Santon's Notebook (Notes of an Errant Kraeved).

       When I conceived of my Moscow-Petushki (elektrichka-based) Project, the centre of Moscow would have been absent. It was very much a peripheries project. And yet here Genoa can not be absent. It is central because the story I went to tell would be impossible without it. Genoa's role in the forging of utopian practices and projects, its centrality to revolt and insurrection along this 'Red Riviera', is, well, fundamental. Genoa has often been a site of rebellion and insurrection and any story about Liguria makes little sense without the city. A city that in any case is a collection of distinct localities that only last century were amalgamted into a greater Genoa under the fascist regime. I'll try to make clearer my lines of thought about this in future posts. But another reason for Genoa being at the very heart of the project is that another fundamental idea/plan of these 'notebooks' was based around the city. If the 'red tour guide' popped into my...

     With some of the bare details discovered about Walter Benjamin's sojourns in Liguria (there is also his time in the resort of Poveromo in nearby Versilia), I want to set down some details about how to develop these initial 'discoveries'. What does Benjamin's presence in the mid 1930s (and earlier presence) allow us to think about? Does it provide us with new opportunities of developing this 'Liguria project'? After all, I do not want to get entrapped in a kind of 'foreign visitors' to Liguria project (although the availability of masses of material will be hard to resist). Both Italian and foreign language writings on all the presences from Shelley, Byron, Nietzsche, Dickens, Rubens, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Smollett, Michelet, Valery, Flaubert, Mark Twain, Tsvetaeva, Gogol, Kandinsky and so on and so forth ad infinitum produce an overloading of the available texts on this region. The abundance is almost certain to be overwhelming. Nonetheless, t...

       Having read a variety of books on Liguria - many of which explicitly focus themselves on foreign visitors to the region - I was curious to learn about the Bejaminian connection to Liguria in Pagani's book on Benjamin (as Benjamin rarely gets mentioned as a visitor to Liguria, although he spent considerable time there). Mainly to the Liguria of the Ponente (at least if we think about more long term stays)- but occasionally moving to the west. In the mid 1920s he would travel by freighter from Hamburg through the ports of the Mediterranean. It stopped off at very points. One of them being Genoa. He would write: Now I’m lying on deck, the evening in Genoa before me, and the sounds of unloading freighters all around me as the modernized ‘music of the world’  .      Eiland and Jennings' biography of Benjamin mentions that this longer stop in Genoa (compared to other ports) meant that he would visit the Riviera and the famous walk along the promo...

           Given the rather haphazard emergence of this project and the idea that I want to use it as a kind of notebook or diary of what I am currently thinking about, I thought I would add some more words relative to the genealogy of the idea and how it has come to be formed in my mind. It is very much a project that has taken on aspects of other projects as I have tried to explain previously. So finding myself in Liguria (the village where my father was born) I have reimagined a project I was planning to work on in the Moscow Region (and maybe more widely on the peripheries of Moscow and other larger cities). Yet there are always links back to previous concerns and these links I discovered will provide or provoke a number of posts. I also want somehow to explain how these links arose along with some stories concerning them. For example, during my to-ing and fro-ing from Russia back to the UK and Italy in the past two decades I recall visiting the local (...