Letteratura on manuel uberti

Le conseguenze dell'amore

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A un tratto le sembra che quel fatto sia soltanto una smagliatura, un’interruzione nella trama delle cose, e a riempirla una storia vale l’altra.

— Atto di famiglia, Alessandra Carati

Raramente penso al divorzio dei miei genitori. Ero appena uscito di casa, stavo già per rifarmi una vita altrove. Sento di non avere mai capito quanto è successo o perché sia successo in quel determinato modo e non in un altro. Non ne parlo mai né ci ripenso mai, come se fosse qualcosa di secondario. E del resto è così che ho imparato a viverlo: come un fatto indipendente da me.

La mia è stata una fuga, in un certo senso, dettata dall’incapacità di affrontare quel periodo della mia vita in modo razionale. Con la scusa di avere lasciato casa per continuare altrove, ho voltato le spalle senza fare e senza farmi le opportune domande. Ho proseguito per lo più ignorando i motivi del divorzio, riducendoli a una mancanza di affetto e semplificandomi così il doverci fare i conti.

Alessandra Carati con il suo Atto di famiglia mi ha insegnato che il divorzio dei miei genitori è tutto meno che qualcosa che posso mettere da parte. Mi ha fatto capire che per conoscermi per chi sono davvero quell’episodio è ineludibile. Va indagato, piuttosto, per comprendere meglio tutte le parti in causa senza cercare conclusioni facili e affrettate.

È proprio con il soffermarsi a turno sulle persone protagoniste della vicenda che Carati mi ha obbligato a riprendere in mano l’accaduto. Invece di offrire una risposta valida per spiegare definitivamente ciò che è successo, l’autrice monzese sceglie prospettive multiple che costringono a rimettere continuamente in questione cause e conseguenze del dissolversi del nucleo familiare. Non si tratta di scegliere una posizione specifica, ma di accettare le inevitabili variabili che rendono ogni esperienza unica.

Carati misura le parole lasciando al non detto il compito di riempire i vuoti spaziali e temporali. Atto di famiglia impone in questo modo le sue linee bianche, tracciando un percorso aperto nella violenza che distrugge la coppia e che ricade impietosamente sulla figlia.

È lei, infatti, a sopravvivere alla disgregazione della famiglia. Incompresa da chi la circonda, con i tratti della madre e del padre che si intrecciano nella sua personalità senza potersene fare una ragione, si nega la possibilità di un confronto costruttivo con i genitori perché il trauma non le dà alcuna tregua, ma anche perché ciò che si è incrinato non si può più aggiustare.

Da adulta il tempo non è più dalla sua parte. I genitori lentamente svaniscono, prede della vecchiaia. A lei rimangono solo frammenti di un rapporto che non l’ha mai vista al centro del dialogo. In secondo piano mentre la famiglia voltava pagina, si trova dunque relegata nell’impossibilità di negoziare ancora qualche parola con il padre e con la madre. Sola, senza conoscersi, non verrà mai a capo delle conseguenze dell’amore.

My 2025

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are again, with another year about to end. You have to excuse me for my silence in the last couple of months, but some things in my life needed particular attention so I haven’t had enough space in my mind to sit down for new writings on this blog.

Even now as I write these words, I am somewhat disconnected from the blank page. In my defense, 2025 has been an emotional roller coaster that I haven’t overcome yet, and I’ve got this bad feeling that 2026 is going to be a hell of a ride for quite some time.

This is to say that this year’s recap won’t look as my usual year’s recap. I’m going to highlight few, memorable things, but that’s it. No lists of any kind, then, just what was worth my while.

work

I lost my job this year, but I was prepared and in September I joined Verlata as a member of the IT department. For the first time in my life I’m working for a social cooperative, which gives a different value to my work. It also asks me to get accustomed to the fact that I won’t be providing software to car factories, banks or insurance companies.

The more I embrace my new career the more it looks like this is a change I was in dire need of. Perhaps it would’ve happened anyway, even if my previous company didn’t shut down. Or maybe not, maybe I needed to be forced into it. Whatever the case, I’m ready now.

education

Thanks to Ribellione Animale I fell in love with nonviolent communication and the world of facilitation. This has led me to join a proper course where I can challenge myself all the time with a new set of skills.

Facilitation is as much about working with a group of people as it is about discovering yourself. It’s a paradigm shift in that it pushes me to look at the world within and around me with another pair of eyes altogether.

What’s more, I’m not even halfway through the course yet and I can safely say it’s going to be a transformative experience.

music

One thing that’s been sort of constant throughout 2025’s most turbulent days is Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, revealed to me in all its intimacy by Warren Zanes’s lovely Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

It’s hard to explain why an old record combining tales of murderers with its author’s past has meant so much. Springsteen’s true intentions here aren’t really clear to me, for instance. Is he trying to sublimate his own experience through the lives of ambiguous characters? Are their stories the evil side of what his conscience is telling us? Is he just a great storyteller and there is nothing more to it?

I don’t know and frankly I don’t care either. What I do know is that Nebraska tells me something relevant to me with every song. And by the way, Scott Cooper’s film inspired by Zanes’s pages is gorgeous.

the end

It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain … remember, remember, this is now, and now and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I don’t want to blot the fear out, and blur the edges of living now. I want to become acutely aware of all that I’ve taken for granted.

— Letter to Edward Cohen, Sylvia Plath

Happy New Year.

Con la coda dell'occhio

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Perché l’affetto quando passa non torna.

— L’arte della gioia, Goliarda Sapienza

È da un po’ che cerco ispirazione. Mi va di aggiornare il blog con qualcosa, ma tutti gli argomenti di cui vorrei scrivere mi scivolano addosso lasciando pochissime tracce meritevoli di essere pubblicate.

Sto leggendo e apprezzando molto L’arte della gioia di Goliarda Sapienza in questi giorni. Mentre lo leggo, però, la mente corre ancora a La morte di Virgilio di Hermann Broch. Un libro quest’ultimo che, pur attestandosi tra i più complessi fra quelli presenti sui miei scaffali, mi ha consegnato le più belle parole dell’anno al momento.

Nonostante mi tenga ancora piuttosto stretto Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, ultimamente ascolto con piacere due dischi nello specifico: Hard Headed Woman di Margo Price e w/ the Producers di Paul St. Hilaire. Country e dub-techno possono convivere fianco a fianco? Sì, e senza litigare per giunta.

Ci sono almeno due film che mi hanno particolarmente, e per motivi diversi, segnato nei giorni scorsi: The Life of Chuck di Mike Flanagan e Together di Michael Shanks. Sono quel genere di cinema che risveglia il mio amore per una passione che tendo sciaguratamente a tenere troppo in secondo piano.

Ognuno dei tre capoversi precedenti, a guardarlo bene, potrebbe fornire lo spunto per un pezzo più lungo. Magari anche più di uno in mani esperte. E poi, non è quello che faccio di solito? Intendo dire, non è di libri, musica e cinema che scrivo e di cui sento il bisogno di scrivere solitamente?

Non riesco a giustificare facilmente la mancanza di stimoli. Mi sento di puntare il dito contro un’esperienza complessa e ancora lontana dal potersi considerare conclusa, nella quale ho visto crescere in me l’affetto per una persona, l’ho visto travolgermi e attraversarmi, per poi prendere una direzione dove solo la coda dell’occhio può ormai percepirlo. Mentre si distanziava subdolamente l’affetto ha deciso di portarsi via qualche pezzo di me. Inutile dire che è necessario ancora uno sforzo per ritrovarmi.

Oppure c’è altro dietro agli stimoli che latitano e devo capire meglio di cosa si tratta. Dopo un paio di mesi senza impiego una nuova avventura è cominciata. È troppo presto per giudicarla obiettivamente adesso, ma se è vero che ho parecchio da fare per essere di nuovo me stesso, allora anche il lavoro dovrà aspettare per vedermi al meglio di quello che posso dare. A patto che questo sia, a tutti gli effetti, il posto dove potere essere la versione migliore di me.

Eppure, in un periodo di questioni irrisolte, ottobre arriva in compagnia di qualcosa di positivo. Annuncerò più in là di cosa si tratta così eviterò di lamentarmi un’altra volta di non avere niente di cui scrivere.

Brucia, dunque disobbedisci

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I say what I mean, and I do what I say.

— Heat, Michael Mann

Uno dei più bei libri che ho letto quest’anno è A fuoco di Gianluca Grimalda, un autore portato alla mia attenzione da No Food • No Science. Ho iniziato la lettura appena prima di partire in treno per una settimana in Calabria, e tutta la vacanza ha finito per essere segnata dalle parole di Grimalda e da frequenti riflessioni dettate dalle sue esperienze.

Licenziato per essersi rifiutato di prendere un aereo, Grimalda racconta il suo viaggiare lento e l’impatto che la disobbedienza civile ha avuto sulla sua vita. Non è ovviamente solo la dimensione lavorativa ad essere coinvolta, anzi. A pagare le conseguenze dell’attivismo di Grimalda è soprattutto la dimensione affettiva.

A fuoco mescola diario di viaggio, vicende personali e ricerca scientifica. Sembra un caos, ma Grimalda tiene tutto insieme con una scrittura fluida che alterna specifici episodi del suo lungo percorso via terra e via mare per rientrare in Italia dall’isola di Bougainville a sintetiche e potenti analisi sulla crisi climatica e i suoi effetti, il tutto senza perdere mai di vista i rapporti con la famiglia.

Proprio questi ultimi sono quelli che mi hanno dato più da pensare. Dopo anni di veganismo, genitori e parenti continuano a rifiutare di prendere seriamente in considerazione le motivazioni delle mie scelte. Insistono, piuttosto, con etichette quali “radicalità” ed “estremismo”, come se il mio solo esistere diversamente costituisse di per sé un problema o, peggio, un pericolo.

Grimalda, allora, diventa un esempio e un modello di riferimento per me. Rischiare tutto consapevoli di perderlo e in nome di un valore più alto è proprio quel genere di vocazione che ci muove senza che la si possa spiegare a parole. La qualifichiamo mettendola in pratica, agendo quotidianemente nel solo modo che ci sembra possibile. Si dice quello in cui si crede, e si fa quello che si dice.

Non è un caso che abbia scelto di partecipare alla Conference for Animal Liberation viaggiando in treno sia all’andata che al ritorno. La disobbedienza è anche questa: rifiutarsi di credere che la comodità non abbia un prezzo.

Non sei mai cosa sei

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sono troppo destabilizzanti gli appagamenti raggiunti fuori dalla norma.

— Chirù, Michela Murgia

Non conosco tanti modi per stare vicino a un’amica in difficoltà. Ho una vita sufficientemente semplice e fortunata che per ora mi ha evitato un certo tipo di esperienza. Quella più o meno traumatica, intendo.

In assenza di particolari qualifiche mediche, il mio stare vicino è a metà strada tra una silenziosa spalla su cui piangere e una lieve sdrammatizzazione degli eventi che sto ascoltando, con il solo obiettivo di vedere l’amica tornare a sorridere nonostante tutto.

Un aspetto interessante di questo mio modo di offrire conforto è che mentre provo a mettermi a disposizione per un’altra persona vedo me stesso con occhi diversi. Non posso dire con assoluta certezza di vedermi attraverso i suoi occhi, ma è comunque un punto di vista esterno a me, uno sguardo puntato su ciò che di me abitualmente non vedo.

È come se ascoltare un’amica in difficoltà portasse con sé un insegnamento. Come se il suo dolore mi mettesse di fronte a una maestra e io, inadeguato e capace solo di impacciato supporto, diventassi il suo allievo. Va da sé che l’intenzione dietro al mio aiuto non è quella di strumentalizzare la sofferenza che ho davanti per ricavarne piacere. È innegabile, tuttavia, che più intenso diventa il reciproco scambio di parole e silenzi, maggiore è la probabilità che io scopra qualcosa di nuovo sul mio conto.

Leggendo Chirù di Michela Murgia ho ritrovato questa ambigua sensazione con una precisione glaciale. Eleonora, voce narrante e protagonista del romanzo, si propone come maestra per giovani allievi nei quali lei, e per lo più solo lei, riconosce un’intelligenza diversa dalla media. Si pone come loro mentore esistenziale, accompagnandoli alla scoperta di se stessi in un mondo il cui limite precipuo è la prospettiva che lei, dolce e severa, impone loro.

Nel fare questo Eleonora incontra e spesso si scontra con qualcosa di sé che o non sapeva di conoscere o aveva a lungo tentato di rimuovere. Così facendo, il suo passato si intreccia a più riprese con il presente. Non si tratta, però, di fornire uno sfondo storico alla vicenda. Il passato, ineludibile e rigoroso, determina ogni singolo passo che Eleonora compie, sia esso reticente o schietto. In fin dei conti Eleonora sta fuggendo dalla stessa cosa a cui ritorna in continuazione, inevitabilmente, ossia se stessa.

È interessante la titubanza con cui Eleonora fatica ad accettare di essere stata cambiata dai propri allievi. Certamente riconosce l’impatto che ognuno di loro ha avuto su di lei, e non si nega la soddisfazione di avere cambiato la loro vita, ma il rapporto con quello che rimane di lei dopo ogni allievo è un processo aperto, in perenne via di definizione. Più si avvicina a loro, più impara di sé.

Il problema di Eleonora è che la lezione appresa sembra non bastarle mai. Anche quando mette da parte il desiderio per l’ultima volta, sacrificandolo per la promessa di una sicura stabilità, sta solo tenacemente illudendo se stessa con la speranza di avere sotto controllo l’unica cosa che non riesce a controllare. La stessa alla quale, dopotutto, è costretta a ritornare: se stessa.

Chirù non è stata una lettura facile perché anch’io, come Eleonora, vacillo se messo di fronte all’ignoto in me. Accettare di dovermi ancora conoscere del tutto è la lezione che devo fare mia, unitamente alla consapevolezza che non smetterò mai di scoprirmi.

Non credo sia un caso, dunque, che sia stata proprio un’amica in difficoltà ad avermi consigliato questo libro.

Chi è infelice ha tutto da guadagnare, perché è dai baratri che si può sognare il cielo. Chi è felice ha invece tutto da perdere.

— Chirù, Michela Murgia

A sense of belonging

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we believe in each other, we are more likely to take risks and to invest ourselves in possibility, even when our own hopes are not fully formed. In this way, our relationships and the work of relationship building can change our sense of what’s possible.

— Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

For most of my life I tended to avoid people as much as possible. Since I don’t remember my parents regularly having friends over for a meal or a coffee, I’ve always considered my behaviour a trait I share with the rest of my family.

Before activism and before Ribellione Animale (RA from now on) in particular, I was set on my parents’ footsteps. In retrospect, the way I chose to live without many people around could be related to specific episodes from my teen days during which, among so-called friends, I experienced an insurmountable distance. Did I discard meaningful relationships because I was afraid to face that distance again? It’s hard to tell.

On the other hand, it’s easy to notice how comfortable I am any time I am involved with fellow activists. Why is this happening? How much does it have to do with me? I still don’t open up easily with other people, so there must be something else at play here.

I found the answer I was looking for in the beautiful Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. In short, I’ve never felt to belong.

A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action.

— Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

Not only isn’t activism as a group act sustainable without an organising community, but every single person involved has to experience what Hayes and Kaba describe as the sense of belonging.

I see this belonging as a sweet combination of multiple facets. That is, when I sense belonging the path to my self-determination is much clearer, I know in my heart we believe in each other, and I am empowered by relationships of mutual aid to the point that “it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid”, as Audre Lorde wrote in The Cancer Journals.¹

The extent of this feeling of belonging becomes even more relevant when I compare my current involvement with RA to my previous experience with Anonymous for the Voiceless (AV from now on). If I may stretch a bit two categories offered by Hayes and Kaba, AV was mostly about connectivity whereas RA is all about political communion. Put otherwise, AV cared more about coordinating activists for the next cube of truth via text messages, while RA practices and encourages care for each other first and foremost.

This kind of solidarity is not a given, nor has it to be taken for granted just because we share some ideas and core values. Instead, it’s a process we go through every day, and it’s a demanding one. We have to show up for one another, we must be there in order for each and everyone of us to keep hoping in the possibility we are building together.

Together, we rise to deprive the monster of its simple story, and replace it with our own.

— Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

I’m not an organiser and yet I feel like Hayes and Kaba have prepared me with the basic resources to become one eventually. Through many voices who have known firsthand what it takes for any struggle to exist, Let This Radicalize You tells stories of resistance and pressure campaigns. Every word we read is an act of courage in itself.

Unfortunately, not all the battles are won in this book. The systemic oppression we have to deal with is too powerful and resilient to be broken once and for all. Nonetheless, the fact that everybody Hayes and Kaba discuss with refuses to give up should be enough for any activist reading these pages to do the same.

Whenever we look around us we see what’s at stake. It may feel like it’s too much, so we shut our eyes. Let This Radicalize You teaches us to keep our eyes open, instead, and to search for hope rather than despair. The truth is we can’t afford despair, not now. Yet this doesn’t mean that we can’t build alternatives towards hope.

My preferred way to understand hope is to consider it, ultimately, as nothing more than the possibility of change. And change is what we are.

The passage I refer to is quoted in Let This Radicalize You. ↩︎

Per essere contenti

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Le rondini mi vennero incontro con un grido alto di saluto: le riconobbi, erano ancora mie parenti; rapide, calavano nella strada mettendo ovunque la loro accorata disperazione. Le sentivo gridare dentro di me.

— Dalla parte di lei, Alba de Céspedes

Adoro l’accadere di una coincidenza significativa, ovvero quello strano evento che Carl Jung ha definito sincronicità di nessi acausali. In particolare, reputo adorabile che un libro entri nella mia vita, senza che io abbia pianificato il suo ingresso in alcun modo, per parlarmi esattamente di quello di cui ho bisogno in quel dato momento.

A onor del vero era un po’ che avevo Dalla parte di lei di Alba de Céspedes fra la pila dei libri da leggere. Più o meno da quando incontrai l’autrice per la prima volta su L’altra biblioteca. Senza un motivo preciso ne ho continuamente rimandata la lettura, lasciando passare mesi, forse un anno addirittura, tra le sue pagine e me. Finché all’improvviso, totalmente impreparato, l’ho preso in mano. Giunto al termine sono ancora impegnato nel tentativo di mettere ordine al caos di pensieri che de Céspedes ha suscitato in me.

La mia reazione a Dalla parte di lei deve parecchio allo stato emotivo in cui mi trovo ultimamente. Il che non significa che l’opera di de Céspedes non sappia farsi amare per mille altre ragioni. C’è di tutto fra le sue pagine: urgente femminilità e implacabile maschilismo; tradizioni in contrasto e distanze incolmabili fuori e dentro l’amore; la congenita inafferrabilità del presente e lo spettro ineludibile del passato; i turbamenti di una giovane in cerca di compromessi con una vita che non accenna a darle tregua; la guerra, le bombe, l’antifascismo. E molto, molto altro.

Ciò che ad ogni modo mi ha sorpreso a più riprese è la frequenza con cui ho scorto tracce di me stesso in Alessandra, protagonista e voce narrante del romanzo. Non tanto per gli eventi che la vedono coinvolta, perché, nonostante le somiglianze con l’Italia contemporanea e il suo prolungato volgere a destra, il tempo delle vicende raccontate è lontano da me, sia sul piano storico che su quello culturale.

In Alessandra, piuttosto, ho rivisto diverse versioni di me. Il me di un tempo, incapace di trovare lo spazio adatto per non dover fingere di essere qualcun altro, e perciò sempre fuori posto, perennemente confinato in un altrove indeterminato. Le mie poche certezze di allora hanno fin troppo in comune con quelle della giovane Alessandra. Come in lei, in me c’era un filtro atto ad impedirmi di penetrare senza vergogna la realtà.

Alessandra è però anche il me di adesso, ossia una persona che si dibatte tra istanze razionali e correnti irrazionali. Attonita, si muove parallelamente alle circostanze, le stesse circostanze che la obbligano tuttavia a prendere posizioni decise, spesso contraddittorie rispetto al suo più intimo sentire. Lei prova a fermarsi, cerca la quiete per ritrovarsi, ma la vita rilancia con passo greve il suo incedere inesorabile, facendosi via via più difficile da seguire.

Nessuno è contento. Alessandra se ne accorge in fretta e tenterà di dare una ragione a questa lapidaria persuasione. Nessuno è contento perché è impossibile esserlo mentre l’incertezza divora qualsiasi progettualità. La guerra annienta ogni sguardo lungimirante, ma allo stesso tempo le consolazioni indispensabili non sono nel passato di Alessandra. Guardare indietro è invece un gesto di rassegnazione al quale lei non vuole cedere. Si costringe avanti, piegata dai fantasmi di affetti scomparsi eppure risoluta nel suo respingere le debolezze che attraversano l’amore.

L’inquietudine di Alessandra dispiegata in Dalla parte di lei ha fatto compagnia a un sentimento del tutto simile in me. Non so se stiamo cercando le stesse cose, noi due, o se abbiamo gli stessi sogni. A ben vedere, anzi, non crediamo nemmeno negli stessi ideali. Abitiamo corpi differenti e ci rappresentiamo il mondo là fuori con sensibilità ineguali. Ciononostante, riconosciamo una crudele mancanza nella nostra vita, qualcosa di irreparabile che concede soltanto fuggevoli attimi di preziosa contentezza.

Avrei voluto rispondergli che la nostra era un’epoca in cui bisognava adattarsi ad essere contenti anche solo per poche ore, un pomeriggio, una notte: appena si poteva.

— Dalla parte di lei, Alba de Céspedes

La realtà del patriarca

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anche con l’aiuto del senno di poi, se devo indicare il punto più basso toccato nel mio percorso di laurea triennale il pensiero va sempre alla stessa aula e allo stesso docente. Quella stessa aula in cui quello stesso docente cercò di convincerci del valore letterario di un testo che ogni aspirante bigotto deve avere a portata di mano, ovvero Il cavallo rosso di Eugenio Corti.

In un’altra occasione il docente in questione, che spesso amava interrompere il flusso della sua esposizione con baldanzosi aneddoti sul suo conto alternati a divagazioni dallo sperato effetto umoristico, si lanciò in un’aggressione verbale rivolta ad alcune università inglesi e americane. Il nocciolo della sua polemica era che in quegli atenei erano stati rimossi dai curricula dei classici greci come Eschilo perché considerati inappropriati.

Lì per lì, lo ammetto, ci cascai. Guarda un po’, mi dissi, uno che ha capito che la cancel culture è dannosa. Poi però sono tornato più e più volte alle sue parole, specialmente dopo che mi si è rivelato fino in fondo attraverso Eugenio Corti, e due considerazioni hanno capovolto la mia posizione di partenza. Primo, per il docente problematizzare gli incesti e gli stupri nei testi era del tutto fuori luogo alla luce del valore estetico in gioco. Secondo, il fatto che la donna in quei classici non di rado emerga come fragile, subordinata, appropriabile e misurabile in termini di funzione del proprio corpo, era perfettamente in linea con quello che Corti, e di riflesso il docente, pensava delle sue donne.

Mi è tornato in mente tutto questo mentre leggevo Realismo patriarcale di Martina Miccichè, il nuovo libro di un’autrice la cui voce sulla contemporaneità è fra le più interessanti in circolazione. Ad un anno di distanza da Femminismo di periferia, Miccichè ritorna, se possibile, anche più furiosa e decisa nelle sue argomentazioni, ma perché si fa carico di un peso, direi, di molto maggiore.

In Realismo patriarcale, infatti, Miccichè estende il suo raggio di incidenza tematica in modo da completare il quadro che Femminismo di periferia aveva cominciato a delineare. Se nella prima opera si trattava di riposizionarci per capire il significato più profondo dei margini e di chi li abita e vive, qui quegli spazi e quelle vite vengono riarticolate in vista di un più ampio percorso lungo il complicato e pericoloso intreccio fra capitale e patriarcato. Ancora una volta, Miccichè non si nasconde e fa di piccoli, si fa per dire, episodi privati i momenti di avvio per perlustrare quel sistema di oppressioni interagenti, come lei stessa lo definisce¹, in cui esistiamo e ignorando il quale chi può permetterselo vede soltanto fin dove vuole vedere.

La trasparenza di Miccichè, che fa della chiarezza nella scrittura un vero e proprio atto politico, colpisce e sa fare male sul serio. Ciò rende Realismo patriarcale, ancor più di Femminismo di periferia, un libro facile da leggere e duro da digerire, come sottolinea giustamente Rachele Borghi nella prefazione, quasi Miccichè avesse preso alla lettera le parole di Kafka sul testo come ascia nel mare ghiacciato dentro di noi. Ma è proprio questo il metodo migliore per comunicare verità scomode ed essere sicure che non ci siano fraintendimenti. Quello che bisogna dire va detto in modo che chiunque lo possa comprendere. Se non scrivesse per tutte e per tutti, Miccichè tradirebbe se stessa, e a me non sembra un’autrice interessata a contraddirsi per ora.

La categoria realismo patriarcale trova il suo compimento letterario ne Il cavallo rosso. Non so se Martina Miccichè abbia letto o meno Eugenio Corti. In caso negativo, mi verrebbe da consigliarle di starne quanto più possibile alla larga, ma penso che non abbia alcun bisogno di me per annusarne il fetore reazionario e reagire di conseguenza. Quello che conta è che, invece di lasciarci con un voluminoso e irrilevante monumento alla propria chiusura mentale, Miccichè preferisce intavolare un discorso faccia a faccia con noi per costringerci a riprendere in mano la storia, a trasformare il presente senza che il passato sia un impedimento in vista del futuro che davvero vogliamo.

Miccichè, Realismo patriarcale, p. 156. ↩︎

Waves of reconciliation

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

— The Sea, John Banville

I don’t remember where my interest in John Banville’s The Sea comes from. Considering I’ve never heard of John Banville before reading this book, it could be one of those titles that someone somewhere has passingly mentioned and I’ve felt intrigued enough to take a note before it vanished from my mind. But it didn’t take too many pages for The Sea to conquer me, so I guess John Banville would fit nicely into that particular shelf of mine where I place contemporary literature next to classics with no shame whatsoever.

Let me clear the air first. Even though I find it rather peculiar that Banville maintains to be primarily influenced by W. B. Yeats and Henry James when The Sea shows obvious traces of Marcel Proust, I didn’t start what I intend to be a journey through this writer’s oeuvre from this book because of Proust. When I picked The Sea up, it had been months since I made the aforementioned note, so I had no plan nor specific purpose behind my choice either.

After a few pages I felt greatly annoyed by Max Morden, the narrator. It’s been a while since I’ve come across a character so self-aware, arrogant, and petulant. But then it started to make sense. The disparaging comments he has for almost everyone around him serve more as the walls of his internal fortress, the barriers he struggles to overcome in order to reconcile with the past he’s searching for the present to mean something. This becomes particularly explicit when it comes to his relationship with his wife and his daughter. The deeper and harsher the contempt, the more his true feelings for them are calling for him to embrace the here and now.

However, how much can we trust Morden? He’s basing the account of his experiences on the power of his memory, but he acknowledges its limits and more than once he seems uncertain about his telling. One could say that this is how memory works in general, anyway. After all, Morden’s age at the time of his recollection could be the source behind black spots, incoherence, and the overall weakening of his mind. Yet he knows when he’s wrong, he knows when he’s adding too much or leaving out too many details.

During a delightful interview, Banville explained that were he to write his own autobiography he wouldn’t be factual, but it would be true. I don’t know about his other works, but I think this relation between facts and truth marvellously applies to The Sea. Everything Morden tells us may not correspond to actual events in his past, but this doesn’t make them any less true. Truth here is the inevitably relative positioning of a single point of view on a carefully selected set of memories. These memories are true as long as Morden believes them to be so and, more importantly, as long as in them he finds what he’s looking for. He’s not even trying that hard to convince us of their objective truth, nor is he bending the truth a little for pleasure. True for Morden is the act of exposing himself, the opening of private doors to let us in and see for ourselves how meaningful intimacy can be. And nothing is truer than intimacy.

Despite his untrustworthiness, Morden is alone and only his memories seem to keep him company now. Whenever he criticises someone or misremember a specific place or moment in time, we know he’s losing something precious and that this will keep him further away from the reconciliation he’s after. How we deal with our own past is never a simple operation of retelling. The audience doesn’t matter either. Some past is meant to be forgotten, other is here to stay. Sometimes we choose what we can let go, others we are stuck with our remembrances. The truth is that looking forward always implies looking back.

Yet for all that, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that we missed something, that I missed something, only I do not know what it might have been.

— The Sea, John Banville

Dalla periferia con furore

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Non so mai come qualificare il mio rapporto con i social. Da un lato non perdo occasione per criticarne la superficialità della gran parte dei contenuti e insultarli per il tempo che mi fanno perdere; dall’altro, c’è una percentuale più o meno grande di valore aggiunto alla mia vita grazie ad essi. Senza i social, per esempio, non sarei mai incappato in Martina Miccichè e non avrei mai saputo dell’esistenza del suo libro Femminismo di periferia.

Miccichè è una scienziata politica, una fotoreporter e un’attivista dall’approccio intersezionale e antispecista. Scrive una newsletter di nome Buccia e a me sembra che non si fermi mai, neanche per tirare il fiato. Chi l’ha vista presentare Femminismo di periferia dal vivo parla di serate travolgenti ed esperienze intense dove la rabbia appassionata dell’autrice emerge con tutta la sua forza.

È pur vero che bastano poche pagine del libro in questione per percepire con quale umore Miccichè stia scrivendo. Partendo dal quartiere milanese in cui è cresciuta, la Comasina, l’autrice analizza tutte le implicazioni della tremenda opposizione centro-periferia. Cosa significa vivere in centro se non essere al centro? E per converso, che impatto ha esistere fuori da esso? Dal suo essere socialmente costruita al bisogno di de-costruirla collettivamente, la relazione centro-periferia investe spazi che non sono solo geografici, ma esistenziali, economici e, prima di tutto, politici. I corpi umani e non umani intrappolati nella distanza dal centro sono segnati da una differenza che ne sancisce lo statuto ontologico inferiore rispetto a quello di chi gode del privilegio di poter usufruire del centro. Esistere fuori da esso, dunque, è anche resistere ad esso.

La restrizione degli spazi vitali e la riduzione del valore sociale di luoghi e corpi è comprensibile solo se le si osserva da più punti di vista. Miccichè, allora, lavora in modo da non concentrare il proprio sguardo su un’unica limitante traiettoria. Per capire le vite ai margini è necessario prima capire cosa sono quei margini e le conseguenze che abitandoli ci si porta dietro. Si nasce marginalizzati o lo si diventa? Si vive in periferia o si è la periferia? Il fuori messo a tema qui è un al di là del centro che quest’ultimo sceglie, ogni giorno, di allontanare sempre di più. Davanti alla periferia il centro si volta dall’altra parte, ne rifiuta le ragioni e contribuisce ad indebolirne le certezze e le sicurezze in nome di uno status quo che si sceglie, perentoriamente, di non mettere in discussione.

Genere, razza e specie sono le categorie con le quali Miccichè interpreta la periferia, ma è anche grazie ad essa che la marginalizzazione di determinate categorie può essere colta nella sua complessità. Il maschilismo che soggiace all’organizzazione capitalistica del centro si traduce ai margini con esperienze che diventano chiare solo se illuminate da chi, in quei margini, è cresciuta guadagnando, volente o nolente, la prospettiva giusta. La violenza di genere in tutte le sue sfaccettature non è una prerogativa inspiegabile della periferia, ma è resa possibile e sostenuta dal centro che, separandosene consapevolmente, le permette di svilupparsi togliendole visibilità. Il razzismo che esclude da qualsiasi garanzia sociale ed economica è incluso dal centro come necessario correlato da espellere, in modo da assicurare il livello minimo di decoro richiesto per rimanere centro in quanto tale. Rimossi, referenti assenti, gli animali non umani costretti nella macchina di produzione sono confinati nella periferia, ridotti a cose per diventare oggetti di consumo, mentre il centro antropico concede appena un poco di spazio agli altri non umani, quelli che ha selezionato per sé.

Sono cresciuto in una periferia che pensavo non avesse troppo in comune con la Comasina di Miccichè e che mi ha nascosto molte delle realtà descritte in Femminismo di periferia. Oggi che da anni vivo altrove, è solo grazie a questo libro che ho imparato a vederne tutte le contraddizioni, a riconoscerne le eccedenze, a biasimarne le omissioni. Solo adesso capisco che tutto quello che mancavo di vedere era costruito per non essere visto. Solo decentrandomi ho potuto vedere il centro.

Disorderly human

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I was reading Agustina María Bazterrica’s Cadáver Exquisito,¹ I was surprised to acknowledge my detachment from the horrific violence perpetrated against human bodies treated as edible products. Have I become so disenchanted with the reality around me that I cannot feel anything any more? Why, then, did the ending disturb me more than what came before?

The truth is Bazterrica’s book put me through a rather unpleasant ordeal. With the sole exception of a brief episode of mindless cruelty against puppies, I found myself repeatedly unmoved by passages where the processing of selected human lives into meat is described in vivid details. Yet when the final moments revealed the aberrant plan of the protagonist, I started reconsidering everything that had happened up to that point, including my feelings.

Cadáver Exquisito can be appreciated from different points of view. It’s a powerful critique of all sorts of capitalistic exploitation and a tale of cynical survivalism, both issues of the utmost relevance nowadays. Morevover, trans-feminism and anti-speciesism can help us interpret the text as a poignant metaphor of how ingrained the disregard for other’s human and non-human lives is in the self-proclaimed superior species.²

I have to admit, though, that I was a bit disappointed at first because most of the events seem to lack emotional depth. I was afraid the reader should only care about the shocking dystopia in front of them, whereas I was looking for intellectual gratification. Events are cut short, placidly placed one after the other, and descriptions are only pertinent insofar as the reader doesn’t lose track of the horror. I didn’t understand why Bazterrica is purposefully glossing over historical facts, for instance. I was craving for more information about the pandemic that created the alternative reality she’s presenting here.

However, I was wrong on multiple accounts. First of all, we experience everything in Cadáver Exquisito through Marcos Tejo’s acts and thoughts. In confining the reader to his mind Bazterrica rightly chooses only what’s necessary to render Marcos’ version of the story. The plain language Bazterrica uses is a brilliant technique to display the cognitive dissonance her protagonist needs in order to position himself at a safe distance from the flesh and blood he’s surrounded by.

Furthermore, this is precisely why the ending hit me so hard. From the very beginning Bazterrica is convincingly eroding Marcos’ privileged, reassuring position as a member of a society whose conditions of possibility he contributes to. But when Marcos reveals himself for who he actually is, every effort he has made to escape his world turns out to be a farce. Whether speciesism or capitalism are responsible for his productive and reproductive instincts, Bazterrica doesn’t tell. The system in place permeates everything around and, more importantly, within Marcos. Whatever we presumed that he was feeling about his father, his dogs, his sister or his wife is reduced to a single goal, that is ensuring the permanence of the very system he has never really been alienated from.

Once again, horror proves to be a genre capable of penetrating our reality with unconventional strength. We may refuse to accept the premises of Cadáver Exquisito because we believe in a different worldview, but we cannot avoid the unequivocal questions about our future. A future that inevitably includes our specific worldview among many others, humans’ and non-humans'.

I read the English translation titled Tender is the Flesh. ↩︎
See Valentina Greco’s Specialità umane. Una lettura posizionata di Cadavere squisito di Agustina Bazterrica in Liberazioni #58. ↩︎

My 2024

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024 has been a mixed bag of delight, anger, frustration, joy, and disappointment. A year of questions, connections, and self-determination. There have been many beautiful things that I know I’m going to treasure, but unfortunately they didn’t come alone.

It’s fair to say then that 2024 has pushed me to reconsider many things, myself included. How far this is going to get me it’ll be next year’s real challenge.

Anonymous for the Voiceless

In terms of emotional turmoil this has to be the central experience of my 2024.

My journey with Anonymous for the Voiceless was what I needed to finally engage with activism. It also led me to meet awesome people who make me fell less alone in my resistance to a status quo that doesn’t understand how to care.

At the same time something didn’t seem quite right to me, and when everything fell apart I understood the true nature of this organisation and decided to leave.

However, I don’t intend to stop with my activism because of this sad outcome. I only need a better project to do it, so I’m exploring options.

Bluesky

Despite all my doubts and concerns I joined Bluesky last month and so far I’ve been enjoying the experience. I found a rich community of philosophers and academics sharing worthwhile content most of the time.

On the other hand, it doesn’t appear to be an entirely safe space. I also tend to get tired rather quickly with social media, especially if I feel like I’m wasting hours following nothing in particular.

Therefore when my next round-up comes I may not be on Bluesky any more.

Books

I thought over and over again about my favourite books of 2024. It hasn’t been an easy task and I already know I’ll regret leaving some great reads out.

In order to avoid any further crime, I’m going to use a basic alphabetical order to list the most relevant titles, hence no real preference will be expressed. Here we go:

Animali si diventa (Federica Timeto)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Calibano e la strega (Silvia Federici)
Checkout 19 (Claire-Louise Bennett)
Cospirazione animale (Marco Reggio)
Del governo degli animali (Benedetta Piazzesi)
Dialoghi sulla religione naturale (David Hume)
Elizabeth Costello (J. M. Coetzee)
Estinzione (Thomas Bernhard)
The Fortnight in September (R. C. Sherriff)
Letteratura come utopia (Ingeborg Bachmann)
Lettere dal carcere (Antonio Gramsci)
A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)
Malina (Ingeborg Bachmann)
Perturbamento (Thomas Bernhard)
Poesie (Paul Celan)
Under the Skin (Michael Faber)
L’uomo senza qualità (Robert Musil)

Random notes:

Ingeborg Bachmann should be a mandatory read everywhere in the world;
every book I read about non-human animals makes me a better human one;
Paul Celan will keep me busy for at least another life;
Robert Musil is the perfect excuse to avoid direct sunlight;
Claire-Louise Bennett is the right writer at the right time;
Liberazioni has become my favourite periodical.

Missing from the list are a couple of books I spent a good chunk of hours on: the first volume of Karl Marx’s Il Capitale and György Lukács’ Storia e coscienza di classe. I have yet to recover from these challenging and deeply rewarding works, but everything I’ve been learning will stay with me.

Cinema

Overall I had great times with my old passion for cinema this year. The following selection is not strictly related to 2024 films because there is always something I missed from previous years. Anyway, here it is:

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
The Animal People (Denis Henry Hennelly, Casey Suchan)
La Bête (Bertrand Bonello)
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
L’étè dernier (Catherine Breillat)
Food for Profit (Giulia Innocenzi, Paolo D’Ambrosi)
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
Here (Robert Zemeckis)
Judas And the Black Messaiah (Shaka King)
Sex (Dag Johan Haugerud)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheang)
The Young Karl Mark (Raoul Peck)

Random notes:

nothing has come close to the devastating effect All of Us Strangers has had on me, and I won’t forget it any time soon;
Food for Profit should be a mandatory watch everywhere in the world;
sometimes a giant monster is all I need to be happy;
yes, Soi Cheang, I love Hong Kong cinema too;
if Karl Marx was as sexy as Peck’s version of him, why isn’t everyone a sworn Marxist yet?

Heart of Clojure

Beside confirming itself as the best conference I’ve ever been to, Heart of Clojure has had the perhaps unintentional side effect of forcing me to rethink my position in the IT world. I’ve been working on this ever since I got back from Leuven, but I have a long way ahead of me.

Other questions arose as well. Maybe one day I’ll come back to them with the proper state of mind and I’ll share my findings.

Music

What follows is a chart as temporary as any other, apart from the first two spots which are by miles the records I needed the most this year. Without further ado, then:

SEI ALMENO UN PO’ FELICE? (Olympia Mare)
Diamond Jubilee (Cindy Lee)
Brat (Charli XCX)
This Could Be Texas (English Teacher)
All of This Awaits You (Swami And the Bed of Nails)
stillness stop: you have a right to remember (Any Other)
Make It Fit (Karate)
Light Sides (Angie McMahon)
A Polaroid for Christmas (Memoria Polaroid)
Revival of a Friend (Sour Widows)
Searching (Staples Jr. Singers)
Where Next? (Sandwell District)

Random notes:

the deluxe edition of The Get Up Kids’s Something to Write Home About made me cry ten seconds after the vinyl started spinning;
a Marta Del Grandi’s concert proved that she is truly from another planet;
I’ve been listening to Pinegrove for an insane amount of hours in the last few months. I miss them so much.

University

There is little I can add to what I wrote already, so let me just say one thing. A younger version of myself couldn’t understand the value of studying at university. That boy had to undergo trials and errors, but he got there eventually. So much so he can’t really stop now.

To be honest in the last month I’ve had some doubts about what I really want to pursue with my studies. I’ll come back to this as soon as my mind is clear. For now, I see interesting paths in front of me.

Self-creation and auto-fiction

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving — homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn’t exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless.

— Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett

Auto-fiction is an intriguing literary genre. Part fiction, part autobiography, whenever I read a book that falls under this category I feel like I’m having a terrific conversation with its author sitting next to me. This is beautifully achieved by writers that I love such as Marcel Proust or J. M. Coetzee, but I had a wonderful time listening to Elif Batuman as well.

I’ve recently experienced a somewhat similarly pleasant feeling with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19. I needed something to take my mind away from the dark places The Bell Jar and A Little Life had built for me, but I wasn’t expecting to be so captured by Bennett’s work.

This is due first and foremost to Bennett’s writing style. Whereas, say, Elif Batuman clearly unfolds events as she ventures to explore and perhaps relive her past in chronological fashion, Bennett lets her pen move on a seemingly free ride. Which is not to say that she’s ransacking her memories randomly and without a clue about the best way to organise her recollection. She isn’t trying to make the stream of consciousness hip again either.

Bennett is recreating herself thanks to the power of language. Instead of listening to her sardonically presenting her coming of age to us, we watch as word after word a storyteller is born. More importantly, we’re not here to witness passively the creation of her own self. Provided we are conscious of the process, we actively participate as we read along. I, for instance, found myself trying to make sense of all the literary references Bennett spreads with adorable confidence throughout the book. I kept track of all the names and the titles I don’t know, but at the same time I was seeing my upbringing as an avid reader mirrored on the pages. When a specific book meant as much to her as it meant to me I couldn’t hide a smile on my face.

This is close yet not the same as the experiences one may share with the protagonist of a novel, being them their author’s alter ego or not. Checkout 19 has of course episodes one can link to their own, but it’s more interesting to observe how Bennett’s writing is shaped by the literary world she builds for herself. The metaphor she chooses, the stories she starts telling abruptly in the middle of a chain of thoughts, not to mention the stark beauty of the sounds carefully picked syllables make. Her mastery of the language is put to test by her own imagination and as we accompany her we detect the challenge with delectation.¹

Is Checkout 19 a challenge on purpose, then? Quite the contrary. Once we’ve adjusted ourselves to the detours, we understand that there’s only one road ahead of Bennett and it’s waiting for us. Modernist and post-modernist writers knew that our thoughts rarely follow straight lines, and so does Bennett. But instead of tracing all the possible combinations on an impossible map, her cartography is simpler and gentler. At all times we are where she wants us to be. We’re lost only insofar as she’s lost. We are literally on the same page.

How much of Claire-Louise Bennett we find in Checkout 19 is not really important. In the end this book is more about the never-ending and transformational processes of language than a rigorous collection of facts we need to put together to have a precise biography. What matters is the spaces Bennett creates for us to fill. The more the blanks in common, the more we share in our own journey of self-creation.

Certain written words are alive, active, living — they are entirely in the present, the same present as you.

— Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett

The last sentence is a little homage to one of my favourite lines of Checkout 19, which says: “each holding their own delectable though not always readily detectable specimen”. ↩︎

Larger than life

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every time I finish a renown classic, I fear that the next book will never match my expectations. It’s silly, I know. It’s also, I think, what the Italian school system has left me with thanks to its relentless praises for a supposedly glorious past. The old, they imply, is always better than the new. A lesson forever rooted in me.

Contemporary literature, however, is full of works that happily and shamelessly I place on my shelves next to Marcel Proust and Ingeborg Bachmann. Among these, I’d say Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life fits nicely if only because, to a certain extent, it seems to naturally complement and expand upon Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

This is not to say that Yanagihara is following Plath’s steps. It’s easy to tell their books apart, since there are all sorts of differences such as their writing style, the point of view from which the story is narrated, and Yanagihara’s rich assortment of characters versus Plath’s claustrophobic soliloquy.

Essential qualities notwithstanding, at the same time it’s impossible to keep the trajectory of Jude St. Francis’s story in A Little Life apart from Esther Greenwood’s in The Bell Jar. Plath is less direct and more enthralling, perhaps. For instance, we hardly know Esther as we turn the last page. Yanagihara, on the other hand, gives the reader plenty of time to know Jude. Everything happening in his own little life has an enormous impact on everyone who loves him, and we get to see how far the consequences of one’s choices and actions reach, in what way they defy control.

And yet both Esther and Jude don’t progress on a straight line. Both books create this gripping tension where we slowly give up expecting improvements in Jude’s and Esther’s condition. We cannot consider them safe from harm. Maybe Jude experiences more relief than Esther, especially when he finds love, but as we follow the non-linear unfolding of the events we get to understand how painful and traumatic Jude’s past has been, how it has shaped him and never ceases to do so.

In order not to forget that there is never just one life at stake, that we are who we are because there is always someone else who determines changes in our selves, Yanagihara intersects the story of Jude with those of his dearest friends, each of them unforgettable in their own way, each of them with a unique, privileged access to Jude. We learn to understand him better through their eyes, but their relationships with him lead us to a better understanding of his friends as well.

Through multiple angles, then, Yanagihara accompanies the readers in and out the lives of her characters. She also uses her inquisitive lenses to explore violence, abuse, rape, self-inflicted scars, pedophilia, and self-consciousness. The physical and psychological hell she puts us through can be demanding at times, but as ruthless as some of the cruelest episodes are, moments of uncompromising love and joy tie us close to these little lives. I’ve never met a person like JB and probably never will, but this doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to. It doesn’t mean he’s any less real than me.

This is why it’s easy to relate to these characters, and I do enjoy this feeling of familiarity. I enjoy it so much, in fact, that spotting myself on the pages has become some sort of a game I like to play any time I’m reading. Usually, though, hints of my own personality are scattered among multiple characters, but it’s still fascinating to discover just how ordinary I am, how things I think only peculiar to me are actually out there for anyone to have. It’s something that projects me into a wider space beyond myself.

When Yanagihara allows her characters to experience the open, breathing web that holds them together, she is making them realise that they’re still part of a larger world. The more they look inward, the more they fail to see what is waiting for them. In other words, they’re never alone. Much like Esther Greenwood really wasn’t. Much like we never are.

My own private bell jar

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It never occurred to me to say no.

— The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

At the moment I cannot name a book with a more devastating effect on me than Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Until recently, Plath was one of those authors I only knew by name and brief anecdotal facts. But instead of wishing to have met her when I was younger, I content myself with the mere fact that I will never forget her novel.

As I was turning its pages, more often than not it seemed like The Bell Jar was reading into me. This is not an entirely new sensation, because other writers are just as capable of intimately piercing prose. Plath, however, has the rare power of poets, the unattainable talent for molding images and letters into unexpectedly perfect shapes. Paul Celan, for instance, acts in the same way on me. These artists only need few, precise words to express with delicate severity the sort of feeling one experiences during uncomfortable situations, that is when in their heart they know what they are going through but at the same time they are utterly inadequate at describing it. This is something that happens to me all the time. When it does, I usually prefer a wall of silence rather than trying unconvincingly to collect one hazy sentence after the other. Reading Plath makes me fully aware of how nearly impossible is to master the art of language.

Nevertheless, despite her ability with words, Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist and Plath’s alter ego on paper, can never grasp the world she lives in. She is actually telling the story of the irreconcilable difference between herself and everything else. The introspection, though, is not instrumental to a better understanding of the world, or of herself for that matter. She doesn’t try to make sense of anything at all, because the world simply moves at another pace altogether. She is young, her intellectual heft and emotional depth are out of question, and yet peace, comfort, and ease don’t have a place for her. Her sliding into depression is shockingly natural, since there doesn’t seem to be any other option available to her. I don’t think ever before had I wanted so desperately to hug a character and being of any help.

I was taken aback at the sudden realisation that I was accepting her deteriorating state of mind as something inevitable. The point is that the bell jar trapping Esther works in the other way too. Family, friends, ex-lovers, doctors, and us readers, everyone is locked outside of the bell jar. She is alone. She sees through the bell jar, but nobody sees her. They watch her, instead, unable to help her out of there, pointlessly moving around her solitude.

How much Esther is aware of the full extent of her condition I cannot say. She rejects any sort of attempt at lifting the bell jar. She is defenseless, obviously, but she somehow knows that whatever everyone is trying to do for her is not the right thing. This is a character truly out of their time, which doesn’t imply that were Esther to be born in a different age her life would have been easier and painless. In fact, I don’t think Esther could ever been saved, here or elsewhere. The categories and intellectual structures she has at her disposal aren’t suitable for a world that reduces everything setting itself apart from the norm to a mistake to be fixed or a disease to be cured. Esther is a question mark in a world full of assertions and descriptions that make no sense unless we accept the bell jar for what it really is, which is the reason why we don’t understand each other.

R. C. Sherriff and Lake Garda

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The most unequivocal sign that in a previous life I was something other than a techie is not my involvement with philosophy, but the mere fact that it takes only few words on a page to turn my day upside down. Yesterday I finished reading R. C. Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September and although it did not match the expectations that some rave reviews had built up for me, it did manage to catch me off guard on several occasions. No wonder I cannot stop thinking about it.

Sherriff’s story is tremendously simple. The Stevens have been going on holiday for fifteen days in September since forever. Every year they travel to the same place: same trains, same streets, same guest house, same beach, same sea. Everything is carefully planned and everyone tries their best to behave according to the plan. Sherriff captures the poetry of the most trivial routines of the Stevenses from the very beginning, framing with consummate elegance their vivid joy about apparently banal accomplishments, as if no surprise is in itself a reason to be happily surprised.

But Sherriff is even better at understanding the anxiety of his characters and the tragedy of their nostalgic attempts at stopping time by trying to preserve everything as it has always been, when in fact, little by little, all has changed, the characters themselves first and foremost. The question of time, the fear of missing a chance, the anxious contempt for wasted opportunities, the impossible dreams of escape: for a Marcel Proust lover this is all too familiar and more than welcome. What I find even more interesting, and what really makes The Fortnight in September a special book for me, is how I can relate many of the people and the events in these pages to my direct experience.

When I was little, we used to spend every summer in a small place near Lake Garda. We didn’t stay for more than a day, because it wasn’t that far from our home so it was cheaper to get there early in the morning and be back right after dinner. The fierce regularity of this trip was so similar to the Stevenses’. My mother, the female version of Mr. Stevens, always packed the same lunch and made sure we always left the house around 7am in order to claim the same spot on the beach before anyone else. In the evening, she always had a table reserved in a cozy restaurant nearby for a pizza. The first two years there was a kid with whom I played a lot. We took crazy dives from the jetty in order to splash all sorts of people, German tourists in particular, who, according to us, had to walk around soaking wet. There was a small arcade where I usually went after lunch, but now I am sure it was a trick my parents used to keep me out of the water for a while.

It’s funny remembering all of this now. Along with the memories come the mixed feelings Sherriff describes with beautiful insight. The first summers everyone was so enthusiastic to be leaving for the lake. Then, as I was getting older my opinion on this trip changed. I started feeling like I didn’t want to be reassured by the comfort of a familiar place any more. Every year the beach, the arcade, the jetty looked different to me, not just because I was less and less interested in these things, trying to act like a grown-up already, but because they served as reminders of habits I was ready to abandon. I wished for new thrills, new adventures.

At the same time, only now I understand how important that small place was for my parents. Much like Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, my parents were not using that beach as a simple escape from their days of work. They were putting every inch of themselves in moments they wanted to last forever. They were trying to have something worth remembering because they knew, deep within their hearts, it wasn’t just the arcade or the jetty ageing quickly. Fighting through anxious routines the inevitable changes with which time challenges the solidity of a family, they wanted us to stay together one more time.

It exists therefore I am

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 07:12:50 +0000

Setting reason aside is not something we welcome gladly, is it? After all, acting according to feelings is acting irrationally, and if we open that door we are going to let in the possibility of regrets and sorrow as well. Since we do not always feel ready to face regrets and sorrow, we prefer applying our mind on every worthwhile occasion. Or so we believe. Why do we act like we must reduce everything to reason, anyway?

John M. Coetzee taught me that it is impossible to subject the richness of our everyday experience to the rules of reason alone. He did so through one of his most beautiful and complex characters, one whose presence by now is almost tangible to me: Elizabeth Costello. And as it often happens with the best things in one’s life, Coetzee and Costello entered mine by chance, that is by way of a casual mention during a course at my university which set off the same irrational drive that led me to Ingeborg Bachmann.

Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian woman, a renown writer whose fame, contrary to her will, is an outcome of the success of one of her early novels. Over the course of Coetzee’s book, she is invited to give speeches on a wide range of topics around the world. She complies, even though her distress is something she will not overcome easily. Eventually, she will have to deal with the consequences of her words, standing by her opinions, and questioning her own beliefs.

As in other Coetzee’s works, taking into account the existence of non-human animals and how we live with and next to them is unavoidable. Coetzee’s ethics are much too complex for me to deal with right now,¹ so I will just single out a passage from Elizabeth Costello which I would like to expand upon.

Both reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking. And if this is so, if that is what I believe, then why should I bow to reason this afternoon and content myself with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers.²

I do not think that I could find better words to explain why, as I am close to get my BA in Philosophy, I am struggling to cope with some of what I have learnt so far.

Do not get me wrong, I value my time at Ca’ Foscari and there is no end to what opening my mind to philosophy has done to me.³ And yet I wish I had known Coetzee and Costello back when I was following a course on moral philosophy. It has been more than two years since that exam, but I have never been able to shake off the feeling of contempt it has left on me, its questionable attempt at winning students over to a specific worldview. It became even clearer a couple of months after the exam, but obvious hints triggered me way before that.

More specifically, while discussing the role of the human soul in Aquinas, the professor decided to share his opinion on animal rights. He did so by oversimplifying his arguments against the likes of Tom Regan and Peter Singer, while talking about animal rights movements without acknowledging how they have evolved since they were first born. It was baffling to notice how conveniently he avoided any practical matter. Why should we care about intensive farming and moral justifications for hunting when we can sit down and discuss about the human soul from the comfort of our classroom?

This whole approach served his purpose rather well. Eventually, he singled out the possibility of reasoning about infinity as humans’ defining trait. Human life, he added, follows an arc trajectory, open to the transcendental, whereas animals’ is a cycle. And so what? How is that even relevant when one looks a bit more closely at how humans have been treating animals over the course of history? More importantly, how is his discourse of any relevance to the lives of non-human animals?

I put forward my opinion to the teacher’s assistant during a seminar, but the conversation was cut short because, I can only assume, he sensed no way out from the circularity of his arguments. Are we not to be held accountable when we decide of the lives of other living beings? Is human reason so peculiar that it can be excused from thinking about the implications of all our actions and not just the ones we deem worth of moral judgements? Who are we to decide what is morally justifiable to do to living beings we share our lives with?

I believe philosophy must teach us how to live in a world greater than us. We exist only because the world exists, not the other way around. We are born humans, we argue with humans, but we find more than humans out there. If we are still discussing the human soul and otherness in human terms, then we still have to move past the old philosophers Elizabeth Costello refers to.

I suggest starting with J. M. Coetzee and Ethics to get a general idea. ↩︎
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 67. ↩︎
As I wrote other times, I will return to my experience at Ca’ Foscari later this year. ↩︎

The irresistible tension of language

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:12:50 +0000

My life is over, for during the deportation he has drowned in the river, he was my life. I loved him more than my life.

— Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann¹

My career at Ca’ Foscari is coming to an end, at least in terms of my BA in Philosophy. I will write about this long and wild journey another time, but today I want to expand upon a brief talk I gave in class last Tuesday as part of an assignment for the Philosophy of Literature course.

The professor asked us to work in groups on one of the essays we have to study for the final exam, free to develop its contents in any feasible direction. For reasons I am not entirely able to explain I was drawn to Aldo Gargani’s Il pensiero raccontato, a marvellous study about Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann. Two other students soon joined me and we pleasantly lost ourselves in her words as well as among the ones by Paul Celan, Thomas Bernhard and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I was particularly fascinated by Gargani’s focus on the tension in Bachmann and Bernhard writings. This tension is not just the reader’s feeling as they turn the pages, albeit there are passages in Bachmann’s Malina and Bernhard’s Gargoyles² perfectly capable of shaking one’s own psychological grounds. The tension that Gargani highlights is within the actual language used by these authors. More specifically, the tension is between what is shown by the language and what cannot be said. Where does this tension lead?

According to Gargani the tension is always aimed at the reality we live in, its purpose nothing less than being the cause of a “moral leap”, as Bachmann puts it in her Frankfurt lessons.³ Bachmann wants us to understand that in order to confront the present we are thrown into and survive, we have to look at it through lenses that are not, and cannot, be set once and for all. The past is always transforming the present just as the present never sits still. There is nothing, then, that we can seriously take for granted. Bachmann creates a language that forces us to constantly look at where we are now and, at the same time, gaze into where we really should be. This is why in her view literature must be capable of influencing any present, the one we are currently in and every present that is yet to come.⁴

The quote from Malina I put at the beginning of this writing is the same one I used in class. To me it is the perfect example of what Gargani so acutely finds in Bachmann. In it she is conflating the tragic experience of Nazi Germany⁵ and the suicide of Romanian poet Paul Celan,⁶ thus keeping alive the horrible connection between the past, hers and ours, with the present, hers and ours. Furthermore, she is pushing us to look for implicit and explicit connections within the text and outside of it. Bachmann is fully aware that her book should not matter just for the people alive at the time of her writing. For it to be of any value to all the possible readers that will get to it eventually, its language has to keep renewing itself for every reader, creating tension between different times and different spaces.

As Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin wrote, this can only be done by using live, dynamic affinities instead of channeling static similarities.⁷ This means that language must not act as a homogenising common denominator. It should not be a universal item that subsumes concepts, historical processes, and cultural events under one, giant umbrella. If we lose heterogeneity, we lose the possibility of seeing beyond ourselves. If we cannot see beyond ourselves, we will never be able to change, and only the dead never changes.

The English translation of Malina from New Directions uses “transport” instead of “deportation”, whereas the Italian translation published by Adelphi goes with “deportazione”. I prefer the Italian version because it makes the not so subtle reference to the concentration camps clearer. ↩︎
The German title, Verstörung, translates as something like confusion or derangement, whereas the Italian title is Perturbamento, which is closer to the original meaning. ↩︎
I am referring to Letteratura come utopia. Lezioni di Francoforte published by Adelphi, but there is an English translation as well titled The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann. ↩︎
See: Letteratura come utopia. Lezioni di Francoforte. ↩︎
Her father was a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. ↩︎
The relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan was so intense and incredible it deserves a much better writer than myself. To get an idea I highly recommend starting with Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan and then watching Ruth Beckermann’s The Dreamed Ones. ↩︎
See Derrida’s Des tours de Babel and Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?, and Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator and On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. ↩︎

The perfect book club

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my recap of 2023 I quickly mentioned that I wanted to expand on my experience with the Proust Society of Greenwich, so here I am. I would also like to take this opportunity to reflect on what a book club should do for me.

I have always wanted to share my opinions on the things I love. I remember fondly the pre-Reddit age of internet fora and I still subscribe to mailing lists and newsletters for in-depth discussions without the ubiquitous distractions of today’s world wide web. My experience with a book or a film is not complete if I do not translate my feelings into words for someone to read or to hear. This urge to express my own mind is what has been driving me to search for book clubs over the past years. Since the Proust Society of Greenwich is the last one I joined, let me briefly describe the previous ones.

My very first book club since I have been living in this town was organised by a co-worker of my better half who wanted to make their students read books in their original language (English) in order to discuss them together (in English). I was not part of their group of students, but I asked if I could join anyway for the sake of reading and sharing comments. After a few meetings I sort of understood that the main aim of the book club was having students practice and improve their knowledge of the English language, which was not really the reason for me to be there. This is not to say that I do not need to improve my English, because I always do. Nonetheless, it was not what I had hoped for.

My second book club was organised by a nearby public library. This is a close-knit group of people, most of them part of the club since its beginnings back in the 2010s. That is why I entered a bit shyly, not really sure how to relate and what to add at first.¹ Soon I started to fit in better, but I also realised that I was not enjoying the books that we were supposed to read and talk about. I tend to treasure the amount of time I have for my readings because, simply put, time is never enough. I cannot afford to waste it on books that do not work for me.

The third book club was one I pushed for. When I got the news that a philosophy book club was about to start not too far from where I live my expectations skyrocketed. Since I am not as close to the university campus as I wish, I do not have many people around me to discuss philosophy with. I wanted the book club to be the place for close readings and unpacking of theories, because, despite my years at Ca’ Foscari, I still feel like a novice in this regard. Unfortunately, the club turned out to be something different.

Open to everyone remotely interested in philosophy, it consisted in monthly chats on selected pages of books picked according to so-called themes (e.g., friendship, love, etc.). With little to no guidance from the organisers, the books were chosen from a list including philosophical, psychological, and literary works. Mostly people shared feelings about the content of the books and that was it. I offered some feedback to the organisers a couple of times, only to be ignored. Introducing philosophy to everybody is an admirable endeavor, but that was not what I had in mind.

After reading Proust’s La Recherche for the first time I just could not stop thinking about it.² More importantly, I thought that what I had been really looking for in a book club was a group of people devoted to just one author or one book that seriously moves us. I had read wonders about an Infinite Jest marathon, for instance, but I could not find anything Proust-related in my country.³ A quick online research, however, pointed me to the right place. Fereshteh Priou, the person in charge of the Proust Society of Greenwich, kindly admitted me to the meetings and so it began.

We get together online once a month, 20-25 fellow Proust lovers. The aim is reading all seven volumes of La Recherce, a small selection of pages at a time. In this age of ever-decreasing attention span this is the right pace for such a demanding work. What really helps, though, is Priou’s vast knowledge of the subject. She singles out passages for us to discuss and she is never out of prompts to keep the words flying around. Most of the times I learn something new and yet I never feel discouraged to speak my mind. Moreover, we rarely lose focus and this is of immense value. Online meetings do not make it easy to stay constantly alert, but Priou keeps it all together nicely and in the end it always seems like one hour is way too short to share our love for Proust.

Eventually, finding myself among people who come with their own cultural background to an author or a book that everyone is at the very least interested in is the best place to spend my time while sharing my obsessions. We take it slow, we value the time spent on understanding the intricacies of Proust’s passages by paying close attention to them. This makes much more sense to me than sitting down to discuss a different book on each occasion. In the other clubs I mentioned above it was often the case that some member did not finish the book in time for the meeting, so they felt unable to add something meaningful to the conversation. Why constraint ourselves to a schedule instead of allowing us the precious and much needed moments to approach a book slowly, to parse it calmly, and savour it page after page?

On the other hand, my experience with the Proust Society of Greenwich leaves my quest for a philosophy book club open, but who knows. Some day, maybe. Some day.

“Sociability is hard enough for me.” (Coffee & TV, Blur) ↩︎
Ask my partner. ↩︎
As it is often the case. ↩︎

My 2023

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another year, another recap. 2023 has been a strange bunch of months for different reasons. Last year I complained about not finding enough motivation with my studies and the book clubs I had joined. 2023, on the other hand, has been definitely better in these regards. I will return to my studies later when I will deal with my favourite books, but in terms of book clubs I am now a member of the Proust Society of Greenwich and I have found myself deeply involved in monthly discussions on my favourite author. A rewarding experience to say the least, something I would like to expand on soon.

Anyway, let’s proceed.

Emacs

I have to say 2023 has seen few experiments with the one and only text editor. I have moved around completion solutions just to rely on the standard, built-in one eventually, because it has been much improved in Emacs 29 and therefore in the development version I use as well. The one thing I was missing is a predictable behaviour for the window containing the *Completions* buffer. Basically, I want this window to always pop up at the bottom.

(add-to-list
 'display-buffer-alist
 '("\\*Completions*\\*"
   (display-buffer-reuse-mode-window display-buffer-at-bottom)))

Furthermore, I have been relying a lot on project-compile to run unit and integration tests and execute shadow-cljs when needed. Speaking of Cloure, I have played around a bit with clojure-ts-mode with nothing to be sad about, although I have yet to find corner cases which regular clojure-mode seriously struggles with.

Learning French

Early this year I briefly mentioned my intention to learn French in order to read the entirety of Proust’s oeuvre. I started with the popular Duolingo, but after a while I was tired of random phrases without context. I cannot learn a language like this. At most this is good for practising and revising.

Therefore I went with the good old way: a proper course with a professional language teacher. I looked for one on Preply until I found the teacher with the right qualifications. Everything has been great so far, my basic knowledge of French has already improved a lot.

Along with the lessons I have been following the same approach I had used in the past to learn English: language exposure. I watched my first French film without English subtitles (Roman Polanski’s J’accuse), I read my first French book with a dictionary on the side and no translation to help me (Neige Sinno’s Triste tigre), I have been reaching for French news (Franceinfo and France 24), and I have been keeping a grammar book next to me for some extra practice.

All of this would not make much sense if I had not set a goal for myself, which is a DELF B2 certification. It will take time, but I will get there.

Books

First, the usual selection from this year’s readings:

I piaceri e i giorni (Marcel Proust)
Jean Santeuil (Marcel Proust)
Saggi (Marcel Proust)
Vita di Marcel Proust (Jean Yves-Tadié)
Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin)
Teoria del romanzo (Guido Mazzoni)
Le vite del romanzo (Thomas Pavel)
The Idiot (Elif Batuman)
Sulla poesia moderna (Guido Mazzoni)
Either/Or (Elif Batuman)
Bel Ami (Guy De Maupassant)
Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates)
Fontamara (Ignazio Silone)
Senza intellettuali (Giorgio Caravale)
Triste tigre (Neige Sinno)

There is no need to explain again why Proust is there. Nonetheless, here are some additional notes:

literary theory is a wonderful thing;
I consider Elif Batuman one of the most interesting writers out there. Her newsletter is a nice way to entertain me while I eagerly wait for her next book;
Blonde hit me on so many levels that I have struggled to find something interesting to write about it. I honestly believe it is one of the greatest books I have ever put my eyes on;
Triste tigre started as an exercise because I wanted to read something in French and it has ended up being an emotional tour de force. A Lolita from the other side if you will.

There is another author that has played an important role in the last months, but I have not put him on the list because I have only studied bits and pieces of his writings so far. Still, since it has already been moving me in so many ways,¹ he deserves a mention: Antonio Gramsci. Thanks to a course on political philosophy I have finally had the chance to study Gramsci more closely and work on my rather sparse knowledge of him. The more I dig the more he is leaving a mark on me as great as Spinoza’s.

Music

The new records from RVG and Angie McMahon came out right when I needed them this year. RVG showed up with their best album so far, fiercely personal and less obvious about its roots than the two before, while McMahon healed her wounds with an open letter from her heart to the world, as close to a real-life hug as possible.

I should also put Róisín Murphy here. Even though her controversial statements ruined her party, I still believe her latest effort is fantastic. And let’s not forget about Paul St. Hilaire, who came back after many years with all the dub vibes one could ask for.

As for Italy, I am glad the people behind the music festival I mentioned last year are back with a new place for great live music. Thanks to them I found out about Trust The Mask and their lovely Idiom. It was impossible to stay still at the concert, a sign of undeniable quality. I have also the utmost respect for the intrepid Daniela Pes, whose Spira sounds like nothing else around me, and only good words for Marta Del Grandi and The Thugs.

However, boygenius’ the record and, to a lesser extent, the follow-up EP the rest are what 2023 has been mostly all about in terms of music. The vinyl did not come cheap, but the record has been pretty much my go-to album until McMahon stole its thunder. It does not matter, anyway, because boygenius are a storm and they still have plenty a thunder to share.

As for older music, I have fallen madly in love with Ada Oda, who are clearly here to remind me new wave is as relevant for me today as it was back in my youth, and I have found something worth of attention in Andrew WK’s most recent and less appreciated albums. They cannot match the wild rides of his first two works but at least they do find him at peace with himself somehow.

Cinema

Just as it has been a great year for studying and reading, cinema has found its way to my heart again. The following is a mixed selection of titles from 2023 and from 2022, because I had so much to catch up with.

Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
La Nuit du 12 (Dominik Moll)
Novembre (Cédric Jimenez)
Coma (Bertrand Bonello)
Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
Blonde (Andrew Dominik)
Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron)
Malum (Anthony DiBlasi)
Sick of Myself (Kristoffer Borgli)
Bodies Bodies Bodies (Halina Reijn)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Bottoms (Emma Seligman)
Ferrari (Michael Mann)
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)
May December (Todd Haynes)

As I did with books, some extra notes:

French cinema is still able to say things like nobody else;
Blonde is absolutely fantastic and I wonder if my appreciation for it could explain why I feel so distant from most contemporary film critics;
James Cameron is once again reinventing cinema;
I am so happy that horror films still talk to me;
I did not need Ferrari to love Michael Mann, but I am glad he wanted to make sure my feelings have not changed.

So much so that the critical editions of his Notebooks and Letters are already next to me. ↩︎

Marilyn’s avatar

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I guess there isn’t any Norma Jean, is there?

— Blonde, Andrew Dominik

The first image of Marilyn Monroe I have ever seen is a photo of her, up on the wall of the living room in the house where I grew up. It has been there for as long as I can remember and it is still there today. I have never paid too much attention to it, to be honest, even when I understood who the charming lady was. It seemed like an icon from a past I did not feel really attached to. Recently, while reading Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde and right before watching Andrew Dominik’s film of the same name, I have had the chance to look at the photo more closely. Once again, it eluded me. Where is Norma Jeane here?

Oates and Dominik ask themselves the same question and set out to explore what phrasing it means, way before searching for an answer. What Oates aptly discovers and what Dominik bravely takes away from her book is that in order to understand the woman behind Marilyn Monroe one has to start from her body and think of how she lived it. This could explain why Oates’ and Dominik’s works have been met with mixed reactions. There is no point in expecting the story of Marilyn Monroe or asking for another apologetic tale of belated repentance, just as it makes no sense to complain about how shattered one’s own mental picture of her will be after the last word and the last scene. Quite the contrary. The fragments Oates and Dominik disperse should be treasured as pieces of a bigger puzzle everyone is required to complete.

Marilyn Monroe (Cecil Beaton, 1956)

Indeed, Marilyn Monroe remains a mystery the solution of which cannot be found neither in Oates’ book nor in Dominik’s film. Still, the pages and the images provide a specific point of view, an angle from which one can observe Marilyn Monroe and try for themselves to find a way in her world of mirrors, illusions, fame and failure, tragedy and eternity. I have the utmost respect for a writer, a director or, generally speaking, an artist who provokes me or even infuriates me. As long as a reaction to what is placed in front of me is demanded, art is already doing the right thing regardless of any aesthetic consideration. I like to think I deserve a bit of credit from an artist, I want to believe they know they can rely on me doing my best to engage with their effort. Simply put, I may not share the artist knowledgeable background, but it does not mean that I should be treated as a goof.

This is why I felt so compelled by Oates and Dominik. They refuse to pamper their audience and keep pushing forward whatever they think worth of our attention. Take Oates, for instance. She offers a plethora of voices, never at peace with a simple opinion, deliberately refusing to add details for the sake of completeness. What if the reader cannot understand a specific passage because they are not familiar with Norma Jean’s youth? What if they cannot recognise names, places, events? Oates does not care. She points at the source material for her book in the very first pages, so the reader knows how to fill the gaps if so inclined. Eventually, Oates shapes facts, invents characters, exaggerates situations, and breaks conventional pictures of Marilyn Monroe. What we read is beyond the true-false dichotomy. Only Norma Jean painfully knows what is true and what is false about Marilyn Monroe.

Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022)

Dominik accepts Oates’ uncompromising imagination and dives as deep as possible in the horror of this story. The director plays to great extent with Norma Jean being an avatar of Marilyn Monroe. One would expect the exact opposite, but Dominik convincingly insists on the psychological power of Monroe, a white men product, over the fragile woman who was never able to overcome it. Monroe takes apart Norma Jean mind and body, destroys her private life every time she tries to get it back, and owns her to the end until exhaustion. Much like Oates, Dominik picks what makes sense to him from the book and, to a larger extent, from Monroe’s life. And just like the writer, the director twists specific moments and develops new scenarios with remarkable effect. Look, for example, at his shocking depiction of Norma Jean’s nightmares or marvel at the outstanding yet unsustainable last minute of the film.

Both authors have been criticised for their supposedly merciless treatment of a sacred icon like Marilyn Monroe. Again, destabilising common conscience and subverting given myths is precisely what art should do. Oates’ and Dominik’s works aim at the same target: where does entertainment end? More than twenty years separate the film from the book, but this question is as relevant today as it was back in the early 2000s.

Elif Batuman and Dario Ferrari

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The summer break from lessons and exams¹ is the perfect time for picking up books I have on my to-read list. Three entries in particular from this lot have been prompting so many notes and discussions with my partner lately that I cannot miss the opportunity to recap everything here. The works I am referring to are The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman and Dario Ferrari’s La ricreazione è finita.

I will not go into many details about plots and characters in order to avoid unfortunate spoilers. Still, a bit of context is necessary. Both Batuman and Ferrari write about academia experiences in a semi-autobiographical fashion, meaning they use bits and pieces from their lives to fuel their pages. With different approaches they look back at what university did to and for them. Having seen my share of the academia world in the last four years I can relate to some of the episodes, which helps appreciate Batuman’s humour and Ferrari’s sarcasm, but this sort of narrative has always fascinated me.²

What I like about Batuman is how she plays with time. She states the importance of time by opening The Idiot with a quote from Proust, and she understands perfectly well what the relationship between writing and time means for the French author.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened[.]

Like Thomas Pavel says,³ writing for Proust is not only a vocation, it is a means for personal salvation. With The Idiot and Either/Or Batuman is using her protagonist to confront a present that only makes sense as it unfolds. For all the love for Kierkegaard she shows in Either/Or, using the title of the book and the epigram to make it as clear as possible, Batuman is subtly defying the Danish philosopher’s words about the meaning of life.⁴ Instead of treating the past as a line that joins previous events and eventually leads them to the present, Batuman lets the reader notice, over and over again, how hard it is to look back at our experiences to make sense of who we are here and now. There is so much going on and even more could have happened that tracing consistent trajectories is impossible.

This is where Ferrari fails. The Italian writer wishes to juxtapose past and present using different alter egos, but in the end he has the two temporal dimensions running in parallel, struggling to connect them via moral and historical checkpoints. Whereas Batuman deals with Turkish culture as an unsolvable puzzle, Ferrari handles Italian anarchism as bygone folklore to be admired through the nostalgic eyes of a paraphernalia collector. He then directs the same pair of eyes to love and friendship, moving between failed romances and dramatic camaraderie with characters whose feeble personalities exist only to abstract the protagonist away from himself. Batuman’s heroine, on the other hand, is surrounded by human beings so rich and specific that she is constantly reminded of the depth of the human condition she desperately wants to capture. Love goes only in predictable directions for Ferrari, while remaining a mystery for Batuman, who is able to depict the vast incomprehensibility of such a powerful feeling with kindheartedness and bitter seriousness at the same time.

Ferrari surpasses Batuman prose in one regard, though, which is the portrayal of university’s inner workings. Batuman moves lightly here, focusing on a limited set of problems, the big picture always a bit too far to be properly seen. Ferrari, however, is an unstoppable force. He knows firsthand what is wrong with Italian academia, the political mess behind it, the poor state of the research sector and the lottery that a career as a professor turns out to be in this country. He may sound too cynical and caustic at times, self-deprecation not being my favourite writing style, yet if one by any chance is or was a student at an Italian university they know Ferrari is right.

I am glad I have come across Elif Batuman and Dario Ferrari. It is obvious that I enjoyed Batuman’s books more, but both writers found more or less compelling ways to tell relatable stories. Summer demands nothing more.

Well, sort of. I am still working on a couple of exams waiting for me between the end of August and the beginning of September. ↩︎
I have admired Donna Tartt’s The Secret History long before the recent wave of enthusiasm. ↩︎
See: Thomas Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel: A History. ↩︎
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” (Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, IV) ↩︎

Why Proust?

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been asked the question in the title twice recently, only to find myself seemingly incapable of explaining my reasons without stating the obvious. It was not the first time that words did not come to me as I really want, and I am sure it will not be last. In order to avoid being cornered by “why Proust?” inquiries again, I decided to put my answer into writing.

Marcel Proust’s name entered my life around my last days of high school. Back then I just had the luxury of an online forum’s community to escape my small, rural town and access a broader range of cultural items. The forum had a section where topics about books showed up every now and then. Truth be told, we were more into films and music, but luckily I wasn’t alone in my passion for literature. I was, and to a certain degree still am, a novice in this regard, so I used to take every recommendation as a chance to widen my limited horizon.

When a member opened a topic about Proust, though, I was scared. I had already read some classics, I knew my way around some English and French literature, but the guy did not care to mention, among other things, that À la recherche du temps perdu was over 4000 pages, nor that it’s nearly impossible to understand without taking into consideration its author’s life. Plus, I didn’t have a teacher as good as the one who made me fall in love with I Promessi Sposi next to me. I could only think of one thing: let’s bookmark Marcel Proust in my mind and get back to him when I feel ready. Slightly embarrassingly, I felt ready almost twenty years later. Put otherwise, it was never the right time to pick up Proust.

We could argue about the notion of right time for ages, I suppose. To me, the right time to do something is when it feels natural to do it, to the point that I start doing it without really thinking about what took me there instead of somewhere else. The right time is also a wonderful and mysterious feeling, especially with books. I remember fondly the right time for Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace because an ever-changing stream of emotions bathed me while reading their works. And even more incredibly inexplicable was the right time for Baruch Spinoza, with the implications of his philosophy destroying most of my thoughts about the world around me. These authors happened to be what I needed in a particular moment in my life, and the fact that they have stayed with me since then adds depth to my idea of “right time”.

When was the right time for Marcel Proust and À la recherche du temps perdu? I cannot pinpoint a day, but last year both the writer and the book found their ways back to me. It had mainly to do with university, I suppose. My partner took a class with a professor who teaches Proust, albeit not in that specific course. Proust was named, though. As it is my custom, I started endless talks on my desire to know more about him, subtly convincing my partner to shut me up by joining me in the hunt for the Italian edition of La Recherche.¹

While devoted to its pages, two things happened. First, during a course on Gilles Deleuze we spent quite some time on his Proust and Signs, working on the relevance of Henri Bergson’s concept of virtual memory on both Deleuze and Proust. My enthusiasm was so manifest that on the day of the exam I ended up talking about Proust even if I wasn’t explicitly asked about him.² Second, rather impulsively, I enrolled on the course of the aforementioned professor to enjoy a theoretical study of La Recherche with some help from Mikhail Bakhtin, György Lukács, Thomas G. Pavel, and Franco Moretti.

The more I learn about La Recherche, the more I want to know about Marcel Proust. His first writings, his early poetry, his essays, George D. Painter’s classic biography, I just cannot stop reading, and I am now seriously considering learning French to dig deeper.³ Just as it happened with Bolaño, Wallace, and Spinoza, Proust’s words speak to sides of me that I wasn’t even aware of having. They seem to understand me better than anyone else, not solely because they shine a light on my inner self, but because they confront me with possibilities yet to come and paths I’d better not take. This is why Proust.

There are different editions and formats of Proust’s masterpiece available in Italy. I wanted the seven volumes translated by Giovanni Raboni, which are starting to be replaced by a new one volume edition, large and heavy enough to make holding it with your hands an endless struggle. ↩︎
The professor appreciated it anyway. ↩︎
The entirety of Proust’s correspondence is not available in Italian. ↩︎

My 2022

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This year I am going to approach my usual recap in a different way. Instead of separating best-of lists I will look back at 2022 in a single writing to keep it simple.

2022 will not be remembered as a particularly stimulating time. For instance, I have struggled to keep my enthusiasm alive when it comes to university. This is not solely because of the whole mess with dual lessons, but it encompasses the quality of the courses and what I have been learning as well. Maybe I will return on this at some point in the future, but for now let me just add that once again I can’t wait to get it over with. Almost the same reasoning can explain why I left the two book clubs I had joined in 2021. I was not pleased by the reading choices nor by the discussions around them, and more often than not it felt like I was putting obstacles between me and the books I want to read. But let’s set aside the negativity for a while and see what really mattered this year.

Emacs

I usually document my Emacs adventures on this website so I’ll be brief. For the ever-present and more reliable software in my computing life this has been the first year fully away from Magit and MELPA. The built-in VC system has been a trustworthy companion, and the combination of GNU ELPA and NonGNU ELPA has provided the few external packages I need. Speaking of packages, Eglot deserves a mention. It’s true that I don’t use it for work, but whenever I deal with academic writings (LaTeX) or hobby projects (Haskell) Eglot has made me appreciate some of the goodies that LSP has to offer. Another package worth being included here is detached.el, which I’ve been using to run commands like bundle, yarn, and shadow-cljs from shell-mode without losing control of the buffer. So neat.

SourceHut

Early this year I moved my projects from GitHub to SourceHut. This was such an important step for me because for my repositories I don’t want to worry about actions, notifications, unnecessary JavaScript, and giant corporations stalking my code. SourceHut firmly avoids all of that and provides the user with a small set of great tools. GitHub helped me to get out of my cave and learn how to share and collaborate with others, something not to be underestimated. However, SourceHut cares. The least I could do was joining them to support this wonderful act of caring.

DivestOS

After almost six years, in May I decided to leave the default Fairphone OS behind and look for something different. The experience with DivestOS has been so fantastic I had to make a donation to this awesome project. My phone battery now lasts longer than ever before and the user interface is generally more responsive, but the true value of this OS is that I have a Google-free Fairphone 2 that works as expected. For a person who has basic needs when it comes to their smartphone and wishes for better privacy, DivestOS is the perfect solution.

Books

From the book lover perspective 2022 has been intense, and I am not referring to the total number of pages I read. What I mean is the profound quality of the works I’ve been through and the hours spent thinking both while reading and after the turn of the last page. Even in the one case where I got angry at the author it was still worth it. Here are the most rewarding readings of the past months:

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
In the Eye of the Wild (Nastassja Martin)
Cecilia e le streghe (Laura Conti)
Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition (Maria Wirtemberska)
Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (Clare Carlisle)
Horcynus Orca (Stefano D’Arrigo)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)

Most of these are classics so you don’t really need my words to pick them up. Still, it’s safe to say that for one reason or another they all are experiences to treasure, worth the time and the effort that they require. If you are wondering where philosophy fits in my 2022 readings, I can say Kant, Hegel, and Deleuze are the authors I have spent a great deal of days on, but there has been room for Spinoza, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno too.

Music

As an avid music listener and record collector, I feel a bit ashamed in this regard. The only records I bought this year are Big Time by Angel Olsen and II by Liberato, but Olsen’s costed me a small fortune, so there goes my banal excuse for not sticking more with music in 2022.

Anyway, some of my best experiences had more to do with concerts. I went to a little festival last summer, called Upside Fest, created by the same people behind the loveliest place for beer and live music around here that sadly did not survive the pandemic. The festival was all about independent music, workshops, and being friendly to each other, which is the sort of spirit the organizers always put in everything they do. It took place in the small park of what long ago was the castle of the town, a cozy and quiet environment which invites everyone to massive chill out sessions. It’s impossible to come out bored or unhappy when these people are involved.

On the opposite side of the intimacy spectrum, I finally attend a Liberato’s live performance. The show has been postponed multiple times due to COVID-19, but eventually they did it and it was glorious. I am not too fond of big concerts and huge crowds these days, but Liberato is some of the best music Italy has at the moment so I could not miss it. He pretty much remixed all of his tracks, interpolating covers and extending them with new beats for the entire set. We danced (well, jumped around mostly) and yelled Neapolitan words for two hours. Fun times indeed.

Cinema

I know this is going to sound horrible coming from a self-proclaimed cinephile, but all things considered I have not been able to feel moved, involved, passionate with a film not already part of my Blu-ray and DVD collection. I can mention Elvis and Kimi as pleasant and interesting movies, but titles such as Deep Water, Armageddon Time, and Crimes of the Future were just below my expectations. The only exception to this bleakness is The Fabelmans, which although formulaic, predictable, and not up there with the best from Steven Spielberg, shows love for the art and it understands where the heart fits among the images. It reminded me of Zhang Yimou’s One Second, hence storytelling for the sake of telling.

It looks like I have been approaching films with a precise idea of what I wanted from them, which is obviously not the right thing to do. Cinema owes me nothing and it’s up to me to be open and apply my mind accordingly. I see myself getting tired quickly with recent films, throwing around comparisons and unable to accept what is in front of me. I have not been keeping up with new releases, at least not as much as I used to, so I don’t have the proper tools to understand where cinema is going and why. I hope this is just some sort of vacation from one of my deepest and oldest loves in order to regain the mindset to be at peace with it again.

Giacomo Leopardi was a loser

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Not too long ago, I was having dinner with relatives and friends. The conversation was circling around topics I do not much care about (e.g., food), but at some point, I don’t remember exactly how, we moved to more interesting subjects. Specifically, literature and poetry. A friend mentioned how hard teaching poetry at their school is, and we ended up sharing comments on our favourite poets. As soon as Giacomo Leopardi’s name was thrown around, from the other side of the table a relative quickly shared their thought: “Giacomo Leopardi was a loser!”. It took me a while to realize what had just been said. Then I failed miserably at trying to explain the stunning beauty of L’infinito to an audience not particularly interested in the sublime, the absolute, and the Spinozistic reality of the poem.

Over the course of the next days I kept returning to the statement “Giacomo Leopardi was a loser”. I wanted to understand it better. I was not particularly interested in shaming the author of the comment, because I am not a poetry expert, so it would have been silly to hold up true aesthetic values for art’s sake without being able to justify my opinion. I simply was fascinated by what something like “Giacomo Leopardi was a loser” could tell me on the author of the comment’s views on poetry and art in general.

What happens when we value a piece of art according to our perception of the author? The relative who expressed their opinion on Leopardi has never cared too much about humanities, so what does it mean for them to acknowledge something as beautiful? One possible explanation is that what they deem beautiful is in fact what they instinctively like or, to a certain degree, think they understand. This is the old subjective versus objective argument encapsulated by the following expression: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

However, I don’t think this kind of relativism can be used as a solid principle, mostly because it can be conducive to naive forms of skepticism for which there is no easy way out.¹ It’s also true that the mere fact that we like something does not make it automatically beautiful for everyone, and yet there are work of arts generally considered beautiful but in front of which we are not moved at all. Is art failing at communicating a universal value of beauty, or is it just us lacking the right perspective and the proper knowledge to grasp beauty as it should be?²

Another question raised in me by “Giacomo Leopardi was a loser” concerns the relationship between the person and the artist who that person is. I remember being desperately incapable of making a distinction between the two, for instance, praising or insulting an art piece depending on how close the author was to my political ideas. A professor dear to me once said: “Should we trash Being and Time now that we know of Heidegger’s sympathies for the Nazi Party?”.³ Whatever the term “loser” means, it makes absolutely no difference when we consider what Leopardi left us with. We have his poetry, we can read his writings. What do they tell us? Do they still mean something to us? Is Leopardi’s art relevant today? Unless the answer to all of these questions is negative and justifiably so, I see no point in avoiding Leopardi in light of how the man was supposed to be.

Moreover, if beautiful is only what I like and can understand, does it even make sense to study this poet, or even poetry at all, at school? There is a not so subtle utilitarian dimension to a notion of beauty built upon an individual’s own interests which, in turn, renders poetry somehow imposed on students against more practical, day-to-day matters. This is an all too familiar situation, because it goes hand in hand with what I want a teacher to be. When I think of poetry, I think of the highest peak of the humans’ adventure with language. When I read poetry, I am taken simultaneously more beyond and within myself than with any other art by the incredible simplicity of the nature of poetry itself: it’s just words on a page, how can they push me so far? If a teacher cannot enable their students to explore the unknown sides of themselves by means of poetry, then the students are totally free to set Leopardi aside and move on. Finding beauty in poetry is hard, and that’s why it takes a really great teacher to make it possible.⁴

Still, suppose for a moment that we have finally found a poem we do like. Suppose the poem has already been valued as beautiful by experts way more trustworthy than us. Should we consider its beauty useful? In my rather limited experience, engaging with beauty in art and humanities does not seem to pay the bills, so is there even a point in studying Giacomo Leopardi when the world out there will rarely if ever match your knowledge with a salary? Let me provide a short question as a quick answer first: who cares? Now let me try to expand on it.

Conflating beauty with interest makes sense only if, for a while, we wish to take care of ourselves in a less income-driven way. Yes, finding beauty in things is for the most part a self-involved endeavor. One can reasonably say that as long as there is pleasure in it, then something is beautiful and worth of their attention. Money means nothing here: I want beauty to provide instant gratification, please. Such a hedonistic stance depends on the kind of pleasure one is looking for. If it is immediate excitement or a quick diversion from boring routine we are searching, then this is not the beauty a poem like L’infinito conveys. To appreciate its beauty one needs hard work. One must know what Leopardi is writing about; one has to remove any interference with their reading; one has to be open to the endless paths the poem will eventually uncover.

I know it takes considerable effort and time to do all of that and usually lack of time is the primary objection to this process, but I do not want to waste words on the amount of hours daily spent in front of screens of different sizes. The point here is actually very simple: you have to work for beauty to work on you. When you succeed, beauty succeeds, and as you feel the eternal you will know that it is worth every penny you are not putting in your wallet while sinking in this sea.

Put otherwise: if everything can be judged according to one’s opinions, then the statement “everything can be judged according to one’s opinions” is questionable as well. ↩︎
Studying Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment has led me to inquiries of this kind. ↩︎
I will never share Martin Heidegger’s ideas on Nazism, but Being and Time is one of the books I can point at if asked about my love for philosophy. ↩︎
I have never had a teacher capable of doing it. Luckily, I had teachers able to show me the wonders of literature and philosophy, and so I came to poetry with my eyes partially open already. ↩︎

Horcynus Orca

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the only European answer to Moby-Dick: D’Arrigo is Melville’s equal.

— George Steiner¹

After I closed the last page of Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca I could not help but think about David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.² What would have Wallace thought of D’Arrigo’s prose? Would Horcynus Orca complicate his reaction to postmodernism? Here I am assuming that the American writer did not have a chance to pick up D’Arrigo’s masterpiece when he was alive. I am also fairly confident in my assumption because a) it takes a profound knowledge of Italian language and culture to get through Horcynus Orca and Wallace was not known to be an expert in this regard and b) there is only a German translation available but it was published years after his death. Still, does his reasoning about postmodernism apply to Stefano D’Arrigo?

In a sense, it certainly does. Horcynus Orca was published in 1975 but D’Arrigo had been working on it since 1950, thus the writing process started and culminated right within an age dense with postmodern fiction. John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, are only few of the several authors whose literary efforts were distinctly geared towards what was supposed to happen after the modernism of early twentieth century. Stefano D’Arrigo could be added to this list as well, as he was clearly influenced by writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, but I like to think that he understood how truly modern Herman Melville had been and even venture to say that before David Foster Wallace embarked in his post-postmodern mission, D’Arrigo had already moved in the same direction.

For the thirty-one year old Wallace behind E Unibus Pluram, literature needed to progress beyond postmodernism by forgetting about its penchant for self-awareness. He sensed the powerful influence of media on fiction, and he brilliantly acknowledged the cynicism that rapidly followed the irony television so insisted upon. His ideal book was a combination of the style of postmodern masters with the themes of modern literary geniuses. When I think of this, I like to imagine Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust writing about today’s society after some years in the company of Cortázar and Pynchon.

In this regard, Horcynus Orca resembles Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thematically, both works are focused on individual persons and their struggles with a world always out of reach. D’Arrigo’s main character, ‘Ndrja Cambrìa, can hardly cope with the leftovers of World War II in Southern Italy, while the Incandenza family, Don Gately, and Joelle van Dyne in Infinite Jest have to endlessly deal with addiction and media-driven entertainment. In both books, the father figure is of utmost importance. It’s the key to Wallace’s mystery but it’s also what anchors ‘Ndrja Cambrìa to a past he cannot escape. At the same time, the two writers share stylistic choices to a certain degree. Beside streams of long sentences, just as Wallace crafts new vocabulary and makes extensive use of slang, D’Arrigo mixes regional dialect with invented jargon. Furthermore, whereas the American writer breaks the narrative structure with a plethora of end notes, the Sicilian author disrupts it with the language itself, forcing the reader to make sense of neologisms at any time.

There is one more similarity which I find particularly fascinating. Horcynus Orca and Infinite Jest avoid unambiguous resolutions. While this can be somehow implied in the title of Wallace’s work, the irony of it bouncing back to the reader after the last page, what does the same reader come out with at the end of Horcynus Orca? The closing hendecasyllable points to an infinity reminiscent of Wallace’s one, but this is pure speculation. The intentionally misspelled title, with that H and that y left there without any explanation, does not help either. On the contrary, I think it may just be D’Arrigo telling us that questions will arise before the very first page. This openness from both books demands multiple readings, closer inspection, and thoughtful attention, which is nothing less than what the world we live in constantly requires from us. It’s an invitation to care, and the complexity of these pages makes explicit how hard learning to care actually is.

What sets Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca apart from its contemporaries is precisely what David Foster Wallace was aiming for. Had they had the opportunity to meet, one can only wonder what the two might have talked about. Would they have agreed on their views on postmodernism? I like to think they would.

See: George Steiner - Un umanista assediato dalla scienza (My translation). ↩︎
The essay can be found in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. ↩︎

The Red Horse

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote about my favourite reads of 2021, I also wrote that starting this year I would share my thoughts on the books I enjoy. My intention was to go longer on specific titles instead of collecting small paragraphs in a round-up post in December. However, I cannot really say that I enjoyed the book I am about to discuss. What makes it still worth of some words is the fascination I found myself in when researching its origins and its author. A fascination that soon became an obsession because the more I dug the less I found. I am writing this piece out of an urge to put an end to the affair between Eugenio Corti’s Il cavallo rosso (The Red Horse) and me.

Il cavallo rosso came to my attention last year when a professor at Ca' Foscari university mentioned it during one of their lessons. Theirs was more than a title-drop, though. They went as far as calling it one of the best books of the twentieth century, and this really took me by surprise. I had never heard of Eugenio Corti and his work before. Why had such a work of art by an Italian author born not too far from my hometown always eluded me? I wanted a copy of that book as soon as possible. After about a month with its 1080 pages¹ I turned the last one feeling confused and offended. I couldn’t possibly understand why Il cavallo rosso should be praised as a masterpiece and why a university professor should suggest it as a notable work to their students. Unless I was missing something, that is to say.

Il cavallo rosso is divided into three parts. Corti writes about his experiences during the Second World War on the Russian front in the first two, and how his life turned out to be after the war in the third one. In doing so he does not put himself directly into his pages. Instead, he splits ideas and different moments of his life among a set of closely related characters. Just like the author, all of them were born and raised in Brianza, an area between Milan and Lake Como which Corti depicts as an earthly paradise of Catholic traditions and pious solidarity. I use the word “Catholic” carefully here, because Il cavallo rosso cannot be read without taking into account what Corti wanted to achieve with it in terms of religious view. I would venture to say that it’s next to impossible to accept this book for what it is without sharing its author’s point of view on Catholicism and faith.

What is Corti’s view on Catholicism, then? Corti distinctively puts himself into a conservative position when it comes to religious matters, promoting a reactionary tale of the present which, according to the character of Michele Tintori, Corti’s closest alter ego, has diverged too much from the pure sanctity of the Middle Ages. The key to understand Corti’s version of reality is the third section of Il cavallo rosso, where the writer forgets about the depths of his male characters by reducing them to little variations of the same notion. The notion being that Communism and everything that has led to it are the prime sources for the moral decadence of the world we live in. Tintori condemns Marx multiple times, reassuring the reader that he studied his books when he was in a concentration camp, while at the same time conveniently forgetting about the differences between Marxism, Soviet Communism, and Chinese Communism. The same character later justifies the Inquisition, a noble cause that only Christians have the right to judge, and defends fascist censorship because it spared Italians the trouble of reading bad literature. At a certain point I lost count of the times Partisans and the Italian resistance movement are ridiculed, but the blind compassion for German soldiers and the hanged body of Mussolini did not escape me either. The more we proceed through the third part of Il cavallo rosso, the more Corti insists on the obstacles that an Italian government scared of Communist and Socialist propaganda placed on his younger self’s way to stardom. Again, it does not matter how Communism and Socialism differ from each other. What matters is that anything other than Catholic faith is inherently wrong and opposed to Tintori/Corti and his success.

I have to admit that Tintori’s tirades, angry and emotionally charged, can easily appeal to people who identify with his opinions. In this regard, Il cavallo rosso is basically a pamphlet of Catholic stances, a literary exercise in dogmatism for the sake of a cause the moral grounds of which cannot be argued with. The real problem with Il cavallo rosso is that only one on Corti’s side, and who basically thinks like him, can in all honesty consider this book a great artistic achievement.² As much as Corti’s experiences on the Russian front are telling of the horrors and the misery of the soldiers and the prisoners, shining a light on events which may not be always remembered as they actually deserve, it’s hard to applaud the third section of this book for the writing style or the content. For instance, Corti is incapable of portraying female characters. He measures them in terms of beauty and devotion to God and to their male partners. More so than with men, women have no real meaning here except serving as reminders of what a good Catholic mother and wife is supposed to be. In a couple of occasions Corti links one of this women, Alma, to Alessandro Manzoni’s Lucia Mondella. Is he trying to create a bridge between Manzoni and himself? If so, Corti fails miserably at it. Lucia is rich with inner turmoil and fear. In I promessi sposi, we witness her becoming a woman every time her unshakeable faith is put to test. Her chastity is not her pedigree, it’s not something to show off. It’s one and all with her intimacy, a private matter altogether. References to Manzoni are not enough to save a character as poorly developed as Alma, whose inexpressive look, a trait so peculiar the reader has to be constantly reminded of, is the only thing one can eventually remember her by.

Interestingly enough, Alessandro Manzoni is one of the writers Eugenio Corti is compared to in the reviews collected on the last pages of the edition of Il cavallo rosso in my possession. This is a baffling comparison, because even if it’s true that they both write from a profoundly religious perspective, Manzoni does not shy away from the wrongdoings of the Church, revealing the shallowness of don Abbondio over and over again. The only way for Corti to criticise a priest is by attacking his progressive views. But even if Manzoni did stand alongside the Church — think of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo — just take the arrival of Renzo Tramaglino in a Milan devastated by famine and weigh it against Corti’s description of life in a concentration camp. Manzoni judges but does not forget the scene in front of him, whereas Corti, in order to state his position on Communism, does it at every turn of the page. He spends an incredible number of words in detailing war scenes, which is probably the one thing he does really well, but prisoners are just good or bad, much like women are just beautiful or ugly for him. In Manzoni we sense the mob, we see poverty, and we feel anger because what Renzo sees is what Manzoni wants us to see. We know what Manzoni thinks because he lets the readers grasp it without force-feeding them. With Corti, however, we only wait for the next iteration of his commentary against Communism. This can obviously be a specific choice of his. Corti may be more concerned about the cause rather than the effects of the horrors around him, but then critics who make use of the comparison with Manzoni are either doing so mischievously or are ineptly trying to raise Corti’s status to that of a classic without securing solid grounds for their statements.

While reading and researching I kept asking myself: what are the praises for Corti and Il cavallo rosso based upon? Why is it that these praises seem to focus only on the poignancy of the historical content and blatantly avoid its more controversial aspects? Try it for yourself. Try to go onto your favourite search engine and look up “Eugenio Corti” or “Il cavallo rosso”. Unless you first hit some comments on Amazon which are openly against this book, you are going to find Catholic zealots rambling about the transformative power of these pages or the methodical removal of this literary talent from the history of Italian literature. The only piece of criticism you may find is Il nobel al provincialismo, which refers to a more interesting article on the now defunct Infonodo.³ You will also note that most of the positive reviews are vague about the writing style and prefer to drop names such as Alessandro Manzoni, Lev Tolstoj, Vasilij Grossman and J. R. R. Tolkien to give you a general idea of the book without actually telling anything useful. Why should I think of Tolkien when reading Corti? The English writer hides Christianity away in the The Lord of the Rings and there is no single meaning consistently put forward. It’s up to the reader to decide what to take away from it. Furthermore, none of these writings on Corti questions the facts or his rather few ideas, and this only means that there is a common ground from which a specific worldview is thrown at the reader’s face. These are not studies on Il cavallo rosso. It’s not even proper criticism. At most it qualifies as advertisement.

In order to counter my theory one could point to the comments on Corti that have been published on paper. For example, on the pages of Il Timone, a Catholic-oriented Italian magazine, one can find various entries about him. Most of them come from Paola Scaglione, who also seems to be the only person to have published books about Corti in Italy.⁴ What I find even more fascinating is that not only Corti wrote on this magazine, but the professor who led me to Il cavallo rosso published something here as well. Which brings me back to their advice. I am struggling to understand why someone who has taught philosophy for a long time felt it necessary to recommend so narrow-minded an author. I want to believe that there is more than a moral cause behind their words, because I want to believe that when one invests their life in philosophy one is always open to different contexts and ideas. Differences matter. Eugenio Corti, on the other hand, is all about removing them in favour of just one point of view: his.

Resources

The following are the most relevant resources in Italian I consulted when researching for this piece:

Il futuro di uno scrittore di razza
Forum dei cattolici romani su Cornelio Fabro
L’eredità di Corti - Radio Radicale
Il Timone
Commento di Paolo Gulisano
Commento e intervista di Paolo Smeraldi
Commento di Benedetto Chieffo
Recensioni su Feltrinelli
Il nobel al provincialismo and the related “Eugenio Corti: come la destra cattolica ha costruito artificialmente la fama letteraria dello scrittore promuovendolo alla candidatura per il Nobel”

I have this edition. ↩︎
A heartfelt thank goes to professor Valentina Ciciliot for helping me put this thought into better words. ↩︎
It’s still available through the Wayback Machine, although I made a copy (including all the comments at the bottom) to not let it disappear any time soon. ↩︎
See Eugenio Corti: come la destra cattolica ha costruito artificialmente… in Resources. ↩︎

The best books of 2021

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To the brave reader who has been following me somehow regularly it’s obvious that Emacs is the main topic of discussion here on these pages. Being it a personal website, though, it makes sense to expand on other topics as well. And since my cinephile side is pretty much covered by Films in Words,¹ what is left to write about? Books, of course. Starting from next year I will share here a few words on the books that I enjoy the most. For today, however, a classic best-of list is all that I am going to offer.

I have selected only the most relevant books from this year, setting aside almost everything related to my university exams. Without further ado, from bottom to top:

12) Spinoza (Lorenzo Vinciguerra)

Carocci has been covering many great philosophers with these handy companions. Beside Vinciguerra’s, I have been through the ones about Aristotle, Plotinus, and Decartes and they all proved to be more than mere introductions. They are deep, clear, and concise explorations that help the reader move swiftly among outstanding thinkers. I am singling out Vinciguerra’s book because Spinoza is particularly dear to me, but any serious philosophy enthusiast should check Carocci catalogue.

11) The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)

Not my favourite work from David Foster Wallace, but he was still able to absorb me and enthrall me. Even though most of the time I was looking for clues to understand how he moved from here to Infinite Jest, he was already a superb writer and an enigmatic story-teller when he published this.

10) Michael Mann (Pier Maria Bocchi)

My favourite Italian film critic on my favourite film director. There is nothing much to add. This is a work of love, it’s plain to see, but it is not only for Mann’s devotees. Bocchi has dedicated more than twenty years to study the director’s career and the amount of insights in these pages is outrageous. I won’t say this is the book about Michael Mann, but yes, it definitely is.

9) Surfacing (Margaret Atwood)

A little book about the imaginative power of memory and how hard it is to control it. Atwood does not tell. She evokes impressions, suggests emotions, points at infinite directions. She traps the reader gently and then shocks them at the right time.

8) Philosopher of the Heart (Clare Carlisle)

One the most introvert philosophers of all time, Kierkegaard put everything he thought and was in his writings, so why should we read a book about him written by someone else? Carlisle answers this rather silly question of mine with a marvellous work that places the reader within the Danish philosopher’s mind and heart. Eventually, she poses an interesting question to any Kierkegaard’s apprentice out there: what if there is something about him that he was not able to process with his philosophy?

7) Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)

Franzen always seems capable of capturing something about my life when he writes, as he does all the time, of people that could not be more different from me. Freedom tops the already great The Corrections not only because of this, but also because whenever I think of life one of his characters comes to mind, and more often than not they have such familiar faces.

6) Attesa di Dio (Simone Weil)

Considering my idea of Christianity, when a book forces me to think about the Pater Noster for months then it has to be special. Weil’s explorations of every word of the Lord’s prayer is the only thing I could think of when, a few days ago, I happened to be in church for a funeral. Faith remains a complicated issue for me, but Weil has forever changed the way I look at prayers.

5) Diari 1941-1943 (Etty Hillesum)

As a member of a book club, at one of our meetings I had a hard time explaining why it is next to impossible to write about what it means to live through hate and die because of it after Hillesum’s pages. Which is the main reason why I didn’t enjoy the book we were discussing, anyway. I wish Etty could have been there because she would have found the right words. She was truly one of a kind.

4) The Human Stain (Philip Roth)

From now on when someone asks me about race I will point them to this book, simply because I’ve never seen the hypocrisy of so many opinions about race and racism framed so intelligently. Roth’s sharp writing takes no prisoners. As soon as I was sure to have him finally pinned down, he punched me hard and woke me up once and for all.

3) Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)

For reasons beyond my understanding Melville’s masterpiece has entered my life many times but only this year I was able to pick it up and go through all of it. In awe, of course, because there is no other way to witness the literary genius of Melville at work. If you are not deeply in love with this book already, I could not recommend the Norton Critical Edition enough.

2) I Promessi Sposi (Alessandro Manzoni)

Possibly the most hated book in Italian high schools, I was lucky back then because I had a great teacher that was able to convey her passion for Manzoni to a kid who was not ready for the world just yet. More than twenty years later I decided to see whether I Promessi Sposi had still something to offer to me. It’s safe to say that it will take me a while to find another novel that can match the emotional turmoil Manzoni has put me through once again.

1) La Divina Commedia (Dante Alighieri)

As great as the above-mentioned teacher was, a colleague of hers who was supposed to enlighten us about Dante Alighieri was instead a complete jackass who disregarded La Divina Commedia entirely, and so I ended up finishing high school with little to zero knowledge about this classic. More so than with Manzoni, I wanted to feel ready when approaching Alighieri, and studying philosophy has taken me right where I wanted to be. I am going to read La Divina Commedia over and over again for the rest of my life and I am confident I will never be able to talk about it with the respect and the wisdom it deserves.

That’s all from 2021. Happy new year, people!

An old blog of mine, not available any more. See: A new filmsinwords.eu. ↩︎

Digital minimalism

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I reached a point in my life where it’s necessary to rethink my digital habits. It happened before, of course, but in some way or another I’ve never done something useful to actively tackle my tech-addictions.

In my defence, a smartphone entered my life only by way of a birthday present in 2016. I had resisted until then for two reasons: I spend most of the day in front of a screen already, and sociability is not my strongest skill. Three years later, I am still far from being a smartphone enthusiast. Besides occasional phone calls, I seldom check it during the day. I keep messaging at a bare minimum, and there are only a couple of applications nudging me with notifications.

Therefore, the smartphone is not to blame for my compulsively click-driven life. The big giants like Facebook and Twitter don’t matter either, because I stopped using them a long while ago. The problem is everything else. Aggregating RSS feeds seemed like the right move at the beginning, but checking them everyday has turned out to be a time-consuming experience much like browsing news websites to keep up to date. Reddit lures me in constantly, even though the small percentage of valuable content just reminds me of Twitter. GitHub usually offers more click-worthy updates, but the repositories I deem interesting are far less than the uninteresting ones. Letterboxd, a staple of my cinema obsession, may be the worse in this regard; its Activity tab is the drug I can’t resist, and yet I usually find no more than a couple of beautiful reviews a week.

All these considerations are the outcome of reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Newport’s writing style is at times too pedantic and close to spoon-feeding, but his book highlights potentially effective solutions to escape the miring web of my networking routines. The decluttering process Newport suggests is a difficult task. Depending on the depth of your online addiction, it requires several levels of confidence and willpower, because you know that fighting your own vices is a painful endeavour.

I experienced something similar when I left Twitter behind. I had always valued Twitter more for the network of like-minded people than the chance to share how I feel in a precise moment, and so Twitter had become my go-to reference for film and technology updates. After I deleted my account, I remember asking myself over and over again: am I missing something important? Will I be able to keep up with everyday trends? These questions were always in the back of my head, poking me every time I heard Twitter mentioned somewhere. It took a couple of weeks, maybe three, to realise how much time and peace of mind I gained from a life without Twitter. And I did find the answer to those questions eventually: who cares?

With this precious experience in mind, I treasured Newport’s tips and followed these key steps:

cut down my RSS feeds to twenty entries and check them only twice a week
remove Reddit from my computer and from my phone
remove GitHub from my phone and use it only for work and open source projects
access Letterboxd for my writings and check the rest of the community once a week

The trick, as Newport points out, is not just understanding what you value most and whether technology helps you get it or not, but occupying the spare time with something else, possibly unrelated to technology. And so, in my case, it means more time with my wife, longer walks with our dog, more writing, more cooking, and more books. Rewarding leisure, and it’s just the beginning.

Note that I am simplifying Newport’s pages for the sake of brevity, because there is more to his idea of decluttering. Bluntly put, if you are reading this on your phone start looking for Digital Minimalism now.

As daunting as it may look, minimizing our digital consumption is the best way to really and deeply connect with the world around us.

Elements of Clojure

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Few days ago, Zach Tellman published a complete draft of his upcoming book Elements of Clojure.

This is a work I have been following closely for a while. I purchased an early draft and have been there at every update from the author, ready to read it all over again. Furthermore, Zach’s talks at various conferences¹ reinforced my belief that he is on a path I am eager to follow.

This kind of devotion is not easy to explain, but I will do my best. Since my first Java 1.2 guide through my experiences with C, SQL, Scheme, Scala, Clojure and now Haskell, IT books have been a constant in my life.

Most of them, unfortunately, became outdated soon, and now serve only as dust support. Some of them, however, stood the test of time and proved to be a reliable source of invaluable knowledge. Structure and Intepretation of Computer Programs, for instance, is still next to me, still teaching me how to be a better programmer.

Why is that? Because a book like SICP is not teaching a programming language in particular. It’s not trying to be the ultimate reference on Scheme inner details, nor it wants to be a guide to improve your Scheme skills. SICP is about the how, not the what. And that is exactly where Elements of Clojure fits.

Much like SICP, Elements of Clojure uses a specific language to convey its points. It’s the common ground, the starting point from where Zach anchors his reasoning and expands his thoughts about software development. What at first looks like a collection of best practices gradually morphs into a deep dive in the realms of indirection, abstraction and composition. Therefore, this is a book about the grain of my everyday programming.

I admire the writing style of Elements of Clojure. Sharp, terse, it challenges the reader at every turn of the page. You are invited to look for what is missing or left between the lines somewhere else. Zach helps you by leaving a decent amount of footnotes with literary references for further inquiries, and I am confident the final version of the book will have a precise bibliography.²

These literary references are particularly interesting. They diverge from the IT way and end up in literature, philosophy, architecture, social politics and economics. From what I have read so far, this is a totally mind-stretching, enriching journey, all the more because these are works outside my comfort zone.

At every step of the writing process, Zach has questioned his own experiences and studies with his open attitude towards feedback and discussion.³ It all reflects in his prose, and this is a testament to the honest quality of his writing.

Elements of Clojure is always a few clicks away from me, and it’s not even complete yet. I already know it will stay by my side for a long time.

Start with On Abstraction, but I hope to see more recent videos before long. ↩︎
There is already a shelf with recommendations on the author’s Goodreads profile. ↩︎
A book club has recently popped up on ClojureVerse. A specific mailing list to discuss the book has also been around for a while, courtesy of the author himself. Moreover, he set up workshops around his work at conferences, but I haven’t been able to attend one yet. ↩︎

Better Living Through Criticism

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Anthony Oliver Scott – A. O. Scott as it is spelled on his Better Living Through Criticism – wrote a book that on almost every page seems to be pointing its finger at me. Incredibly, more often than not Better Living Through Criticism aims precisely at my cultural background, filling all the gaps my IT curriculum has left me with when I approach cinema and film criticism.

This is quite obvious from the very first pages. Scott opens quoting the same Oscar Wilde’s words that more than 15 years ago pushed me to go beyond simple matters of “taste”. I cannot think of a better call to arms, and from there on I devoured the book in a couple of days.

Which is probably the wrong thing to do, especially if you – just as myself – know little about the history of arts and criticism. However, I can easily justify my rush. Scott has the rare ability to guide you through centuries of knowledge with the delicacy of an intimate friend. He appears to understand why you are trembling in front of the vast ocean of culture he is about to unveil. So he chooses his words carefully, delivering his thoughts at a quiet, reasonable pace for you not to get lost.

Furthermore, Scott manages to be always on your side. I must admit I was partly put off by the title. Better living through criticism, seriously? Are you going to tell me what to do with my mind just because you think you can? If I had not read Scott’s film reviews before, yes, I might not have been here today writing my comments on his work. But I did read his film reviews, and I still do. I do not agree with him sometimes, but – as he explains – this is the difference between a casual critic and a great critic. Scott has his own voice, and all its idiosyncrasies are what make me go back to his writings again and again.

Better Living Through Criticism traces the path from art to criticism and from criticism to art. This back and forth relationship drives consensus and objections, argument and coffee break talks. Through the likes of Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Susan Sontag and Yvor Winters, Scott wanders in the land of the love and hate paradox that is criticism. There may be no end to his journey, albeit over and over an end of criticism has been declared and somehow hoped for.

Scott states that there is much demand for criticism today, even more than in the past. Our epoch of consumerism, digital abundance and readily available tools for crafting a piece of art has a desperate need for someone who can judge and value. Provided this someone cares about the object of her analysis, because lack of empathy is one of the most horrible sins a critic can commit.

There is some advice for the next critic-wannabe in this book, but more importantly there is a fresh and perceptive look at what is going on in the mind of the next person who lays her eyes on the latest work of art.

The New Cinephilia

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s fair to say Girish Shambu’s The New Cinephilia is what pushed me out of my cavern. That and a mail from the author himself telling me “You should do it!”.

I have been following Girish’s blog for so many years. I’ve always liked the wide range of his reflections. He expands on his thoughts with links to further readings, therefore each of his posts often brings me out in the wild web to read new pieces of criticism.

The New Cinephilia reads exactly as one of his blog posts. It reaches out for new connections and new directions at every turn of the page. Not only it traces the origins of contemporary film criticism, but in doing so it analyses what makes modern cinephilia just as fascinating as the old school.

Social media have deeply expanded the possibilities we have nowadays to understand films. Girish points out the relevance that even a single tweet has and his acknowledgement is more than a hint to join the social network revolution. Scholars, but also passionate amateurs such as myself could deeply enhance their own experience if only they approached the Internet with open-mindedness.

This is the most important lesson The New Cinephilia taught me. A lesson to live by.