In Love with France, At Home In Italy

This feels like a good time for me to apologize to my Blog (yet again) for neglecting her.  😔💐  To encourage myself to follow through with my plan to update her, yesterday I posted a message to that effect on Facebook. Here comes more about my good intentions.    I see that my most recent post is from last summer, so it’s hard to know where to begin. I also understand that readers get impatient if they don’t hear from you on a regular basis, so I am working at turning over a new leaf.    Since my book Letters To Men Of Letters   came out,    https://bookshop.org/p/books/letters-to-men-of-letters-diane-joy-charney/16485616?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email  I was persuaded that it would be important to try to learn how to use social media, and being a complete technodunce, I faced a stiff learning curve. Further, just as soon as I thought I had figured out how to do something on Facebook, there was a change in how the site worked...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...