Tendentious

Irritated. I have a little library research I can do on the book locally, but Swarthmore (where I do almost all of my incidental research) is on spring break this week. What I really need to do is the main bit of work which can only be done at the Library of Congress in Washington, and for that I'll need to set aside a few days. With Bob away at the Gama Trade Show in Las Vegas next week, I will have to wait at least a week longer.

Also, Silvio Negri and Luigi LoForti, who used to work with me at Stratelibri in Milan, are visiting me next Thursday the 20th. After their trip to GTS they are stopping over in Philly for a day to visit me. Which thrills and delights and, yes, saddens me--because every recollection of Stratelibri saddens me. Even today, their website still floats there in cyberspace, a dead, empty shell existing for no other reason except to torment me. If you click on "News" and then "L'Opinione" you can even see one of my columns for their magazine Excalibur that I wrote in 1998. Don't get me wrong...I loved my time in Italy, and I love the people I met there, and it was absolutely necessary for me to go there. But the way things ended was so tragic. I need to talk about this more sometime, about Giovanni and what his friendship meant to me. When I returned to the USA I managed to compartmentalize the experience to the point where, when Luigi called me up in September 1998 to tell me that Giovanni had died, I hardly mourned at all, not because I was indifferent, but because the experience was so far away in many ways. I am not explaining this well, but I am working on it.