dimmi

The title is what waiters say to you when they are taking your order. It literally means tell me, which I like, because it is delivered in a brisk tone like a friend demanding that you spill the gossip. Who would have thought a café normale and a canolo could be big news?

Right. I've neglected this blog terribly. I find it hard to write when I'm bunking down in a room without a door in a house shared with two of my colleagues and my boss--I come home to find three teachers talking shop until eleven at night, people walk in on me getting changed, I can't pee after eleven at night because everyone's asleep and the only bathrooms in the apartment are en suites. I haven't had any private time to turn all my psychic pockets out and see what I've collected. But yesterday I went for a ride around deserted, Sunday-afternoon Reggio and thought about all the reasons things aren't that bad, really, and I got The Shame, and I decided I have to give you something to read twice a week at least. Here is something to read. It is a list, I am afraid, but it has comments and everything.

Watching: The Straight Story. David Lynch makes a film where a vulnerable man makes a lone road trip, encounters a succession of strangers and... they all turn out to be really nice people. Who's funding this one? Oh right, Disney. Props for the deer-killing scene and the war memories, but if the protagonist is too blind to have a drivers licence, why is half the screen time taken up with lingering shots on corn fields and forests so sharp you can see every individual leaf?

Reading: Gravity's Rainbow, about which I can't yet say anything more sensible than 'it's not as hard as I expected it to be'; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which I'm considering for the nine to 13 year-olds' book group I'm starting; and a serious candidate for the best blog in the world.

Hunting: for an apartment, as usual. Last potential place was in a sixteenth-century palazzo with a lot of original features and cathedral ceilings... except in the attic room with the broken window where I hit my head on the door frame on my way out. And I would have had to walk through another lodger's bedroom to get to the toilet. And the other lodgers were a middle-aged man and two mouse-coloured girls (all-over mouse-coloured, hair and skin and eyes) who stood side by side in the lobby and said 'Welcome. We hope you would like to live with us.' Well, when you put it like that.

Overheard in staff room at school: 'Who would you back in a fight: Pavlov's dog or Schroedinger's cat?'
'I'd go with the dog. At least you know for sure it exists.'

Comments by the international drinking community on Australian culture:
'And then at parties you eat little pies. With, like, meat in them.'
'I thought you'd be more, sort of... tanned.'
'What do you mean, who's Nicolle Dickson?'
'Who's that guy, you know, that basketball guy. Oh wait, he's South African.'

radio italy

My Italian is coming along quite quickly. Half of it is cuss words, but even so. I am not making as much conscious effort as I did with French, but my unconscious mind seems to be running its own program. This week it is doing the passato prossimo tense. Whatever I’m doing, whatever the time of day, my brain keeps creating nonsense sentences in this tense. ‘You have looked at a head’ or ‘I have forgotten the boots’ or ‘That baby has eaten the computer.’ It’s odd but it doesn’t really bother me, and I am certainly producing the passato prossimo more smoothly than I did a week ago.

My listening comprehension is slowly improving too. I hadn’t really noticed it until a couple of days ago, when I realised that I was understanding snatches of conversation as I rode through town. Eaves-dropping is something you take for granted in your native language—you pick up five-second fragments of other people’s lives everywhere you go, like it or not. Take yourself out of your native language and suddenly other people’s conversations fade out like white noise. Lately, it is like the radio is tuning back in. My comprehension is still on a delay, so in my head it sounds a lot like this: blah blah incomprehensible blah blah but my wife can’t cook for shit. It’s actually a bit spooky.

cold october rain

It’s getting very cold. They’re roasting chestnuts on the corner and selling them in brown paper bags. Unctuous, floury, a little bit sweet, and very warm. The chestnut people have a little shack set up next to the barbecue. It’s clad in fake wood paneling and inside it has floral carpet, a calendar with photographs of district views and a small television. It looks like a living room from a Martin Parr photograph. All this outside a flashy supermarket on the main street of this wealthy little town.

I’ve never worn a puffy jacket inside city limits before. I look like a geezer. I’m waiting for Matt to send me my The Streets album so I have a soundtrack to match my look.

There is a roller-skating rink next to the school. When I am here at night I can look in through their windows and see the kids making slow circles around the floor. I can’t hear the music. The school is in a brand new commercial complex. Most of the offices and shops are empty, but some of the top-floor apartments are rented. From the balcony I can see in to a white-walled, harshly-lit kitchen. Through the venetian blinds I can see a mother and a child, both of them walking distracted little figure-eights around the room, each talking on a mobile phone.