To be in Venice

8 June, 2009

I’d heard that Lee, my union’s Te Pou Tuarā was away in Italy, but I didnae realise it was for this.

Traditional Maori group perform (Venice Biennale – June 3, 2009)

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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Matthew Dentith 8 June, 2009 at 15:34

Venice is one of the few places I really would like to go visit again. Utterly magical and charming. I was there about this time three years ago and I wish I had bought that broad-rimmed hats you always associate with Italian country clergymen.

Matthew Dentith’s last post was Funding cuts

harvestbird 8 June, 2009 at 16:50: I haven’t been to Venice but read last year Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (whose film version had a four-hander of Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken) which was, by its end, terrifying. There must be some novels out there about people have a good time in that city and not a life-endangering encounter that calls everything they thought they knew into question.

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Matthew Dentith 8 June, 2009 at 16:56

Well, the novel I most associate with Venice is Jonathan Gash’s ‘The Gondola Scam.’ There is a quite terrifying part when Lovejoy ends up swimming from one graveyard to the next (this being Venice the graveyards are basically ossuary islands), but rather than give me the fear about Venice it made me want to go.

I was never really sure why ‘The Matriarch’ ends in Venice, however; it was a very good book up to that part.

Matthew Dentith’s last post was Funding cuts

harvestbird 8 June, 2009 at 16:59: Given that Ihimaera wrote his novel following a break of what?–nine or ten years?–I can imagine the feeling of wanting to put in all the cool stuff he had thought of in that time. I never rated the Matriarch’s knowledge anything like as highly as her ability to turn herself into a spider and paralyse her opponents, but I suppose the knowledge of things Italian was less able to be read as a metaphor.

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Giovanni 8 June, 2009 at 21:48

It’s a beautiful city, but I don’t know if I’d want to live there.

(Sorry, I am obligated to write that whenever Venice is mentioned or I will lose my citizenship rights. I believe it’s a cliche older than the city itself.)

Giovanni’s last post was The Museum of You (3): Something You Lost