tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90572254411011833942026-04-26T12:57:13.304+12:00Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comBlogger469125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-89741513989329479382018-12-28T15:36:00.001+13:002018-12-28T19:47:17.963+13:00

There is no overarching theme to this year’s collection of my favourite Wellington photos. Walking our still fairly new dog has taken me to some new places – it amazes me that a neighbourhood of nearly twenty years can still hold secrets – but otherwise most pictures are of sights I knew well. None more so than St Mary’s Church in Berhampore, which I pass at least twice a day, but had never

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-33766222932129202512018-12-20T16:01:00.000+13:002018-12-20T20:32:35.655+13:00

When I started blogging, ten whole years ago, people were already saying that blogging was dead. They were right. Certainly the blogs on which I formed my idea of blogging were all in various stages of slowing down and winding up. By late 2012, they were all gone – by which I mean that the authors had moved on to other things. Better things, for the most part. I’ve always enjoyed blogging,

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-82849971282168210322018-12-14T09:25:00.000+13:002018-12-14T09:25:47.725+13:00

(This being by far the craziest thing that has happened to me all year. Possibly all decade. As originally reported at Overland.) It started quite innocently, as these social media collisions always do. A friend and I were discussing on Twitter Ed Whelan’s bizarre conspiracy theory in defence of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, remarking – as many people have – that it was reminiscent of

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-81070765967809681332018-12-12T19:10:00.003+13:002018-12-13T14:26:15.522+13:00

Some years ago, New Zealand poet and scholar Michele Leggott was able to date a series of poems by Robin Hyde after noticing that one of the pages of the manuscript bore faint traces of another piece of writing. It was a fragment of a short story that Leggott knew well, and whose date of composition had already been established. What must have happened – she realised – is that Hyde used

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-36643047758309524982018-09-03T20:01:00.003+12:002018-09-03T20:24:36.634+12:00

I’m due to write a more formal review of the literary content of WORD this month, so these quick notes focus in more scattered fashion on the festival as a cultural event. I think about 50% of the reason I love WORD so much is that it’s set in Christchurch. I’ve only known the city after the earthquakes, mostly through WORD and being associated with Freerange Press – the first time as

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-79632935509615329892018-09-02T00:49:00.001+12:002018-09-19T18:18:25.372+12:00

Reason: he will spend weeks becoming intimately familiar with the work of the writers and come up with a long-form essay introduction that ties all their works together then bugger off back stage and let them do their thing. The gala event is a literary festival at its worst and best. At its worst, it strings writers together for no better reason than their commercial appeal, their ability

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-8612790537396999382018-08-31T19:23:00.000+12:002018-08-31T19:29:45.449+12:00

My first day at the Christchurch WORD Festival this year has been about pathways and dirt tracks and maps. It began when Sacha McMeeking, at an event on the 125 years of women’s suffrage in Aotearoa, suggested the need to carve new paths as a metaphor for the creation of new social habits (which is also a metaphor). Human rights, she claimed, don’t change the world: they can help you formulate

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-20346604706411219632018-08-08T21:03:00.002+12:002018-08-08T21:35:53.420+12:00

The full text of the canto in Italian/English Il mio bel San Giovanni . My dear, beautiful San Giovanni. Of all the buildings that survive from the time of Dante’s Florence, this is both the most famous and the one he cherished the most. While the construction of the adjacent Santa Maria del Fiore began five years before Dante was exiled from Florence, it wasn’t completed until the fifteenth

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-8069699530824039282018-07-23T19:15:00.000+12:002018-07-23T19:26:57.064+12:00

Originally published at Overland This week forty years ago, Italy became the first country in the world to legislate the closure of its asylums. The law was drafted by a psychiatrist and member of the governing Christian Democratic party, Bruno Orsini, but was known from the outset as ‘Basaglia Law’, after the leader of the movement that pushed for that radical and in some ways paradoxical

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-63169961074726799982018-07-10T22:12:00.000+12:002018-07-12T12:17:45.521+12:00

And so, it has come to an end, as obnoxiously as it began: with a short press release, in which the leader and owner of the Opportunities Parties declared the organisation disbanded and bid a fond farewell to the voters, those morons. A lot has been said and written about the personalities involved – the good, Geoff Simmons; the bad Gareth Morgan; the ugly, Sean Plunket – and for good

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-81190739367365792432018-06-26T10:38:00.001+12:002018-06-26T19:09:17.822+12:00

Originally published at Overland This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’:

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-25713906767408454322018-06-12T20:05:00.000+12:002018-06-13T09:56:00.017+12:00

The story of Ava Crager isn’t at the top end of discrimination and neglect against children with disabilities in New Zealand. After all, it resulted in her missing a single week of school, when there are children who miss months or even years – to say nothing of those who attend regularly but are marginalised, secluded or excluded from the curriculum and the social life of their schools. The

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-24346474160435676312018-06-07T14:30:00.003+12:002018-06-07T14:30:52.112+12:00

The full text of the canto in Italian/English Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge A place there is in Hell called Malebolge We could spend this week’s post talking about this one line. Not c’è un luogo but luogo è, not ‘there is a place’, but ‘a place there is’. A declarative statement bearing a timeless, universal truth, which is also a sentence (in the judicial rather than grammatical

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-27028213746188736262018-05-30T21:01:00.001+12:002018-05-30T21:03:29.014+12:00

The full text of the canto in Italian/English It’s been a while since I attended to this with any regularity, so it may pay to state when and where we are. It’s the early morning of 9 April 1300, a mere hours after the beginning of Dante’s journey into Hell. The place is the third and lowest ring of the seventh circle, where those who committed the sin of violence against god and nature

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-48921395516745707312018-05-23T21:11:00.000+12:002018-05-24T08:37:17.100+12:00

The full text of the canto in Italian/English It is heartening for the mortal to learn that not even Dante Alighieri got everything always right, and that the sixteenth canto of the Divine Comedy is something of a dud; little more than the B-side of the fifteenth. Dante meets more sodomites, and not in the fun way. They converse. They go their separate ways. Then at the end something

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-4799337910149292522018-05-16T22:03:00.000+12:002018-05-16T22:05:19.319+12:00

What follows is my translation of an interview that Marxist journalist and author Carla Ravaioli conducted with law scholar Guido Rossi in 2010, in the early stages of the eurozone’s crisis. Rossi was an unlikely person to call for Leninism or revolution: he had spent his career as a financial regulator and business law expert, overseeing major banking acquisitions and working for a time for

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-51648375261678588832018-05-09T20:41:00.001+12:002018-05-09T20:44:50.398+12:00

When I was 6 or 7 years old, a newsstand opened right outside my apartment building. I can’t tell you how happy this made me. The previous closest newsstand was two blocks away. Not very far. But a newsstand right outside my door was something else. I would be able to check for new issues all of my favourite comics at a moment’s notice, and greatly increase the impulse purchase of sticker

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-979679644873871682018-05-02T20:10:00.000+12:002018-05-03T11:15:24.224+12:00

The Airbus A380 is the world’s largest passenger aircraft. It seats over 500 people on two decks, and can travel on routes of over 15,000 kilometres without refuelling. Last month, this monster of the skies took my youngest son and I on a near-18 hour flight towards Europe. The view of Mount Taranaki as we travelled from Wellington to Auckland I had been on one of those extra-long hauls

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-25561451771220234912018-04-19T20:42:00.001+12:002018-04-19T20:51:49.219+12:00

On the morning of 11 August 1993, my partner and I took a train and then a bus from Milan, where we lived, to Courmayeur, an alpine town near the French border. We didn’t book any accommodation, but headed with our blankets a little way up Mont Blanc, in search of an open space protected from the lights of the city. It was the night of the Perseids, or ‘tears of Saint Lawrence’, when the

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-80795363381315564892018-04-11T22:28:00.001+12:002018-04-11T22:28:23.755+12:00

The first ever Italian film had an exceptional premiere: on a giant screen outside of Rome’s Aurealian Walls, on 20 September of 1905, that is to say on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the capture of the city by the army of King Vittorio Emanuele II that completed the decades-long process of liberation and unification of the country. The subject of the film was that epic event: La Presa di Roma

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-75366643481298743802018-04-03T23:59:00.000+12:002018-04-03T23:59:00.161+12:00

A book of maps. One hundred and twenty-seven of them, held together by three brass screw-on bolts. On the hard cover – the dust jacket, if there ever was one, is lost – the words Atlante della Cassa del Mezzogiorno, 1950-1962. The book has no introduction, and no text outside of a table of contents, the customary brief publisher’s information and the title, place names and legend of each of the

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-35210030596144048182018-03-28T20:19:00.001+13:002018-03-28T21:47:42.210+13:00

Here’s a question that anyone should be able to answer. What happened in Rome on 10 October 1582? While you try to work it out, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s about the solar clock on the floor of Milan’s cathedral, which my father showed me when I was a boy. It’s a thin bronze strip of that runs through the floor of the left nave and climbs up the lower section of one of the

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-56626340380341831632018-03-21T22:22:00.001+13:002018-03-22T09:05:00.387+13:00

I can’t recall if it was an ad by Taboola (probably) or an ad by Outbrain (I think it was an ad by Taboola). Either way, I clipped it along with the page it linked to, because surely I would have to revisit this. What goes by the very misleading name of native advertising – one might as well call it ‘indigenous lying’ – is one of the most insidious elements of our current media age. We’ve

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-37525965717018957582018-03-14T21:05:00.001+13:002018-03-15T20:27:21.293+13:00

I told this story before. Whenever my father was asked for directions near his place of work, in the part of Milan where he was born, he would tell motorists to either turn at the bridge or continue straight after the bridge or similar, which would have confused them greatly since this so-called bridge was removed and the waterway it crossed paved over in 1930, four years before my father was

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9057225441101183394.post-54597912017573640242018-03-07T23:59:00.000+13:002018-03-08T14:43:35.318+13:00

When I was a small child, I thought there was a man who lived in a flooded house, with the water coming up to his chest. But he was very neat so he always dressed up, although he also got his shirt badly stained. This man was known as l’uomo in ammollo, the soaking man. The soaking man was always going on about this bet he made with his wife. His shirt was very dirty. Wine, tomato sauce,

Giovanni Tisohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10618534731338616708noreply@blogger.com