graphics are vastly superior to anything we had available to us when I was in high school.  I hope their writing is as good as their graphics.

The fact that Seattle school newspapers seems to be bucking the tide of retrenchment, seen in metropolitan papers -- while the Log from my home town has faded into oblivion -- may be another sign of the differing opportunities available to the affluent and the not-so-affluent.  Seattle is booming and its schools, if not rolling in money, are better supported than most large city schools.  My home town, on the other hand, like many other small, non-suburban towns, is in a period of prolonged decline.

But cities rise and they fall.  I have hopes that the proud name of Lumberjack Log will be revived at some time in the future, supported by a city that itself will be reviving.

Trains and planes

A thousand miles seems pretty far
But they've got planes and trains and cars.

--Plain White T's, "Hey There Delilah"

I leave a week from Thursday for Rome.  It will be a short, one-week trip.  Why not longer?  A question I now ask myself.

But although I'll actually have only 3½ days in Rome itself, plus a two-day side trip to Levanto and Florence, as I discussed in an earlier post -- and will be back in Seattle before I have a chance to become fully acclimated to "Central Europe Summer Time"-- I couldn't feel more excited. 

Why?  Partly because 5½ days in Italy is better than two weeks in most parts of the world, even including Tulsa, Oklahoma.  But also because -- as I realize as I ponder the question -- I simply like the mechanics of travel.

I like airports.  Not so much TSA lines, although Pre-Check removes most of their sting.  But I like the atmosphere, the excited travelers, the constant departures to places to which I've never yet been, and to other places that I've visited and loved. 

I like airplanes.  Although the airlines seem determined to do everything possible to make plane travel unpleasant, I remain enthused.  I'm too short and skinny to be bothered (yet) by decreasing knee space.  I miss the meals on domestic flights, but the food on international flights remains decent or better -- and part of the fun of meals is to interrupt the monotony of sitting in one place.  But I also love, to some extent, that very same monotony.  A book to read; an old classic movie to watch or a new movie I'm too lazy to see in a theater.  Music on my iPhone -- when else but on long flights do I listen repeatedly to the "Goldberg Variations"?!

Once I arrive, I love train travel.  I've written on this blog repeatedly about the joys of Amtrak's long haul trains.  Train travel is much faster in Europe, so one rarely lingers for hours these days in an overnight "Wagons Lits" accommodation.  But their fast trains are very comfortable, and the scenery zooming past your window is great.  I'll be taking a 4½ hour high speed train from Rome to Levanto (on the Ligurian coast between Pisa and Genoa), and a 1½ hour high speed train from Florence to Rome. 

"Planes and trains and cars."  Cars aren't my favorite way to travel, but a rental car picked up at the airport or at the end of a railway journey and used for visiting small towns in the region affords access to certain areas that would be unattainable otherwise.  Especially when many countries have cut back their rail service to many small towns off the main lines.  No car rental this time, but I'll be renting a car a couple of weeks later to reach my sister's house, some three hours from Sun Valley airport.

City buses and subways?  Absolutely.  Figuring out their routes is one of the great joys of visiting a large city.  Note all my posts about maneuvering through subway systems, including my 2009 review of Lowboy, a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who lived in the New York subway!¹

Even long-distance buses can be fun.  When I was a college student, I frequently rode the Greyhound between school in California and home in Washington state.  Bus rides were associated in my mind with "finals are over!"  Since those days, I've read an essay that  David Sedaris wrote a couple of decades ago about a bus ride from hell that he endured in Middle America.²  Sedaris's vivid powers of description, although funny, do make me a little nervous about venturing again to "leave the driving to us," but I've also heard people claim that the buses have become much more enjoyable in recent years.

What I'm saying is that yes, even were I going to Tulsa for a week, I'd probably be looking forward to the trip, just because -- hey! -- travel is travel.  Out of the house and into the world!  Maybe for an introvert, travel is a substitute for long, convivial conversations, night after night, at the neighborhood tavern.  Who knows?  The heart has its reasons of which one's reason knows not, and even if reason knows it isn't talking.  To me, at least. 

So, as I say, I'm off to Rome.  A week in Rome would be something I'd anticipate even if I were being "teleported" there electronically in a nanosecond, using some quirk of quantum physics.  But combined with the blessed "mechanics" of travel? 

Yes!  Only 205 hours until take-off, bro!
-----------------------------
¹ John Wray, Lowboy (2009)
²David Sedaris, Naked, "c.o.g." (1997)

Families

Sedaris siblings as kids
Clockwise from top left:
Gretchen, Lisa, David, Tiffany,
Paul, and Amy  

How could anyone purposefully leave us -- us, of all people?  This is how I thought of it, for though I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.  It's an archaic belief, and one I haven't seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it.  Ours is the only club I'd ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn't imagine quitting.  Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you'd take your own life?

--David Sedaris, Calypso, "Now We Are Five"

Sedaris is stunned that his youngest sister, Tiffany, has committed suicide.  When you're privileged to be a Sedaris, he thinks, why would you give it all up by voluntarily dying?

So, I think to myself,  I'm not unique.  I'm not the only person who's always felt that being a member of my family somehow lifted me above the common herd.  Not that we're the best family on the face of the earth, but certainly way above those we've encountered in our own lives.  It's clear that our Christmas traditions, our family jokes, our style of vacations, not only differ from others, but are easily better than those of our would-be peers by any objective standard.

From an objective point of view, admittedly, one might question Sedaris's faith in his family.  He himself -- and I speak of his persona in his essays, not knowing how exaggerated that picture might be -- is an entire constellation of neuroses.  As a child, he suffered severely from obsessive-compulsive disorder, forcing him to face an exhausting list of items that he was required to touch each day on his way home from school.  He has put his OCD to a slightly less irrational use as an adult: Starting out with the common goal of walking 10,000 steps, or four miles, per day, he quickly demanded more and more of himself, ultimately spending most of each day walking 25 to 30 miles, and picking up highway litter as he walked.  He claims, probably truthfully, that his region of West Sussex, where he now lives as an adult, is stunningly litter-free compared with surrounding areas.

He was a mediocre student in school, and an ambitious but untalented art student in college.  He spent years doing menial labor, his brain addled by an amazing assortment of drugs.  His life for years was one series of humiliations after another.  I haven't yet read an essay explaining how he transitioned from this unpromising beginning into a world-famous comic speaker and writer, but it's probably out there somewhere to be read.

His four sisters were each different, and all more or less weird.  There was Tiffany, who lived in squalor for years, ignoring her family.  The personalities of the other three girls are less precisely defined, but together they were the type who, once the first joys of childhood were past, spent their time at the beach avoiding the water and stretched out on a blanket working on their tans.  David's brother Paul, the youngest child and the only one born in North Carolina, where they all grew up, rather than upstate New York, where the others were born, was the kind of guy who could not speak a simple declaratory sentence without including at least three obscenities.

The mother was a character, who could charm everyone, including her family, assisted by the glass of wine in her hands.  The father? David was convinced that his father had never felt any affection whatsoever for him, only contempt -- from David's earliest memories until his father finally thawed a bit as he approached his 90s.

Not only was each member of the family dysfunctional in one or more ways, but so, consequently, was the family as a unit.

And yet, David feels they were and are better people than anyone else -- the only club he ever wanted to be a member of.

Every member of my family, none more so than myself, is weird in varying degrees.  And so must the entire ensemble appear to those who know us well.  And yet, I can truthfully say that none of us is as weird as the least weird of the Sedaris family, at least as portrayed by their famous son.  So my professed belief in the perfection of my own family passes what we lawyers call "the straight face test" -- i.e., I could profess it in court, looking the judge in they eye as I spoke.

I do not contend that every family evidences this same chauvinism; I've spoken with too many sad folks who hate their families and avoid them at all costs.  Even David's sister Tiffany refused to communicate with her parents and siblings in her final years, leaving behind -- as a shock for her heirs -- boxes full of family photos which she had torn into small pieces.

But, even admitting such exceptions, it does seem to be human nature to feel pride in one's family, however odd that family may seem to others, and to be convinced of its superiority -- not so much for its achievements as the world sees them but for the private secrets and traditions known perhaps only to themselves .  Thus the House of Lancaster was pitted against the House of York.  Thus the Tudors and Stuarts.  And the Roosevelts and Clintons.  Families whose members sincerely believe they belong to the Finest Club Ever. 

Even when, or especially when, they suspect that no other club would have them. 

Shmoo

I recently reviewed a novel (Rabbit and Robot), set about 50 years from now, when, for the great bulk of society, automation had eliminated all job choices except those of coders (for programing robots) and soldiers (for fighting wars that had become essentially a form of fatal recreation).  It was a dysfunctional version of an ideal world that I've often enjoyed discussing with willing and unwilling listeners.

In my version, however, life becomes a paradise.  The most creative members of society still have opportunities to advance civilization, and are rewarded for their accomplishments.  For the great majority of citizens, however, the folks who used to man assembly lines, employment would no longer exist.  Automation would produce with little human input all the goods and services that were needed, and all members of society would share in those goods and services.  A minimum standard of living would be guaranteed everyone.

Interestingly enough, almost everyone is furious at this idea. Capitalists hate seeing anyone get something for nothing, of course. But it's also resisted by the intended beneficiaries.  Maybe because they can't figure out how they would spend their lives if not required to work 9 to 5.  Or maybe because of the biblical injunction that fallen man must live by the sweat of  his brow.  (Not many American brows sweat much anymore, actually.)

The hostile reaction by capitalists was anticipated back in 1948 by the cartoonist Al Capp in his popular satirical comic strip Li'l Abner.  In that year, he drew a sequence of strips dealing with a new topic, a topic to which he frequently returned in subsequent years -- the shmoo.   Everyone talked about shmoos. In my family, when one of us kids worried about the poor little piggy or lamb whose meat we were eating for dinner, my dad assured us that it had been a "shmoo piglet" or a "shmoo lamb."  We read the comics, and we understood the allusion.

Wikipedia reminds me that Abner discovered the shmoos in the Valley of the Shmoon.  They were a strange and versatile animal.

They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying exponentially faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.

Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)

They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.

The use of "shmoon" for the plural is a bit pedantic.  Everyone I knew called them "shmoos."

Their most interesting quality, and the one to which my dad referred, was their joy at being eaten.  Without this craving for self-immolation, their tasty qualities would be heart-breaking, because of their lovable personalities.  Eating Bambi would have been easy by comparison.

The critics -- political, economic, philosophical, moral -- were enraged by the way in which the plot developed.  Once the world learned of the excellent quality of the shmoos, the world is turned upside down.  Li'l Abner is quick to understand the consequences: ("Wif these around, nobody won't nevah havta work no more!!")  The traditional economy collapses.  Everyone has everything he needs.  No one buys anything.  Folks just embrace the lovable shmoos, and eat them.  The Malefactors of Great Wealth were no different in 1948 from today -- relentless.  The capitalists hired "Shmoo Squads" to exterminate the shmoos and eliminate this threat to "The American Way." 

As automation turns the economy upside down, I doubt if we'll see corporate-created "Robot Squads," because automation, unlike shmoos, is the creation, the tool of the capitalists.  Robots enhance corporate profits, rather than undermine them. 

But for the average working stiff, the question remains:  Would automation/shmoos bring a worker's paradise, where every citizen can become a painter, a novelist, a singer, a hobbyist?  Or would we all be bored out of our minds and, like the citizens in Rabbit and Robot enlist in the military and go to war, out of a sheer sense of ennui?  

Or choose a third alternative, perhaps the most likely, one that's becoming increasingly prevalent wherever jobs become scarce -- live life on drugs. 

I hope not.  I don't think our little shmoo friends would like it.

Tasty little devils.

Princess Ida

Pat and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Bagley Wright Theater last night, for the 64th (I think?) season's production of the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society -- this year, Princess Ida.

Arthur Sullivan always considered himself a serious musician, a notch above the comic operas he orchestrated in partnership with W. S. Gilbert.  After the successful production of Iolanthe, still playing in 1883, Sullivan wanted to jump ship and go off on his own.  But, as is so often the case, financial constraints forced him to sign a five-year contract, together with Gilbert, with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre in January 1884.

Gilbert had written a libretto for Princess Ida in 1870, based on an 1847 poem by Tennyson, but he rewrote it for his collaboration with Sullivan.  Attendance was poor, for a number of reasons, and its season was short.  It was not performed again until 1919.  Nevertheless, it is considered one of their better comic operas.

The plot is a spoof on feminism and education for women, which were hot topics in Victorian England. 

Prince Hilarion was betrothed at birth to Princess Ida, of a neighboring kingdom.  But now that the hour for marriage is at hand, Hilarion's father, King Hildebrand, discovers that Ida has decided to have nothing to do with men, and has founded a women's university.  Hildebrand threatens his counterpart, King Gama, with war if Gama's daughter doesn't come to her senses.

The two kings send Hilarion off to decided the matter by force.  But Hilarion, a typically dreamy-eyed G&S hero, hopes to somehow woo his reluctant fiancée, charming her into marriage.  With two buddies, he sneaks into the university -- nicely staged by the Seattle company -- and is appalled by what he sees:  The female students are taught that men are stupid apes, and that women are superior.

The three men don women's student robes to disguise themselves, allowing them to mingle with the students, but one of the boys gets drunk during dinner and gives away their secret.  They are seized and held prisoner, with death looming as their punishment.  However, it becomes increasingly clear that many of the students, as well as some of the faculty, consider the handsome "manliness" of Hilarion, his friends, and his soldiers a true and startling revelation.

King Hildebrand arrives on the scene with his soldiers, and the women who were intended to defend the university fade away at the thought of actual, rather than theoretical, fighting.   Ida is left only with the three sons of King Gama to defend her.  A brief struggle ensues, Ida's forces are defeated, and Ida agrees to the marriage, accepting it only after it is pointed out to her that if women avoid all men, they will have no posterity.  "I never thought of that," she exclaims with wide eyes. 

As in so many G&S operas, the final scene is one of joy on behalf of the entire company, with ensemble singing, as all of the men pair up with all of the women, and everyone plans to live happily ever after.

The plot may sound a bit, um, "dated," as well as farcical, to our modern, enlightened ears, but it is farce, after all and not to be taken seriously.  Our local production was very well sung and acted.  More so, perhaps, than in Victorian times, there was an almost Shakespearean premium placed on cross-dressing and gender confusion.  It is surprising that King Gama has sired three sons and a daughter, as he flounces around the stage, emanating elegance, and flirting with both young men and young women. 

Gama's three sons turn out to be -- in this production, but not traditionally -- three daughters, revealed when they remove their helmets and let their long hair blow free.  They fight with more hilarious gusto and defiance than the soldiers who defeat them, leaving their gender with at least a moral victory.  In fact, to me it appeared they had defeated their opponents, but that's not how the plot reads.

Not really one of my favorite G&S operas -- Pirates of Penzance is next year, yippee! -- but funny, quite musical, and only superficially topical.  Excellent acting.  See it if you're in town between now and July 28.

Venice Observed

As I've mentioned in some past post, I first became acquainted with Mary McCarthy during my sophomore year at college in a course on Renaissance history, when we were given a series of articles she had written in the New Yorker about Florentine life, history, and art.  The articles were consolidated into a book, The Stones of Florence, published in 1959.

"How can you stand it?"  According to Ms. McCarthy, this was the first question every visitor to Florence asked.  The town was dry, unattractive, business-oriented.  When the traffic momentarily stops, she wrote, one heard two characteristic sounds:  "the clack-clack of a sewing machine and the tinkle of a young girl practicing on an old piano."  The closest American analogy she could think of was Boston.

A year after taking my Renaissance history class, I attended school for six months in Florence.  I loved it.  "How can you stand it?" was certainly a question I never asked. Visit today and you'll discover that Florence has become virtually loved to death.  Read Mary McCarthy's book, and you realize that she loved it as well.

All this is prelude to my thoughts about an earlier book by Mary McCarthy, written in 1956, Venice Observed, a volume some regard as a warm-up for her better known study of Florence.  In both books, she combines reportage on the present day city with a much more extensive study of each city's history, commercial development, politics,  artistic achievements, and collective personality.

If Florence appears, at least at first glance, dry and withdrawn, business-oriented, old money aristocratic, somewhat off-putting for the casual tourist -- building after building being plain and brown on its exterior, hiding from prying eyes an often beautiful and lavish interior -- Venice, on the other hand, is all exterior, all beauty and ornamentation displayed openly as proof of the importance and commercial success of its owners. 

McCarthy describes how the cantankerous, nineteenth century British art critic John Ruskin loved to prowl around the city, finding statues and buildings that had been finished only on the side facing the public. The implication being that Venetians, unlike Florentines, cared little for artistic integrity as opposed to the impression they made on their neighbors. American readers may squirm a bit.

Venetian art, she argues, is beautiful but derivative.  All the important artistic advances had been made in Florence and other Italian and Northern European cities; Venice used those advances to entertain its own people and attract what had begun very early -- tourism.  When the sailing routes around Cape Horn opened up, Venice lost its commercial advantage as the provider of ships and transport across and about the Mediterranean.  Tourism quickly took its place.

And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples.  The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's Quadri's, Torcello, Harry's Bar, Muriano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto.  Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself.

But before then, Venice, more than other cities, had long looked to the east for its income and its cultural influences.  Its ships carried the products of the Spice and Silk Roads from the Levant to Western Europe.  Its ships had carried the Crusaders from Western Europe to the Holy Land, and raided the Christian cities of the East to ensure a profit.  (McCarthy describes the disgraceful sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.) 

Venice's art, as a result, was heavily influenced by Byzantine art, with the improved techniques of the Italian Renaissance a subsequent development.  But while Byzantine art and architecture were heavily spiritual in their development, Venice's adaptations were the adaptations by a society of businessmen who were celebrating their own status and success.

A wholly materialistic city is nothing but a dream incarnate.  Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. … The Venetian mind, interested only in the immediate and the solid, leaves behind it for our minds, clear, dawn-fresh images out of fairy tales.

Mary McCarthy, in addition to her other talents, is a student of art.  In Venice Observed, she often overcomes the casual reader with her discussions, analyses, and conclusions regarding Venice's artistic origins and lasting heritage.  The book certainly will most interest readers with some background in the history of the region and the basics of Italian art.  But those passages that seem overly detailed can be skimmed, without losing much of the value of her commentary.

McCarthy does not claim to be original, though many of her conclusions struck me as new.  She modestly suggests:

One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her fur piece and jeweled pin.

Don't let her kid you.  This book has much to offer.  And it demands that some day soon, I must return once more to the City of the Doges.

Roman holiday

I liked nothing better than to lose my way in a labyrinth of tiny, shady, furtive, ocher-hued vicoli, which I hoped would one day, by dint of being strayed in, finally debouch into an enchanted little square where I'd encounter some still higher order of beauty.  What I wished above all things was to amble freely about the streets of the Campo Marzio and to find whatever I wished to find there freely, whether it was the true image of this city, or something in me, or a likeness of myself in the things and people I saw.

--André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, "Roman Hours"

Italy was the first country, outside North America, in which I ever set foot.  I was an impressionable 21-year-old, bowled over by Florence. First impressions stick with you. 

It's now been ten years since my last visit to Rome -- or to Italy in general -- and I've been growing impatient.  Impatient even though -- or perhaps because -- I'm joining a large contingent of family and friends getting together next May in the beach town of Levanto.  A gathering for which I bear some major responsibility.

And so, in three weeks I fly off to Rome.  It will be a fast visit of just one week.  And of that one week, two days will be devoted to a detour to Levanto, an inspection and orientation visit just to assure myself that I haven't made some terrible mistake in luring my trusting relatives to that town.

After three days in Rome, I'll take the high-speed train to La Spezia, just south of the Cinque Terre, connecting with a local train for an additional half-hour ride to Levanto.  After about five hours checking out the Levanto scene -- will that be enough?  I don't know! -- I'll take an evening not-so-high-speed train to Florence, where I'll spend the night.  The following day, I'll wander about Florence, lamenting my lost youth, and then take another high-speed train in the evening back to Rome.

One more day of enjoying Rome, and I'll return to Seattle, looking eagerly forward to our two-week Levanto stay ten months from now.

This will be my eighth visit to Rome over my lifetime, which suggests that I've seen the major Roman "sights."  That's true to an extent -- the Forum, the Colosseum, the Vatican, the major basilicas, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps.  But Rome is the only city that's called "eternal," and over the millennia it has accumulated a lot of other less major sights.  Remnants of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque era, and odds and ends in more recent times including architectural insults by the Italian Trump -- Benito Mussolini.

But such "sights" -- major or minor -- are not the only reason for enjoying Rome.  The last time I was in Rome on my own, in 2009, I spent more time just exploring areas of the city, getting a feel for buildings, the people, the caffès, the parks, the musical performances.  You can enjoy a couple of hours or so -- especially in the frequently unbearable August heat -- just nursing a beer or a glass of wine at a sidewalk table and studying the hordes, both local and tourist, that pass by.

Certain areas of the city -- especially the ancient twisting streets of the Centro Storico ("historic center") described by Aciman (above) -- seem just made for walking and getting lost in.  I can't count the times that I've concluded that I was hopelessly lost in an endless maze, and then turned a corner and found the Pantheon or the Piazza Navona or the Trevi Fountain staring me in the face.  To those of us who love labyrinths and getting lost, Rome offers many challenging enjoyments.

An unreal spell always descends upon Rome at night, and the large lampadari on these empty, interconnecting streets beam with the light of small altars and icons in dark churches.   You can hear your own footsteps, even though your feet don't seem to touch the ground but almost hover above the gleaming slate pavements, covering distances that make the span of years seem trivial.  Along the way, as the streets grow progressively darker and emptier and spookier, I'll let everyone walk ahead of me, be alone a while.  I like to imagine the ghost of Leopardi, of Henry Beyle (known to the world as Stendhal), of Beatrice Cenci, of Anna Magnani, rising by the deserted corner, each one always willing to stop and greet me.

Aciman, id.

So I'm looking forward to a fast but enjoyable visit.  I leave August 8 and return the 15th.