When Jan Morris opens her 2001 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere with the phrase, “I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye,” I feel bad for her. When she adds, rhetorically, it seems, “Who can?” I want to object, “Well, I can!” Probably the difference in our perceptions comes from how each of… Continue reading Trieste as Cultural Nexus (rather than “nowhere”)
Category: Sea of Intimacy
Writing as Gift
I had a consultation with a writing coach recently because I recently wrote myself into an impasse and needed help. I published this person’s work many years ago, and while I don’t know her well as a person, I see that she has skills and sense, and this is what I wanted, especially from someone… Continue reading Writing as Gift
Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy
I’ve been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to continue — to finish! — my book on the Adriatic. Watching the welcome videos from Donna Brazile and a senior official in the Department of State this morning, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that I did not receive this award during the presidency of the previous person… Continue reading Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy
Racializing Travel Narrative
Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century,… Continue reading Racializing Travel Narrative
Two Islands
A colleague in Dalmatia, whom I have written about before here, mentioned a pair of islands in the Kvarner Gulf, the idea of which has fascinated me since last summer. A couple of weeks ago I finally got there. The islands are paired in a distinctive sense: one, which is called Sveti Petar has the… Continue reading Two Islands
Prospero in the Adriatic
I’ve been reading “around” the Adriatic as a way of imagining it, or rather seeing how it has been imagined. In this spirit, I picked up Lawrence Durrell’s 1945 book Prospero’s Cell. Durrell does not refer much to the Adriatic in his account. His Corfu, or rather Corcyra — he begins using the Latin name… Continue reading Prospero in the Adriatic
Murina
The Indiana Slavic department is co-sponsoring a series of films with the Ryder and our colleagues at REEI over the next several weeks. Yesterday was the 2021 film Murina, which we have on our list as a Croatian film though it is really an international co-production (executive produced by Martin Scorsese) with a good deal… Continue reading Murina
World in a Word
My friend Nikola, who hails from Sveti Filip i Jakov, to the south of Zadar, Croatia, tells me that in his local Dalmatian dialect there is a word for “open sea” that only applies to the Adriatic: kùlaf. When I first heard him pronounce it and looked at the spelling he provided, I thought it… Continue reading World in a Word
Kaplan’s Adriatic
I’m about 60 pages into Robert D. Kaplan’s Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Era and am still uncertain about it. With such a big sounding title, in such a nice new cloth bound edition from Random House, it seems it should be more substantial than it is so far.… Continue reading Kaplan’s Adriatic
From Non-Space to Landscape
I am struck by the notion of the absence of space in Vladimir Propp’s account of the wondertale. This is similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation about the absence of the effects of time on the hero and heroine of romance, where they have adventure after adventure but, in the end, don’t seem to have aged… Continue reading From Non-Space to Landscape
Russell Scott Valentino 