stories Archivi - Keep Calm and Drink Coffee

THE CHILDREN’S TRAIN NETFLIX

Dec 15, 2024 | BOOKS, MOVIES, BOOKS, MOVIES

We already talked about The Children’s Train when I read Viola Ardone’s book published by Einaudi.

But above all, we talked about The Children’s Train when I read the book Happiness trains by Giovanni Rinaldi.

I became fond of Giovanni Rinaldi’s research work and his subsequent There was me on that train too and with words I travelled through the stories of many children, many families, many people who today still witness the beauty of solidarity through eyes that have seen the train of life run and through words that have much to teach us.

A discovery, a gift, which has brought us the privilege of the direct testimony of Americo Marino.

Americo, not Amerigo, I am not mistaken: the real name of the man we knew as the protagonist of Einaudi or The Children’s train Netflix, played by Christian Cervone and Stefano Accorsi is Americo.

And if in some interviews Viola Ardone recognised Derna, Pachiochia or Maddalena as real characters, officially Americo remains a fictional character, despite the fact that significant elements such as his shoes, to name one, come from his direct testimony.

This is why I could not miss seeing The Children’s train Netflix directed by Cristina Comencini and produced by Palomar.

The film was presented at the Rome Film Festival and has the support of the Emilia Romagna Region and Film Commission Torino Piemonte.

I sincerely hoped for a different epilogue with regard to the personal story of Americo, a person of rare sensitivity to whom I have grown fond of.

A thank you in the credits, a reference, a name, even coffee was mentioned.

How would you react if, we can say the whole world, given that The Children’s train has been translated into twenty-five languages, knew elements of your story, then declined in a different way?

Would you still be happy or would you suffer?

Have you seen The Children’s train Netflix?

If, like me, you are left with the thought of those children travelling to the unknown and how they found the affection of families who welcomed them as children, I think this video will move you, it is not fiction:

Derna and Americo from the Rinaldi Archive

NON-DEMOCRATIC DWARF TALES

Dec 7, 2024 | BOOKS

The last reading I owe to Mary’s Handbook is Andrea Francavilla’s Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales.

The short stories are dwarfed in terms of length but the author’s ability to evoke situations and contexts in the space of a few words by building characters through their dialogues immediately emerges.

The short stories are not democratic, how would you personally interpret this definition?

The author mentions a friend in the acknowledgments for this very title.

These Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales have a common denominator: a rainy night.

I don’t know about you, when I think of the words ‘night’ and ‘rain’ I immediately think of the very famous phrase from the film The Crow: It can’t rain all the time.

For me it’s like a kind of mantra in difficult times.

Do you like the rain?
Do you like to go out when it rains ?

The book’s protagonists are what one might call a repertoire of varied humanity and well represent hardship, frailties, mistakes, doubts, imperfections, and all the varied facets of the difficulties of living.

My compliments to the author on how he has come full circle.

Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales is a first work but I hope we will soon be able to read more by Andrea Francavilla.

In his bio he says he is convinced that behind every problem lies an opportunity and I personally have only to learn.

GIOVANNI TOMMASINI

Jan 6, 2024 | BOOKS, BOOKS

With each new year in one way or another, we find ourselves with the thought of “beginning.”

I would like to quote Mary Shelley’s phrase
The beginning is always today.

At the beginning of the KCDC journey I could not imagine that I would have met you, perhaps we would not have had the chance to connect without the help of the web, or perhaps we would.

The network of virtual connections also led me to a very special ‘home base’: Giovanni’s concept of home base and baseball metaphor, which I suggest you discover directly from his words.

The KEEP CALM & DRINK COFFEE collaboration begins with this first article.

“The perfect setting for a chat: coffee” this is the presentation of this blog in which thoughts, comments, suggestions are collected and reposted, as if each of us had our favourite cup to show along with our passions and life stories.

It seems to me a good opportunity to start with a presentation of the beginning of the path that led me to get in touch with this reality, whose motto is ‘the site that gives you this opportunity’.

It is not every day that one hears these words.

In fact, when I read them, I could hardly believe the beauty of the willingness to create reciprocity and collaboration.

So I sent a message via social pages to return my enthusiasm for the proposal and opportunity for reciprocity.

After a few messages of first acquaintance, here I am to tell you my ‘writer for home’ story.

It started with the purchase of a laptop on special offer back in the winter of 2012.

It all started like this…

…….

“Gian I bought a laptop, I’m bringing it all down”.

That’s how I announced my desire to put my personal stories into story form.

Not only to tell them, but also to make them a road to follow, experiences to propose, to share, to relive together, each in his own world, in his memories, on his own emotional tone.

I set out to write…

Three pages on the ‘little unaware heroes of baseball’, I sent them to various publishing houses that dealt with sports, sports culture, sports education.

Fabio Mancini of G. Danna of Florence, Edusport.it website, called me.

“Tommasini, we really liked your way of romanticising reality, can you send us the whole story, we would like to publish it on our site as article of the month and we would like to make a DVD on the teaching of baseball in the physical education class in high schools.”

What had I written?

I’m going to review the e-mail, “I send you the first three pages of my story Little Unknowing Heroes of Baseball, fifteen teenagers who, in 1976, having just celebrated their age entering double figures, they were introduced to the art of baseball and nothing was ever the same again.

I forgot to write that the pages were the first but also the only ones…

The story was still to be written.

But the whole story was required for the edusport.it site.

I found myself in the same condition in which I had to do my homework for the holidays.

So I set to work.

They published it on the site as the article of the month of July, and on 1 August it was reported by the FIBS – Italian Baseball and Softball Federation on the official federal site.

Various sites, online editorial offices, especially baseballmania, began to contact me, as if electrocuted by the story.

“Something ravishes, the words go deep, those who read them do not forget them, indeed it is as if they rewrote them in relation to their own experience and emotional state”.

My name is Giovanni Colantuono from Nettuno, editor of the online site Baseballmania.

“Tommasini you’re the first one to tell baseball like this, there’s everything in your story, not just the batting, there’s all of us, our passions, the way we live life and sport, I can publish it, tell me about yourself, I want to know more, I’ll do a feature article on you, write others, let’s do a column dedicated to Giovanni Tommasini’s baseball stories, on the Little Unknowing of the Tomato baseball club.”

A few days after my debut as a writer, for the first time I was referred to as such.

What is going on, and how is my way of narrating my personal events re-enacted in a narrative so intimate that it elicits reactions in the reader that are also deeply personal, which are in the reading translated into a universal language, whereby the reader sees himself again, relives parts of himself and his own experience?

The first comments from readers arrived.

They would be of the same tenor as the comments of my first proofreader, once I had collected all the stories that in three months were written by me almost compulsively and which, within a few weeks of publication on the sites that requested them, would go on to form my first book.

I notice a common denominator.

My words excite, my description of the realities returned touch the emotional side, “the text possesses the quality proper to works of art, it excites” is how my text is commented on during editing.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw

I begin to wonder why this ‘effect’ as I think of my writing?

Why did I start writing, where did the urge come from, the need to express an experience of mine, what need moved my will, led me feverishly to the keyboard, as if there was nothing else to do.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.
Albert Camus

In THE ART OF BASEBALL, the proposal, the requirement, the starting point was:

The story of the experience of some fifteen children who, starting from the basement of a car park in the centre of spectacular Sanremo, at the ‘mercy’ of two passionate, visionary personalities, will live an ‘adult’ experience at a still tender age.

The need to emphasise the beauty and depth of an adventure that will change them forever and teach them the pleasure of doing something well, with passion, curiosity, without thinking about results, but only to be able to fully express themselves, get to know each other better, grow together.

The articulation of the broader concept of growing up having the good fortune to be involved in an adventure disproportionate to one’s age, and the great value of passion, curiosity, friendship, healthy craziness that will lead these children to live an experience that will give them an indelible formation and imprint for their entire lives.

The memory of those years, places, feelings experienced, contexts, humanity, lived will be the sub-concepts that allowed the articulation and restitution of the stories told in the tales that make up THE ART OF BASEBALL.

Among the stories, one in particular totally involved me and was written solely by involving my emotional being.

For some time now, the concept of ‘addiction’ had been reverberating in me, the memory of one of our teammates getting ‘pierced’, our living through this drama, not knowing what to do, hiding our suffering and love for our beloved teammate.

Linked to the concept of dependence was that of our helplessness, that of our being too small in the face of such a big issue, our emotions that we could not express, dominate, live.

Which exploded in our worst nightmares, fantasies, suffocated suffering.

It was all a mixture of these ‘themes’ and I could not understand how to describe, return all this humanity, so intensely felt by all in inaccessible depths.

I was in the supermarket queue and like a flash of lightning ripping through the sky and clouds the story came to me. All the concepts that had grown up until then only created unexploded ordnance in me.

It was shocking and in me it began to rain, thunder, hail.

Arriving home in a hurry, I stood at the keyboard weeping and in twenty minutes, as if overwhelmed by a real ‘storm’, I wrote the story….

Now in play.

I asked myself, what to do?

Enjoy this first unexpected, never planned, unthinkable until a few months before, book or try to write something else, and what?

And how?

Everyone asks me one thing. Write Cesare.

Your story with the autistic child you have lived with for fifteen years.

I decide to go ahead. To stay in the game.

The project of giving back my first experience as a home educator is born.

I begin to ask myself questions and catch a glimpse of the path already unconsciously taken in writing the stories of THE ART OF BASEBALL.

The first answer to be given.

In the future second book, I AM CESARE …., what is the ‘experience’ to be returned?

Thinking back to the good fortune of having experienced the relationship with Cesare, a child suffering from a severe form of autism, an urgent and pressing need arose in me to represent concepts deeply rooted in this extreme experience, well ingrained in me, but to be brought to the light of awareness.

The first step other than the first three pages…

Now I am beginning to plan the path, a method is emerging, making clear the starting points, the roots of the story, long before I get in touch with everything else, which is still unclear in me, but on this occasion I am beginning to ‘see’ in the slow construction of the book.

On this occasion there is no longer occasionality, but a real ‘constructive thought’.

An awareness.

Being a project and not an accident, I begin to truly understand whether it will be possible to put myself forward as a writer or leave it at that, considering it a fortunate experience, my narrative debut and nothing more.

Pinning down what I want to express regardless of the story I am going to give back.

Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.
Paul Klee

And here I am at the keyboard telling you about the beginning of my journey and why I call myself a writer.

And here I am at the keyboard telling you about the beginning of my journey and why I call myself a writer by chance.

In the next few articles, one by one, I will introduce you to all the books that grew out of those first three pages.

Because from that story born by chance, ten years later, this past August, my twelfth book came out…

Below is an introduction written by Antonella Giordano during an interview for the release of one of my books following those first three pages…

Giovanni Tommasini

He likes to describe himself as a ‘writer by chance’ Giovanni Tommasini, more precisely’Writer by chance’ since 2013. Surely he is not just any writer, judging by the resonance that all his books have achieved, whose narratives indiscriminately follow in the footsteps of social and civil themes, especially concerning the ‘building of a helping relationship’.

For Giovanni Tommasini, social commitment is not a casual mission. A native of Sanremese, born in 1966, after graduating in political science from the University of Genoa, he has dedicated his life to bringing help to society’s neediest contexts.

A registered professional educator and seminarian, initially working as a collaborator in neighbourhood family counselling centres as a home help, since 1994 he has been an educator in the day centres and family homes of the Genova Integrazione Cooperative, under the Anffas brand. His professional experiences gained in the field make him an authoritative voice for understanding the panorama of the ills that afflict the many social realities of our time.

In his seminars, he offers debates and workshops on autism, emotional writing, internet addiction, sports culture and the new generations. He is the author of several books, among which the essays “Dad will you connect me?”, “Virus is us”, “Emotions and words. Emotional Writing’.

No less important and intense are the fiction texts ‘The American Dream of the Tomato Baseball Club’ ‘The Musicality of Silence. Our autism and that of the world around us’, ‘A life without. A story of everyday resilience’, ‘The last letter to my first girlfriend’, ‘Beaten earth. Being alive and going down to the net, that’s happiness’.

In the summer of 2023, the latest publishing endeavours of this prolific author produced the books ‘Well-Tempered Panic’, ‘Cinema and Sport, 12 Unforgettable Films’ and ‘Opposite World’.

All of this prolific author’s publishing endeavours have been produced by him and published on Amazon.
Antonella Giordano.

Giovanni Tommasini Stories of life lived in a forgotten world where the only social platforms were the Other and reality.

Blog: here.

Amazon: link.

THE BOOKBINDER OF LOST STORIES

May 13, 2023 | BOOKS

The Bookbinder of Lost Stories is the book I read, again thanks to Monica.

Speaking of friendship, Sas Bellas Mariposas and Mamaglia are skilled fan of the author: Cristina Caboni, so maybe they would like to tell us something about her.

In the meantime I would like to chat more about how I especially liked the parts that describe the binding process in the early 19th century.

Nowadays how long does it take to create a book?
There are several 24-hour delivery options on the web.

And each time we find ourselves with the usual question: have we gained or lost?

Recently with my husband we have been looking for someone who was still in a profession related to the traditions of the past, but here in the area unfortunately we do not have old style jobs anymore.

It is very sad to be aware that the precious chain of passing on knowledge and teaching patience and time needed to acquire skills has been interrupted.

By interrupting the oral tradition, we will deprive ourselves of the privilege of being able to know stories because there will be no one left to tell them.

So I would very much like to take up the concept of “binding” lost stories to unite them and to keep them living with us.

I spent a lot of time listening to one of my grandmothers telling about her childhood in a peasant family, talking to me about a seemingly distant era, about an essential lifestyle, about objects that we will never use.

My other grandmother, had less life to live but equally her tales remain indelible to me, as well as the memory her rice-fields worker knees.

My great-grandfather, on the other hand, was a carter, and his traveling for work gave him the opportunity to meet and to marry my great-grandmother: German, in spite of the saying “wife and oxen in your own country …” jokes aside, theirs was a rather unconventional marriage considering historical period and social conditions.

But tell me please! I would love to “listen to you.”

If you have a craft to tell, if you want a story not to be lost, if you wish to pass on a tale, a thought, a concept, a proverb, an experience or even just a comment, I will be grateful and add it to the lost stories to be bound.

BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD

Sep 17, 2022 | BOOKS

Before the coffee gets cold is the first of Toshikazu Kawaguchi川口俊和 trilogy best sellers, we had already talked about it here.

While reading it, I also found a nice description about the now famous siphon coffee!

The author describes a depression coffee pot, however I don’t really like the word “depression” combined with the coffee pot, which instead represents a small happy moment.

In any case, the ritual is told like this:

Nagare poured hot water into a lower cruet, then brought it to a boil to allow it to rise through the siphon into the upper cruet, where he poured ground coffee, which was then filtered back into the lower cruet.

Coffee plays a very important role in the stories told in Before the coffee gets cold, stories touching deep inside.

If you had the chance to say something that you should have told or would have wanted to say, in a moment that has already fled away, however, what would it be?

I know, it’s getting very personal here, because these thoughts are generally dedicated to the affections.

Feel free to share whatever you want.

In the meantime, I would also propose a fantasy variant, somewhat keep calm style …

Such as pointing out to Michael Stipe that R.E.M.’s decision “to stop being a band” caused a loss for the music.

Or, still about Japan, asking Sofia Coppola if she foresaw how much Lost in Translation fans would not let the whispering “come between” them and the curiosity of discovering Bill Murray’s words in Scarlett Johansson‘s ear.

Or just thank Meryl Streep now and always for showing the world that true Beauty has no canons, and that producing King Kong should have presupposed knowledge of the important underlying message about who the real monsters are.

All this only ever before the coffee gets cold …

I must acknowledge the undoubtedly brilliant idea of the author, who among other things made an unusual choice for the context: in the book itself he tells us that

coffee arrived in Japan in the Edo period, towards the end of the 17th century. At first it did not satisfy Japanese taste buds, and it was certainly not considered a pleasant drink, but then again it was not surprising since it tasted like black, bitter water …