My arsenic post from Facebook

Does your children’s school serve lunches that provide the minimum daily requirement of arsenic?

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on fb lately, talking about the nutritious school lunches that are served to children in Europe. Mostly, these posts are just pictures.

The water in the entire province of Viterbo has arsenic in it at levels so high that just drinking the water from your tap or washing in the water can cause life-threatening health problems. I’ve got lymphoma, a type of cancer, because I drank the water from my tap and used it to wash.

There are about one thousand different types of lymphoma, divided into three main groups: one-third that will kill you quickly; one-third that can be cured; one-third that, with the proper treatment, will just shorten your life. I lucked out; I’ve got the kind that will just shorten your life.

The governments of the province of Viterbo and the European Union have known about this problem for more than twenty years but they don’t care enough to do anything about it. The allowable levels of arsenic go up, the deadline for meeting the level requirements are extended, and people are dropping dead.

If you don’t believe me, search for Viterbo water arsenic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this problem is present in other parts of Europe.

There are filters that can be installed but they’re considered too expensive—although they’re probably not as expensive as chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments which, I was told by a fellow patient when I was undergoing therapy at the day hospital, cost €20,000 for one treatment. Multiply that by the nine I’ve had so far and it adds up.

That same arsenic water is used in the preparation of school lunches. No matter how nutritious those lunches may be, using water that can give those children cancer, heart problems, and other deadly health conditions, is not to be considered an indication of the superiority of European school lunches over those in the United States and is not something to be boasting about.

Eating nutritious meals is not going to do those children much good if they end up dying of a heart attack at the age of forty when, if they hadn’t drunk that water, they might have lived to be eighty-five.

Those of us who are going to die before our time because we drank the water in Viterbo know that plastering fb with appetizing pictures of nutritious food isn’t going to do anybody any good.

I think it might be more helpful to post pictures of nine-year-old children who are dying of cancer.

More Personal Stuff about Me

I started writing novels just after my mother died because I decided I didn’t like the world anymore and I’d just make up one of my own.

I know that it was against cultural norms among poor people in Italy. But I also know that going from a description of a culture to the implied belief that every member of a culture lives by its norms, is just describing stereotypes. Insisting, in spite of proof to the contrary, that those stereotypes are true of every member of a culture, is bigotry.

My mother was raised by Sicilians, a people not known for being literary (This idea comes from ignorance—there has been a highly respected Sicilian literature, in the Sicilian language, since at least the 1200’s.), but she gave me my love of reading and writing.

The summer I turned six, just before I started school, my mother taught me how to write my name. It was pretty long—Rose Sorrentino. I spent the whole day writing my name over and over again. I said “Let there be Rose Sorrentino.” I wrote it and there I was—I existed. I still consider it the most exciting day of my life—and my life hasn’t been boring.

Every Saturday night, my mother gave me and my brother our Saturday night bath and washed our hair. We put on fresh pajamas and the sheets were all fresh. We were allowed to stay up late, until my father came back from the corner candy store at midnight with a copy of the Sunday newspaper. He gave the funnies to my mother and we all sat in the big bed, me on one side of my mother and my brother on the other side, while she read us the funnies, including the sound effects. It was total paradise and I learned then to associate reading with feeling good.

She also made sure I had a library card, before I started school, and that I used it.

After my mother died, my Neapolitan family, who didn’t read and didn’t see why anyone else should, while they didn’t encourage my reading, they didn’t really seem to me to disapprove of it. In any case, I had long since concluded that adults should be seen and not heard. So when I walked into a room with my book in my hand, and found the aunts talking, and they would all turn to me and say, disdainfully, “And this one here, always with her nose in a book,” I just ignored them. Besides, I was allowed to have a membership in a children’s book club, one of the few things I was allowed to have even though it cost money.

I started writing poetry when I was fourteen years old. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and I had no reason to trust the adults around me to give me any useful advice. I’d write up something, read it, think about it, and toss it into the trash. I’ve always loved language and I tried to make what I wrote as good as I was able. Pretty soon, I noticed that I was writing poetry, so I decided that, as long as I was already writing poetry, I might as well do that with my life, and I started keeping the poems.

I first came across Emily Dickinson when I was about ten years old. The nuns had given us a little book of poetry for children which included Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I like to see it lap the miles, / And lick the valleys up,” which I thought was a really dumb poem. Who cares about a stupid train? And she used the word Boanerges, which sent me to the dictionary where I discovered that it’s a kind of horse. So why didn’t she say horse, like a normal person?

I’ve read that Italian-Americans, belonging to a culture that doesn’t value literature, have to go to school to learn to appreciate reading. For me, it was the other way around. And there are a lot of people who feel that many schools discourage a real love of learning and literature.

When I was sixteen years old, one evening at the Brooklyn Public Library, I was desperate for something to read. I just couldn’t find anything I wanted. Finally, I heard, over the loudspeaker, “Ping, ping, ping. The library will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring your books up to the checkout counter.” I panicked and grabbed the first book I could reach, which happened to be a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, and ran with it to the checkout counter.

When I got home, I just tossed the book onto a shelf and went back to working on a poem which I had been trying to write for days, but just couldn’t get it right. All I knew was that I wanted to write about the light on winter afternoons and I all I could think of to say was that the light was slanted.

Frustrated, I put the my poem aside and took down the book of Emily Dickinson’s poems and began to read. I decided that some of them were okay, but I wasn’t really impressed so much. Then I read a poem that totally blew me away. It begins “There’s a certain slant of light / On winter afternoons.” I was astonished and in love because that was the poem I had been trying to write.

When I read her poem that begins “Unto my books so good to turn / Far ends of tired days; / It half endears the abstinence, / And pain is missed in praise.”, all I could think was, How does she know so much about me?

The first line of the last stanza of this poem is “I thank these kinsmen of the shelf,” and that was when I decided to try to get my poetry published. I wanted to be kinsmen of the shelf with Emily Dickinson.

In other words, I had been writing for eight years before it even entered my head to try to publish anything.

I’ve heard of people who write because they want to be published. I don’t. Although I like being published and I appreciate it when people, who know how to read, like my work, that’s not why I’m writing. I write to be writing because writing gives me the energy I need to live. I always feel like crap if I haven’t written for a long time. When I’m not writing, little problems become big and big problems become hell. When I’m writing, the little problems melt away and the big problems get little.

I learned too late that Dickinson, after having a few things published, decided it wasn’t worth it and that she should write but not publish. By the time I read that, I’d had a few things published and I was hooked. At this point, seeing what some people have written about my work and me, I sometimes think that Dickinson was right. But I love being published. If I never published again it would be a big disappointment, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Not writing anymore would be the end of the world.

Just a little Background Information

I’ve been reading “critiques of my work.” I put that in quotes because they’re not critiques of my work; they’re mini biographies about me supposedly based on my work, most of which is misinterpreted just to fit in with what the critic wants to say. One critic told me that literary critics aren’t required to do research. Apparently, he doesn’t realize that all that really means is that a literary critic doesn’t have to know what he’s talking about and can just make up stuff.

So if there’s anyone out there who wants to be a responsible literary critic, here are a few facts that you might be interested in knowing.

I was born in Brooklyn on May 20, 1951. Contrary to popular belief, I’m still alive—at least as of this writing.

My paternal grandparents were from the province of Naples, my grandmother from Procida and my grandfather from Castellammare di Stabia. They were nobility, a count and countess, and knew King Vittorio Emanuele II personally. Not all the immigrants left Italy because they were poor. Some had other reasons, usually political, or maybe they just had a sense of adventure.

My maternal grandparents came from Alcamo, a small city in Sicily. They were probably poor, although they’re not poor now. I know that because I visited with them, living for a year and three months in Alcamo.

Although I’m half Neapolitan and half Sicilian, I have always identified as Neapolitan. When my mother died a month before my eight birthday, my father brought me and my brother to live with his mother, who had arrived in Brooklyn with my grandfather (I don’t think they were married.) when she was seventeen years old. Although my brother and I were pretty much neglected, my grandmother was a big influence on me. I watched her and I listened to her and I learned to be Neapolitan and proud of it. Sicilians, in spite of the fact that my mother also had a big influence on me, were always seen by me as foreigners. I was just too little when she died.