Her real name: on the unmasking of Elena Ferrante
By Giovanni Tiso

I can't help but feel that someone has done this on purpose

Mum is visiting

I'm just jotting things down here, relaxing a writing muscle that has been tense for a while. There'll be errors, generalisations, stupidity and maybe embarrassment.

Images look thin on the computer screen, they don't look like shadows or projections, but something else (I'm referring here to a text by Paul Chan). I just walked into the lounge room and the door on the microwave was left open, this is what it looked like

Like most cities, there are many delineations or boundaries that mark out Prato's history. There’s the really old city, you can see the remanence of the old walls underground at the Cathedral museum. Human habitation like any other sort of history seems to blend in with the geological in long time-spans! The newer city walls are still very much visible, they’re huge. I guess it makes me think of gated communities or hyper-securitised suburbs.

When I landed in Rome the first thing that really impressed itself on me was the complexity and layering of the walls in the city. They looked like manuscripts, written in a language that I didn't understand. The old city wall doesn’t represent the limits of Prato now anyway, which has spread considerably further. Actually catching the train to Firenze, it’s hard to tell exactly where one city ends and the other begins. 

There is a certain density in the old city, most of the buildings seem to be a maximum of five stories high. People are packed together, but you get the feeling that it isn’t too tight. It seems just tight enough to be able to walk or ride your bike wherever you want to go. Actually the bike riders seem to operate on a completely different set of logic to that of cars. They do and go wherever they like. This reminds me about how pleasurable something can be when its not too formalised. I saw an elder person this morning riding their bike in large arcs swerving across the road like a child. Maybe the quality or nature of joy doesn’t change much with age, or maybe all joy has some kind of childhood element to it, of self-abandonment or something.

The other thing about this 'human scale' (actually I don't know what I think about this term, it seems too universal); in the Prato Museum, a former palace, there were doorways that seemed really small. I wondered if that related to the size of the Pratese in the 1400's or whether they just didn't mind small archways. I've also noticed incredibly low rail bridges, barely tall enough to accomodate the cars that drive underneath. I might find out some answers to these questions, but for the time being I'll leave it as observation

I got the flu so had to lie in bed for a day, was thinking about the bed as this area where things accumulate (esp. if you're not sharing it with anybody). Actually these sheets are so white it's like a gallery, you can see everything, stray hairs, dirt & whatever. Qualche cosa

Waiting for a candle to extinguish itself

Can any one of us write like a man, like a woman, like a white? Surely, someone would quickly answer, and this leads us straight back to the old master-servant's Guilt. A sentence-thinker, yes, but one who so very often does not know how a sentence will end, I say. And as there is no need to rush, just leave it open, so that it may later on find, or not find, its closure. Words, fragments, and lines that I love for no sound reason; blanks, lapses, and silences that settle in like gaps of fresh air as soon as the inked space smells stuffy.

Trinh T Minh-ha

The water pressure in the apartment varies wildly

The fountain turns off at 5:54pm

Perhaps a lot has already been said on this subject, but I suppose it can’t hurt to say more (maybe to write about everyday things is to return to the same subjects over again anyway). I like how washing is hung from under apartment windows here in Prato. I know this happens in many places all over the world. Here you can see bedding, table cloths, clothes and under-clothes; it doesn’t matter what quality or design, all fabric looks wonderful when it’s undulating in the wind. It’s also a good trick, where the internal spaces like the bedroom get turned inside out. I went to the library and stumbled on a picture by a local artist Mario Mariotti who in 1985 hung large painted canvases from the windows of apartments in Florence.

I don’t know about the notion of art as externalisation (seems more confusing than that). But it does feel exposing. This activity of writing is exciting because I have no idea how each sentence will end

A frame from The Decameron by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The weather changed finally last night, cool breezes and rain rolled in. Windows that were previously closed around the school opened up

Every morning there seems to be fresh bird feathers on the balcony, which I find a bit weird. I saw one leaf fall from a tree today, it’s the beginning of autumn and I left Australia on the cusp of spring. How do you come to understand subtle seasonal changes when you land in a place from the exact opposite side of the world? I opened an exhibition in Melbourne just as I was leaving. While making it I was thinking alot about falling, actually two things that have a tendency to fall from the sky; feathers and leaves. I haven’t really thought much about falling until this year. Today was my birthday I turned 33. I took a walk along the river with a vague plan of following a trail to a waterfall. As I was walking under a bridge along the river, someone above me on a footbridge began to throw single sheets of newspaper over the edge. They floated down and landed in the river one by one.

Earlier last week I watched someone in a car drop tiny bits of ripped up paper out of their car window. The bits scattered on to the road.

Climate change is increasing air/wind activity in the upper atmosphere (article here). Planes have statistically become more likely to encounter turbulence during long haul flights. Turbulence feels like uncontrollable falling, I had it for most of the flight over here. My anxiety purrs along with the engines. I remember a bit in a Wim Wenders film I watched maybe 13 years ago... while scaling a tall billboard, a character in the film said I'm not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of falling.

Me too.

Piazza del mercato nuovo

On Sunday I joined the students at the Prato Cathedral to see a fresco by Fillipo Lippi, a story of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist. I guess the benefit of being a tourist is that sometimes you’re genuinely surprised by very obvious things, in particular the violence and death that are pictured on the walls of churches here

Fabien Vallos, an artist from Paris, hosted a discussion with the students about Lippi’s painting (and later cooked a banquet as a work & an extension of this experience). I assumed this was the first time I had seen one of his paintings, it was such a rewarding experience. There is so much expressiveness in his figures, I guess this was all part of the humanist tendencies developed during the renaissance. But the faces still feel very fresh! I later learnt that Lippi was Botticelli’s teacher and in general they were obsessed with curls

At the Cathedral I was endeared to the cardboard boxes that the ‘ricordo’, the momentos of the paintings were kept.

During a lecture here by the author Sarah Dunant, we were showed another Lippi painting, Madonna with the Child and two Angels, 1465. Actually I had seen this painting before, I grew up looking at it almost everyday–a cropped reproduction–on our living room wall. No one in our family ever mentioned who painted it, it was just a Madonna. The other image I remember we had up for years was a photograph of a luxurious stack of pancakes. But seeing this Madonna pop up in the lecture made me feel vertigo, like the past and present being telescoped together.

When I was 5 my parents took my family to Europe, Dad was on sabbatical from the University of Canberra. We stayed on campus at the University of Coventry. As we were taking time off school, Mum and Dad made us all write in our diaries at the end of each day. These diaries became treasured items that we would refer back to for years and years. On the front of my diary were a few scratch and sniff stickers (made to smell like cola or fruits or anything really). After returning to Australia I would intermittently scratch the stickers to release their smell (and consequently, the memories of our trip). Eventually, after a decade you could barely detect the smell.

I arrived in Rome yesterday and the moment I stepped on to the platform at Termini the smell that engulfed me was combination of both of my Nonna's houses. I can't explain it, but one of the most striking memories of my grandparents were the smells from the home; from meals, perfumes, christmas trees, whatever. I've never been to Italy before, my parents immigrated to Australia when they were both teenagers. Mum came from Puglia and Dad from Calabria. I think that people came to Australia from Italy to escape the harsh economic conditions that prevailed after the war. Coincidentally, Australian industry was in need of labour and so goes the story.

I'm in Prato, Italy for 3 months to participate in a residency at Monash University's campus here. Blogs are a bit outdated, I think people used to write in them more a decade ago. I still think they're good, maybe they're even better now noone is reading them.