Podcast: The First Italian Noir, and the Murder that Inspired It

Monument to Emilio De Marchi, Milan

Today we debut our first podcast, which is about the murder of a priest named Virgilio Costa in Imola, Italy in 1881, the sensational press coverage of his trial, and the novel it inspired, published in 1887: The Priest’s Hat, by Emilio De Marchi.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button here,

or going to this link:

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-f9c5a-1641d6e

And of course, we invite you to check out the novel itself, The Priest’s Hat!

In case you have trouble accessing the podcast, or just want to read the transcript, here is a text version:

Verbal Exchange Episode 1: True Crime, Fiction, and the First Italian Noir

Hello, and welcome to Verbal Exchange, a show about literary translation. My name is Steve Eaton.

Today I want to talk about a novel that has been called the first Italian crime novel, or the first Italian noir. Its title is Il cappello del prete, or in English, The Priest’s Hat. It was written by a man named Emilio de Marchi, and first published in installments, in 1887. Last year, an English translation of the novel, by myself and Dr. Cinzia Russi, was published by Italica Press, and I encourage you to download the free sample of the novel on your Kindle or e-reader and check it out.

But before we talk about De Marchi’s novel, I want to say a few words about the actual event, the actual murder, that De Marchi used as the basis of his story.

That story begins in the year 1881 in the town of Imola, in northern Italy, about forty kilometers southeast of the city of Bologna. In August of that year, a priest named Virgilio Costa, a man in his seventies who lived in Imola, suddenly vanished, and his family reported his disappearance to the police. Now, I’m going to describe what happened based on contemporary newspaper accounts. These accounts don’t always agree on the details, but the basic facts are these:

It took some time for the local authorities to determine what happened to Costa, but eventually suspicion fell on a local aristocrat named Count Alessandro Faella. Faella was a man in his forties, with a wife and child. He was a captain of artillery in the Italian army, and had served with distinction in Italy’s war of independence against Austria 20 years earlier. But he was also known as someone with lavish tastes, and a passion for gambling. He personally knew the priest, who was wealthy, and had previously lent the count money.

In October of 1881, two months after Virgilio Costa went missing, the grounds of Count Faella’s villa were searched, and Costa’s body was found. It was discovered at the bottom of a recently dug hole that was about 6 meters deep, or about 20 feet. Costa’s body was reportedly found standing upright in the hole, with his arms raised as though to protect himself from the heavy rocks that were being hurled down at him from above.  But according to the coroner’s report, although his body did show signs of severe injury from rocks, the cause of death was asphyxiation. He was apparently buried alive in the debris that was shoveled into the hole after the priest fell or was pushed into it.

Now, the police questioned a worker who had been hired by Faella to dig the hole. The worker had been told by Faella that the hole was to be used as a cistern for cooling wine, which would have been a very ordinary thing to do.

After the hole was finished, Faella dismissed the worker, and evidently had laid some flimsy material, like a thin reed mat, over the opening, and then disguised it by scattering straw over it.  Then he had apparently lured the priest into literally walking into his trap.

What was Count Faella’s motivation? Money. He was charged, not only with murder, but with forging an anonymous document sent to local authorities which claimed that Faella had left town indefinitely for missionary work, and had named Faella as executor of his estate. Faella had also forged Costa’s signature on bills of exchange (essentially checks) made out to Faella.

Faella said he was innocent. He told the police that someone else murdered Costa, and placed his body in Faella’s cistern in order to frame him. Faella said that he had found the body but hadn’t reported it, for fear of being falsely accused of the murder, and instead had decided to fill in the cistern and hide it.  Nevertheless, he was jailed, and his trial began in Bologna in February of 1882.

The trial of Count Faella for the murder of Virgilio Costa was front page news, not just in Bologna but all over Italy.

The February 19, 1882 edition of the Genoa newspaper L’epoca had an illustration taking up the entire front page, showing an imagined cross section of the cistern, with the priest trying to shield himself from the rocks raining down from above; the next day’s edition also had a large cover illustration showing workers pulling the priest’s body out of the cistern as police and investigators watch.

The weekly magazine Rivista Illustrata Settimanale of Milan had an article in its February 12 issue which began, “Today Italy is little concerned with politics; there are two topics that claim everyone’s attention, although very different: Count Faella and Sarah Bernhardt.” Sarah Bernhardt was the immensely popular French stage actress, who was touring Italy that year, so that gives us an idea of how gripped the Italian public was by this case.

And it wasn’t just news in Italy but across Europe. The Devon Evening Express, for example, included an article in its March 14 issue entitled, titled “A Mystery of Crime in Italy,” which began “All through the spring the Italian public has been eagerly interested in the trial for murder of Count Alessandro Faella. Day by day the gradual unwinding of the plot became more fearful and more complicated[….]The story is strange; no less so than the murder trials of the Renaissance which it recalls to mind, and the actor is difficult and complex in character.”

The news even hopped across the Atlantic and made it into American newspapers. In the March 18 issue of the Boston Pilot, an article appeared titled, “AN INTERESTING MURDER CASE. AN ITALIAN COUNT ACCUSED OF KILLING A PRIEST.” It contained a detailed account of the crime and discussed the upcoming trial.

But the news was already outdated. The editors of the Pilot were apparently unaware that back in Italy, the trial had already begun, and then abruptly ended, with the unexpected death of Count Faella on February 18. What happened? Well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Right now I want to jump ahead, to five years after Count Faella’s trial and death, and discuss the novel that was based on the murder of Virgilio Costa. That novel was called The Priest’s Hat, or Il Cappello del prete. It was written by Emilio de Marchi, and it debuted in the year 1887, the same year, incidentally, that the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in the U.K.

Some of the details of the actual crime were changed in the fictionalized version. For example, the action was moved from Bologna in northern Italy to the southern city of Naples. Count Alessandro Faella became Baron Carlo Coriolano of Santafusca.  But the essential elements of the crime, its motivation and how it was planned and carried out, remained the same.

The Priest’s Hat was initially published in 43 installments, as daily supplements to the Milan newspaper Italia, in June and July of 1887.  The following year, it was published, again in installments, in a newspaper in Naples, as well as in book form.

 In recent times it’s been called the first Italian crime novel. The contemporary Italian crime writer Carlo Lucarelli wrote an afterword to a modern edition of novel, in which he states that the Italian noir genre began with The Priest’s Hat.

 In 1943, towards the end of Mussolini’s reign, a film adaptation was produced, and in the early 1970’s it was made into a 3-part miniseries on RAI, the Italian state television network. Those three hour-long episodes can be found today on YouTube, although the dialogue is in Italian, without subtitles. And in 2023, an English version of the novel, translated by Cinzia Russi and me, was published by Italica Press.

So that’s a brief history of the book, but now I want to talk about what, in my opinion, makes it special. If it had just been a retelling of a lurid crime with the names and places changed, I think it would have been a pretty forgettable novel. Certainly De Marchi’s intentions went well beyond simply capitalizing on a sensational true story. In the introduction he wrote for the bound version of the novel in 1888, he told his readers that in writing the book, he was conducting an experiment, with two goals. The first objective was, in his words, “To show whether it’s really necessary to go to France to obtain a so-called serialized novel, or if instead with a bit of good will, we ourselves can’t amply and with better judgement provide for the simple needs of our wider public.”

What did De Marchi mean by this, and why he is bringing France into the discussion? Well, we’ve said that The Priest’s hat was first published in a newspaper. This was a very common way to debut a novel in the nineteenth century, and indeed many of the novels we now consider masterpieces were first published this way. War and Peace, The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations, among many others, all began life in serial form in newspapers or journals. In Italian newspapers, these novels were typically not written by Italian authors, but were translations of works originally in French, English, or other languages.

An example of a very successful novelist of this period was the French author Xavier Montépin, who lived from 1823 to 1902. Montépin was a prolific writer, turning out something like 90 novels in the course of his career, and like successful writers of thrillers and romances today, he eventually employed ghost writers to do the writing for him. It was said that he turned out novels “au kilomètre,” or by the kilometer. And in fact De Marchi makes a mocking reference to Montépin in The Priest’s Hat. This is the point in the story after the priest has disappeared, and before his body has been found by the police. His murderer, Baron Santafusca, had hoped and expected that public interest in the priest’s fate would quickly fade away, but unfortunately for the baron, local newspapers have latched onto the case and are making all sorts of lurid speculations about what may have happened to the priest. Santafusca thinks to himself, “Vedi il sogno! vedi la stravaganza! vedi il romanzo di Saverio Montépin!” “What a dream! What an extravaganza! What a novel from Xavier Montépin!”

So our fictional killer didn’t think much of writers like Montépin, and neither did De Marchi himself. And that ties into his second goal for The Priest’s Hat, which he declared was “to conduct an experiment, to find out how much vitality and honesty and reason exists in this wider public, which is so often vilified, and declared to be a hungry beast, sated only by nonsense, filth, and naked flesh, and which our newspapers with a circulation of a hundred thousand copies feel required to feed with slop.”

When De Marchi talks about “the wider public” here, he is referring to working class folk who buy their newspapers from a street vendor, or who are illiterate and listen to their neighbors read the latest installment of a novel aloud. He felt that Italy’s newspapers treated these readers cynically, by feeding them with trashy potboilers, and assuming that they wouldn’t understand or appreciate real literature. De Marchi didn’t think that was true, and he wanted to prove it. And I believe this is why the novel was initially published in serial form, not just in De Marchi’s native Milan, but also in Naples.

De Marchi states in his introduction, “This Priest’s Hat, printed by two newspapers with different sensibilities in two cities at the extremes of Italy, Milan’s Italia and Naples’ Corriere di Napoli, has accomplished more than the author hoped for.”  When De Marchi refers to the “extremes of Italy” he’s not really talking about geographical location. Milan, which not coincidentally was the writer’s home town, was considered the cultural and intellectual capital of Italy, home to its banking industry, the La Scala opera house, and the center of its publishing industry, as it remains today. Naples on the other hand was thought of as the symbolic capital of southern Italy, which was associated with poverty, illiteracy, and crime. De Marchi aimed to demonstrate that readers in Naples would be just as receptive to a serious novel as those in Milan.

But he also believed that literature had a mission: to both entertain, and educate and improve, its readers. In his words, he sought to “nourish, within the excitement of their curiosity, some living feelings of justice and beauty, which elevate the soul.”

To give you an idea of De Marchi’s outlook, in 1887, the same year that The Priest’s Hat was published, he also published a book aimed at teenage boys, titled L’eta’ preziosa (“The Precious Age”), meant to advise and guide the young into becoming responsible adults. In the introduction he writes:

“I know that the biographies of many famous men tell tales of an unrestrained, lost youth, which doesn’t stop someone from attaining goodness and glory. In the hands of a young man these examples, without the necessary reflections, can cause misunderstandings and lead to bad consequences. I want to put them on guard against hasty decisions.”

So De Marchi was certainly successful in accomplishing his first stated goal, that of writing a popular serialized novel in Italian, instead of importing and translating one from abroad. What about his second goal, that of writing a work that is ennobling and uplifting? And if so, what moral lessons was De Marchi trying to impart?

To answer those questions, I would like to talk about what I think makes this novel special.

The most important ingredient that De Marchi adds to the true story of Count Faella and Virgilio Costa is that he tells the story through the eyes of the killer, as he tries to keep his crime a secret, and to shift suspicion elsewhere.

What sort of person is De Marchi’s Baron of Santafusca? Well, De Marchi describes him in the very first sentence of the novel:

“Baron Carlo Coriolano of Santafusca did not believe in God and still less in the devil, or even, though a good son of Naples, in witches or evil spells.”

And the author goes on to give the reader a brief history of Santafusca’s life, the life of a boy raised in a privileged, aristocratic family, a brave young soldier, now a middle-aged man who loves fine clothes, cigars, beautiful women, and gambling, and who has carelessly frittered away his inheritance. But I think the key to Santafusca lies in that first sentence. As we continue to see throughout the novel, he doesn’t believe in anything. Or rather, he believes only in himself. He tells he himself that morality is a meaningless abstraction, and that therefore any actions he takes to save his own skin and stay out of prison only confirm his own natural superiority.

This is Santafusca talking to himself, trying to convince himself that there’s really nothing wrong in murdering an innocent man, who in the novel is a priest named Don Cirillo:

“Cirillo the Priest was already a carcass consigned to death. Time would have destroyed little by little what the strength of a man destroyed in a moment. It was thus a question of months and days, which vanish into the great number of years, and are nothing over time without end.”

De Marchi also made an interesting decision with respect to the character of Santafusca’s victim.. While Don Cirillo is certainly an innocent victim, he’s not a very sympathetic character. He is an old man who has become wealthy through exploiting the poor and working people of Naples, by loaning money to those in financial distress. He himself lives in poverty, and he values the accumulation of money for its own sake, unlike the spendthrift Baron. But rather than using his money for doing good works, he believes that by leaving his money to charity after his death, he is paying for his own salvation.

I believe that De Marchi is saying that both the baron and Don Cirillo are wrong. Don Cirillo can’t buy his way into heaven. And Santafusca, in some way, will have to face the consequences for his murder.

What are those consequences?

You may remember that I spoke earlier about the abrupt end of Count Alessandro Faella’s trial in February of 1882. Faella was, or claimed to be, in poor health, too ill to attend his own trial. Before it could result in a verdict, he was found dead in his jail cell. The Rivista illustrata settimanale of Milan reported that a chemical test indicated that Faella had died of poisoning, presumably by his own hand.

Why am I telling you this? Have I spoiled the ending for you? No, because that’s not what happens to De Marchi’s Baron of Santafusca. If you want to know what happens to him, you’ll have to read the novel.

So far I’ve painted a pretty dark picture of this narrative about a selfish playboy murdering a miserly old priest. And there is a lot of darkness in this story. But there is also a lot of joy and humor. That joy comes from the important parts played by all of its other characters, servants and groundskeepers, policeman, journalists, fishmongers, barbers and tailors, the peasants who farm Santafusca’s ancestral lands, and many others. The Priest’s Hat functions as a love letter to the people of Naples, especially its poor and working-class people, precisely the kind of people De Marchi wrote this novel for.  

The most important of those other characters is an unassuming parish priest named Don Antonio. He is important to the novel for two reasons. First of all, in terms of plot, he unintentionally sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately lead the authorities to suspect the baron. Incidentally, that’s where the priest’s hat of the title comes into play. But more importantly, I believe it is through the unlikely person of Don Antonio that De Marchi intends to arouse, in his words, “living feelings of justice and beauty, which elevate the soul.” How he does that, well, I’d rather leave that for you to find out.

Again, the novel is The Priest’s Hat, by Emilio De Marchi, translated by Steve Eaton and Cinzia Russi, published by Italica Press, available in hard copy or Kindle versions on all the usual online booksellers.

This has been Verbal Exchange, and my name is Steve Eaton. I invite you to visit my blog at gardenofeaton.home.blog

I’m going to leave you now with a recording of the song “Santa Lucia.” This is a quite famous song. Its title refers to a neighborhood that runs along the bay of Naples, and in the novel it’s played and sung at a celebration. Here is the great Enrico Caruso performing Santa Lucia.

Goodbye.

On Crime, Punishment, Donald Trump, and Crystal Mason

The echoes of thirty-four jury pronouncements of “guilty” had scarcely died down on the evening of May 30 last, before the punditocracy started trying to answer the question on everyone’s mind: will former president Donald Trump be sentenced to jail time?

So far the experts’ answer has been generally “no.” The crime committed was the teeniest kind of felony (N.Y. State “class E”). The defendant has “no priors,” as they say on the cop shows. True, a jury previously found that he had sexually assaulted a woman and then loudly and publicly denied it, but that was a civil case, so it doesn’t count.

The law says that the judge may sentence him to anything from only probation to 34 consecutive terms of 4 years. Putting the man in jail for 136 years would at least keep the country safe from his plans to turn our government into a family business, and exact retribution on anyone who doesn’t publicly adore him, until more than halfway through the next century. It probably still wouldn’t be long enough to make this criminal reflect on his miscreant ways and become a useful member of society.

So what would a just and fair punishment be, one that tempers stern justice for the victims (you and me) with compassionate and humane treatment of the criminal? It would be five (5) years in prison. I call it, The Texas Way.

What was Donald Trump’s crime? Falsifying official records in order to subvert an election. Well, we have a “precedent,” as the legal types say, down here in Texas.

In 2016 a Black woman named Crystal Mason went to vote, in the very same election Donald Trump was trying to throw, in Tarrant County, Texas. And she did cast a ballot.  But she was legally ineligible to vote according to Texas law, since she was on “supervised release” after completing a prison sentence for tax fraud.

True, her vote hadn’t even been counted. The poll worker didn’t find her name on the rolls of eligible voters, so they gave Ms. Mason a “provisional” ballot, meaning that Ms. Mason would fill it out, and it would only count after the election authorities determined that she was eligible (which they never did). We don’t indulge in technicalities like that down here in Texas. She intended to vote, so…a court convicted her, and sentenced her to five years in prison.

So the two cases are practically identical, apart from the fact that one defendant is white, male, wealthy, and powerful, and the other is a Black, female nobody. And also that Trump’s actions may well have decided a close election, whereas Mason’s literally had zero impact. And also that Mason falsified one official document instead of thirty four. We don’t want to seem vindictive. If Crystal Mason’s crime deserved five years in prison, then the same sentence for Donald Trump is, if anything, quite lenient.

 Note: After fighting her conviction in the courts for six years, Crystal Mason’s conviction was recently overturned on appeal. The court found that it had no evidence that Mason knew she wasn’t eligible to vote, and the law she was charged with breaking requires intent. Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply to Mr. Trump. The judge in his case explained very carefully to the jury that intent was required, and even explained what the word meant.

Next week: Sing-Sing or Rikers Island?

Latest Updates: Results of Jury Decision on All 34 Counts of Trump Trial for Falsifying Business Records

Count                 Result

1.                         guilty

2.                         guilty

3.                         indubitably culpable

4.                         oh, totally

5.                         yep, he did it

6.                         most definitely

7.                         does a bear evacuate its bowels in a forested area?

8.                         guilty as sin

9.                         uh, yeah!

10.                       Mesdames et monsieurs, cet homme est coupable !

11.                       like, what part of he paid off a porn star he had sex with to keep quiet & wrote off the payment as a “legal fee” in order to keep the voting public from knowing what a pig he is do you fail to understand?

12.                       guilty of doing what Michael Cohen went to jail for saying he didn’t do

13-15                  guilty guilty guilty

16.                       yeah we know it might even help him get votes but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s GUILTY

17.                       guilty

18.                       see previous

19.                       被指控有罪

20.                       Even Melania knows he’s…guilty!

21.                       12 citizens brave and true from his own home town say…guilty!

22.                       We don’t have to keep saying “alleged” anymore!

23.                       Jail time or no jail time, he’s still…guilty!

24.                       You tellin me you never even met the broad? Whaddya think I am…stupid?!

25.                       The finest legal team that money can buy and still he’s…guilty!

26.                       Sure, he’s innocent. And Trump University was an institution of higher learning dedicated to ensuring a prosperous future for its student body

27.                       Duh!

28.                      Guilty, and considering you have yet to be sentenced, you might wanna tone down the judge-insulting business a little

29.                       Do we gotta keep doing this? The man is guilty as the day is long. And it has been a long, long day.

30.                       Even OJ couldn’ta got out of this one

31.                       Extra super-duper guilty

32.                       The next State of the Union Address might be from Ossining, NY

33.                       Guilty

34.                       Not guilty Guilty!

On Love, Beauty, Seagulls, and Ortolans

Anton Giulio Barrili’s short story “The Seagull” (from Men and Beasts: Tales of Summer, 1886) is now available in English

We invite you enjoy our new translation of Anton Giulio Barrili’s short story “The Seagull” (1886). We’d say more about it but…you should just go ahead and read it! Thanks as usual to my brother, the novelist and graphic artist Jonathan Bliss Eaton, for creating the artwork and hosting the story on his fiction website Corylus Press. Just click (or tap) the bird!

On Antisemitism, Blood Crimes, Pop-Tarts, and Barbie

Some members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), recently opposed passage of a bill that would outlaw antisemitic speech on college campuses. Their objection was that the bill would have labeled as antisemitic their constituents’ treasured belief that Jews murdered Christ.

This is not simply a belief that some Jews, thousands of years ago, were behind the crucifixion, but that somehow all Jews, everywhere and forever, are collectively responsible, a belief that has been an essential pretext for the mistreatment and massacre of Jews since the Middle Ages. Never mind that a certain expert on matters biblical, some guy named Pope Benedict XVI, concluded a few years ago that “there is no basis in Scripture for the argument that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death.” The Hon. Rep. Greene apparently knows better than Mr. XVI. Maybe that’s why she left the Catholic Church.

For the record, Congresswoman, I never touched The Guy…I never even met Him!

When Roe v. Wade was overturned by a largely Trump-appointed Supreme Court, I was afraid that the new Republican Party was turning back progress in this country by fifty years. Now I fear it’s more like five hundred years.

What is the difference between a plain old movie director and an “auteur?” The past year has seen the release of two Hollywood comedies that lampoon the consumer culture of post-war, pre-Vietnam-protest baby-boom America: last summer’s Barbie from Greta Gerwing, and now, Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted.

Unfrosted is the more wide-open of the two. It takes aim at a wide swath of pop-culture icons, from junk food to toys to physical-fitness mania, and the crass commercialism behind them. It’s humor is also broader and more irreverent. Barbie is much more thematically focused, on the doll industry and how it fed or subverted the self-image and aspirations of little girls.

So why is Barbie so wonderfully entertaining, while Unfrosted turns out lame and just dull?

Unfrosted is the most densely packed with top-shelf comic talent, including Seinfeld himself, Amy Schumer, and Melissa McCarthy in the lead roles, along with Jim Gaffigan whom, I confess, I just don’t get. (He tries to fill an awkward lane between straight man and comic buffoon, and ends up just taking up space.) Scores of recognizable funny faces playing the minor parts. But the continual succession of disconnected throwaway gags quickly grows tiresome. It’s as if the creators sat around in the writers’ room, discussed funny ideas, and decided to keep…all of them. As in some of Mel Brooks’ weaker films, you can see how some ideas may have sounded hilarious in the concept phase, but you wonder why they were kept when they clearly flopped in the finished product. A whole extended subplot about a living ravioli doesn’t make even comic sense and is just unfunny.

But unfunniest of all is a bit in the movie’s final stretch, involving cereal mascots, led by Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant), who are on strike. They attack Kellog’s headquarters in an attempt to prevent the FDA “certification” of the Pop Tart. The underlying gag is that the attack mimics the January 6, 2021 riot in Washington, D.C. It’s unfunny, both in the lack-of-comedic-substance sense as well as in the cringe-inducing sense. It attempts no discernible sense of irony or biting commentary relating to the actual event, in which some rioters and the forces behind them actually tried to end our democracy, and in which people on both sides were killed. It’s just the January 6 riot…with cartoon characters. Ha ha!

Then what makes Barbie not only more endearing, more touching, but also more fun? Apart from sheer craftsmanship, I think it is because Barbie is ultimately about something or some things: important, painful, anxiety inducing things. The fear of death. A woman’s power to determine her own destiny. A little girl’s fear of not fitting in. The elusive nature of beauty. A man’s insecurity over losing his dominant position in society. All of the jokes along the way serve to work out these anxieties. And the great comedic talent employed in the film both serves and is served by that end.  I’m thinking in particular about Will Ferrell as the obtusely chauvinistic head of the Mattel corporation, and the brilliant Kate McKinnon as the unapologetically “weird” Barbie.

So now you know the difference between a movie director and an auteur. In this case, it’s the difference between Jerry Seinfeld and Greta Gerwig.

(Some friendly advice, however, to both Mr. Seinfeld and Ms. Gerwig: when you want to portray our great country, even in parody, you might want to include some actual Black people.)

In Which We Put AI to the Test

Verdict: boooorrring!

Editor’s note: We decided to answer for ourselves the question, “Does AI make my blog obsolete?” Or more precisely, “Does AI make me obsolete by writing a blog as good as me?” So we asked ChatGPT to write its own post for this blog. We kept the prompt as neutral as possible, with one essential bit of direction: we included the URL, so that the AI engine could read our 200 or so existing posts to get an idea of what we write and how we write it. As far as we can tell, the AI engine completely ignored the content of our blog, but the URL name itself drove the generation of the post. Here is our prompt:

please write a blog post for https://gardenofeaton.home.blog

And here is the response, with our comments in brackets.

Title: Embracing the Green[?]: Cultivating Your Garden of Eaton: [actually kind of clever so far! What is a blog if not a literary kitchen garden?]

Welcome to the Garden of Eaton, where every leaf tells a story and every bloom whispers secrets of growth and renewal. [Ok, we get the metaphor already] Whether you’re a seasoned gardener [uh oh] or just beginning to dip your toes into the world of horticulture [the metaphor’s starting to look muddy], this blog is your sanctuary—a place to immerse yourself in the wonders of nature and discover the joy of cultivating your own patch of green paradise.

In our bustling modern lives, it’s easy to become disconnected from the natural world around us. Yet, there’s an undeniable allure to sinking your hands into the soil, feeling the earthy embrace of Mother Nature [hello, is eco-porn a thing?], and witnessing the miracle of life unfold before your eyes. That’s precisely what the Garden of Eaton is all about—a celebration of the beauty and serenity [agreed, yes!] found in nurturing plants [uhh…] and fostering a deeper connection with the world outside our windows. [close, but more like the world inside my head]

But why garden, you might ask? [oh, I do! Ask, I mean] The reasons are as varied as the petals on a daisy [have you ever seen an actual daisy? The @#% petals are all the same]. For some, it’s a therapeutic escape from the stresses of daily life, a chance to slow down and savor the simple pleasures of tending to living things. For others, it’s a form of creative expression, a canvas upon which to paint with vibrant colors and textures. And for many, it’s a sustainable way to source fresh, nutritious produce [in case the apocalypse comes and looters clean out the Giant] or create habitats for local wildlife.[True enough. Everything I ever planted basically turned into a caterpillar farm]

At the Garden of Eaton, we believe that gardening is more than just a hobby—it’s a way of life. It’s about fostering a deeper connection with the natural world, nurturing our environment, and reaping the bountiful rewards that come from working in harmony with nature’s rhythms. Whether you have a sprawling backyard or just a few pots on a windowsill, there’s a place for you in our community of green-thumbed enthusiasts. [Yawn!!]

So, what can you expect to find in the Garden of Eaton? From practical gardening tips and techniques to inspirational stories of fellow gardeners’ triumphs and challenges, we’re here to support you every step of the way on your journey to cultivating your own slice of Eden. Whether you’re interested in growing your own vegetables [not really], creating a pollinator-friendly garden [we have allergies, my digital friend] or simply adding a touch of greenery to your indoor space [they’re fine on the patio], we’ve got you covered.

But perhaps most importantly, the Garden of Eaton is a place of connection—a virtual gathering spot where gardeners from all walks of life can come together to share their passion, knowledge, and experiences. Whether you’re a novice looking for guidance or a seasoned pro eager to share your wisdom, you’ll find a warm welcome and a supportive community waiting for you here. [Well, okay…change “gardeners” to “people” and maybe you’re onto something…]

So, why not join us in the Garden of Eaton? Take a stroll through our digital pathways, linger awhile among the blooms, and let the spirit of growth and renewal inspire you to cultivate your own green oasis. After all, in the Garden of Eaton, there’s always room for one more seedling to take root and flourish. [Nice try, pal. Are you working for me here, or Hallmark?]

Academic Funding at the University of Texas: an essay in 4 photos

Business Management
Computer Science
Petroleum Engineering
Music, French, and Italian

Note: to be fair to the University of Texas, Homer Rainey Hall also includes a largish room on the second floor, taped to the door of which is a sheet of paper proclaiming “Center for Middle Eastern Studies.” (Ed.)

Luigi Pirandello on the state of Italian literature

Note: Luigi Pirandello wrote a four-part appreciation of the work of the novelist Alberto Cantoni, which was included with the publication of Cantoni’s novel L’illustrissimo (Most Illustrious) in 1905, a year after Cantoni’s death in 1904.

This is my translation of the first part of that tribute, in which Pirandello lays out what he sees as the stagnant condition of Italian letters at the turn of the twentieth century. –Steve Eaton, April 12, 2024

Translation copyright © 2024, Steve Eaton

Perhaps everyone knows the tale of the poor yokel who heard the parish priest say he couldn’t read, because he’d left his glasses at home. So he puts his brain to work and conceives the brilliant idea that knowing how to read depends upon a pair of glasses. Then of course the poor man goes to the city and walks into an optician’s shop, demanding, “reading glasses!”

But since not one pair of glasses manages to let the poor man read, the optician, sweaty, gasping, and out of patience after upending half of his store, asks him, “Look, do you even know how to read?”

To which the astonished yokel replies, “Oh, fine! And if I knew how to read, why would I need you?”

Well now. All those who think that in order to compose prose or poetry without any thoughts or feelings of their own, they simply need to start writing in someone else’s style, should have the courage and honesty of the poor country fellow. To the question, “Look, do you have anything of your own to say?” they should have the courage and honesty to reply, “Oh, fine! And if we really had something of our own to say, would we write like this, in someone else’s style?”

But I understand that this would really be asking too much. It would be enough if these types didn’t get too offended, when someone politely points out that while there’s no rule against the exercise of writing, or transcribing, in a certain style, the exercise means that they don’t have their own eyes, but rather a pair of glasses borrowed from someone else.

It’s been said that the imitative faculty of our native intelligence is superior to the inventive, that the entire history of our literature is basically nothing more than an endless succession of imitated styles.  In short–looking into it–we find quite a lot of eyeglasses and precious few eyes. And even those eyes are often not above, in fact are proud of, arming themselves with ancient classical lenses, to see in the style of Virgil, or Horace, or Ovid, or Cicero, who in their day had seen in the style of the Greeks. But at least these optical aids were fashioned at home by Madame Rhetoric,[1] who always kept her eyeglass shop in our neighborhood. And they passed from nose to nose, over many, many generations, until suddenly the cry was raised, “Gentlemen, let’s try for once to see with our own eyes!” We tried, but…well…we couldn’t see a thing. And that’s when the import of foreign glasses began.

Old history! And I wouldn’t have mentioned it if today we hadn’t actually arrived at the point where, if you want to gain the public’s favor, you need not so much your own pair of eyes, but rather a pair of glasses furnished by someone else, which make you see people and life in a certain style and a given type. Heaven help one anyone who scorns them and refuses to put them on, who persists in wanting to see people and life in their own way, from their own perspective; their vision, if simple, would be called bare, and if sincere, vulgar.

And the funny thing is that it’s precisely those who have the glasses and don’t realize it (or pretend not to) who preach that in art one absolutely must have eyes of one’s own, while opposing those who, for better or worse, use them. Because—let’s be clear—eyes of one’s own are fine; but they must be and see, in every way, like their eyes, which are actually eyeglasses, and if they fall off, good night!

One purchases these glasses, needless to say, in Paris. Its market for such goods has only recently turned international. It seems that the most renowned French factories are now in decline, and more than one has lost all credibility. It’s true that glasses, or rather monocles, from the Stendhal factory are still used by some of our men of letters; but the rest, who shop elsewhere, never pass up an opportunity to let them know that they’re damaging their eyesight, and that it’s time for them to shop elsewhere too. A pair of critical lenses, until recently highly recommended, for their, shall we say, idealistic virtue, came from the firm of Brunetière.[2] Without a doubt the lenses from various factories in nearby Belgium, Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany, which deposit their wares in France, are more in vogue. These are adopted in the greatest number by our men of letters, though they’re careful to insert two different panes in the frame, one Russian, let’s say, and one French, or rather one a Nietzschean concave, and the other an Ibsenist convex.[3]

The harm is this: that we, as much as want to believe the opposite, are still dominated by Rhetoric and still follow her rules and her precepts, without realizing it. And not only in literature, but in all the expressions of our lives. Rhetoric and imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

And the damage she causes in every age not only to our literature, but first to Latin as well and then, to a greater or lesser degree, to all the romance literatures, is incalculable. Rhetoric has almost always taught our poets what norms, what precepts should guide the construction of their works of art, as if the work of art was a formal argument. And it’s precisely Rhetoric’s fault, if all or almost all of our literary works have, in their patient diligence, in their rigorous composition, a discouraging air of familiarity. We do not have, for example, between one author and another, wide differences of personality, or obviously original forms, visions, and concepts, like English literature has. Almost all of our literature is arranged as if in a filing cabinet, belonging to Rhetoric: over here are the plays which—until Goldoni—all resemble each other, plays of classical imitation and commedia dell’arte;[4] over there are the chivalric romances, and so on. The Divine Comedy has always tormented the rhetoricians. Which drawer does it go in? Is it lyric, epic, dramatic, or instructive? You’d have to rip it up and scatter bits of it everywhere, in various drawers. And all the narrative literature, even of the most varied and diverse deeds, and all their descriptions, seem alike, precisely because Rhetoric has taught us how to narrate and describe this way, by genre, and how to architect the periods, the numerous Ciceronian periods.[5] But didn’t Rhetoric actually teach the poets how they should express feelings of love, how they should make love in verse? Oh yes! First, all of them followed the style of the Troubadours, who dictated the Laws of love, and then everyone followed Petrarch, their greatest heir. And for so many centuries of our literature, we have witnessed an infinite herd of love-smitten monkeys who go on a pilgrimage, sighing, to take the clear, cool, sweet waters of Laura’s serenader.[6]

Rhetoric is the one who not only approves, but recommends the imitation of every model she considers classical. And imitation was prized and honored by every writer, a testament to their high education, their high literary manners, to the obedient devotion to academic norms, to the rules defining beauty, or rather the beautiful, the good, and the true. To imitate; that is, not to have one’s own way of seeing, of thinking, of feeling; prized and honored. But why write, then?  Why restate in a timid voice what others have shouted? Why be a ghost and not a person? To have a parrot within, instead of a soul?

Nor has it stopped yet, unfortunately! First they imitated the classical writers, and now the foreigners. And still we hear, from time to time, a voice raised which advises a return to the ancients, as if art could renew itself by turning old, reverting itself, that is, and adapting itself to the ideals and needs of the life of an age now long distant; as if the ancients—as Goethe has already stated—hadn’t been new in their day, and we aren’t condemning ourselves to turn old by imitating them; as if the imitator isn’t denying himself, keeping himself by definition a step behind his own guide; as if, finally, it wouldn’t be better to affirm one’s own feelings, one’s own life. And even today, in our analyses which call themselves “critical,” we hear talk of form and content, as if form were a suit, more or less elegant, more or less fashionably tailored, of more or less fine cloth, for dressing a mannequin. And debates break out, for example, around theater, which we’re incapable of because we lack a living language, etc. etc. Analyses, debates, outdated and vain, made by Rhetoric in every age, which will be made forever, until it’s understood that we shouldn’t start from external laws that works of art are supposed to conform to. Rather we must discover the law that each work of art necessarily has within itself, the law that defines it and gives it character, in short, the law of its own life, if that work of art is indeed vital, a law which cannot be arbitrary, as free or capricious as it may seem. And we must see a work of imagination as a work of nature, as a living, organic creation, and as such we must study its birth, its development, and its qualities; we must see in it nature itself, serving as the instrument of human imagination in creating a superior, more perfect work, since it discards all that is common, obvious, and ephemeral, since it is more defined, simplified, living only in its ideal essence. One cannot speak of art in the abstract, since the essence of art lies in its particulars; and the critic may criticize only on one condition: that with each work they penetrate the soul of the artist, in other words, that they identify and reveal in each work of art the seed from which it’s born and grows, given its  temperament, its conditions, its behavior, in short the nature, the culture, and the temperament of the artist, as if they represent the landscape onto which the seed has fallen and the climate and the environment in which it has grown.

Two things are lacking, glaringly and most importantly, from our current literature: criticism and character. Two reasons, therefore, for which we lament the recent passing of a writer who possessed these two gifts, criticism and character, at the highest level: Alberto Cantoni.

[1] at home: that is, in classical Italy.

[2] Brunetière: the conservative Catholic critic Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906)

[3] one a Nietzschean concave, and the other an Ibsenist convex: concave lenses improve long-distance vision; convex lenses aid in seeing close-up objects.

[4] Goldoni…commedia dell’arte: Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was a popular and influential playwright of social comedies; commedia dell’arte refers to a popular form of semi-improvised comedy, including Punch-and-Judy type puppet shows, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century.

[5] Ciceronian periods: “Latin, unlike modern languages, expresses the relation of words to each other by inflection rather than by position. Hence its structure not only admits of great variety in the arrangement of words, but is especially favorable to that form of sentence which is called a Period. In a period, the sense is expressed by the sentence as a whole, and is held in suspense till the delivery of the last word.” (Allen and Greenough, Latin Grammar)

[6] the clear, cool, sweet waters of Laura’s serenader: A woman named Laura was the object of many of the romantic poems by Petrarch (1304-1374). “Clear, cool, sweet waters” (“Chiare, fresche et dolci acque”) is the opening line of one of his love poems.

On Jennifer Croft’s Brilliant, Terrible Translation

Sometimes I get comments from readers of a story or novel I’ve translated, along the lines of, “I had to remind myself it was a translation.” This is meant as a high compliment, and I take it as such. Yet there’s something about it that makes me feel uneasy. It feels like being praised for denaturing the work of its originality, for taking a nice smelly Italian cheese and turning it into…Monterrey Jack. Ok, my version of someone else’s story didn’t slap the reader in the face and announce that it was a translation, but did it also convey the excitement, the wit, the tension of the original? Or does it avoid translatedness by reflecting all the pat phrases and cliches that have wormed themselves into my brain over a lifetime of reading good, bad, and (too often) indifferent English-language literature? Some of the anxiety comes from the nuts and bolts of the process. For example, if the author uses a word that appears strange, or mismatched to its context, is it because the author intends a strange or disorienting effect? Or is it just because the translator isn’t familiar with that particular usage? Am I supposed to aim for a strange and disorienting effect, or is the work better served if I find an alternative in English that “makes sense?”

These are some of the thoughts I had while reading Jennifer Croft’s hilarious new novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, which is a novel within a terrible translation within a novel. As I read it, I had the giddy feeling one gets after starting a book and realizing that they’ve come across something entertaining, original, and new—the feeling I had in the past reading books with a unique voice, such as Wolf Hall, All the Pretty Horses, and Pale Fire (which I see as the closest thing to an ancestor of Croft’s book), works which bear both an exciting story and their own distinctive language.  

The conceit of the novel is that it is a translation of a novel, written in the form of a first-person memoir, about a group of translators from eight countries, who are gathered in the home of the Polish author they both idolize (literally) and depend upon for their living. They are there for a “summit” during which they are to translate into their eight native languages the latest masterpiece of the mysterious and dictatorial Irena, or “Our Author” (as they often refer to her), who may be on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

The debacle of this summit is the heart of the story. And it often reads like a ludicrously bad translation, full of non-sequiturs and nonsensical descriptions. For example, a character who’s just been bitten by a snake “leaped back with a gruff and provocative howl.” Now, I don’t know what a gruff and provocative howl could possibly sound like, and it had me wondering what the words might have been in the original language. Wondering absurdly, since, firstly, I don’t know Polish, and secondly, Croft’s novel was actually written (I assume) in English.

But if this is (fictionally) a bad translation, it may be a willfully bad translation. The novel-within-the-novel is a thinly disguised memoir by one of the translators, Emi, Our Author’s Spanish translator. One of its main characters is Alexis, Our Author’s English translator. Emi tells us that Alexis is “the person I hated more than anyone in the world.” And Alexis is the translator of Emi’s novel, which we are reading.

Or perhaps it is an accurate translation of a terrible novel. After all, we are told that Emi has written the novel in Polish, not her native Spanish. Why exactly she wrote the novel in Polish and why she selected Alexis to translate it, or whether Alexis for some reason swiped it, is not clear. (The novel is prefaced by a brief “WARNING” from Alexis which I had to refer back to, to regain my readerly bearings.) As some of Alexis’ footnotes, dutifully marked “(Trans.),” make clear, she has no great affection for Emi, either.

The Extinction of Irena Rey functions in several ways at once. It is an effective satire of cozy ensemble mysteries of the “Ten Little Indians” variety; it is parody of bad writing in general, and especially of the omniscient, over-explaining style. (“Chloe opened her door to find us in this quasi-embrace, and I could feel her fighting not to raise her eyebrows….”) It deals with environmental degradation and the critical role of fungi in repairing and maintaining forest ecosystems. Its narrator Emi is an insecure, libidinous drama queen for the ages. Her antagonism towards Alexis is largely due to Alexis’ perceived attractiveness: “’Emi’s right,’ Alexis said and grinned at me. Her white glinting teeth were among my least favorite of her perfect features. It was terrible, too, when she agreed with me. It made it impossible for me to trust my own thoughts.”

Most interestingly for me, it examines the contradictory nature of literary translation, whose duty it is both to spread an author’s work into a new language and culture, while, in a way, obliterating the author’s identity. At one point Emi accuses Alexis of something like colonialist translation: “I knew that what she really wanted was to civilize Irena’s text, exactly as you would expect a U.S. usurper to do. She wanted to tidy it up by eviscerating it, make it essentially her own.” An ironic statement, since Croft herself is a highly gifted (American) translator of Polish, Ukrainian, and Spanish-language literature.

Above all, one has the feeling of reading something by a writer who loves language, words, and wordplay, and got a kick out of devising every sentence. Those sentences are packed with surprises, reversals, little jokes, and just plain information. Here are two of them, referring to a journal which has just pirated part of the unpublished novel that Emi and others are supposed to translate:

“The Bucharest Review was an achingly hip website without a print magazine that consisted of 70 percent white space, 25 percent prose in Akzidenz-Grotesk by authors without vowels in their names, and, now, 5 percent an extremely long excerpt from the magnum opus of Irena Rey. To reach it, you had to click on a photograph of a cast-iron skillet containing nine tiny critically endangered Macaya breast-spot frogs.”

Yes, Akzidenz-Grotesk is a font. Yes, Macaya breast-spot frogs are real, and really endangered. I couldn’t find a Bucharest Review. Croft’s story is crowded with tidbits that seem too fantastic to be true but on further (Wikipedial) inspection…like the species of mushroom that is poisonous, but only if consumed along with alcohol.

I recommend downloading the sample of this novel and checking it out. (If you can get past the “WARNING” without reading the rest, you’re stronger than I am.) I think it will be discussed and analyzed for a long time to come, but more importantly, it’s terribly funny, and written by someone who cares about writing.

Crime and Punishment, Revisited

I have a confession to make. Back in the 90’s I got a ticket for speeding in a school zone. The ticket was $210 dollars. It wasn’t like I couldn’t afford it, but it was enough to sting. I have done some illegal things in my life, but I never felt particularly bad about any of them, except for that one. It was just stupid. I wasn’t paying attention, and it would have been truly horrible if I’d injured or killed a kid on their way to school. So I paid the fine and figured I deserved the pain.

However, in light of recent events, I’ve been rethinking my feelings about that “crime”, and I’ve realized that I got it completely wrong. First of all, nobody got hurt. It was a victimless crime, if ever there was one. All of the kids made it safe and sound to school that day, and I’m sure it was a great day for them—it was probably pizza day in the cafeteria or something.

Second, it occurs to me now that those cops were out to get me. Otherwise, why would they have had that cop with his lidar on the exact route that I always took to work, on the exact day and hour I always went to work? There were thousands of other drivers speeding in school zones that day who didn’t get tickets. What about them? They don’t talk about them, because it was me they were after all along.

Everyone speeds. Everyone does it. But when I do it, I get a ticket for $210, and I didn’t even run over any kids. Not one kid. Okay, so if you run over a kid, then maybe you should have to pay $210—but why should I have to pay for kids I didn’t run over? I mean, if you think about it, they should pay me for all the kids I didn’t run over. They should pay me $210 for each kid that had a great day at school that day, ate really great pizza for lunch, and grew up to be a productive member of society because of me. That makes more sense.

Did you ever hear about that guy Schindler? I heard about this guy Schindler. I heard he saved some kids from the Nazis. Now, I know I’m not supposed to say anything nice about Nazis, so I’m not going to say it. I’m not going to say that whatever you think about the Nazis, they were strong. When they wanted to take a country, they took it, and no one could stop them. I mean, it would take, like, a hundred countries to stop them—that’s how strong they were. Very strong. So Schindler, they say he saved some kids from the Nazis. I don’t know why he had to save them, I guess these were the bad Nazis. I guess some Nazis were bad and didn’t like kids or something. Anyway, Schindler saved some kids from the bad Nazis, and what did they do? They planted a tree for him. Think about that. Schindler saves a few kids, and he gets a tree—I don’t run over any kids at all, even though I could have—I could have run over so many more kids than Schindler ever saved from Nazis in his whole life, but I didn’t—and I have to pay $250 for not running over any. If they planted a tree for Schindler, they should plant a forest for me.

But then I thought, what the hell do I want with a forest? And so I said, “What the hell do I want with a forest?” And they said, “Sir, you can use the wood.” “What for?” “Sir, you can make books out of the wood.” Did you know that? Did you know books are made out of wood? I know more about books than anyone, but I didn’t know books were made out of wood. It’s true. And then I said, “The Bible is a book, right?” And they said, “Sir, we never saw anyone catch on to books so fast! You could be a publisher!” But I said, “The Bible is a book, right?” And they said, “Yes, sir, the Bible is a book.” And I said “So I could take all those trees and make Bibles.” “Yes, sir. That’s genius, Sir. The Bible is the best-selling book in history. You could make a lot of money, Sir.” And I said, “What’s on the cover of the Bible?” And they said, “Sir, usually it just says The Bible on the cover.” And I said, “If they’re going to use my trees to make Bibles, I want my face on the cover.” And they said, “That’s genius Sir. You will sell more Bibles than anyone has ever seen.” And I said, “And a full spread of me naked in the middle.” And they said, “That’s genius, Sir.” And I said

On the real “March Madness”

I am afraid to linger over anything on my Facebook feed for more than about a second and a half. Otherwise I’ll be flooded with nothing but Nazi fighter planes and videos of crocodile vs. wildebeest. Three thousand years of Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-Rennaissance-Enlightenment-Romanticist-Realist-Impressionist-Modernist art and thought have come down to this. Crocodile vs. wildebeest.

If Donald Trump wins the election and institutes his police state, I’ll be in big trouble if anyone outside of close friends and family reads this blog. In other words, I’m perfectly safe.

Speaking of the Man from Queens Who Would be King, The Republican Party is now led by his personal ally and his daughter-in-law. Just when this country really needs the wicked old party of communist hating, petro-billions-backed, backroom cigar-smoking, bible-thumping, electoral-map-manipulating good ole boys to stand up for itself, it just rolls over and surrenders to some obnoxious yokel from New York. Maybe you can explain it to me.

Much ink has been virtually spilled recently over Joe Biden’s mental capacity. But what about the rest of us? According to a recent article in the New York Times, “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?,” Americans are having trouble remembering all the awful things said and done by Donald Trump, from the “illegal immigrants are mainly drug dealers and rapists” announcement of his first presidential candidacy to his attempt to end the democratic experiment on January 6, 2021, and everything in between. Maybe the whole country should check in to a “memory center.” I think there’s a nice one in Sweden where you get to waltz with schoolchildren in the common room on Tuesday afternoons and on Sundays you can pet a baby goat.

And the Lord spake unto his (Republican) people: Lo, I give you a New Candidate, One who does not treat women as objects of random engropement, but is even a woman unto her own self; One who is not long in years, decrepit of posture, short-term of memory, and stumbling of speech but is youthful, slim of figure, straight of posture, healthy of mental and clear of diction; One who is not a bankrupted real-estate huckster but has spent a lifetime in Public Service; One who does not bow to kiss the hindquarters of foreign dictators but will kick them therein; Yea, one who is all these things, yet still the weaselly climate-change-denying conservative so beloved by you all. And her name is Nikki Haley. What say ye?

And the Republicans spake unto the Lord: “Nah.”

By the way, I happened to see the old film version of the musical “The Music Man” recently. It’s about a charming, seasoned con-artist who rolls into a sleepy little Iowa town. He dazzles its inhabitants with imaginary projects for bringing vitality and pride back to the moribund place, and extracts as much money as he can from the town for their completion. He plans to take the money and leg it before the hoax is revealed. But he tarries a bit too long. His past catches up with him, along with news of his swindles in other towns back up the road.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter; he’s seduced the town, figuratively and (in the form of the town librarian) literally. The town believes him because they want to believe him and the flattering lies he tells them about themselves.

I used to think this movie was pretty funny. Now…not so much!

The Mysterious Painted Trees of Northwest Austin

The Rainbow Tree of Bull Creek, photographed January 31, 2024

Perhaps 15 years ago I came across a strange and beautiful sight as I walked along a thickly wooded trail near my northwest Austin home: someone had painted a dead, gnarled old mountain cedar next to the trail a deep, lovely shade of blue. It wasn’t an elaborate paint job, but it had the look of a work by an artisan or at least an art student.

I should mention that this tree is not located on one of Austin’s well-trafficked marquee trails such as the Barton Creek trail or the one that follows Ladybird Lake downtown. No, this artifact was found on what is basically an old game trail that winds back and forth through what is probably private property, on a hillside too steep to develop, between a bedroom community above and a highway below. It seemed to me that someone had painted the tree, not to get themselves noticed, but for the pure joy of expression.

Over the next few years, time and weather wreaked their damage on the little dead tree, and the blue became faded and patchy. Then one day on my trek I saw that the tree had been repainted, this time in a beautiful palette of various blues and violets.

But this only delayed the work of the greatest vandal of all, mother nature, probably helped along by passersby snapping off a souvenir here and there. The last time I saw the blue tree, it was just a gnarled gray splintery stump with a few colored blotches here and there.

I imagined that whoever had painted that tree was likely long gone. So I was delighted to see another dead old mountain cedar today, further along the trail, beautifully painted in all colors of the rainbow. Of course I have no way of knowing whether the same hands responsible for the blue tree are behind the rainbow tree. It could be a case of copycat artistry.

I’m not going to reveal the location of the tree. (Although if you like to hike along all the trails that wind in, around and across Bull Creek, you’ll eventually come across it.) And I’m not going to Google it, to find out if someone has claimed responsibility or identified the artist. I’d rather let the mystery be.

But to whoever did this…thank you. It’s lovely.