Snazzy Italian footwear

Imagine that…

*(I hope the artist doesn’t mind me posting this cartoon. Click on the boot to see more of his/her work.)

Cipollapods!

Have you ever wondered about cephalopods? Well, I present you with the first half-vegetable, half-squid: I’ll call it a cipollapod. Cipolla means “onion” in Italian, of course. I found them swimming in my kitchen cabinet this morning. Instead of throwing them away, I catalogued them. Then I threw them away.

Samuel Menashe Reads at the Harvard Club

On this blog, in addition to my atheistic screeds, I like to keep my readers up to date with stuff I publish elsewhere. Usually this kind of stuff has to make it past editors, so it’s kosher (the kids can read it). Here is a poem of mine that came out in the Winter 2011 issue of Italian Americana. It’s not online so, if you don’t subscribe, this may be your only chance to read it. Like you were going to lose sleep over it.

The bad news is that I had to upload this as an image because WordPress blogs can’t really handle poetry. Neither, apparently, can GoogleDocs. Anyway, click on the image above to read the whole thing. It’s the best I could manage.

Note: Samuel Menashe is a real, living poet. I didn’t make him up. He lives in New York City. In 2004 he was – really! – awarded the “Neglected Masters Award” by the Poetry Foundation. The above poem is based on many true events jumbled by memory and then recorded years later by close attention to music and meter.

What are they saying?

I’m looking for a caption for this cartoon.* If you think you have a good one, post it in the comments! You might find inspiration here. Of course, the winner gets his or her caption inserted in the quotes.

*For the cartoon caption winner, see the cartoon archive.

100% nonsense

Despite Phil Plait’s infamous “Don’t Be a Dick” talk last year, I still like him. I just didn’t like his message much. But that’s fine, because disagreement is what I do best (if you don’t count foot massages and omelets). He’s especially good – and kind of dickish in a mild-mannered way – on things like astrology. Here are a few words that should be written on a t-shirt. I know I’d wear it.

We knew this already, but it's still good to hear.

Introducing Monicks

There is a blog I’ve been reading for a few days now by a woman named Monica (hey, my sister’s name is Monica!), who calls herself Monicks. She has made a super-long list of atheists on Twitter to which my name (@godlessinitaly, duh) should be added sometime soon, I hope. So if you’ve never checked out Monicks Unleashed I suggest you do so. She’s way cool.

“Daddy, What’s a Ramone?”

We’re moving, and each time I move I end up reflecting on all the moving I’ve done over the course of my life. I’ve tallied up a total of 22 separate abodes in 36 years. I count as an “abode” any place I’ve lived for at least a month with no more permanent address to call home. To be clear, I’ve included places my father lived after our parents’ divorce, really just a succession of cheap apartments in which I was guaranteed a bed. A third of my “abodes” were in New York City, where I racked up a frightening four in one solar year.

Throughout it all I’ve managed to hang on to a few things — mostly books and records — thanks both to my mother’s basement and her goodwill. Now those things are in jeopardy; she’s moving to a small apartment and my ad hoc collection will have to find another home. The alternative is the dump.

Since I bought most of this stuff used, it would be perfectly natural to bid it all adieu in a similar fashion. I could sell the records and donate the books to a local library, in the spirit of the Greek adage panta rei (“everything flows”). What matters most to me is that they find owners who appreciate them. I know this sounds weird for a bunch of plastic and paper — and it’s purely sentimental — but it matters to me.

My collection isn’t worth much even by the standards of an armchair collector. Sure, I have a few choice albums: an original mono version of Blonde on Blonde, an unpeeled Velvet Underground and Nico, a vinyl copy of Metal Machine Music. It’s nothing any Dylan or Lou Reed fan wouldn’t have, and the records themselves aren’t in excellent shape. As for the books, I shipped a lot of them to Italy on my last visit. But what to do about my four-volume calfskin-bound set of Montaigne’s “Essays”? Throw it in my carry-on bag on my next trip? That’s a tough one.

“Forget about them,” my mother said. “Be glad you have your health. You have a family now. Stop obsessing.”

I know she’s right, but I can’t help obsessing. I’ve read the Stoic philosophers, but I’m not able to entirely repudiate material things. “Don’t preach,” I told her. It didn’t come out well, and I regretted having said it.

What she meant was this: “You’ve done perfectly well without these things for eight years. You’ve made a life for yourself in another country. Let them go. You’ll be happy when you don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

I’m not really attached to things in general; in fact, I don’t own much of anything worth keeping. Once you subtract my ballooning personal library, there’s not much left except furniture and underwear. So I think I should be permitted an occasional excess.

Happily, we’re moving to a place with more space than I’ve ever had in any previous arrangement, so there will actually be room for my things. It would cost an arm and a leg to ship them all here, and that’s a nagging detail, but wouldn’t it be worth it in order to restore the harmony of my collection?

That’s the meat hook beneath my skin right now. Should I heed the noble, philosophical angel on my left shoulder and separate past from future? Or should I listen to the neurotic bibliophile devil on my right shoulder and follow my impulses? The deadline is only a few weeks away and I can’t decide what to do.

Like all parents I entertain a fantasy of sharing my passions with my children. I want our daughter to grow up in a home swarming with books, records and cultural artifacts. Now that personal libraries tend evermore toward the electronic (hypothetically I could stuff every book I own into one wafer-thin Kindle) this seems particularly urgent. I dream of the day when Melissa pulls my copy of, say, “American Yiddish Poetry” off the bookshelf and I get to explain it to her.

Not long ago a columnist in The Guardian wrote ecstatically of getting rid of his “dead tree books.” I was mildly shocked reading what appeared to be a manifesto urging all decent people to toss out their weighty stockpiles in favor of a pared down selection of truly essential volumes. The author was positively gleeful, embracing the changing times. By contrast I am a melancholy, deeply torn 20th Century Man.

Which isn’t to say I’m not going to get an e-book reader someday. The problem is simply which one. Because, despite my 20th-centuriness, I recognize a Catch-22 when I’m in one. It’s simply impractical to keep accumulating books unless I develop a system of filtration. The records are a different matter. I would be happy with just a few of the really meaningful ones, and the bulk on CD or iTunes or whatever nascent technology is in store for us. I’ll miss the cover art, the skipping needle, and actually listening to sides of an album. But I’ll still be able to broadcast music through the house, prompting my daughter’s curiosity.

“Daddy,” I can hear her saying, “what’s a Ramone?”

From The American

Lou Reed’s “Red Shirley”

Lou Reed, probably the biggest single influence on my life and thought, has made a movie about his one hundred year-old cousin. One of the things we always loved about Lou was his empathy (“Lisa Says,” “Candy Says,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” etc…), and now that he’s no longer mainlining meth I bet he’s as charming as ever.

via The Arty Semite

The Sarah Palin of Hip hop

Until yesterday I’d never heard of the ICP, or Insane Clown Posse. Rebecca Watson clued me in as I was catching up on last year’s SGU podcasts. Now I realize I completely missed one of the saddest, most rueful chapters in the history of awful music. And I mean awful. Listen for yourself. Worse, watch these morons in action. It’s like Zinnia Jones says, a “ferocious breed of ignorance.” Palin-like, one might say.