Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Poetry magazine rejects Sandro Penna

Or so they thought. Penna died in 1977.

Dear Sandro Penna:

We’re not going to be able to keep anything from this submission, we’re sorry to say. Thank you, though, for letting us have a chance with your work.
Sincerely,

The Editors
POETRY
444 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1850
Chicago, IL 60611

Penna’s reply:

Dear Editors,

It was indeed an honor to find myself, in the email rejecting my translations thereof, addressed as one of Italy’s greatest 20thcentury poets, Sandro Penna himself! Thank you for the attention.

Sincerely,

miseraestupendacittà

The War Against the Jews

An incomparable description of Hitler’s mental world:

“The Jews inhabited Hitler’s mind. He believed that they were the source of all evil, misfortune and tragedy, the single factor that, like some inexorable law of nature, explained the workings of the universe. The irregularities of war and famine, financial distress and sudden death, defeat and sinfulness – all could be explained by the presence of that single factor in the universe, a miscreation that disturbed the world’s steady ascent towards well-being, affluence, success, victory. A savior was needed to come forth and slay the loathsome monster. In Hitler’s obsessed mind, as in the delusive imaginings of the medieval millenarian sectarians, the Jews were the demonic hosts whom he had been given a divine mission to destroy.”

(Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews p. 21)

I find this passage utterly chilling.

Porn!

Or so you would think. This ad for the Renault Twingo has apparently been banned by RAI and Mediaset because it features lesbians. That’s code for “porn”, as we know. You can see it on La7, the only television station worth watching in Italy anyway. I think it’s a sexy, powerful ad, and lesbians are even less visible than gay men, Jews, Protestants and atheists in this country. They need all the publicity they can get!

Pius XII and his crystal ball

If I told you that Pius XII spent the war years peeking into a crystal ball or shuffling tarot cards in order to divine the future, you might say something like, “What a nutcase!” And you’d be right, I suspect. So what’s the difference when John Cornwell tells us – citing beatification testimony of Pius’ own nephew – that:

…the Pope was in the habit during the war of conducting a form of exorcism to cast out the devil that he assumed inhabited the soul of Hitler – which he did in the dead of night in his private chapel in the papal apartments.

That’s not nuts? Ooga-booga, the Pope communing with the spirits in a private seance (true, one wonders how his nephew knew this) in his most private of Holy Holies? The valiant Pius wrestling with angels for the soul of the world, while Satan stalks the heart of Europe in the form of the Third Reich. Apparently, a papal encyclical would have been wasted on mortal eyes; ditto a radio broadcast in condemnation of Hitler. Pius XII produced nothing of the kind for the duration of the war.

But he wrestled with the Children of Darkness in his private chapel at midnight. How spiritually elevated of him.

Why I tweet

Because now I finally have somewhere to put all those crumpled up notes to myself, quotes, citations and brilliant thoughts that would otherwise get thrown out or catalogued in one notebook after another and never see the light of day. Twitter is perfect for this, and it lets you share them with your followers. Plus, it’s a nice way to gather interesting links for further use. I think of Twitter as an ongoing log, a bit like blogs used to be back when they were web filters. In fact, the blog that gave blogging its name, called Robot Wisdom (“a weblog by Jorn Barger”), really looks more like a Twitter feed than a blog. Too bad it fell victim to its author’s anti-Semitic rantings…

Now I can cancel all those annoying emails I get that I never open from the Anti-Defamation League. I can just follow their Twitter feed and read the things that look interesting. Ditto everyone else. Email can go back to being personal.

(This post has been truncated by my daughter waking up.)

Fortune-teller lady at the truck stop

When I got out of the car to take this photo, my wife couldn’t understand why I would want to photograph this. “It’s pure schlock,” I said. Context is everything.

Exotic boardwalk junk machine.

It’s officially That Time of Year now

Now that Hanukkah is over we can start in on Christmas.

You can’t do this on a computer (yet)

Maud Newton says you can do something similar on an iPad, but only with your finger. I still write poetry (but not much prose) the old-fashioned way, as you can see. Brain activity seems to lend itself nicely to having every thought recorded in a whirlwind of ink. So take that, Mr. Jobs.

(I should add that I am grateful to my computer for being able to upload a handwritten manuscript and make it visible on the Internet via something called a “blog.”)

Manuscript page of "Her Mother's Clothes"

 

 

How do you dedicate an e-book?

I’m sure they’ll figure this one out in good time. But they won’t look like this.