It's been quite a week for us. Monday we released the first episode of our new vodcast, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Theory and Practice of Resistance. It is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xELKX54aKI

We feel like we can't just sit here silently on our hillside while the great wave of fascism swallows the US whole. We only have tiny voices, but we will use them anyway, as best we can. The vodcast is kinda wonky and very homemade, but we hope that what we lack in flash, we make up for in sincerity. And fresh vegetables.

And then Tuesday, we spent ten hours in the hospital while Jonathan had a polyp removed from his vocal cord. We are certainly using the hell out of the fabulous free Italian health care system. Now we wait for the results of the biopsy to come back. So the terrible word "biopsy" hangs in the air here and we stay very close together all the time, as if we are protecting each other from something.

But the good news is that we have discovered the perfect way to make French toast by using leftover pan d'oro from the holidays. Sliced horizontally, it is shaped like a star and it is impossible to be glum while eating stars.

 

With the looming tidal wave of fascism all around the world, but especially in the US, we've been feeling pretty low, even here in our forgotten little Eden. So about three weeks ago, I had an idea -- Jonathan and I should put together a video podcast combining our expertise in social movements, collective action, protest, and resistance. I have three decades worth of thinking and teaching about this under my belt. I would have three decades worth of class notes about it except that after paying $30,000 to transport my notes all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, I immediately recycled them once they got here. That was about 48 hours before I had my idea and they suddenly became relevant again. Oh, well.

In any case, we are working away very hard on the episodes -- we have three of them finished now and are working on the next two and putting together a website, etc. The first episode will drop the day of the US presidential inauguration -- for obvious reasons. Then we plan to release one a week for 50 weeks. We are very earnest about this. I emphasize our earnestness and sincerity because our on-camera personalities are sock puppets and that may make us seem un-serious, which we are not. The puppets are named Juanita and Rodney.

Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." She said it right before they deported her.

 

Quite an uproar at the opera Friday night!

Jonathan and I went to Torre del Lago to see the premiere of this season's new production of "La Boheme" at the annual Puccini Festival. As one does.

It was a lovely evening. The theatre is open to the stars and the breeze comes off the lake. So elegant, so genteel, so sedate.

But no!

Apparently, a right-wing undersecretary of culture, recently appointed by the new Fascist Prime Minister, had denounced the production, whining that by setting the opera during the French student riots of 1968 (rather than its original setting of the French Revolution of 1830), The Puccini Festival Society was egregiously mixing art with politics -- something he only agrees with when the politics in question are right-wing.

The conductor of the orchestra, who had not been part of the production but was flown to conduct in only two days before it started, apparently agreed with the Fascist undersecretary. (When we told the regulars down at the pub about it, they were vociferously united in their disdain for the undersecretary, who is, they say, a buffoon. "Even a donkey," said Nonno, who is one week shy of his 89th birthday and, therefore, holds the place of highest honor and respect among the all-day drinkers, "Even a donkey, if you let it loose in the street, has sense enough to find its way home. The undersecretary hasn't got the brains of an ass!")

So the conductor, an apparent fan of the Fascists, to show his displeasure with the production, walked to his podium at the beginning of the show and put a black blindfold over his eyes, saying tat he didn't want to even see such a travesty. (There was also a fair amount of xenophobia mixed in here as well because the set designer was apparently French -- the horrors!) When he did this, the audience erupted in boos and catcalls. (Side note: one should not piss off opera aficionados -- many of them apparently have very strong lungs.) 

Jonathan and I were completely bewildered. We knew none of the backstory and only managed to catch the conductor's speech up to "I'm wearing this blindfold because..." We are so consistently clueless that Jonathan said later we are like the people who show up to the book burning with s'mores.

After the intermission, when the director reappeared for the second half, the screaming was even louder: "Vergogna! Buffone! Scemo! Vai via! Leccaculo!" ("Shame! Buffoon! Stupid! Go away! Ass licker!") "This is getting ugly," I said to Jonathan, still completely in the dark. "Is this where they start throwing things?" The chairs, however, were all attached to the ground.

At the end of the production, the cast on stage held up signs: "There is no Planet B," "Look Up," "Save the Earth" and other pro-climate-activism slogans. The crowd cheered and clapped for the cast and crew, but when the conductor came out to take his bow, almost all the clapping stopped, the yelling was deafening, and most of the audience very pointedly high-tailed it towards the exits. The conductor continued to take bows to a miniscule scattering of applause as elegantly-clad opera buffs stormed towards the exits.

Jonathan and I tried to eavesdrop on the conversations around us on the way out, but to no avail. We feared that this negative response was perhaps to the rather mild gesture towards climate change activism, but even for someone who just published a book about people going berserk over art, it seemed to be a disproportionate reaction to a sign saying "Look Up" (although I guess no more than the things I wrote about in "Outrage" -- people purposely stabbing Impressionist paintings with their umbrellas and fighting a duel over The Rite of Spring. I wrote a blogpost for Stanford about how the things I talk about in the book are back with us with regard to banning books, drag shows and abortions -- the link for that is here: https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2023/07/anthony-comstock-rides-again.html#more )

The next day we went down to town for the newspapers and figured it all out. It is comforting to know that if there is going to be a rampaging mob of enraged opera-goers, they are rampaging on our side. (Another side note: Don't mess with ladies in spike heels -- you could lose an eye.)

We have changed to buying our bread at a new bakery because the (Swiss) owner of our former bakery re-emerged after having been absent for nine months and went on a pro-Trump rant when she heard our accents. The new bakery is a bit out of our way, but seems very nice. And someone has spray-painted "Fascista Merde!" on the front of the garden supply store that is run by people who are, in fact, Fascist shits.

We are still having an unprecedented heat wave, but the air is not all that is getting hot around here.

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

 

In many ways, I became an academic in the first place because I love to read. Ironically, now that I have retired, I finally have time to read books for pleasure again. Even more ironically, the book that I am currently reading purely for pleasure (and enjoying enormously) is Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenny and Karl Marx, Love and Capital. I am currently up to the momentous year of 1848 and Gabriel's discussions of the horrors of unfettered capitalism, wealth inequality, and the economic transformations of industrialization are riveting. And enraging. That a society would be OK with people having to live like this!

Mudlarks, for example, were people (often children) who were pushed by poverty into trying to scrape the most meagre living by scouring the mud on the banks of the River Thames in London for whatever they could scavenge that they might be able to sell. There among the garbage, raw sewage, and corpses of dead dogs and cats (and sometimes humans), they might find a few pennies worth of something to sell and eke out another day of existence. 

Mind you, this was happening in sight of the towers and palaces of the rulers of an empire, of Queen Victoria herself. Those rulers had every reason to fear that Marx was right and that these oppressed and starving people would one day rise up in revolution. Justice would have demanded it.

I met a mudlark at our storage unit a couple of days ago. She cleans out houses that have been foreclosed and apartments where people have been evicted. Quite a lot of stuff is usually left behind and she scavenges what she can and stores it in her unit, hoping to be able to sell it somewhere. 

We talked about the recent spate of robberies at the facility. Someone has been cutting through the locking hardware on the individual units with bolt cutters and making off with the stuff inside.

"But who would want all this junk?" I said, looking at our stacks of used math books and boxes of baby pictures.

"Oh," she said, "People will take anything they can get these days."

Alas, in this version of 1848, we seem more likely to end up with fascism than any utopia.

Writing aobut the events of 1848, Marx said that everything in history happens twice -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Perhaps if we are lucky.