If it doesn’t fit, it’s probably a blog post.
I’ve scheduled an event at Manny’s in the Mission District in the evening of Tuesday, October 14. The event is on EventBrite. HOW COME? Well, Norma and I had a publishing business in San Francisco. I wrote the books and we shipped them out of our garage. It worked really great. Then we moved to Italy. I put the remaining inventory in a storage locker in Daly City. That was nine years...
Favorite Italian punk band from Arezzo: Osaka Flu Favorite piece about Tuscan geology: The Life of a Tuscan Wall Favorite funny Outdoor Dining in the Pandemic video This Week’s Favorite Italian News in English web site: TheLocal.it Favorite Italian Bob Dylan Scholar: Alex Falzon, author of Bob Dylan: Tu Sei quel che sogni (You are what you dream]) Favorite 60s music movie genre: I love...
I’m not sure why I started writing the handwritten journal but it has taken on a life of its own. I write in it nearly every day now. As a lonely expatriate I get a feeling of anonymous connection by putting pages of the handwritten journal on the Internet. Then I see you at a party and you tell me you read it. Which is unlikely since I live in Italy. Still, I think about the possibility...
This time for my flight to Paris to meet my wife Norma I did everything perfectly. For the 9pm flight on Caribes airline — FrenchBee — I arrived at Miami airport at 4pm. It just seemed prudent. I did all the things you do, I checked my one bag electronically at the kiosk, I managed to secure a much better seat for an extra $20, I managed to separate fact from fiction regarding the...
We’ll be in Italy of course because we live there. That’s always weird but less weird every year and this’ll be Year Seven EIGHT! Our first year living in Italy we went to Venice for Christmas and got ripped off at some supposedly great restaurant. C’est la vie, live and learn. This year we local americani will have Thanksgiving dinner with some likewise Americans etc. at...
Last week I was sitting in the yard playing the guitar enjoying my freedom when I put down the guitar and picked up the London Review of Books and chanced upon that same Hamlet quote from last week’s agonized sermon on the disgustingness of sex. Cheesily teased on the cover as “Adam Phillips on FOMO” but more accurately titled inside as “On Being Left Out,” the...
This morning, Monday morning, March 29, 2021, I woke up in Castiglion Fiorentino as usual and was still thinking about a column I published on Salon.com just over fifteen years ago titled, “What’s the Best Method for a Painless Suicide?”. I still to this day receive an occasional letter about that column, both from people who find solace in it and people who call me mean names...
This is not an advice column. This is commentary. Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old, of Woodstock, Georgia, was arrested Tuesday in the murders of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent working in massage parlors. Initial media reports indicated that he claimed he did it because he was a sex addict. Sex addiction is not a trivial matter. But right now his claim feels like a...
This story is all in the comments below.–CT
How do you reach a point where your conscience is overwhelming and you must make the leap?
How do you get to that point?
… where the conscience … blooms, and all the fear subsides, and the conscience floods the spirit, floods the mind, floods the brain, and gives one the courage to just do the right thing. Just fucking do the right thing!”
Full podcast:
Dear reader, This week I made two podcasts. This first podcast, “I cry for My Country” emerged from relentless self-interrogation: What am I feeling about America? What is the origin, the heart of this vague tangle of feelings and evasions that is hovering about me? How can I stop taking refuge in trivialities? What needs to be said? What is urgent, important, necessary? And then, the...
Do you feel like life will never return to normal? Does the future seem like a dim, unending nightmare of isolation? Do you fear that the habits we have acquired will forever dampen the bright spontaneous spirit of social life? Does despair feel like the only realistic response to world conditions? I know many people feel this way. I myself, having survived the COVID-19 disease, having spent...
Dear Reader, Because I fear being misunderstood, because I care what you think of me, I want to add an addendum to yesterday’s podcast but I don’t want to do it via podcast because while in one way a podcast is less work, i.e. all I have to do is talk and let the talk wander where it will, that method can lead pretty far afield, and this requires some precision: So I was watching TV moments...
NOTE: This is my podcast made the day after the the January 6 2021 attempted insurrection. On the podcast I get the date wrong; I say it’s January 7, 2020. I think that is because, as you can hear, my voice is still hoarse, as I was just three weeks out of my five-week stay in San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy after my catastrophic illness. NOTE: This is my podcast made the day...
October 4, 2020 (the week of his Covid-19 diagnosis, the day before we left for Rome) I’d like to stop thinking about Donald Trump. I thought about him all day yesTERDAY and the day before that and it’s getting kind of ridiculous. I would like to get to the point that I don’t care if he lives or dies. But I keep watching CNN. I would like to stop thinking about what other people say about Donald...
October 11, 2020 The hills north of Rome are green. There is a farmer in a field of sheep squatting over an animal, apart from the herd, lying in the grass. The Tiber river, or Tevere as they call it, snaking slow and low under an ancient stone bridge. The sky that is the blue of Michelangelo. Plowed fields. A house on a hill. The colors of brick and stone and marble. Well-tended vineyard. Old...
October 25, 2020 Oh, gee. I’ve got these notebooks. For 25 years I have been keeping a journal. Since 1995. There were the bleak streetcar years when I rode San Francisco Muni’s N Judah, and then the L-Taraval, across the 7 miles from one side of the peninsula to the other every morning, grabbing the single seat and hunching over my notebook. Through my dark years as a minion at Chevron through...
Hi folks, after five weeks or more of relative silence I wanted to let you know where I am and what’s happening. So I did a short podcast on Buzzsprout. That’s all for now. Be well, hang in there!
Being a poll worker was one of the best things I’ve ever done. If you’ve ever thought about doing it, here’s my advice: Give it a shot! Poll workers were under attack four years ago and they’ll be under attack this election too. It’s a hard, complicated, sometimes boring but wonderfullly rewarding experience. Democracy doesn’t work without poll workers...
Dear reader, In Donald Trump, I see a man obsessed with death but unaware of his obsession with death. What clinched it was his recent rallies. They were literally invitations to infection. The life-affirming had become death-affirming, and the tragic gulf between Trump’s awareness and his actions was palpable. So I began to think about malignant narcissism and the death wish. I would love...
I rode the train to Florence today. I wore my surgical mask and sat only in the designated seats. I walked the streets of Florence today, ate lunch in Florence, bought tea in Florence, visited the Ceccherini music store in Florence, and got back on the train and came home to Castiglion Fiorentino. Then I watched CNN. And I am appalled. I am appalled at America’s failure to contain this...
Every now and then in his reality show called “The President,” Donald Trump tries a gag that fails. The idea probably came to him in the wee hours when he stews and sweats and tweets. It had a glow, it felt right, the idea of getting up there with a goddam Bible on the church steps, shaking that Bible at people like a stick, that Bible must have looked good to him, this square black bomb made of...
Tears come out of my eyes and wet my cheeks and go into my mouth and taste salty. I watch Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tell the citizens of Atlanta to go home and I get it. This is no way to blah blah blah I get it, I hear the reason born of pain and oppression and I get it but I would be there too, wouldn’t I, if I were there. I would also be feeling that enough is enough, fuck it, burn...
I have lived so long with America, with its promise and its shame, with its beauty and its tragedy. I have lived so long now with America’s numbness to its own pain, its impotence, its blindness to its own shame and its own crimes. I have lived so long with this! I am in tears! I am in tears with all the rest of us who have lived with this for so long and have protested and written and spoken and...
I asked readers of my newsletter to write to me and tell me what they see out their windows. PART 1 RAN LAST WEEK. This is Part 2. (the photo above is what I see.)–cary t. 4. Peacocks and mangoes Mumbia, india Dear Cary, Greetings from India, where 1.3 billion people are in lockdown since 25 March. For many weeks, all of us have been doing our best to keep to ourselves. This is no small...
I asked readers of my newsletter to write to me and tell me what they see out their windows. 1. A murder of crows Portland, Oregon Dear Cary, A group of crows is called a murder. A murder of crows. Portland has multiple murders of crows. The Audobon Society says more than 15,000 crows roost in downtown Portland in the fall and winter. I’m not sure about the spring, but my amateur...
After two and a half years working on The Stones of Le Santucce, about the rebuilding of a bombed medieval Tuscan convent into the Residence Le Santucce, the Tanganelli family, the town of Castiglion Fiorentino (and our reasons for leaving America, and the tragic bombing of December 1943, and Napoleon’s suppression of the church, and Garibaldi’s visit in 1849, and the rise of Fascism...
Dear reader, Enjoy with me if you will the humor of this, from my notes on the writing of The Split-Second Forever: Soon after I began living in this little town in Tuscany, I told everyone I was writing a book about it—about Le Santucce, about the history, about medieval building techniques, about Tuscan convents, about this beautiful place the Alfeo Tanganelli built from the bombed-out ruin of...
We will do workshops in Italy again one day, once this awful pandemic recedes! Meanwhile, this post captures some of the spirit of our Italy-based Amherst Writers and Artists method workshops.–Cary T., April 2021 Surprise! A huge chocolate festival happens during our Tuscan Writing workshop. So we’re going there! Come on along! Coincidence, coincidence. While we are having our...
[UPDATE July 27, 2021: I briefly called it “The Split-Second Forever” but the title has gone back to being The Stones of le Santucce.” Just so you know.–ct] I’ve been working on The Stones of le Santucce nearly four years. People are starting to wonder. I saw Professor Alpini this morning, standing near the gate to our little walled garden, talking in the driveway with a...
As I mentioned in a post from the other day, when I decided to create an Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshop centered on food, I started reading the Stories from the Kitchen collection and then someone sent me to this interesting and helpful piece in Poets and Writers. The writer attends a class about food writing, and Corrine, the instructor, says to describe a lemon. “Look again,” said...
In my Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshops sometimes we write using only one-syllable words. It’s really really fun! So I’m thinking up prompts for this “Writing is Delicious” workshop we’re having in October and thinking about using one-syllable words only to describe food, and … We can’t say the word for how we can just have one of them, because it has...
Each piece in the Stories from the Kitchen collection has something interesting to offer about craft. Take for instance the Virginia Woolf piece, the dinner scene from To The Lighthouse. It makes you think about the craft, the way she does things, the way she has her narrator move from inside one person to the next around the table, and how deftly and interestingly she does it, even at one point...