The problem? "I had been attempting to live in Italy without living as an Italian."

Catania, Sicily (2016)

The author moved to Italy and found herself perplexed that Italians typically aren't outraged by the sort of relatively minor difficulties that send Americans howling to social media for illusory relief.

And then she learned something.

What Italians Taught Me About Nothing, by Isabella Lazzareschi (Medium)

... Answers to these questions came to me later after moving to a smaller and rather ancient Italian town. Just north of Rome, the Etruscan village of Viterbo was still surrounded by a protective wall from the 11th century — the original cobblestones jutting out at every angle like the mangled teeth of an ancient creature. The both beautiful and haunting deterioration of the city kept both cars and pedestrians at a slow pace, which seemed to fit the overall culture of the self-contained city. After learning every stone of my walk to work, and when every barista knew my coffee order and name, I felt myself relax into the scaffolding of a true Italian lifestyle. Soon after, my aforementioned frustrations seemed to dissipate gently, like the commuters into the streets on that day I waited for a bus that would never come. I learned to value something that Americans avoid at all costs: idle time.

This concept is an unyielding centerpiece around which the Italian culture hangs. Idle time — moments to be present with friends and family, to allow ourselves to indulge in both deep introspection and light-hearted chatter, writing down thoughts that pass through our heads throughout the day — allows us the ability to keep our demanding lives from ruling our existences. To do nothing is to have the power to quiet our surroundings and sometimes indulge in solitude — it is to allow our minds to grow inward ...

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In less than two months, the Confidentials will travel to Gdansk, Poland for a long overdue appointment with my bucket list. It’s sweet of the missus to indulge me.

In 1980, the Solidarity trade union was established at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, an act made provocative by the fact that Communist doctrine of the time in Poland precluded such an independent challenge to orthodoxy.

In theory, the Polish Communist government already was protecting the interests of workers, and for Solidarity to suggest this stewardship was deficient plainly represented a threat to the established order.

Unfortunately for the party bosses, it wasn’t their only problem. The Soviet Union had imposed communism on the devastated territory of a revamped Polish state following World War II, but the indigenous Polish variety of red star rule was capable neither of collectivizing agriculture nor curbing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Smallholders and clerics remained as obstacles to "enlightenment." 

In combination with these obvious resistance sources, Solidarity proved to be a mortal contagion. Nine tumultuous years after the trade union emerged, Communism collapsed both in Poland and across the “East Bloc,” a demise attributable to socio-economic pressures from within as well as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s calculated gamble of jettisoning the USSR’s vassal buffer states to buy time for an ultimately doomed effort to reform his homeland.

By all rights I should be preparing for the trip to Gdansk by learning a few words of basic Polish, like numbers, greetings and restaurant menu items, but instead I’m suddenly immersed in the Southern Peloponnese -- specifically, the Mani Peninsula, where a tangle of jagged mountains on the Greek mainland yields to the cooling breezes of the Mediterranean Sea.

As my preoccupation with Europe has been throughout the past four decades, so it continues for me in 2018. I am an unreconstructed Europhile, an enthusiastic scattershot generalist fascinated by all things European irrespective of where they’re located on the continent, and as yet stubbornly unwilling to concentrate on any one facet of Europe long enough to become an expert, whatever this word means.

Except as it pertains to beer.

The process of boning up for Pints&union led me first to the United Kingdom and readings about traditional pub culture, cask-conditioned ale and the history of Guinness in Ireland, pausing for a digression into Bavarian wheat ale, and recently followed by an overdue re-reading of Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s seminal Great Beers of Belgium, last updated shortly before the legend’s death in 2007.

Stuck somewhere in the middle of Fuller’s, Weihenstephaner and Duvel samples came The House of Government, a lengthy tome by Yuri Slezkin, which gently lured me back to previously dormant Kremlinology via the history of a 1,700-unit Stalinist apartment block built on the Moscow River embankment.

Cast against a 2018 summer’s backdrop of raging Putin paranoia in America and the World Cup successfully held in Russia, this book had me contemplating the eternal Matryoshka “Slavic enigma” dilemma all over again.

Rest assured, it has not been resolved.

---

Christianity of the Russian Eastern Orthodox persuasion connects Mother Russia to Greece by way of Byzantium -- or Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985. Toying with the idea of studying in Greece, I actually was accepted into a “year in Athens” university program, but decided against it, and instead spent three weeks in the country as a tourist (including an idyll in Istanbul) before returning to Italy by boat.

I haven’t returned since, and I've no idea why.

Thanks to my cousin and mentor Don Barry’s recommendation, my lone visit 33 years ago was encouraged and prefaced by a travel book by the American novelist Henry Miller, called The Colossus of Maroussi.

Following is background from a previously published piece.

---

For someone as renowned for his bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but The Colossus of Maroussi is just that volume.

Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as participating/liberating belligerent, it recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, a respite coming at the conclusion of his Depression-era tenure as a Parisian urban expatriate, and immediately prior to his relocation and reinvention as tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.

Ostensibly, Colossus is a travelogue about Greece as a country caught in transition during the middle of the 20th century, with one foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and generally exaggerated) past. Much of Miller’s narrative focuses on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein hides a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since release, the book actually is all about Miller …

… For all its flaws, The Colossus of Maroussi was essential and compelling reading, and I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me during the early 1980s. Upon request in 1984, the Greek tourist office in New York had mailed a huge package of brochures and maps, and as I read Miller’s account that winter, I plotted his progress with their assistance. At the time, Ernest Hemingway meant more to me as a writer, but he hadn’t written about Greece. Spain would come much later.

There I was, finally in Greece, well aware that the intervening decades would render dated Miller’s descriptions unlikely, and this much was true. 

Many things had changed, but happily there were moments of timelessness when the pre-war mood still jibed, and when, not unlike the writer, I stood at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushed off the dust from the journey by bus, and felt the weight of millennia … when I’d hear a tinkling bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with oil, kick back a cool beer or tumbler of Retsina … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, one was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow sewage pipes became clogged.

---

Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was the son of a well-to-do English family, not a product of Miller’s hardscrabble, working-class Brooklyn. However, their shared obsessions with Greece are mutually evocative.

I’m chagrined to concede that until seeing Leigh Fermor’s obituary in The Economist seven years ago, he was completely unknown to me. Had I been aware of his incredible life story, perhaps a trek to the Mani Peninsula would have been in order back in the day. He’d have been 70 years young then, and still a working writer. He might have helped me with my Retsina education.

In 1933 at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor -- later described by a journalist as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" -- departed London on a journey to Istanbul by foot, first to Germany and then along the Danube into the heart of the Balkans.

In all this walk lasted almost six years, until Leigh Fermor returned home to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Later in life, he authored a trilogy of books documenting these pre-war travels; the final unfinished volume was published after his death. They’re acclaimed to this day as incredible snapshots of Europe, pre-destructive spasm.

During the war Leigh Fermor, a master linguist, was a special forces operative in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he famously orchestrated the kidnapping of a German general. Remarkably, the two soldiers became friendly owing to their shared love of antiquity, and met again two decades later on a Greek television show based on “This Is Your Life.”

Eventually Leigh Fermor settled among the Greeks in his beloved Mani with true love Joan Rayner, a photographer, in a house they built on a hillside at Kardamyli. The book I’m reading now begins with the couple trekking from Sparta with guide and mule through wild forbidding mountains into the Deep Mani, and a first glimpse of their village of destiny.

---

Such is the agony and ecstasy of the aging Hoosier hick as persistent Europhile, frustratingly wrestling for the 34th consecutive year with nagging expatriate thoughts that have been tamed in twilight, though never altogether dispensed.

Might it all have unfolded differently?

It's a stupid question, and I avoid it 98% of the time. My oft-aborted escape plan from the 1980s would have been furthered had I hailed from a wealthy family, possessed some semblance of a skill (linguistic, literary or artistic), or displayed more raw ambition.

At the same time, as crazily fortunate as I’ve been in this charmed life, it would be ridiculous to lament spilled milk. After all, I hate milk.

If there exists any such thing as a celibate expatriate, I suppose that’s me. Nothing wrong with that; a voyeur from afar, looking not touching, and scratching the itch with short trips like the one to Gdansk, and later, Munich.

Someday if we liquidate everything we own and get just a little bit lucky, a period of retirement in Europa might be an option. A collegiate classmate has done this in Ecuador, which comes recommended for affordability. She loves it there. The problem for me is an utter lack of interest in places like Ecuador. Nothing personal; I'm just a Porto kind of guy.

I’ll hold onto this pleasant retirement dream for a moment or two, until reality rudely intrudes, and then as always regroup, channeling the mad European impulse into a beer travel story from the salad days. This tale will be told at Pints&union, hopefully to someone who hasn’t heard it before.

I may still be stuck inside of NA with the Mechelen blues again, but whenever passing along the chronology, I'll at least have done my job as cantankerous wannabe expatriate.

---

Recent columns:

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

August 9: ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

August 2: ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

Paine & Pleasure, Part 2: A design for life.

Part one of "Paine & Pleasure" urged you to think about Thomas Paine on July 4. In retrospect, this repeat of a column written in 2016 has little to do with Paine, but I already brought it up, so here it is.

It's a good snapshot of my mood in the run-up to Pints & Union, about which there'll be more to say in the next few days. My period of exile is just about over, and it's going to feel a bit odd having a regular spot to hang my hat.

Baby steps. Get back in the saddle, and ride.

---

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Throughout my decidedly mediocre high school basketball career, members of the coaching staff often administered what they surely imagined as damning criticism of my uninspired performance.

“Baylor, you’re always on the outside, looking in.”

They were right on target, and it didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always felt like an outsider, even when making conscious (read: doomed) efforts to conform.

These efforts to fit in almost always fail. High school athletics were merely an early example of the pattern. I tried to take sports seriously, but couldn’t. Reviews were scathing. You’d think I’d clubbed baby seals, or urinated on a grave.

Perversely, many years later there emerged a role model who might have inspired me to work harder at basketball. When Dennis Rodman took his rebounding-first attitude to its most ludicrous extreme and refused to shoot even uncontested layups, at last I saw how it might have been for me.

Alas, by then it was too late.

---

Contrarianism, especially as it pertains to embracing positions that offend the majority, is a quality associated with dissent and radicalism. It’s no surprise that of all the “founding fathers” we Americans are taught to venerate – often mistakenly, in my view – the one who made sense most reliably was Thomas Paine.

Paine was brilliant when it came to documenting the need for revolution. He was less adept at contributing to principles of governance following the revolt’s successful conclusion, but this difficulty in transition isn’t uncommon.

Welcome to my life in “craft” beer.

If I have any single regret about my life as a contrarian, it’s that a pesky sense of fair play causes me to consider the other side, and at periodic intervals, to make ill-fated efforts to go with the flow even when I can foresee the dismal outcome.

Owing to my lifelong mathematical ineptitude, this cannot be attributed to a gambler’s instinct for statistical improbability. Maybe I’m just too nice a guy to avoid “reaching out” here and there.

By high school graduation, many of the various threads of my disgruntlement were exposed, and others were revealed during college – which ended with a philosophy degree, of course.

By 1985, and the high water mark of Ronnie RayGun’s incessant theatrical blather about what it meant to be patriotically American, I’d been to Europe and realized that the waylaid stork made a tragic error dropping me here.

Accordingly, intemperate arbiters of style back home in Indiana greeted me with a fresh new message:

“Baylor, if you hate it so much here, why not just go to Europe and just stay there?”

As usual, they completely missed the point. To be a contrarian is to understand that you can’t ever truly belong, and making good on this realization logically requires staying put, not leaving, so as to inflict your opposing viewpoint on the wider, somnolent community at every turn, forever more.

Perhaps the real reason I never tried playing the role of expatriate in Europe was fear that my contrarianism wasn’t continent-specific and would follow me wherever I went.

In other words, having felt like a European stranded in America, I’d move to Europe, only to find myself becoming attached to Harley Davidson, Bud Light and Mitt Romney.

I couldn’t risk it.

---

The Public House provided the chance to fine tune this approach. A quarter-century ago, I stumbled into the pub and restaurant game quite by accident. It was something I’d never done. My only core belief at the pub’s commencement was that the only way to succeed in business without really trying was to pretend the barroom’s four walls delineated completely different worlds.

Outside them, it was insane Indiana. Inside was a classroom somewhere in Europe. I stayed upright only by self-deception, generally too busy to think, though unfortunately not to drink. There was plenty of alcohol, and while I’m bright enough to know it wasn’t always a good thing, it was a good idea at the time.

However, there was plenty of teaching, too. In retrospect, my expectations were profoundly naïve, but the plan was to be as European as possible within the space allotted, with which I’d be able to locate others of like mind for commiseration, and to educate those who weren’t simpatico.

I genuinely thought of myself as an instructor, and at times it almost seemed to work. The lesson plan called for a period of dependence on European beers, following which America would reclaim its place as a beer country.

We called it microbrewing then, and I was sure that when it got off the ground, the ensuing dialectic would produce the best of both worlds. We’d have good, local beer and a European-style community in which to enjoy it. I could declare victory, and collect consultancy fees happily ever after.

Like I said, I drank a lot in those days, and it may have altered by cognitive function.

I thought better beer could presage a better life, and it was this conviction that started me asking questions about New Albany, because after all, it isn’t as though anyone else would be doing it, especially Alabama-based newspapers.

In turn, this led through Bank Street Brewhouse to two-way streets and a mayoral bid, and the scoreboard shows that none of these have turned out particularly well for me, but isn’t disappointment always a potential outcome when you decide to drop the shield and for once, lead with your heart?

You might win, you might lose, and there’s a reason why sweet dreams are made of this. It’s because they’re dreams, and dreams, you see … well, dreams just aren’t real.

They’re unreal, though bizarrely, with my plans for world domination doing double duty as bird cage liner, those dreams I had aren’t any more unreal than the current spinning wheel marketplace for “craft” beer, or the present brain-dead shape of “two-party” political solutions.

Satire is neutralized, and contrarianism threatened with extinction. We’re living in a skit.

Contrarianism can be exhausting, even more so when you’re older, and never more so than the present time. I find myself becoming reacquainted with my former tactical device, that of an expatriate in my own country, a willful stranger who keeps his eyes fixed on the pendulum, waiting for it to come near again, close enough to hold on for another ride.

But is that what I really want?

A very long time ago, it became obvious that a contrarian can’t be a prophet in his own time. An asshole, yes, though I’m serene about my talent at it.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, and when the local hacks, vandals and poseurs approach you with wilted mutton javelins in hand, you always have the option of throwing the ultimate haymaker in return: A six syllable word.

Okay, that felt better.

Looks like I’m not going anywhere, after all.

When the final buzzer sounds, all a contrarian really has left is the satisfaction of knowing that he fought the bastards good and hard, right down to the last possession … and this I propose to do.

My coaches would be proud.

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Throughout my decidedly mediocre high school basketball career, members of the coaching staff often administered what they surely imagined as damning criticism of my uninspired performance.

“Baylor, you’re always on the outside, looking in.”

They were right on target, and it didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always felt like an outsider, even when making conscious (read: doomed) efforts to conform.

These efforts to fit in almost always fail. High school athletics were merely an early example of the pattern. I tried to take sports seriously, but couldn’t. Reviews were scathing. You’d think I’d clubbed baby seals, or urinated on a grave.

Perversely, many years later there emerged a role model who might have inspired me to work harder at basketball. When Dennis Rodman took his rebounding-first attitude to its most ludicrous extreme and refused to shoot even uncontested layups, at last I saw how it might have been for me.

Alas, by then it was too late.

---

Contrarianism, especially as it pertains to embracing positions that offend the majority, is a quality associated with dissent and radicalism. It’s no surprise that of all the “founding fathers” we Americans are taught to venerate – often mistakenly, in my view – the one who made sense most reliably was Thomas Paine.

Paine was brilliant when it came to documenting the need for revolution. He was less adept at contributing to principles of governance following the revolt’s successful conclusion, but this difficulty in transition isn’t uncommon.

Welcome to my life in “craft” beer.

If I have any single regret about my life as a contrarian, it’s that a pesky sense of fair play causes me to consider the other side, and at periodic intervals, to make ill-fated efforts to go with the flow even when I can foresee the dismal outcome.

Owing to my lifelong mathematical ineptitude, this cannot be attributed to a gambler’s instinct for statistical improbability. Maybe I’m just too nice a guy to avoid “reaching out” here and there.

By high school graduation, many of the various threads of my disgruntlement were exposed, and others were revealed during college – which ended with a philosophy degree, of course.

By 1985, and the high water mark of Ronnie RayGun’s incessant theatrical blather about what it meant to be patriotically American, I’d been to Europe and realized that the waylaid stork made a tragic error dropping me here.

Accordingly, intemperate arbiters of style back home in Indiana greeted me with a fresh new message:

“Baylor, if you hate it so much here, why not just go to Europe and just stay there?”

As usual, they completely missed the point. To be a contrarian is to understand that you can’t ever truly belong, and making good on this realization logically requires staying put, not leaving, so as to inflict your opposing viewpoint on the wider, somnolent community at every turn, forever more.

Perhaps the real reason I never tried playing the role of expatriate in Europe was fear that my contrarianism wasn’t continent-specific and would follow me wherever I went.

In other words, having felt like a European stranded in America, I’d move to Europe, only to find myself becoming attached to Harley Davidson, Bud Light and Mitt Romney.

I couldn’t risk it.

---

The Public House provided the chance to fine tune this approach. A quarter-century ago, I stumbled into the pub and restaurant game quite by accident. It was something I’d never done. My only core belief at the pub’s commencement was that the only way to succeed in business without really trying was to pretend the barroom’s four walls delineated completely different worlds.

Outside them, it was insane Indiana. Inside was a classroom somewhere in Europe. I stayed upright only by self-deception, generally too busy to think, though unfortunately not to drink. There was plenty of alcohol, and while I’m bright enough to know it wasn’t always a good thing, it was a good idea at the time.

However, there was plenty of teaching, too. In retrospect, my expectations were profoundly naïve, but the plan was to be as European as possible within the space allotted, with which I’d be able to locate others of like mind for commiseration, and to educate those who weren’t simpatico.

I genuinely thought of myself as an instructor, and at times it almost seemed to work. The lesson plan called for a period of dependence on European beers, following which America would reclaim its place as a beer country.

We called it microbrewing then, and I was sure that when it got off the ground, the ensuing dialectic would produce the best of both worlds. We’d have good, local beer and a European-style community in which to enjoy it. I could declare victory, and collect consultancy fees happily ever after.

Like I said, I drank a lot in those days, and it may have altered by cognitive function.

I thought better beer could presage a better life, and it was this conviction that started me asking questions about New Albany, because after all, it isn’t as though anyone else would be doing it, especially Alabama-based newspapers.

In turn, this led through Bank Street Brewhouse to two-way streets and a mayoral bid, and the scoreboard shows that none of these have turned out particularly well for me, but isn’t disappointment always a potential outcome when you decide to drop the shield and for once, lead with your heart?

You might win, you might lose, and there’s a reason why sweet dreams are made of this. It’s because they’re dreams, and dreams, you see … well, dreams just aren’t real.

They’re unreal, though bizarrely, with my plans for world domination doing double duty as bird cage liner, those dreams I had aren’t any more unreal than the current spinning wheel marketplace for “craft” beer, or the present brain-dead shape of “two-party” political solutions.

Satire is neutralized, and contrarianism threatened with extinction. We’re living in a skit.

Contrarianism can be exhausting, even more so when you’re older, and never more so than the present time. I find myself becoming reacquainted with my former tactical device, that of an expatriate in my own country, a willful stranger who keeps his eyes fixed on the pendulum, waiting for it to come near again, close enough to hold on for another ride.

But is that what I really want?

A very long time ago, it became obvious that a contrarian can’t be a prophet in his own time. An asshole, yes, though I’m serene about my talent at it.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, and when the local hacks, vandals and poseurs approach you with wilted mutton javelins in hand, you always have the option of throwing the ultimate haymaker in return: A six syllable word.

Okay, that felt better.

Looks like I’m not going anywhere, after all.

When the final buzzer sounds, all a contrarian really has left is the satisfaction of knowing that he fought the bastards good and hard, right down to the last possession … and this I propose to do.

My coaches would be proud.

---

May 5: ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

An American in Plymouth, and her guidebook.

Regular readers may recall two recent visits by the Confidentials to Plymouth, a city (and region, including the counties of Devon and nearby Cornwall) with which we're quite enamored. My wife's cousin lives there, and I'd be happy to return when time allows.

Reading this account takes me back to days of being a footloose, wannabe expatriate. I never quite made the grade, and now you're stuck with me. But a boy can dream, and live vicariously through the experiences of others.

New book about an American's experiences of living in Plymouth even has a Janner dictionary (Plymouth Herald)

Moving to a new city can be a daunting prospect for anyone, but what about moving to a new country? EMILY STEWART, a young expat, writer and yoga instructor, has done just that and has been detailing her experiences via social media, blogs and a new book - to 'discover the places Lonely Planet forgets to write about'.