Reading

[Umberto Rossi]

(Henry, I haven't taken it personally.  Hope my answer didn't sound
rough or brisk--did it?)

Anyway, here's a little Italian story.

Years ago, when an overload of TV and the cult of illiteracy hadn't 
reduced our nation (Italy) on the verge of barbarism--but this is 
another story...--Italian children usually read the novels written by 
Emilio Salgari.  He was our Dickens, Mark Twain and E.R. Burroughs 
conflated in one person--not on the same literary level of those 
writers, but sometime funnier.  Salgari set his novels in any exotic 
place you could imagine at that time:  Indonesia, Africa, the Poles, 
you name it.  The stories of Sandokan, a Malaysian pirate and 
nobleman who fought against the Brits to set his land free, were a 
classic of children literature--and sound rather politically correct 
even today, if you think that Sandokan's sweetheart was an English 
maiden, called Marian, the Pearl of Labuan (I often ask myself where 
labuan really is, anyway...).

Salgari wrote incredibly detailed stories.  When he told you that 
most of Sandokan's men were Dayaks (in Italian daiacchi), you could 
trust him.  If you checked on any encyclopedia you could find out 
that Dayaks existed, and that not a few of them earned a living by 
assaulting ships.  Salgari knew a lot about all those faraway 
countries, peoples, traditions, and told you about the weapons they 
used, the dresses they wore, the things they ate--and he was usually 
right.

Great traveller?  Not at all.  His biographers revealed that Salgari
lived all his life in Turin;  he simply went to the libraries of his
hometown (which worked quite well at that time) and made extensive
researches.

As I said before, you can never read too much--especially if you're a 
writer.

(Now if a true-born Herero comes up and tells us that Pynchon lived 
in Namibia for 3 years I think I'll cry...)

Umberto Rossi

"A commission is appointed 
To confer with a Volscian commission 
About perpetual peace"--and nobody told me!