Re: The Cold Stones

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Thank you everyone for your kind words with regard to “The Cold Stones” post. I believe that “The Sopranos” is the most profound American tragedy since Arthur Miller’s “The Death of a Salesman.” I also think that this online community is more stimulating than most of the learned societies I attend! It’s an honour to post with you.

Fly: I do have an academic background in theology. My MA is in baroque Italian history. I spent a lot of time studying seventeenth-century Catholic piety. I’ve also been a student of the buddhadharma and meditation for eighteen years. Nova Scotia has a large sangha (Buddhist congregation) of American ex-patriots, boomer types who trekked north to escape the materialism of American culture and otherwise to deal with the boredom, lost on an isolated peninsula somewhere between New York and London.

I’m now doing a doctorate on Italian immigrants in industrial Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. There is a large community of Italians who crossed the pond at the turn of the twentieth-century, sojourned in places like New Jersey, and then headed north to work in the local steel mill and coal mines. Many of them came to my home town, Glace Bay via Naples and Treviso, Newark and New York.

I’m ethnically Polish, but I’m literate in Italian. Go figure! That’s more than enough about me.

Ciao, tesori!

Avellino

PS What’s up with Ro’s lost red glove? Does anyone want to take a crack at decoding that vignette?


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Re: The Cold Stones

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Avellino said:

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>I’m ethnically Polish, but I’m literate in Italian. Go figure! That’s more than enough about me.<hr></blockquote>

Nice to know Avellino. Why not stop into the "Kitchen Sink" Room and post a little more about yourself there in the dedicated sticky thread so that all members can learn about you (as some others have already done).


PS...Bravo on a splendid thread!

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Re: The Cold Stones

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The Red Glove: Ro, God bless her, was very much the caricature of the fragmented tourist as exemplified by her jammed bowels, frantic shopping, flight fatigue, etc. With the exception of her assignation with her Belleville paramour, she was just another rather bourgeois American woman. As Rosalie scurried along preoccupied by the search for her misplaced glove, we catch Carmela in the throes of, what may be for her, an ultimately transcendent experience. The glove piece felt to me to be the device for establishing the contrast between the two women's differing capacities to experience Paris.

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Re: The Cold Stones

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<blockquote>Quote:<hr>The glove piece felt to me to be the device for establishing the contrast between the two women's differing capacities to experience Paris. <hr></blockquote>

I pondered this opinion for some time. I never got the feeling that Rosalie showed us anything at all about her capacity to experience or appreciate Paris. Come to think of it, I don't think she ever showed anything about her capacity to experience or appreciate most anything.

Yet the writers must have something in mind as to her essential nature when they write for her. Could it be that she just went along on the trip to go along with her friend to be there for her as her companion? I realize she didn't hang onto Carm for the entire trip. I suppose she would say, "A girl has to get her fun when she can."

I find it difficult to express this but from my experience, women I know who seem to have the same characteristics as Roe might feel this way about it: "You have a best friend and she invites you to go somewhere with her. You don't thing twice. You just go. That is what being a best friend is about."

Could it be that Roe would have acted the same way whether Carm asked her to go along to a trip to Paris or to a trip to a garbage dump? I guess I'm asking if it's possible that friendship and loyalty are supremely important to Roe and most other things in life are nowhere nearly as important.


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Re: The Cold Stones

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I'll put it this way. To Rosalie, Paris was like a drug. It was a way to escape the reality of her life. Back in Jersey she will be the same. She might of had a great experience but nothing has been altered in her mind.

To Carm it was transcendental. She opened up and made realizations concerning her existence and purpose on earth. At the same time, her dreams of Ade are a reminder of her guilt and coalescence about the way she gets her material positions. At this point, deep down she knows "the life" is the reason behind Ade's disappearance and who knows what other violence and evil doing.

What her awakening will mean is yet to be seen.

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Re: The Cold Stones

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<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Fly: Google has a "language tools" page where you can do simple translations from and to various <hr></blockquote>

On this note for any/everyone's reference there is also a great site for translating single words in a plethora of languages, it is http://www.wordreference.com

Apart from simple translation it can also give examples of context and it also has linked forums for any translation queries. I find it very useful...

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an american in paris

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First of all, three big cheers for avellino an excellent post!

As much as I look at it, I can't stop thinking about the fact, that this might be Carmela first escapade to anywhere since we met her: remember how angry she was at T when he didn't take her to Italy in S2? And how important that trip was for Tony? (Altough not as symbolic<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> )

Also, we must not forget a more obvious symbolism: Paris is the city of LOVE: and Carm going there without Tony, clearly means that some way the romance will end. Also we must not forget, that she is with Roe who is the closest of a victim of "business".

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