Venice

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A DEATH IN THE ROYAL SUITE

By David SelzerAugust 29, 20242 Comments1 min read652 views

She fell asleep as she often did thinking

of that first operation, the longest,

her team fourteen hours in the theatre,

a white child’s brain given to a black –

the furies raging. She woke at dawn wheezing,

coughing, chest tightening, inhaler out of reach,

knowing the attack for what it was,

hearing, somewhere distant, children’s voices.

In death her right hand was open as if

holding an orb, her left clutching her heart.

She had dreamt of the abandoned islands

of the lagoon; the broken bell towers,

the wild fig trees; the discovery,

with her girlhood’s lost companions, of an arm,

female, severed from a marble statue,

the supple hand holding an apple.

The famous surgeon died in the Royal Suite

that Easter Sunday when Armageddon came

at last to the Levant. She could hear

children egg-hunting on the greensward

five floors below – between waves breaking

in an attenuated roar, vestiges

of a storm out in the Cretan Sea.

Beyond the horizon to the east, countless

villages and cities went to smoke

then dust; deserts became relentless;

theologies cracked like bowls of eggs.

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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

By David SelzerJune 27, 20240 Comments2 min read368 views

Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost

slightly shifty in Walter Mori’s

black and white photograph taken

on the Fondamenta Nani, Venice,

in the winter of 1963,

the ageing poet in overcoat and scarf.

The photographer was creating

a series of images of cultural

phenomena. He has his subject stand,

not in one of the usual settings,

like St Mark’s Square, but on this narrow path

beside the Rio San Travaso –

one the busiest, most direct walk ways

from the Grand Canal to the Zattere.

For cognoscenti, over Pound’s right shoulder,

dimly is the Squero di San Travaso,

one of the oldest gondola boatyards.

Caught in the image is a passerby

who has walked on then suddenly turned,

a man with startlingly large, black rimmed

spectacles, like a burlesque foreign agent,

who has stopped as if amazed or appalled

by what he has just seen – hence perhaps

Pound’s expression, his paranoia

overcoming his vanity. Like

some provincial tragic hero

in self-exile – his hubris, by his own

confession, ‘that stupid suburban

prejudice of anti-semitism’ –

he poses reluctantly in a city

of decaying labyrinthine passage ways,

surrounded by unending waters.

A much younger man, during the First World War,

he wrote about poetry, charmingly

and dogmatically denigrating

the Fin de Siècle’s ‘…rhetorical din…

luxurious riot…painted adjectives…’.

His reputation suffers, in retrospect,

from what might be termed the Wagner Syndrome.

Genius and fascist – how is it possible to

both approve and condemn?

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ART

By David SelzerSeptember 29, 20222 Comments2 min read536 views

For Tod Davies

Two of the exhibitions from the last

Venice Biennale have stayed with me.

Both were in the centre of the city

rather than in the Giardini.

They were close to the vaporetto stop

at San Samuele on the Grand Canal.

The first was in the Palazzo Grassi,

on the Calle De Le Carrozze:

Anhela Ayzenberh’s IMAGES OF WAR

AT HARVEST TIME. The Kyiv journalist

curated tens of thousands of anonymised

mobile phone photos of wrecked and rusting

Russian hardware: tanks, rocket launchers,

and long range artillery against

a backdrop of unharvested fields of wheat.

The second was across the narrow calle

in the small church of San Samuele:

TALKING WHITE MEN, dedicated to

Diego Garcia’s indigenous

inhabitants, and only comprising

four large holograms – of Tim Berners-Lee,

Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and

Henry Kissinger – showing each subject

on an endless loop with no sound except,

through the open doors, the vaporettos

slowing, idling, accelerating.

Both caused much controversy. The Kremlin

and Downing Street respectively complained

to the Italian government. Supporters

claimed that the continuation of the war

and the expulsion were shameful, and needed

continuous exposure. That summer

and autumn a number of anonymous

YouTubes appeared. One purported to show

the exhibit in the early hours

when the power was supposedly switched-off.

There was still no sound but sub-titles

suggested Chomsky and Kissinger

were arguing both about Israel

and the International Criminal Court,

Dawkins was frequently shouting, ‘Selfish Gene!’,

and Berners-Lee was speaking machine-code.

Another seemed to show, in profile,

the disembodied and larger-than-life sized heads

of the two principals in a minibus

in the car park of the Elysian Fields,

a Jefferson Heights retirement home

in the Catskills. The most viral featured

a very large rat, with Putin’s head,

setting fire to uncut fields of wheat.

The following year each season made the earth

a little less inhabitable

for humankind. During one long night,

in late December, high water rose

as usual, but did not ebb. All

of the islands of Venice – that most serene

of cities – were engulfed.

Note: the poem was first published in the Summer 2022 edition of EAP: THE MAGAZINE – https://exterminatingangel.com/eap-the-magazine-archive/.

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HINDSIGHT

By David SelzerFebruary 25, 20212 Comments1 min read524 views

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

***

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.

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SCREENPLAYS

FOUR SCREEN PLAYS

By David SelzerNovember 25, 20202 Comments3 min read800 views

I wrote the screenplays between 2001 and 2008. They are presented below in the order in which they were written. Each is set against the background of armed conflict.

I was inspired to learn how to write screenplays as a result of a number of conversations in New York in August 2001 with Annabel Honor-Lissi, a fellow creative, and digital tutorials with her which followed.

THE MEMORIAL

The Memorial is about redemption through kindness, compassion and love. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1^st World War, it is a love story that explores class, religion and anti-war issues through the eyes of Captain Edward Standish VC. Much of the action takes place at Standish’s country seat, in a Midlands village dominated by a colliery, as well as in London where the Captain meets and commissions artist Clara Zeligman. The Memorial also takes us to the battlefields on the French/Belgian border where Standish had faced the toughest moment of his military career – an event that haunts him throughout the story.

LOYALTIES

Loyalties begins in 1936, when Kathy, sixteen, beautiful, a film fan and fascinated by Elizabeth, last Empress of Austria, about whom she secretly writes romantic fiction, leaves Llandudno to train as a nurse in London. In 1940, she goes to the Isle of Man to nurse refugees from Nazi Germany interned as enemy aliens and falls in love with Peter, an Irish barman, whom, she discovers, is an IRA Bomber whose real name is Pearse. He renounces violence, though not the cause, for her – until she is the victim of an attempted rape. Pearse murders the likely suspect (who is an undercover Special Branch officer). In despair, she rejects Pearse. She returns home pregnant – and tells her mother that she was married in the Isle of Man but that her husband has been killed in action. In 1946, Pearse – now prosperous and married but still active in the struggle – finds her (and their daughter). She rejects him again.

ALTOGETHER ELSEWHERE

Altogether Elsewhere is a tragi-comedy of errors, driven by character, coincidence and circumstance. Both of the main protagonists were born on the same day in 1953 in Liverpool and Daytona respectively. One becomes an acclaimed documentary and fashion photographer, the other a Vietnam Veteran selling oranges by the roadside in Portugal. The story – set against a background of the decline and fall of empires – focuses on key episodes in their lives from 1961 to 2002.

IN THE LION’S MOUTH

In The Lion’s Mouth is set in 1865, in a Venice under Austrian occupation, and against the background of the Risorgimento, the revolutionary movement to unify Italy. The story describes a love affair which, bedevilled by jealousy, possessiveness, intrigue and racial and religious prejudice, comes to a tragic and violent end. Though set in the past, the story portrays contemporary issues – particularly those of mixed race and of terrorism. The two main protagonists are a Liverpool sugar heiress of mixed Afro-Caribbean and European origin, who is in her early thirties, and a Austrian Jewish doctor in his forties, a widower, who is attached to the Austrian occupation forces but an active though covert supporter of the Risorgimento.

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