For all my pale and delicate skin-tones and moderate aversion to the rays of Ra, I like this time of year. The lads are away – Chris in London, John-F in Poland, one supposes (he's become a bit strange and secretive with the bus-pass years approaching) – and Lucy left to mind the fort, more a sparely furnished upper room to tell the truth. August minding is strictly a.m., and the afternoons are an ideal time to explore abandoned islands with a boating beau and a bathing suit. Alas, one is rarely alone in such a scheme, and finding a grassy arbour not already rife with abandonment can take more time and cunning than one has time and wit for. You might have thought Poveglia would be a winner, what with all that 'Island of Screams' guff on the internet. In reality of course it's a magnet for unclad Goths, and other, grosser undesirables. Buel del Lovo has a certain unkempt charm, with its mysterious cove of scuttled craft, but as often as not we end up playing safe and take advantage of Massimo and Viretta Micheluzzi's open invitation to their garden paradise on Mazzorbetto. Massimo is a fine glass artist, second only some say to the great Ohira, while Viretta, well, Viretta only needs to be Viretta. Men do, women are, as the saying goes. Imagine your Lucy then with a straw hat and a faraway look in a deck chair only half an hour from home, while you're all stuck in a torrid airport somewhere on that planned annual purgatory, your 'holiday'. A bientôt!
6.8.2010

Thursday evening and Lucy was one of 29 at Davide and Luisa De Franceschi's excellent Trattoria 'Alle due Gondolette' on the Fondamenta delle Capuzine for the launch of Hugh Tolhurst's 'All Out of Space-Junk', no.19 in San Marco Press's ongoing whizz-bang pamphlet series. The thin gravy of literati was enriched on this occasion by the Bisto of The Beards, the Brenta-based 'spaghetti southern rock band' and another musician, Julien Poulson from Tasmania, friend of the poet. The local covers had also been beaten to flush out any resident or passing Ozzies, so we had artist David Henderson and vogatrice Jane Caporal strategically placed along the long table. Hugh's Strine lyrics had been wrenched into a semblance of Italian by Philip Morre - catch his new website, by the way: www.philipmorre.com - and these were then worked on severally by native lingoists and duly recited by same to accompany the poet's own vigorous address – a form of audience participation that proved highly successful and involving, and could well become a regular feature of future events. Hugh's salty Catullus translations went down particularly well, though I have to wonder if anyone other than your own properly educated Lucy got much out of the Latin originals Morre insisted on reading. Serve him right that the only casualty of the evening was his Polish straw hat, now dancing, Lucy suspects, over a Beard.
15.7.2010

I know you will all have been waiting for an official San Marco pronouncement on the Oxford Poetry Chair. The thing about this piece of furniture is that it needs to be occupied by some pretty weighty buttocks, which being so, Geoffrey Hill was as things turned out the only plausible candidate. Sad to see the Sisters disgraced for the second time in a year by the ridiculous antics of Paula Claire, a soi-disant poet who could only have been elected by a field of sunflowers (see Youtube and weep). Of course the Poetry Editor is currently in South Africa sporting a hideous rugby shirt, but I think I can safely say We would have liked to see John Fuller step into his father's shoes (Roy Fuller, Ox Prof 1968-73), not least because he is, in Our view, the better poet. Professor Hill's olympian disdain for contemporary poetry is not, We think, well, OK, I think, the ideal qualification for the role. I fear we are in for fifteen erudite speeches about minor seventeenth century divines and their agonising struggles with doctrinal trivia, and not much practical help for aspirant undergraduate bards, but Lucy lives in hope.
23.6.2010


It's a sad truth to enunciate in these liberated times, but the fact is that even, perhaps especially, educated chaps are liable to think of a blonde as a couple of protuberancies in a t-shirt, or out of one, if they are hot (I use the word advisedly) from Damiano Michieletto's new Don Giovanni at La Fenice. Now I want you-all to know that Miss S got this job on the strength of an English 2.1 in one of our better known ancient academies, and furthermore... well, never mind that, suffice it to say that Latin and Greek come as smoothly to Lucy as “Another pint, Harry, when you've a moment” to you unwashed snivelling mum's boys. OK?
Now that's off my chest (see above), we'll get to the gist, which is: LUCY BEING SERIOUS FOR ONCE. Have you noticed, comatose alcoholics out there, that The Classics Are Back? Did they ever go away? I hear you mutter. Well, yes. Can you see Larkin Pounding Propertius? Almost all dear old earnest Ted's so-called 'Translations' were really translated by someone who knew the language in question, and 'versed' by the Great Man – and what kind of translation is that? (Even Famous Seamus, I regret to say, has likewise ventured blindfold and shameless into mediaeval Polish). Ashbery? Geoff Hill, the Thinking Woman's Crumpet? Carol Ann? Don't make me larf.
It would be good to be able to claim that, once again, San Marco Leads the Way, but Fair Play was our watchword on the playing fields of Westheath, praise where praise is due and all that: your Lucy feels honour-bound to deliver the palm to Dan Chiasson, whose 'The Afterlife of Objects' (2002) and 'Natural History' (2005) are rife with, respectively, Horace and Pliny.
But SMP's not far behind. About-to-be OWB pamphleteer Hugh Tolhurst ( 'All out of Space-junk', OWB 19 – see Press News) has no less than five racy Catullus versions in his forthcoming full collection 'Rockling King', while joined-at-the-hip OWB founder member Philip Morre (OWB 2) has two epigrams from Callimachus in 'Save the Eagle' (OWB 20). Straws in the wind? Get those Loebs down from the upper shelves, if you aim to fly with the Zeitgeist: the last time this sort of thing happened, we had the Renaissance.
What's that subdued agitation in the cheap seats? Callimachus? Come on. Cory then ('They told me Heraclitus...')? Nothing? Not a glimmer? A girl despairs.
1.6.2010


A good week since April Fool's Day, so no leg-pulling here. 2,500 polite and quietly dressed academics in town for a Renaissance Society of America jamboree, lectures and round tables in every hall and hostelry. Now a nicely-spoken tenured Renaissance Man could be just what your Lucy's been hankering after, so an extra half-hour in front of the slap-mirror after breakfast and out on the town with my rod and line. From what I've seen so far, they're not the fast-talking jet-setting conference bed-hoppers I sort-of expected from my background research with David Lodge, but so much the better say I: a girl my age is not looking to hook a flippertigibbet. It seems to me that a nice fresh Abandoned Islands of the Venetian Lagoon in startling blue against the bold pink of my hunting dress might be just the bait for a steady unhitched prof, so that's what I'll be toting. Besides, matrimony aside, a copy of the Islands for every delegate would take us into a reprint with one bold stride: if that's not enough to get a girl promotion, I don't know what is. Watch this space.
L.S.
8.4.2010

Went out Saturday with SMP paladins Chris Wayman and John Francis Phillimore to do the Centri Commerciali (shopping centres). Our motive: a bulky order for Isole Abbandonate/Abandoned Islands from Feltronelli, the retail-editorial giant founded in 1954 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, inspired publisher and futile revolutionary, now expanded into the retail parks, some 25 of them, under the admanspeak banner ‘Feltrinelli Village’. The Veneto part of the order was spread between four such ‘villages’ and all three of us were curious to inspect these bucolic communities.
First up, the Marcon Valecenter (to all intents and purposes the Valecenter is Marcon) – architecturally unremarkable, but light and cheerful and quite busy for the last Saturday of February. Of course the ‘Feltrinelli Village’ is no more a village than I’m a milkmaid, but I doubt that even Marie-Antoinette’s cowshed was as bright and clean and anxious-to-please. Five copies of The Great Book were briskly consigned to a helpful amazon, who exclaimed (gratifyingly) ‘How nice – Something on Venice!’ (though in Italian), which seemed a strange cry ten miles from the Serenissima, but it turned out to be a leitmotif of our brief tour, prompting the thought that central ordering, if it had turned out OK for us, might not be without it’s downside.
And so to Auchan at Zelarino, on the doorstep of the Watery City. The Shopping Centre Experience. Every race and creed. Good sandwich bar, crowded but efficient. All shapes and sizes of children being squeezed into all shapes and sizes of springwear, being pacified with buzzing electric toys... The Feltrinelli Village a mercifully (if unintentionally) child-free zone. While the boys bankrupted their charm-bank on the sparky sales girls, I wandered off to check out the poetry shelves. Surprising to find two separate editions of Nazim Hikmet, but no Riccardo Held (Venice’s Big Bard) or Seamus Heaney (‘Scemassini’), who’s much translated here and, seventy last year, has been in the news, and in Bologna to boot.
By the time we reached Padua’s Giotto Centre, your correspondent was flagging, and ditto Giotto, by the look of things, some of his escalators out for the count, and a general air of ‘that’s enough for now’. Modern retail needs to gleam. The Fell Vill was gleaming its heart out, but custom was thin, if not emaciated. To be fair, the carpark was full, so unless canny out-of-towners were improvising a free park-and-ride facility, the consumers were probably consuming their buy-one-get-one-free vegetarian lasagne somewhere out of sight, or site, if they knew what was good for them.
I prised our two Argonauts from the sirens, and we headed for Nane della Giulia, where the wise sup...
L.S.
3.3.2010