Much as described, except for the dachshunds

Notes from Rome

Dear Readers,

Hello from Italy, where I’m a spring fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Rome is much as described, so I’m not going to go into a whole thing about it—except to mention the absurd profusion of dachshunds. Also: parakeets. There are so many parakeets (possibly the descents of 1000 parakeets confiscated at Fiumicino in 1999)! Together with the famous “umbrella pines,” the dachshunds and parakeets combine to create a unique and whimsical natural landscape that I haven’t yet managed to capture in a single photograph, so here is some AI for now.

Of course, it is easy enough to take pictures of the trees…

…but the parakeets they tend either to fly rapidly through the air, or to hang out in green locales.

If you zoom in, you can see the parakeets.

Most culturally challenging is the dachshund, or bassotto, as it is known in these parts. The other day, I was walking in the park and wondering how socially inappropriate it would be to ask someone if I could photograph their dachshund—and, as I was rehearsing various Italian formulations, none satisfactory, I noticed that I hadn’t even seen a single dachshund for my whole walk, so what if I had hallucinated the thing about Rome being overrun by dachshunds—at which point I turned a corner and saw a woman absolutely surrounded by dachshunds! I took several steps toward her, causing two of the dachshunds to run directly at me, barking maniacally. “Can I take the photograph!” I shouted. The woman waved her hand in a way that seemed to connote liberality…

… and yet, as I was taking the picture, I became aware that she had gone on to express some kind of voluble objection—not, I eventually gathered, to the photo being taken, but, rather, to it not being a video, because dachshunds come out better in video. By that point I was getting kind of a strange vibe from the whole scene, but here is the video.

But OK, that’s it for local color. Otherwise, since arriving here, I’ve been hard at work on the proposal for the next Selin novel/s (I hope to have more news to share soon), and doing some PR for the Italian release of Either/Or, a.k.a. Aut-Aut: an utterance I have, interestingly, heard from several bassotti, but were they talking about me, or about Kierkegaard? Will they be at my upcoming events in Rome and Venice? In the meantime I did a presentation here about my work—the format is, they pair you up with another fellow, and you each talk for 20 minutes about complementary aspects of your basic life problem, and then there’s a conversation and questions. My co-presenter, John Delury, is a historian currently working on a book about the the seventeenth-century Confucian thinker Gu Yanwu, and at first I was worried we wouldn’t find any points of overlap, but as soon as we sat down we found like 15 of them, and in fact this seems to be the case with all the presentations—which makes me wish there were more occasions in life where you have to (get to?) sit down with someone who works in some completely different field from you, and identify the things you do that are the same!

My initial plan for this post was to summarize the talk for you, along with some of the discussion, since it took up a lot of my thinking capacity for several days—but I’ve been working on this post for more than a week now and it still isn’t done, and I didn’t want you to think I had forgotten you, so I’m sending the introductory material as a placeholder to say thank you for reading, and more is coming soon!

As a special thank-you, paid subscribers will find some mildly delightful bonus dachshund content below.