June 13, 2023 Diaries War Diary By Alba de Céspedes Alba de Céspedes, 1965. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and the Germans, who had already occupied the north of Italy, immediately moved to take over the rest of the country. Just days later, they invaded Rome. Meanwhile, British and American forces had landed in the south and were slowly moving northward. The writer Alba de Céspedes and her companion (and later her husband), Franco Bounous, were living in Rome. De Céspedes had been jailed briefly by Mussolini for antifascist activities; Bounous was a diplomat and did not want to collaborate with the Germans. As conditions in the city worsened, becoming more chaotic and more dangerous, de Céspedes and Bounous decided to leave. On September 23, “secretly, at night,” they departed, “each with a suitcase,” de Céspedes wrote to her mother, “thinking we’d be gone a few days, that Rome would soon be liberated.” They escaped to a village in Abruzzo, east of the city, where they expected they would be able to wait in tranquility. But the Germans showed up, and they fled again, to a tiny village in the mountains nearby, Torricella Peligna. This diary recounts the days between October 18, when they had to flee Torricella and go into hiding in the woods, and November 19, when they decided to try to get through the German lines to reach the safety of the Allied-occupied zone. De Céspedes later wrote, “Life had gradually become more unbearable, the Germans were coming at night, too. So we decided to risk it all and cross the lines, reaching the Anglo-American troops. And safety. We did that, walking at night, November 20” Guided by a local farmer, Fioravante, they managed to cross the Sangro river, which marked the German front line, and arrive in the Allied zone. From there they were taken in a farm cart to Bari, where de Céspedes began broadcasting for the antifascist station Radio Bari. Eventually she and Bounous moved to Naples and, finally, returned to Rome, after it had been liberated by the Allies in June of 1944. —Ann Goldstein, translator October 18, 1943 We were still asleep this morning, sheltering in the dusty, desolate tax office in Torricella, when we heard frantic knocking at the door. The pale face of Carmela, the girl from downstairs, appeared, animated by a new fear: “Quick, get out right away, the Germans have surrounded Lama dei Peligni and taken the men, all of them. Now they’re on their way up here.” We dressed in a few minutes, maybe three or four, not even taking the time to grab some clothes, and we were gone, Franco, Aldo, and I, rushing down the stairs. Someone was already shouting, “Here they are, you can hear the truck.” We hurried along narrow stony streets, running amid other people running, me wanting to stop and catch my breath, then thinking, I have to make it, I don’t want to leave the others, and I kept running, with a stitch in my side. Some young people were fleeing with their few possessions salvaged in a basket, and we all looked to see if the white ribbon of the main road was stained with the yellow of German cars. Ears strained to the faintest hum. Squatting below the level of the main road, we let some armored vehicles go by, then we ran, crossing it quickly, almost in a leap, and were finally on a path through the fields. Aldo said: “We have to get to the Defensa woods, no one will come and look for us over there.” In less than three hours we had found shelter on Trecolori’s farm, an isolated place at the edge of the big woods. Trecolori is a sly, monkeyish old farmer who lived in Pennsylvania for twelve years. He didn’t have room for us; already, there were numerous relatives around the hearth who had come from nearby villages to escape the raids, some sitting on sacks of flour, others crowded on the floor, looking at us silently. “You can sleep in a stable, five hundred meters from here. Anyway, it’s just for one night.” Read More
May 30, 2023 Diaries Diary, 1994–1999 By Dina Nayeri I don’t read my old work anymore. After a decade as a writer, I know exactly what it’ll make me feel—compassion, some pity; maybe there will be a phrase that I’ll admire, but mostly I’ll feel self-loathing. Last year I came across my diary from a summer when, five years after having arrived in Oklahoma as a refugee from Iran, I was determined to win a national championship in Tae Kwon Do so I could get in to an Ivy League university. It was the summer of 1994, and I was fifteen. I kept the diary because I was lonely, weighed down by money worries and shame of being Iranian, desperate to perform my Christian faith. I was anorexic and addicted to Tae Kwon Do, which I practiced for six or seven hours a day. Writing in the diary was a self-soothing mechanism—I wrote down every kind word anyone said to me. Reading it now, I feel gentler toward my old self, a version of me now nearly three decades in the past. I read her entries like I might read a daughter’s. Maybe when I’m seventy, I will read my forty-year-old self with similar compassion. The most interesting parts of the diary come at the end. After that summer, I returned to the diary in 1995, 1997, 1998, and twice in 1999, and in each entry I seem appalled by my voice in the one before it until finally I give up and stop writing in it altogether. There was no chance of sounding anything but stupid to the Dina of the following year, though she was the audience I was most eager to impress. The penultimate entry, from February 1999, during my sophomore year at Princeton, reads: “Note to Junior Dina: Don’t read this crap anymore.” Then, a few months later, scribbling a final entry on a locker clean-out notice: “I’ll always be a stupid kid. Good thing I realized that now.” Read More
March 27, 2023 Diaries I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear By Sean DeLear and Brontez Purnell Courtesy of Semiotext(e). I met Sean DeLear when I was twenty-four, in this house across from the Eagle in Los Angeles—I remember Sean talking about the LA scene, me asking him if he had a Germs burn (I don’t remember the answer), but also being very struck by the fact that up until that point I had probably met only a couple dozen Black punks but never anyone of Sean De’s age and with their poise. Even in Stripped Bare House at 2 A.M. and being festive she just commanded this kind of magic and glamour—it was definitely something to reach for and to aspire to. We don’t always clock these things when we are younger, but the mere presence of her let me be hip to the fact that I could be beautiful, Black, and punk forever—and in fact, it would be the best possible path to take. It had been mentioned to me by Alice Bag (of the Bags, duh) that Sean was amongst the “First 50”—that seminal group of LA kids who were the first freaks to go to punk shows in Los Angeles and the geniuses of LA punk. Being a total-poser nineties punk I can’t even wrap my head around the dopamine effect of being in the mix when it all felt new—when Sean first started taking the bus out of Simi Valley and going headfirst into the scene for shows in Hollywood. How very frightening and liberating it must have been at the time for her, but of course I think Sean De was way beyond the title “trendsetter”—the word for her is MOTHER, forever, for sure, and for always. Read More
March 14, 2023 Diaries Camus’s New York Diary, 1946 By Albert Camus Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, 1943. Photograph by John Vachon. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. March 1946. Albert Camus has just spent two weeks at sea on the SS Oregon, a cargo ship transporting passengers from Le Havre to New York City. He’s made several friends during this transatlantic passage. Sunday. They announce we’ll arrive in the evening. The week passed in a whirlwind. Tuesday evening, the twenty-first, our table decides to celebrate the arrival of spring. Alcohol until four in the morning. The next day, too. Forty-eight hours of pleasant euphoria, during which all our relationships quickly deepen. Mme D. is rebelling against her class. L. confesses to me the marriage she’s headed for is one of convenience. On Saturday, we exit the Gulf Stream, and the temperature turns awfully chilly. Nevertheless, the time passes very quickly, and ultimately, I’m not in such a rush to arrive. I’ve finished preparing my talk. In the remaining time, I gaze out at the sea and chat, mostly with R., who’s really quite smart—and with Mme D. and L., of course. At twelve in the afternoon, we catch sight of land. Seagulls have been flying alongside the boat since morning, hanging above the decks as if suspended and motionless. Coney Island, which looks like the Porte d’Orléans, is the first thing we see. “It’s Saint-Denis or Gennevilliers,” L. says. It’s absolutely true. In the cold, with the gray wind and flat sky, it’s all rather gloomy. We’ll anchor in the mouth of the Hudson but won’t disembark until tomorrow morning. In the distance, Manhattan’s skyscrapers stand against a backdrop of mist. My heart is still and cold, as it is when faced with sights that don’t move me. Read More
March 2, 2023 Diaries Things That Have Died in the Pool By Isabella Hammad Photograph by Isabella Hammad. This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank. Wednesday, May 20, 2020 My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live. I looked at the objects in the house the titles of the books strange incandescence from the windows Thursday, May 21, 2020 I feel, what is the point of anything going places seeing people doing anything just ways to pass the time Read More
January 24, 2023 Diaries Diary of Nuance By Adam Thirlwell In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page. The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life. Life! I missed life very much. Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another. La Perdida, O Pando 2018, citrusy, salt, chamomile, then what? A thin mineral sourness. Codello grapes. I hate all descriptions. Maybe this will become all names and nouns. / Chanel’s Cuir de Russie—ylang and jasmine and iris, which somehow produces the illusion of leather. But then there’s also Rien by État Libre d’Orange, aldehydes then frankincense, incense, labdanum, which also produces leather but this one somehow fizzing, like it’s at a level above reality. I have no idea how to write this. I wonder if you could do an essay on perfume writing as an example of the problem (impossibility) of all criticism: something abstract infected by people’s associations (the mad online reviews of Rien, which seem to be describing a perfume that’s completely different to the one I’m smelling). Read More