neomenia - new middle ages

September 15: Died Oriana Falacci

2006-09-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Oriana Fallaci (June 29, 1929 – September 15, 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. An antifascist partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. She died in her native Florence, Italy. She was 77 years old and had been suffering from breast cancer for some 15 years.

She was called "our most celebrated female writer" by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera.[1] Decades ago, the Los Angeles Times described her as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no."

As a young journalist, she interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Lech Wałęsa, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Omar Khadafi, Federico Fellini, Sammy Davis Jr, Deng Xiaoping, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis, Werner von Braun, Archbishop Makarios, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Haile Selassie and Sean Connery.

After retirement, she authored a series of articles and books that roused controversy amongst certain Islamic and Arab factions.

In 2003 in one of several interviews over the years with the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network's Charlie Rose, Rose asked of her, "What are you most proud of?" "My guts, my honesty and my independence of judgment," she replied.

She spent the last years of her life in New York, where she fought a prolonged battle against breast cancer, which she referred to as "the Other One" in her most recent works. She returned to Italy before succumbing to cancer in a hospital in her native Florence on the night between the 14th and the 15th of September 2006.[2][3]

She was buried on September 17 2006 in the multireligious cemetery Allori in Florence, where only the family and a few friends were invited, no memorial service, neither religious nor civilian, was held according to her last will and no photo or film was taken.[4] She was buried in a white coffin wearing a tailleur and a military watch[5] around 11 am, at the same time the bell of the church of Sant'Ilario where her mother used to pray and she was baptized, was rung.

Career

Fallaci was born in Florence. During World War II she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà".

Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It was during this period that Fallaci was first exposed to the atrocities of war.

Fallaci began her journalistic career in her teens, becoming a special correspondent for the paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1950. Starting in 1967 she worked as a war correspondent, in Vietnam, during the Indo-Pakistani War, in the Middle East, and in South America. For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo, and wrote for a number of leading newspapers and Epoca magazine.

During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican armed forces. Later, her recollection of the events would shift. According to The New Yorker, her former support of the student activists "devolved into a dislike of Mexicans."[6]

In the 1970s, she had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship. He had been captured, violently tortured, and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt against dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. Panagoulis died in 1976, under controversial circumstances, in a road accident. Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta, and her book Un Uomo (A Man) (ISBN 0-671-25241-0) was inspired by the life of Panagoulis.

During her infamous 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger agreed that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse." Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."

Fallaci twice received the St. Vincent Prize for journalism, as well as the Bancarella Prize, 1971 for Nothing, and So Be It; Viareggio Prize, 1979, for Un uomo: Romanzo; and Prix Antibes, 1993, for Inshallah.. She received a D.Litt. from Columbia College (Chicago).

In previous years, she lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.

Fallaci’s early writings have been translated into 21 languages including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Swedish, Polish, Croatian and Slovenian.

It's sympthomatic that a life that has been dedicated against any type of racism and oppression, has been completly forgotten in favour of the more recent part of it. During her life she has been continuosly attacked by both Italian main parties and ideological systems. Her death did not stopped the process.

Controversy

A journalist from Florence, Tiziano Terzani, expressed disagreements with her approach in an open letter to her in Corriere della Sera while David Holcberg at the Ayn Rand Institute supported her cause with a letter to The Washington Times.[7]

Fallaci received support from rightist political parties and movements such as the Lega Nord in Italy, where her books have sold over 1 million copies alone, but also from individuals and organisations in the rest of the world.[8][9]

At the first European Social Forum, which was held in Florence in November 2002, Fallaci invited the people of Florence to cease commercial operations and stay home. Furthermore, she compared the ESF to the Nazi occupation of Florence. Protest organizers declared "We have done it for Oriana, because she hasn't spoken in public for the last 12 years, and hasn't been laughing in the last 50".[10]

Italian pacifist singer Jovanotti implicitly mentioned Fallaci in a song, Salvami, where she is described as "the journalist and writer who loves war/because it reminds her of when she was young and beautiful".[11]

In 2002 in Switzerland the Islamic Center and the Somal Association of Geneva, SOS Racisme of Lausanne, along with a private citizen, sued her for the supposedly racist content of The Rage and The Pride.[12][13] In November 2002 a Swiss judge issued an arrest warrant for violations of article 261 and 261 bis of the Swiss criminal code and requested the Italian government to either try or extradite her. Roberto Castelli, Italian minister of Justice mentioned this fact in an interview broadcasted by Radio Padania affirming that the Constitution of Italy protects freedom of speech and thus the extradition request had to be rejected; the episode is mentioned in her book The Force of Reason.[14]

In May 2005, Adel Smith, president of the Union of Italian Muslims, launched a lawsuit against Fallaci charging that "some of the things she said in her book The Force of Reason are offensive to Islam." Smith's attorney, Matteo Nicoli, cited a phrase from the book that refers to Islam as "a pool that never purifies." Consequently an Italian judge ordered her to stand trial set for June 2006 in Bergamo on charges of "defaming Islam." A previous prosecutor had sought dismissal of the charges. The preliminary trial began on 12 June in Bergamo and on 25 June Judge Beatrice Siccardi decided that Oriana Fallaci should indeed stand trial beginning on 18 December.[15]

On June 3, 2005, Fallaci published on the front page of the Italian daily newspaper a highly controversial article entitled "Noi Cannibali e i figli di Medea" ("We cannibals and Medea's offspring") inviting women not to vote for a public referendum about artificial insemination that was held on June 12 and 13, 2006.[16]

On August 27, 2005, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo. Although an atheist, Fallaci had great respect for Pope Benedict XVI and her admiration for his 2004 essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself".[17]

In the June 2006 issue of Reason Magazine, libertarian writer Cathy Young wrote:
Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci’s 2002 book The Rage and the Pride makes hardly any distinction between radical Islamic terrorists and Somali street vendors who supposedly urinate on the corners of Italy’s great cities. Christopher Hitchens, who described the book in The Atlantic as “a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam,” notes that Fallaci’s diatribes have all the marks of other infamous screeds about filthy, disease-ridden, sexually threatening aliens.[18]

Awards

On November 30, 2005, Oriana Fallaci received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York. She was honored for her "heroism and valor" that made of her "a symbol of struggle against oppression and fascism". Since 9/11, Fallaci had dedicated herself in the fight against "the greatest threat to Western civilization since the Cold War, Islamofascism".[19]

On December 8, 2005, the writer received the Ambrogino d'oro, the most prestigious award of the city of Milan.

On December 14, 2005, she was awarded, upon proposal of Education minister Letizia Moratti of the Berlusconi cabinet, with a gold medal for her cultural efforts ("benemerita della cultura") by the President of the Italian Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Because of the writer's serious health condition, she couldn't travel to Italy. She sent a message stating (translated from Italian):
The gold medal moves me because it gratifies my hard work of writer and journalist, my engagement to the defense of our culture, my love for my Country and for Freedom. My well-known health condition prevents me to travel and to withdraw personally an award that, for me, a woman not accustomed to medals and to trophies, has an intense ethical and moral meaning.

This award also generated controversy, and anti-racist organizations sponsored a petition against the award.[20]

On February 22, 2006, the president of the regional council of Tuscany, Riccardo Nencini awarded Oriana Fallaci a gold medal. Nencini explained that the writer is a symbol of Tuscany's culture in the world.

Books by Oriana Fallaci

A Man, a novel telling the biography of Alexandros Panagoulis, who fought against the Regime of the Colonels in Greece.(1979) ISBN 84-279-3854-3
The Seven Sins of Hollywood preface by Orson Welles, Longanesi (Milan), 1958.
The Useless Sex: Voyage around the Woman Horizon Press (New York City), 1961.
Penelope at War (1962).
Limelighters (1963)
The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews (1963)
Quel giorno sulla Luna (1970)
Inshallah, a fictional account of Italian troops stationed in Lebanon in 1983.
If the Sun Dies, about the US space program.
Interview With History (1976, a collection of interviews with various political figures Liveright)
Letter to a child never born, a dialogue between a mother and her unborn child.
Nothing, and so be it, report on the Vietnam war based on personal experiences.
Oriana Fallaci intervista Oriana Fallaci, Fallaci interviews herself on the subject of "Eurabia" and "Islamofacism". (Milan: Corriere della Sera, August 2004).
The Rage and The Pride (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio, 2001) ISBN 0-8478-2504-3.
The Force of Reason (La Forza della Ragione, 2004) ISBN 0-8478-2753-4
Oriana Fallaci intervista sé stessa - L'Apocalisse (in Italian). An update of the interview with herself. A new, long epilogue is added. Publisher: Rizzoli, November 2004.

References
^ Oriana Fallaci: Anger and Pride, hosted on a strongly pro-war site, December 19, 2001
^ Oriana Fallaci died in Florence, La Repubblica, September 15, 2006
^ Oriana Fallaci, Writer-Provocateur, Dies at 77, The New York Times, September 15, 2006
^ Una bara bianca e una campana È l’ultimo viaggio, Corriere della Sera, September 17, 2006
^ Domani i funerali di Oriana Fallaci Verrà sepolta al cimitero degli Allori, La Repubblica, September 16, 2006
^ The Agitator: Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam, by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, June 5, 2006.
^ Oriana Fallaci and Freedom of Speech, letter to the Washington Times by David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute, publ. June 1, 2005.
^ Italy has a racist culture, says French editor, The Guardian, August 8, 2004.
^ Oriana in Exile, The American Spectator, July 18, 2005.
^ Sabina Guzzanti became Fallaci, La Repubblica, November 8, 2002
^ Salvami, text of the song.
^ Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Switzerland 2002, United States Department of State, March 31, 2003
^ Swiss Muslims File Suit Over "Racist" Fallaci Book, from The Milli Gazette, July 1, 2002.
^ Excerpts from The force of Reason.
^ Fallaci, the trial continues in December, L'Eco di Bergamo, June 26, 2006.
^ We cannibals and Medea's offspring, by Oriana Fallaci, June 2005.
^ Prophet of Decline, The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2005.
^ The Jihad Against Muslims: When does criticism of Islam devolve into bigotry?, from Reason magazine, June 2006.
^ Honoring Oriana Fallaci, Front Page magazine, November 28, 2005.
^ Petition against the award presented to Oriana Fallaci from the Observatory on Racism and Diversities of Rome's third university, January 13, 2006.

Source: Wikipedia

James Kelly -- Troubled Son of Kerry Mists

2006-06-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

Fall

Was it all the dubious nights
we shared
tumbling into the shallow specks
to see our hallowed heroes fall
that brought us to a place
where we fed on all
who fed on us.

2004

North Kerry

Through these lost fields I work
the heart carts of the dark,
with mixed emotions clear old stones
and hear forever fenian tones.

Where all my hills chart grief,
castrated redemption is chief,
to my familiar Nostos I've come,
to my kingdom and my home.

January 2002

Eve

She indicates through cursed fires
of draped deceit and doom
I find her stroking in a room
where ruins and rural rivers
and unfulfilled girls of soaked promise
bask in boys' dawns and desires
palm the bleached and blessed rose
blistered the arbitrators' pose,
come all prodigal rabble
lame the lanes of purple prose
now and then the hoarse of yell
with these psalms of hoarsened will
on routes to burning rooms
sit outside awhile where sun consumes
but waxing still the hill
for days and dawns and dooms and hell
where girls and boys fight and jell
and sob and sing for Eve and Adam's
Jack and Jill.

The Dissidents

Beware of the dissidents
they know every redundant fence
every disobedient to dunce,
from dunce to disobedience.
So hence, the speaker
who speaks the speak,
spills and spells the spiel
slips slowly through the crowd,
the lowly and the loud.

Sad Crag

Sad crag
open door
fuss pot of the shower
deep genius of the bothar

Sad crag
open door
take a part in my hour
Mister stillness lives no more

Sad crag
open door
Mister king of all time
will you miss me when I have no more time?

Sad crag
open door
of the shower
hide me in your tower

Sad crag
open door
call me silence if you will,
call me anything but nil.

1980s

"Freegans" forage for food in bins

2006-05-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Ross and Ash are about to dig in to a meal of chicken rogan josh, king prawn makhani and rice, chicken balti and naan bread followed by pineapple, strawberries and grapes for dessert.

All of which came out of a bin.

"Everything I eat comes from dumpsters," Ash says. "For me it's a logical lifestyle choice. It's such a natural thing to use up that waste."

Some call them "dumpster divers," others brand them "skip lickers," but Ross Parry and Ash Falkingham like to count themselves among the Freegans -- a growing band of foragers who seek to live entirely from the waste of others.

In this brief trip to a small supermarket skip in southeast London, they have recovered enough food to provide themselves -- and several others -- with an impressive evening meal, as well as bread, muffins and teabags for the next morning's breakfast.

Freeganism, derived from the words "free" and "vegan," is spreading to Britain from the United States, where one of its founding fathers, Adam Weissman, has set up a Freegan information Web site to persuade others to join him.

"TOTAL BOYCOTT"

Weissman describes Freeganism as "a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations."

"Instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able," he explains on the site.

Falkingham, a 21-year-old Australian, sees Freeganism as a way of forcing the world to wake up to what it is wasting.

"Nine million people die every year of starvation ... and while that's happening, we are literally destroying food," he says.

There are no exact figures for how many people are choosing to live a Freegan lifestyle in Britain. Despite the name, not all those who opt to live this way are strictly vegan.

Falkingham and Parry, who is 46, have been roaming Britain since last October, pursuing their Freegan lifestyle in cities from Manchester and Leeds in the north, to Plymouth in the south.

They eat, sleep and live in a beaten-up old van which is equipped with mattresses, a stove, a sink, carpets and even a heater all taken from skips or wreckers' yards.

Falkingham wears a watch recovered from a bin behind a charity shop, his boots were taken from a retailer's skip and the pair say they have found computer parts, furniture and even an MP3 player in dumpsters.

They have no jobs and no money but see very little need for either.

"When you first start off, you think 'how am I going to live without a wage?'," says Parry, who has been living a Freegan lifestyle for more than 20 years.

"But our priority is to work for love to make the world a better place, and we want to have more time to do that. The less time we spend chasing a salary, the more time we have to do what we really believe in."

"There's so much excess in this society that you don't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from."

MILLIONS OF TONNES OF WASTED FOOD

According to research, more than 30 percent of the 17 million tonnes of waste that goes to landfill in Britain is food waste.

Fareshare, a charity which delivers surplus food to the homeless and other vulnerable people in need, says around a quarter of that is perfectly good, edible food.

"Last year we redistributed 2,000 tonnes of food -- that helped provide 3.3 million meals and helped around 12,000 people -- but that is still just the tip of the iceberg," Fareshare spokeswoman Maria Kortbech Olesen told Reuters.

Fareshare, which distributes food given by some of Britain's biggest food retailers such as Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury's which would otherwise go to waste, sympathizes with Freegans, but is concerned at their sometimes risky methods.

"What they are trying to address is basically the same thing as we are," says Kortbech Olesen. "There is a lot of waste and we have to do something about it."

"But you have to be careful. Freegans take food from bins, and they can never know whether that food is safe."

Falkingham shrugs off any concern about getting sick.

"I think I have only once been ill from eating food from bins -- I got diarrhea," he says. "But I like to push the limits with what I eat."

The Da Vinci Code as a work of literature

2006-05-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

Peter Costello

Dan Brown’s thriller The Da Vinci Code is something of an enigma. Though most scholars agree that the story is total nonsense, and badly written nonsense at that, it has achieved a world-wide sale of nearly 50 million copies and rising.

By what tricks of the literary trade has Dan Brown imposed his deceptive notions on so many people? It is worth looking at just how such a book comes to be written, why is it written in a certain way, and how is it sold.

Relevant senior figures have expressed concern about the need to oppose Dan Brown’s ‘ideas’. This misses the point: Dan Brown has no ‘ideas’ of his own. He is not interested in religion or debate, as theologians and historians understand them. He avoids all discussion of the book, because he cannot discuss it.

Brown has hovered up gaudy bits and pieces from many sources to make an intriguing, glittering mosaic. The hectic design may be his own, but not the fragments from the myths and legends of New Age culture he makes use of.

To call the novel badly written also misses the point. Dan Brown is a skilled writer of commercial fiction or ‘airport novels’. He knows just what he is doing, for the Da Vinci Code is his fourth novel. The first three were best-sellers too, but not on the cosmic scale of The Da Vinci Code.

Using the same commercial formula, he applies it here to more sensational material. Picking up on recent heated controversies about various organisations, he has integrated the distrust of those organizations with eccentric notions about the origins of Christianity from Lynn Picket, Laurence Gardner, Henry Lincoln and several others.

The book opens with an attention grabbing murder, and continues at a breathless pace for nearly 600 pages. The captures are all short, averaging about seven pages. The short length is essential to the effect of the book. There are no long boring explanations but a series of brief ‘factoids’. This constant forward movement never allows the attention span of the reader to falter, or their critical faculty to click into place.

The choice of Leonardo Da Vinci as a central symbolic figure was very clever. Da Vinci is one of the few great artists that every reader will have heard of, as the Mona Lisa is the most recognizable image in the world.

One of the features of the traditional airport novel, as written by the likes of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, or Clive Cussler is that their thorough research, say about the Nobel Prize awards, how airports work, or the Titanic, is all accurate. Their information can be added to one’s stock of general knowledge. The books claim to be both fun and informative. Just so, one Canadian reviewer actually claimed that Brown’s novel provides “an educational tour of France and England.”

Brown also uses the device of the academic in modern popular fiction. The academic is always a truth teller, the man who reveals the deceptions of the big government, or other sinister organizations. In a world of lies the man in the white coat with the PhD always tells the truth. Readers are happy to believe this because they have been conditioned to do so.

Throughout the book the hero, a professor at Harvard, employs a variant on the formula ‘Many scholars believe…’ The claim that follows is as often as not entirely bogus. Yet there is no way in which the casual reader can check up on the information. It has to be taken on trust, a trust that is soon abused. The same is true of the historical claims about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But Dan Brown is not interested in facts as such. He is only concerned in creating and maintaining an atmosphere of suspense and excitement.

In the two hundred and fifty years old tradition of the gothic novel, to which The Da Vinci Code belongs, the devious villains were just the same (and we know who). This device can be traced back through Dumas, Robert Maturin, Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe to Horace Walpole. Those wicked characters were eventually replaced in popular fiction by the Mafia, Communists, Fascists and others. By contrast for much of the last century the priest was a figure of moral authority. But not any more. However well he conforms to and exceeds the expectations of the thriller genre, Brown’s book would not have succeeded without some help from the devices of modern publicity.

From the beginning the American papers played up the ‘controversy’ of a novel ‘threatening the foundations of Christianity’. These reports were then spread around the world by press agencies as ‘news’. All this made for free publicity.

But in the summer of 2004 it was word of mouth alone that lead to what seemed to be every fifth person on the streets of London carrying a copy: “My friend in the office says it’s wonderful”. I suspect that for many in the English-speaking world there was a notion that Dan Brown was dishing real dirt on Christianity. This idea played well with readers who had come to think the worst of that religion.

Dan Brown’s book, however distasteful to various organisations, does not pose a real threat to Christian tradition. A small commercial novelist, his aim is to sell lots of books. He trades on the courage of other writers’ ideas. He is not a Strauss or a Renan de nos jours. In a year or two his book may even be forgotten, eclipsed, as is the way of publishing, by other bestsellers.

So it is time we stopped talking about The Da Vinci Code, as that only gives it yet more publicity, and started thinking about the real problems facing ourselves.

Source: The Irish Catholic, May 18, 2006

Note: this article has been slightly edited by neomenia

Borges's Buenos Aires: A City Populated by a Native Son's Imagination

2006-05-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

By LARRY ROHTER

The taxi advanced up Avenida Garay and came to a stop a couple of blocks short of the Plaza Constitución. The corner seemed familiar though I knew I had never been there before, and when I saw the sign for Calle Tacuarí, it came to me: in his story "The Aleph," Jorge Luis Borges had chosen a cellar in one of the anonymous buildings on this anonymous street as the location of the mystical "point in space that contains all other points" in the universe.

For any admirer of Borges, to wander about Buenos Aires is to collide with the products of his fervid imagination. His birthplace beguiled him, and he especially loved to walk its streets aimlessly, but he also complained that it had "no ghosts" and decided it was his task to populate the fast-expanding immigrant boomtown with his own phantasms. "In my dreams, I never leave Buenos Aires," he once wrote, though his dreams often were anguished ones, as expressed in one of several poems called "Buenos Aires":

"And the city, now, is like a map
Of my humiliations and failures;
From this door, I have seen the twilights
And at this marble pillar I have waited in vain."

The 20th anniversary of Borges's death is coming in June, and between then and his birthday in August, the city plans readings, round tables, exhibitions, a concert and other homages. Most of the time, though, seeking overt traces of Borges in Buenos Aires is, to use a Borgesian image, like trying to read a palimpsest: you have to look past the top layer to sense his underlying presence.

Take the street in the Palermo area where Borges grew up, known then as Serrano but now renamed in his honor. Today the neighborhood is perhaps the most chic in Buenos Aires, full of trendy bars, restaurants and boutiques patronized by young writers, artists and filmmakers more likely to cite Paul Auster or Martin Amis than Borges as influences.

In Borges's youth, though, Palermo was "on the shabby northern outskirts of town," as he put it, a semirural place frequented by gauchos and criminals who drank hard and fought hard at the pulperías, or taverns, that dotted the neighborhood. Their tales of derring-do and the sudden eruptions of violence to which they were prone impressed the bookish lad known as Georgie, and left him with a fascination with knives that would later infiltrate stories and poems like "The Dagger":

It is more than a structure of metal; men
Conceived it and shaped it with a single end in mind.; it
Is in some way eternal, the dagger that last night killed
A man in Tacuarembó and the daggers that rained on
Caesar are in some eternal way the same
dagger. The dagger wants to kill, it
wants to shed sudden blood.

The Borges family's Palermo homestead still exists, at Serrano 2135, but it is not open to the public and there is nothing to mark Borges's passage there save for a small plaque. Just up the block, however, at the corner of Guatemala and Serrano, is the site that, in the poem "Buenos Aires," Borges imagined as that of "the mythical foundation of Buenos Aires," a city "I judge to be as eternal as water and air."

At first glance, the corner does not seem very promising: a hamburger joint, a design store and a bar called Mundo Bizarro, whose motto is "in alcohol we trust," capture the current character of Palermo. But the fourth occupant of the corner is a tavern called the "Almacén el Preferido," in a building that dates to 1885 and that Borges describes as the redoubt of toughs:

"A pink shop, like the back of a deck of cards/Iit shone and in the back room they talked of tricks ..."

Even more than taverns, however, Buenos Aires is a city of cafes, and Borges and his friends were habitués of several. Most of those have either disappeared or, like La Perla in the Jewish neighborhood known as Once, been transformed into pizza parlors and the like or, like the Gran Café Tortoni, near the corner of Suipacha and Avenida de Mayo, become tourist traps in which a wax figure of Borges is seated at a table with Carlos Gardel, the tango's greatest singer.

But the Richmond, at Florida 468, still preserves some of the atmosphere of the 1920's, when Borges was editing an avant-garde literary magazine, Martin Fierro, just around the corner and spent a lot of time there with fellow writers. As the name suggests, the feeling is that of an English club, with wood paneling and prints of fox hunting scenes and country estates on the walls. That would have appealed to Borges, who prided himself on his English ancestry on his mother's side of the family.

Borges's circle of associates included the younger writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom he wrote a series of detective stories set in Buenos Aires, and Bioy's wife, the poet Silvina Ocampo. But perhaps the most fascinating and influential of his friends was the painter and poet Alejandro Schulz Solari, whom Borges once called "our William Blake." The painter, who took the artistic name Xul Solar, was a dozen years older than Borges and shared his fondness for inventing imaginary universes and languages and exploring the esoterica of this world. In the 1950's, Borges would regularly flee the stifling atmosphere of the apartment he shared with his mother and head for Xul Solar's home at Laprida 1212, where the two men would often spend the day conversing about the kabbalah or Norse sagas.

Xul Solar's residence is today a museum devoted to his work, containing more than 100 of his paintings as well as the fanciful objects that he created and called "heirlooms of another cosmos." Looking at the paintings makes clear the intellectual affinities between the two artists: Xul Solar's watercolors are full of utopias, cities floating in the sky, creatures that are half man and half machine, alternate universes and other touches that we have come to think of as typical of Borges.

Visiting these and other sites where Borges lived or worked helps one to appreciate what a potent imagination he had. In 1937, for example, his once promising literary career seemed to be stagnating, and he was forced to take a job cataloging books at the Miguel Cane municipal library, where he remained until 1945. There was little for him to do there, so he spent much of his time in a small, windowless room at the rear of the second floor, where he wrote many of the pieces in the collection eventually published as "Ficciones," including the story "The Library of Babel."

"Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god," he wrote.

Borges later wrote that "the innumerable books and shelves that appear in the story are literally those I had beneath my elbow." But like the room in which the story was written, which can be visited, the library itself is small with a limited collection of books, and hardly seems worthy of the immortality Borges bestowed on it. It is at Carlos Calvo 4321, in the working-class Boedo section; Borges used to ride the No. 7 tram to work there, reading Dante as he stood, and while the tram no longer exists, a bus line with the same number still runs the same route.

For a man whose personal life was often unhappy, libraries provided a kind of consolation: "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," he wrote in a poem. After the dictator Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955, Borges was appointed director of the National Library. This was the kind of place that seems a candidate for his Babel tale — a four-story octagonal structure whose columns are engraved with the names of great writers and thinkers like Shakespeare, Goethe and Plato.

The library, at Mexico 564 in the San Telmo neighborhood, is now the national conservatory of music and is open to visitors. Next door is the headquarters of the Argentine Society of Writers, where Borges sometimes offered public readings. The society currently shares the space with a restaurant, Legendaria Buenos Aires, whose main dining room is adorned with portraits of famous opera singers. There is, though, one reminder of Borges on a wall of the restaurant: a metal plaque listing the society's board of directors during 1942-44, including one Jorge Luis Borges.

Other than knives, perhaps the favorite motif in Borges' work is the feline, evoked in such works as "The Other Tiger," in which he meditates on the difference between the real beast and those that populate his imagination. From childhood on, the beasts fascinated him, and he would often go to the Buenos Aires zoo, on Avenida Las Heras on the edge of Palermo, to observe the big cats. Sometimes, well into his 60's, he would even be accompanied by a woman he was hoping to impress, and recite poetry as they stood in front of the cages:

It came and went, delicate and fatal, charged with infinite energy,

On the other side of the firm bars and we all watched it ...

The feline collection is still there, and it includes a solitary white Bengal tiger, which seems to spend most of its time sleeping under a tree As an adult, Borges lived in various apartments in the Recoleta area, on Calle Presidente Quintana and Avenida Pueyrrydón, also dutifully marked with brass plaques. But he lived the longest, nearly 40 years on and off, in apartment 6B at Maipú 994, just off Plaza San Martín, which he came to think of as his true home.

When I was a young Newsweek correspondent in the early 1980's, I twice interviewed Borges there. I remember the apartment as being small and austere, with no television, no radio and, most surprising of all for a man who by then was blind, no record player. Borges insisted the interviews be done in English, which he spoke with what he called a Northumberland accent, inherited from the English grandmother from whom he had learned the language, and he showed a fondness for antiquated words like "thrice."

Though the apartment is not open to the public, La Ciudad, the bookstore in the shopping gallery just across the street, where Borges would spend many of his afternoons, is still in business. First editions of many of Borges's works are in the window, along with photographs of him sitting in a chair that still occupies a spot of honor in the store, as if awaiting his return. If the octogenarian proprietor, Elizabeth Alonso, is in a good mood, she might even be persuaded to reminisce a bit about her friend and most famous client.

But perhaps the most vivid reminder that Borges was not just a literary personage but a real flesh-and-blood inhabitant of Buenos Aires is at Paraguay 521, a photographers' studio where residents still go to have their pictures taken for passports and identity cards. Look carefully at the collection of some three dozen portraits in the front window, and there, fourth from the right in the top row, is Borges, still peering out quizzically at a world that seemed so alien to him that he had to invent his own.

Source: New York Times Travel

Prostitution in the Middle Ages

2006-05-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

Source: Decameron Web

Prostitution and Canon Law

The Middle Ages in Europe witnessed a universal paradox of tolerance and condemnation with regards to prostitution. While technically a sin (because it hinged on the act of fornication), prostitution was recognized by the church and others as a necessary, or "lesser evil" (Karras, 246). It was accepted as fact that young men would seek out sexual relations regardless of their options, and thus prostitution served to protect "respectable" townswomen from seduction and even rape. In 1358, the Grand Council of Venice declared that prostitution was "absolutely indispensable to the world" (Richards, 125). In general, declarations proclaiming the necessity of prostitution were not quite so enthusiastic. Indeed, the church did not hesitate to denounce prostitution as morally wrong, but as St. Augustine explained: "If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts" (Richards, 118). Thus, the general tolerance of prostitution was for the most part reluctant, and many canonists urged prostitutes to reform, either by marrying or by becoming nuns. In fact, there were many religious sanctuaries set up specifically for prostitutes who wished to quit the profession (Bullough, 183).

Prostitution in the Middle Ages was, much as it is today, primarily an urban institution. Especially in Italy, efforts were made early on by municipal governments to expel prostitutes from the cities, but to no avail. The demand was simply far too great, as not only young unmarried men, but men with wives and even members of the clergy considered themselves in need. Many cities tried to solve the problem by banishing prostitutes to certain areas of town. Often, these quarters turned into "criminal underworlds" associated with the poor and the undesirables of the city, the most famous existing in Bologna (Brundage, 464). (We may think here of neighborhoods such as Malpertugio, in which Andreuccio meets Fiordaliso, in II.5.) Vern Bullough provides interesting note: streets with the word "rose" in them, he observes, were most likely designated for prostitution during this period, as the phrase "to pluck a rose" was a common metaphor for the act of hiring a prostitute (Bullough, 182).

Another almost universal restriction placed on prostitutes pertained to the clothing they were allowed to wear. In order to set them apart from "decent" women and avoid confusion, the church required that prostitutes adopt some type of distinctive clothing, which each particular city government was allowed to select. For example, in Milan the garment of choice was a black cloak, while in Florence prostitutes wore gloves and bells on their hats (Richards, 119). According to Bullough, a citizen who found a prostitute clothed in anything other than the official dress had the right to strip them on the spot (Bullough, 182).

Many cities decided to take advantage of the situation and earn a little money, setting up municipal brothels with laws and restrictions prohibiting beatings of the prostitutes by brothel keepers, restricting the number of customers a prostitute might entertain in one day, and of course demanding a certain percentage of all earnings (Karras, 246). In 1403, about forty years after ending a long policy of expulsion, the municipal government in Venice established its own brothel in the Rialto, which has since become the traditional center of prostitution in the city. Later, there were attempts to set up other brothels, but this only led to more expulsions in order to regulate the trade and finally to strict compromises between these businesses and the church (Richards, 125-126).

Those who argued against prostitution suggested all sorts of reasons for its existence. For some it was the product of poverty, for others greed or lustfulness, and according to some people, even the stars had something to do with it (Brundage, 464). There were also those who justified prostitution on the grounds that it was a viable economic activity and was primarily directed towards the earning of money rather the gratification of sexual desires (at least, for the prostitutes themselves). As a matter of fact, when it came to economics, concubinage was often an appealing option; formal contracts involving agreements of sexual fidelity, support obligations and the like were frequently drawn up between partners. Concubinage could be an easy way for poorer families to make beneficial social connections and gain monetary support for their unmarried daughters. Once in a while, concubinage even led to marriage (Brundage, 446).

Prostitution in the Decameron

There is really only one obvious instance of prostitution in the Decameron: the "young Sicilian woman... willing to any man's bidding for a modest fee," who swindles Andreuccio in II.5. This young woman is presented as extremely clever and exceedingly cruel. She seems to have created quite a network for herself, but she is by no means a "high class prostitute." Also called "courtesan mistresses," these women, who restricted their business to the nobility, began to appear in the later Middle Ages as a result of urbanization and the growing popularity of the ideal of romantic love (Bullough, 184). In general, prostitution seems to be a topic which Boccaccio avoids, contrary to his treatment of certain other sexual behaviors.

(A.M.S.) Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bullough, Vern L. "Prostitution in the Later Middle Ages." Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982, pp.176-86.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. "Prostitution in Medieval Europe." Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996, pp. 243-60.

Richards, Jeffrey. Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994.

2006-05-04T03:54:00.000-07:00