Friday, February 16, 2018

malafemmina press is up and running again

malafemmina press

is up and running again

You’ll never have me like you want me,
a novel by Rose Romano, is back in print,

thanks to the help of Emanuele Paris,
a neighbor who runs a small press of his own:
Edizioni Sette Città (www.settecitta.eu)

When Emilia realizes what Italy means, she decides to keep a journal.
As an Italian-American who lived all her life in Brooklyn, Emilia goes to Italy because she wants to live in the only place in the world where it’s normal to be Italian. She’s completely unprepared. She doesn’t speak Italian well and isn’t familiar with her rights and obligations. Although she has Italian citizenship, she finds it almost impossible to get real help from her psychologist and her social worker.
Her life gets smaller and smaller. Her chances get slimmer and slimmer.
The solution to all her problems appears in an unexpected flash.

Rose Romano is an Italian-American living in Italy for too many years. In the United States, she published a literary journal, la bella figura, and founded malafemmina press, the first to publish only the work of Italian-Americans. Her books of poetry (Vendetta and The wop factor) and her anthology (La bella figura: a choice) are included in the collections of many public and university libraries. Her work has been taught at universities in the United States and Canada. She has organized and participated in poetry readings and book presentations in the United States, Canada, and Italy.

You’ll never have me like you want me
can be ordered from:

www.libreriafernandez.it
info@libreriafernandez.it
tel 0761.304967
fax 0761.303020
via Mazzini, 87
01100 Viterbo (VT)
Italia
(If you’re outside of Italy and learning Italian, this is a great store to get Italian books. They not only have a huge selection of books in Italian, but also some other stuff in English and other languages.)

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

she's not bad looking for someone that old

Donna Fanciullo, a novel by R. M. Kelleher

available on amazon

Donna is the Italian word for woman. Fanciullo is the Italian word for child; used in the masculine here, it would be translated into English as boy. Matt, Irish-American, is a boy (Actually, he's 16 years old, so don't tell him I called him a boy.), who is accused of stealing from his slightly off-center father. Donna, Italian-American, is the woman, 35 years old (Although, according to Matt, she's not bad looking for someone that old.), who takes him in when his father kicks him out. Most of the novel is spent exploring their relationship. It's a complicated relationship; it doesn't take too long before they begin to find each other attractive, although they barely have the guts to admit this to themselves, never mind to each other.

Donna's pretty good at understanding herself. Matt does his damnedest to keep up. They both go through real life, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Donna goes on a few dates with a real jerk. Matt ends up getting a ride home with a stop-off at the driver's home, which is filled with young women and older men who are on drugs, where he’s taken advantage of. They both grow, they both learn, they're both extremely real. Kelleher really knows how to make you care about a fictional character. In fact, I blame Kelleher's able writing as my excuse for thinking through most of the novel: So, are they going to do it, or what?

Every scene blends italianità with the rest of Donna and there’s the way Kelleher throws in objections to bigotry and sexism and the way she speaks out against stereotypes, but only enough to make her point, not enough to interrupt the story or be a pain in the neck. And although they’re both catholic, neither one of them is limited by their religion.

It's just the way their ethnicity, for both of them, fits so easily into their souls that gets to me. There's nothing artificial about it; it's not something outside of them; their identification doesn’t depend on a few predictable words; they don't have neon signs over their heads saying Italian or Irish. They just are and it goes very deep.

It’s a good story, well written with real people. Read it for that and, while you’re at it, notice how you can make a fictional character a real Italian-American without making her a stereotype.

How the Mediterranean arrived in Brooklyn

The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn by Anthony Valerio
an e-book available on Amazon

In spite of his university education, Valerio writes like a real person sitting there telling you what happened. Maybe he’s making some of it up, but so what?

He isn’t rigid about anything. All his stories start with what’s announced in the contents. But all his stories, with little warning, go galloping off in all directions. Those are the circles, Italian circles, because they always come back again. He’s not afraid of anything. He’s not intent on sounding like a university person who wants to write a brilliant novel, just like his professors taught him to do, just like most of those classics do. You’re never given the feeling that he consulted a dictionary, a thesaurus, and God knows what all else. He just goes ahead and writes a brilliant novel. Or are they brilliant stories? Maybe brilliant poetry? Well, it’s brilliant stuff, anyway. And it’s the brilliant part that’s important.

Everything is floating around like real life; you don’t have to read the pieces in order. Things don’t always go together but they always fit together. It’s a mystery that I want to explore even if I don’t understand it. It’s like real life—you just keep rolling it around in your head whether you understand it or not and the thoughts feel good in your mind.

It’s easy to find something to say, like being at a party and everybody’s stoned, so whatever you say makes sense, even if it doesn’t. It’s like you dive into the book and take a tour of Valerio’s family, which would be just like a tour of your own family, like wandering around in a museum with great stuff all over the place. Valerio’s family is fascinating and you want to be a part of it, no matter what they do, and before you’re even half way through the book you know you’re going to want to read the book again because you know you’re going to miss these people when you’re finished the book.

It even echoes stuff from his other work and repeats stuff in this book and it all circles around you until you feel like a constellation right in the middle of Brooklyn.

Valerio has a great talent for description using a few simple words. He knows that little words say a hell of a lot more than big words. “On my first day home after being born, I stopped in at Mary’s and peed on her lap.” His first day of school: “By the time I was torn from the banister leading to my mother and father, it was eight-fifteen.” “Valentino’s penis was likely uncircumcised, but there is no evidence he ever used it.” “While Mr. Bernstein was reading my story, I looked around the cafeteria and felt that it was a sacred place reserved for writers and editors of the first rank. Mr. Bernstein was editor-in-chief of a line of soft-core pornographic books. After he read my story, he offered me a job answering the telephone.”

There’s a touching story about his father and how he died. But it’s not told touchingly; there are hardly any emotional words. The words he uses are almost cold, straight-forward, no-nonsense, and matter-of-fact, which is how it touches you. When words go straight from the author’s pen to your heart, they’re not watered down the way words are when they go from the author’s pen and pass through the author’s heart before going to the reader’s.

The story I can relate to the most, as a writer and the proud owner of an HB pencil, is “Lament of the Cheap Pentel Pencil.” He searches for a new Number 2 pencil, the best, and the cheapest, that Pentel makes, all meanderings included in the price. One meandering describes how he first learned about masturbation. It starts like this: “One day while my friend Albee and I were writing on the street, he told me about a wonderful discovery he had just made.”—in case you want to search for it and read it first.

It comes pretty much in the middle of the book but, as I said, you don’t have to read this book in order. You just have to read this book.

Damn, you just have to read this book.

Friday, February 9, 2018

Wikipedia and the lynching of Sicilian-Americans

I always say to anyone who will listen that Wikipedia is a useful site, but . . . But whatever you’re doing research on, you can’t rely on only one source. And unlike any other encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not written by experts. It’s written by anyone who cares to contribute. And some people contribute their own ignorance based on their own prejudices.

The people who “run” Wikipedia try to make sure that the people who contribute are at least responsible enough to cite sources for their information. But it should be obvious to anyone that they don’t try hard enough.

There’s a discussion going on now on Wikipedia about a listing for the lynching of Sicilian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891. The bigots don’t like this listing because it “claims,” after careful and responsible research, that this lynching of Sicilian-Americans is considered the worst lynching ever to have occurred in the entire history of the United States. None of these ignorant bigots would object to this statement if a lynching of Afro-Americans were listed as the worst lynching ever to have occurred in the entire history of the United States. The ignorant bigots just go on about the difference between a massacre and a lynching—which is a bullshit waste of time.

They denigrate Richard Gambino for his book Vendetta, a book extremely painful to read, because it describes this lynching in detail. They don’t care that Gambino is a respected scholar who wouldn’t waste his time on a not-entirely trustworthy site like Wikipedia. Instead, they object to his “claim” that this was the worst lynching. They don’t even give a shit that the NAACP, an organization that has done extensive research about lynchings, considers this lynching to be the worst lynching in the United States. And don’t try to tell them that there were Afro-Americans among the people doing the lynching because they’ll just call you a racist. Like any other bigots, they don’t like the truth.

I tried for many years to speak out against the prejudice against Italian-Americans. I’ve gotten no support from Italian-Americans. In fact, I’m been ridiculed, insulted, and ostracized by my own people for trying to improve our situation.

This goes a long way in explaining why Italian-Americans are still treated like crap.