my stepsisters Kristen and Kylie moved into town from Santa Monica, along with Kristen’s boyfriend, Boone. I stopped in at their house two weeks after they first got the keys to the place. the furniture isn’t yet convinced of how it has been arranged. Boone had unpacked even less than the girls had, with many of his eclectically filled boxes still strewn about the various spaces. as if I didn’t already like Boone, he won more cred from me for already having unpacked exactly what I would have unpacked first: his books. I was further impressed with what I found on his shelves: Chris Hedges, David Harvey, Cormac McCarthy.
as I looked over the shelves, he grew excited, looking for books to ask me about. he said, “oh! I got one,” and he handed me a copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. “great book, it’s not difficult or anything but you should read it.”
it’s not often nowadays that I get an unsolicited book recommendation for something I’d never heard of from someone whose taste I respect, so I took this to heart and started reading Eboli pretty much immediately, since I was struggling to land on a narrative book after bouncing around between several different titles.
Christ Stopped at Eboli deserves more thorough attention than I’m going to give it here, but I do recommend reading it. it details the time spent by the painter Carlo Levi in the south of Italy, in Lucania, modern day Basilicata, where he was sent as a political prisoner for his anti-fascist activism in the 1930s. germane to my interests now, though, is the care and attention Levi devotes to his rendering of the deep poverty suffered by the peasants of Southern Italy, and his sympathetic, yet unsentimental, portrayal of their lives, customs and struggles. that Levi is a painter is surprising only insofar as the fact that not all painters are as skilled as writers as he is. the precision of his descriptions, the acuity of his observation, all speak to a perspective finely tuned by practice in noting details with an economy of gesture, as a painter would.
an artist must be as alert as a watchdog, as focused as a sniper, as decisive as a guillotine, and as compassionate as a bodhisattva. it would do me well to make studies, much like a painter would, of the details that encode an entire cosmos of meaning, the building blocks from which fiction is made. it’s in honing this skill that a writer can be, as Henry James urges, “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”
tonight, crickets sing at an early summer tempo. the days are stretched as tight as a drumhead. in the morning I will be doing 108 surya namaskar, sun salutations, in honor of the the new season. if spring is the season of sowing, summer is the season of work, of tending to, of practice. and I need to get to work.
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