The Language-Place blog carnival



Last October, during one of those blog-hopping journeys I occasionally indulge in, I stumbled upon an invitation to participate in a “blog carnival” on “Language and Place”. Through it I learned what a blog carnival was — a curated list of links to blog posts on a given theme, which moved like a traveling carnival from one host to next — and, finding it an intriguing concept, I decided to participate. An old post on my German learning experiences figured in the first edition of the carnival that came out in November 2010. A few months later, in April, I hosted edition #5.

Now, after an year of travelling around the world, this carnival is back to its creator, Dorothee Lang. The anniversary edition, modelled around the theme “Streets, Signs, Direction”, features 31 entries presented ingeniously along three dimensions: a poem, an itinerary, a geographic map.

With age, the carnival begins to show its value as a concept. So much of individual writing on the Internet is buried under a tangled web that search engines can barely reach; a carnival like “Language-Place” offers a theme-based portal to navigate such writing. Like an anthology of essays, it offers a menu of tastes to savour and discover, leading you to voices you may otherwise have never heard of. Over time, the archive of links carves out a historical journey spanning lands and peoples, creating a more enduring repository of stories and events than real-time networks spawned by Twitter or Facebook.

The best way to grasp its potential is to begin at the carnival home page and go through the editions. Spend an hour doing this. You may be surprised by what you discover.



The feast of the Madonna



[Part 3 of the Como series]


On Sunday, we decided to first visit the small church in our town, Lezzeno, before continuing to Bellagio. Visiting the church on a Sunday morning is a fast-disappearing habit in parts of Europe, and we thought it a good idea to preserve a memory or two of this ritual before it becomes extinct. But what we saw on this Sunday showed that our fears were for nothing. The whole town turned up at the church that morning, some in fine grey suits with sailor caps on their heads and wind instruments in their hands, and the ceremony we watched went back, we were told later, six hundred years.


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A curious old town

[Part 2 of the Como series]
In 1867, during his travels in Europe, Mark Twain visited lake Como. He writes, in The Innocents Abroad, that he reached “the curious old town of Como, at the foot of the lake” by train from Milan, and then took a steamer to Bellagio where, along with his co-passengers, he was locked in a cell and exposed to “a smoke that smelt of all the dead things of earth.” The locals resorted to this method of “fumigation” to “guard themselves against the cholera, though we hailed from no infected port.”

After this pungent beginning, he settled down and took in the beauty around him:

A great feature of Como’s attractiveness is the multitude of pretty houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on its mountain sides. They look so snug and so homelike, and at eventide when everything seems to slumber, and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the Lake of Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose.

Mark Twain stayed in Bellagio for a few days, before journeying further to the town of Lecco. Later in the book, in a passage that pokes fun at the Italian obsession for Michealangelo, he says the artist “designed the Lake of Como.”




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The Como weekend



Driving southeast from Germany, through Switzerland towards Italy, the Italians reach you before you reach Italy. In a service area near the Swiss-Italian border, the small grey-haired lady behind the coffee counter (who turns to customers with a sprightly “Prego!”) is surprised by our request for a Cappucino mit Sahne (cream); for the Italians, coffee goes only with milk. We are heading towards the Italian Lake District, to a town next to lake Como, about 20 kilometers from the city with the same name. Como is close to the Swiss border, which explains the Swiss-Italian blend visible there. The roads are small, but the traffic exhibits traces of Swiss restraint. Fashion shows a stronger Italian influence: the elegant costumes in Como mirror the styles I’ve seen in Milan. The elaborate lakeside villas and the expensive cars – Mercedes Benzs, BMWs, Porches – paint a Swiss-like glossy, rich canvas. You could take in the alpine mountains all around and believe you are still in Switzerland. This isn’t the Italy of the South, not the real Italy, as some would say.

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The Left Hand of Darkness



What is the loneliest job in the world?

Imagine an envoy visiting a remote planet seventeen years from his own, living on that alien world in the middle of an ice-age, sifting through layers of unfamiliar etiquette, entangled in political intrigue, with no one to trust: this is the world of Genly Ai, envoy from Hain, through most of The Left Hand of Darkness. His mission is to enlist planet Winter/Gethen into a federation he hails from, and his quest reveals what is at the heart of this sad and beautiful story: the meeting of two vastly different cultures, and the possibility of a friendship between aliens.

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