savonarola was right about florence

what i've been up to lately

Hello friends—

Last week, I made it to Paris after a month in Florence. I did not enjoy my time in Florence, and I believe it to be a city uniquely hostile to my temperament, disposition, and mode of life. Florence is a pat of dried clay, webbed with thin, uneven cracks. The city is next to impossible to traverse. Every aspect of living is carried out under a punishing, direct light from which there is no escape. I now understand why Dante found it so easy to think so vividly and elaborately of Hell. When I told people that I had not enjoyed myself, most of them said, as if apologizing for a family friend with a habit for murder or sexual harassment, “Was it the heat?”

It was more the light than the heat—I find this very strange, but it was strange. The temperatures in Florence were seldom below 80F and more often hovered in the low and mid 90s, but European heat, like European money and European time, like the European night and the European morning, often feels illusory to me. The heat has no sting. I don’t know that I felt “hot” per se in Florence. I did sweat, but in a place that dry, your body’s natural cooling mechanisms come into play. Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t hot. I’m sure I was. But I didn’t feel hot. Part of this is because unlike New York and an increasing swathe of the United States, Florence is not tropical. Your sweat can do its job due to the relative lack of humidity. I feel much the same in London and Paris and Stockholm. My body sweats, sure, but I don’t feel suffocated, oppressed, brutalized, the way I do in New York.

But the light? The light is another thing entirely. There is nowhere to hide in Florence. Light falls upon everything in these cruel angles for hours at a time. The sun scrapes your eyes raw and bleaches your clothes until the threads start to disintegrate. Light in Florence is an eradicating beam, as if someone had harnessed the pure intensity of God’s image and channeled it upon the Earth. Sunlight makes me anxious. It gives me insomnia. If I spend too much time in sunlight, I get depressed and my mind goes slack and foggy. Sometimes, I develop a kind of pseudo-hayfever of headache and swollen sinuses. I know this about myself, and I plan accordingly. Lots of cold water. Sunglasses. Sunscreen. Limiting my time in the sun. Staying out of direct sunlight as much as possible. I take precautions, or I try to.

There is nothing to be done about Florence on this score, however. You cannot reason with this place. There are no shadows. There are no trees. Everything is dusty and brown and turning to ash. There is no rain. There is no water. There is only the sun. There is only light, splitting everything open and drying out its insides. This is a Godless place. If you ever wanted to imagine a place forsaken by the divine and left to its own ruin? Look only to Florence.

I rented an apartment in Le Cure, located in the northern part of the city. Le Cure takes its name from process of “curing” fabrics and textiles, that is softening them via washing. This region of Florence was home to a great many washerwomen and fabric dyers and tanners due to the presence of the Mungone, a small tributary of the Arno. I picked that part of the city because I thought it would make it easier to get to the NYU campus, nestled in a villa in the hills. This was not the case. I should say that Le Cure as a neighborhood had everything I needed: a café where I became a regular, multiple grocery stores in very short walking distance, an electronics store where I could purchase a printer and a couple small kitchen appliances, an Amazon delivery post literally up the street, a stationery store where I could replace the paper for my printer, a couple small bookshops, and perhaps the only tree-lined street in the entire region of Florence. The apartment itself was a small miracle. It stretched across two floors with the upstairs being an office with a desk and chair and good lamps as well as the laundry room and spare storage.

The downstairs had the bedroom (eerily spacious for the price), a full kitchen with an adult-sized dining table, a sofa (which I never used), and a full-sized fridge. Likewise, the property manager was a friendly, handsome guy with a Californian wife, and an extremely (to my Southern mind) open affect. If my trip had been limited to Le Cure, I would perhaps feel differently about Florence. But it was not.

As I said previously, I try to limit my sun exposure. Florence doesn’t even have clouds. I don’t think I saw a single cloud in the sky the entire time I was there. It rained one time, and it seemed to fall out of an impassive blue sheet of a color only slightly lighter than the horrifying blue monstrosity that normally hung over the city. I realized my mistake on the very first day, when I had to go up to campus for the opening reception of the semester. The bus was not running—little did I know that this was to become a recurring theme. There are no trains. And as I found out, all of Florence’s taxis are concentrated in the city center, several kilomters from where I was staying. They do not have Uber as we understand it in the First World. The only option was an Uber Black for almost sixty dollars. Thankfully, one of my colleagues, Raven, had warned about this and told me to download the app TaxiMove. With luck, I was able to get a car right away, and we made our way up to campus until we came to the gate at the top of Via del Bolognese. I got out and showed them badge and told them where I was supposed to be. They were confused. I was confused. No one knew where I was supposed to go. Not really. So I walked the long gravel road up to the main villa and was shown down a pair of steps, along a green shrub filled with mosquitos to the small patio where the welcome reception was unfolding. There were my colleagues. Everything seemed to be going okay. Afterwards, I walked down the long, long, long, long, long incredibly dangerous, horrifying, cracked and uneven, punishing, disturbing route that is Via del Bolognese. Raven and I talked, gossiped and caught up, and I began to feel a strange sense of déjà vu. Suddenly, I could recall the things that other colleagues had said about this route in passing that I had never really paid much attention to because when would I ever be in Florence. Suddenly, I could understand why they’d called it a death trap and why they’d stared into the distance with a look of abjection on their faces when they spoke of this program.

I am going to tell you some facts. The walk from my classroom down that horrifyingly vertiginous sidewalk takes forty-four minutes. There is no other way because there the taxis do not go up that far for pick-ups. And the bus stopped serving the nearby stop about halfway through the semester. As I said, there are no trains. There is only the descent in all that light on your face, your neck, your shoulder, your back, your thighs, hitting you in every place that is available to strike, for the entire duration because, again, there are no trees. That’s not entirely true. It’s not the whole duration, because thirty minutes in, you have to walk underground through the unmarked pedestrian walkways. Do you know where you are going down there? No. Not really. You guess and hope you emerge on the proper side.

There were days when I couldn’t get a car and had to scramble at the last minute to walk up the long path. There are no shortcuts in Florence. There is only doing what one must and taking it raw until it is over. You submit to the distance as you submit to the light and when it is over, you submit yet again and thank God you don’t have to do it again until Tuesday, where you will have to do it twice. During each journey, I thought with increasing bitterness of how I had outgrown this particular variety of municipal provincialism. I thought also with grim amusement that Florence was not dissimilar from places like Montgomery or Birmingham, Alabama. In fact, the difficulties I had with transit were precisely the difficulties I had had with transit the last few times I visited the South and even some smaller cities in the Midwest. I posted on social media that I found it very easy to imagine what life must have been like for my grandparents and ancestors in the Reconstruction South by living in Florence.

I wanted to visit some stationery stores while I was in the city. Florence has an abundance of stationery. More than that, they have an abundance of ateliers and craftspeople who will make you a beautiful leather notebook before your very eyes for like 10 Euro. I spent an afternoon—my birthday in fact—browsing notebooks on the square in Central Florence. I touched a lot of leather. And browsed the paper. One of the shops had a paperworkshop in the back, where they made elaborate sculptures of palaces or people from paper. It was exquisite. There were a variety of marbled notebooks and pencils, bookmarks, that sort of thing.

The quality was astonishing, and the thing most impressed me was the lack of plastic. You walk into a similar store in New York or even in Paris and you are confronted with large, international brands and plastic notebooks wrapped in plastic paper. The typical metropolitan stationery store is not an artisianal shop. It sells on from other brands and confers to those objects an aura of the “aesthetic.” Cute objects in muted colors for your Instagram feed. But in Florence, every shop was just stuff made from real stuff. Real plant fibers or real animal skin. They made their own fucking glue to hold their stuff together. And they crafted it on these machines that looked about a million years old. And every shop was run by some cranky guy with glasses and a younger, crankier guy in the back wearing an apron ready to put the notebooks together. Or women wearing hideous linen smocks and sandals, their eyes sharp and ready to make a fucking sale.

Those shops revealed something to me about my stationery shopping experience in New York and elsewhere, mainly in that it showed me how much shit there is in the stationery world and how it could be different. It made me want to seek out smaller, more artisanal shops, and to focus on quality. The stationery stores can stay.

I also visited a really wonderful pen shop, where I got a new fountain pen for my birthday. But it drew into sharp relief a contrast between the stationery stores on the square and this more urbane, international brand of luxury affected by the pen shop. Standing there, looking at all the Viscontis and Montegrappas and Pilots and Sailors through the shining glass cases, I felt an unfamiliar wave of revulsion. Embarrassment, even. Something seemed so false about the store. It was so bright and filled with so much glass and chrome, such ostentatious display. Whereas in the stationery stores on the square, everything was just put on shelves and left to speak only for themselves. Anyway, I bought a new Pelikan and went on my way.

By the way, to get to the stationery stores from my apartment? Twenty-seven minute walk. One way. I was able to take a bus to go to the pen store, though. There was that at least. I had dinner with my colleagues a couple of times. The first time I booked a car in advance because I knew it would be a nightmare otherwise, and I was able to get there more or less on time. A little early in fact. The second time was a nightmare because I decided I would take the bus. But the bus didn’t show up. It just didn’t arrive. The Italians caught on first that this was happening and all just got on a different bus. But I couldn’t take a different bus because there was only bus that would take me where I needed to go to meet my friends. I was early, mind you. I had left my apartment forty-minutes early. But I was still going to be late. I spent twenty minutes just trying to get a taxi via all of the apps I had. Then ten minutes Googling to find a different app, getting it to download, and then, at last, I got a car after ten more minutes of waiting. Eventually, I got to dinner, much less late than I had anticipated but still late. Sweating and tired and over Florence.

Getting around was so irritating that I spent most of my time indoors reading. As you perhaps know, I am working on a book of literary criticism. For the last while, I have been working on a long essay (hopefully not too long, actually) about post-2015 American realism. This has meant reading a lot of articles about W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard (if you know, you know) as well as reading profiles, interviews, and literary criticism about Rachel Cusk (again, if you know, you know), Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner. I’ve also been reading a lot about the European novel of the 1960s and 1970s as well as post-modernism. Back in the spring, I went on a jag reading about neorealism and what this one really great critic calls “backlash realism.” I also read Thedore Martin’s really good book “Contemporary Drift” as an example of how to do historicism of the contemporary, what that might look like.

Instead of going outside, I read about history and History. I read about the periscopic narrator and the “witness account” as apologetic recuperation of mediation. I have a theory. I am building a theory, I guess, I should say. It’s more like I am building an idea about contemporary realism. The reading was the only thing that kept me from flinging myself from that third-floor apartment because soon everything in Florence became sorely trying on my nerves. Just acquiring anything, even food, became such a chore and such a slog that I thought, you know what, just let me lie down and die right here, I don’t even care anymore. I didn’t realize that life could still be that inconvenient. I suppose, I am grateful to Florence for that, a reminder that there are still regions of this world untouched by modernity, still plugging away in the unpowered dark, chewing through the solid mass of the earth with only their bare fingers and a stick in hand.

When I am in a city, I like to live as the people who live there do. I like to make my footprint as small as possible, to take up as little space as possible. I like to be unobtrusive. Easy. I like to be able to be bored in a place I don’t live. And to feel no need to rectify that boredom. I don’t want to go look at art. I don’t want to go busy myself with a lot of nonsense. I like to be able to spend my time slowly, without regard for its dwindling. The tourist rushes and in their rush, they make their own lives and the lives of everyone they interact with into a commodity. That feels evil to me. I try not to do it. I am not going to be rushing around to cram all the experiences into my eyeballs. I think ambivalence to a place is a sign of respect. Anyway, I spent my time reading. A lot of reading. I was grateful to leave.

Though, something happened to me when I was trying to leave Florence. I won’t get into it here. But it was so frustrating and so humiliating and so painful that I find it hard even to contemplate the existence of the country of Italy. The short of it is that I had to drag my suitcases across the gravel road at the villa because they wouldn’t store them even though I work for NYU, and in having to do that, I tripped on the uneven paving stones and fall very hard. Then I had to get up and drag my stuff through the dust down a flight of stairs, one bag at a time, limping along, so that I could drag them across the gravel yet again, to my class room, and then when I finished teaching, I had to drag them back. But by then someone had realized how stupid this was and offered me a ride to the front gate, because even though you can take a car to the villa, you have to meet your car at the front gate, like half a kilometer’s walk, by the road, the very scary road. And after my booked car canceled on my twice, I finally got to the airport. But by then, I had bled through my pants, and bruised my wrist and wrenched my shoulder because I fell very violently. I was dusty. My shoes had a rip. My shirt was torn. All of my clothing was stained. My wrist throbbed. And I’d just been through the hell of dragging and re-dragging and worrying I would miss my flight, anxious because the next day a strike was starting. A nation-wide strike in Italy. And I was hungry because there was no food. And thirsty because the water machine had been broken for a while and it was a bottled-free campus so there were no vending machines. And at the end of all that, I was in the airport, hoping my flight didn’t get cancelled, standing unevenly because my knee really hurt. And there was blood in my sock. And my back hurt, and my neck hurt, and my eyes hurt. And there was dust in my mouth. And blood in my mouth, somewhere far back because I’d bitten my cheek as I fell.

Whenever I think of Italy, I think of this now. That moment, standing in front of the screen, trying to figure out where my flight was boarding, hurting all over, dusty, head-throbbing, trying to read the screen but finding it impossible because of the screen’s constant jumping. Instead, I do not think of Italy anymore.

When I arrived in Paris, I was relieved. Very sore, but very relieved. I was also very hungry because the meal on the plane had been quinoa (good) with shrimp (bad). The dessert had been a chocolate cake (bad). I am not a picky eater. I eat most things. But there are two things on earth I don’t eat. Both of them were in that meal. I don’t eat shrimp because I was once raped in a house that smelled very strongly of shrimp. There were discarded shrimp in a newspaper and in plastic bags on the kitchen table. I could see them while he did it. That was a summer of shrimp. He bought them almost every night for a month, and he and my aunt and my cousins ate the shrimp. Constantly. While his eyes were on me. Everywhere, every house smelled of shrimp that summer. So, I do not eat shrimp. I don’t even like to look at them. As for chocolate, I just don’t like it. I used to eat it. But now I don’t. It burns when I eat it. I find it extremely unpleasant. It tastes like dirt. Even milk chocolate is horrible to me. So I was hungry in Paris. But the best thing about Paris when I landed that night was that it was not Florence.

At one of the dinners I had with my colleagues, one of them asked me in a moment of exasperation with my dislike of the place, “What’s the best thing you’ve had here?” I said, immediately, “A flight to London.” Everyone laughed, but I was absolutely serious. I don’t even like London. I think London is ugly, tiresome, confusing, and extremely unpleasant. But when I fled Florence the first time for London, I felt like I had landed in the most beautiful, generous, modern city on Earth. I understood immediately how the Parisians felt when the electric lights first lit the boulevards. It felt like the future. I could immediately understand why some people thought that Capitalism would lift all of humanity out of the bleak, oppressive muck of poverty into a clean, brilliant, unceasingly glorious future. Truly, to leave Italy for any other country in the G8 is like leaving the world of The Flintstones for that one meme of a futuristic techno utopia.

But I have arrived in Paris on the hottest days of the year so far, and there is so much light here too. The difference of course is that there are many places to hide from the sun in Paris. There are cool dark tunnels and there is the train and the bus. There are taxis on every corner. There is also the fact that I speak the language and can make myself understood here. I know how to live the way I want to live here—that is to say, I know how to make myself invisible here and how to vanish, how to be bored here. I know how to stretch my time and pour it all out like it’s nothing. In Italy, I found it impossible to merge into the way of life there because the way of life was so anti-thetical to my own modes of living and thinking. I can’t live in a place you have to drive everywhere. If I wanted that, I would go live in Alabama again.

I’ve rented a small desk at a coworking space for the next month so that I have a place to go work because the apartment I’ve rented here in Paris doesn’t have air conditioning or an adult-sized table. The Florence apartment was the best working apartment I’ve ever lived in. I will miss its space. And also its cheapness. But I think the coworking space has its advantages too. Chief among them being that I get to leave my apartment each day and go work somewhere that is not my bed. Also, I think I respond well to public peer pressure. Having people around makes me focus. The last couple of days, I finally got back to climbing PDF mountain. I am hoping to have this realism essay drafted by the end of the month. It’s taking so much time to do all the reading. But if I don’t do the reading, I will feel like I’m just making stuff up. I’d like to not be just making stuff up. I’d like to support my ideas with research. Rather than just slinging out grand narratives that are so popular on Substack.

I find that Substack is a place where people are very amenable to grand, unifying narratives that rhyme with their core suspicions and key paranoid themes. And that’s fine. But I feel rather sick when I think of passing that off as real literary criticism and putting it in a book with my name on it and sending it into the world. I’d like to have some reasons for thinking the things I think and to bolster those reasons with research and reading. The downside is that it takes a long time. The upside, I guess, is that I respect myself at the end. I guess that’s one thing that marks the difference between my informal Substack writing and my more formal criticism that I publish in other places. In that Substack is my notebook, where the theories can be loose and silly. But in the more formal stuff, I feel a need to really dig into the existing literature and see what’s what before I offer an opinion. Not everybody feels this way. I think it’s the sort of thing you have to find your own way through.

Somehow, though, having both modes seems generative. Or at least it is for me. I can come up with ideas on my newsletter that I then try to bolster with further research and reading. An example is this realism essay I’ve been working on. It started as a couple Substack posts, but now I’m putting the ideas under real scrutiny and forcing myself to work through them in a rigorous, systematic fashion. Some people probably learned how to do that in grad school. I am unfortunately having to teach myself through doing and the cruel ritual humiliation of public posting. But whatever way you get there is probably fine.

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