Mario Traverso alla carica di Isbuschenskij

Mario Traverso è morto il 4 gennaio 2011. Aveva 94 anni, era di Napoli e si era laureato nel 1939 in economia presso l’università di Bari. Durante la guerra servì come ufficiale nel Savoia cavalleria. Sulla stampa italiana nessuno s’è accorto della sua scomparsa, mentre sul londinese The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8334018/Mario-Traverso.html#) gli hanno dedicato mezza pagina, con tanto di foto. Facile capire i motivi del loro interesse: la sua storia bellica ricorda molto la celebre carica guidata da Lord Raglan a Balaclava, nel 1854, durante la guerra di Crimea.

Il momento decisivo della sua vita arrivò mentre stava in Russia, la sera del 23 agosto 1942. Delle staffette scorsero un gruppo di duemila soldati sovietici armati di mitragliatrici e di mortai che si stavano attestando sul fiume Don. Il comandante del Savoia cavalleria – forte di seicento cavalli proprio come la brigata leggera a Balaclava – era il conte Alessandro Bettoni. Un campione olimpico, vincitore di due medaglie d’oro e un personaggio pittoresco, ma gran signore, con tanto di monocolo. Ordinò di prender posizione difensiva e poi cenò con i suoi ufficiali, tirando fuori il servizio d’argento e indossando le uniformi di gala. Il mattino successivo ordinò ai suoi uomini di prepararsi ad attaccare. Gli ufficiali si annodarono al collo le sciarpe rosse e infilarono i guanti bianchi, prima di montare in groppa ai loro magnifici animali. Traverso comandava l’avanguardia in quella assolata piana coperta di girasoli che stava davanti a Isbuschenskij. Partirono al passo, poi al trotto e infine arrivò il comando: “Sguainare le sciabole. Attacco!”

Fu un’azione da manuale. Lo squadrone di Traverso, dopo aver passato la linea tenuta dai sovietici, tagliò a sinistra per prenderli da dietro, lanciando bombe a mano. Non appena completarono quella manovra, Bettoni scagliò il resto dei suoi cavalieri in avanti, in un attacco frontale che sgretolò la resistenza nemica: “Magnifico” mormorò un ufficiale tedesco “Noi queste cose non le sappiamo più fare!”
Un’esclamazione che ricorda un po’  quella del maresciallo francese Pierre Bosquet a Balaclava: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre!” Infatti quelle manovre non le sapevano fare perché non servivano più a nulla. Quella fu l’ultima vera carica di cavalleria che chiuse un ciclo lungo seimila anni.

Dopo la guerra, Mario Traverso si concentrò nel settore dei tessuti di moda, soprattutto nella maglieria, un settore che conosceva bene perché era stata l’attività dei suoi parenti materni. Divenne fornitore di ditte prestigiose, come Dior, Givenchy, Balenciaga e Balmain. Poi, fiutando l’aria negativa che tirava in Italia, si trasferì all’estero, come Guillet e lavorò come consulente nel settore delle fibre sintetiche per le maggiori ditte del mondo: negli Stati Uniti, in Gran Bretagna e in Australia, restando attivo sino al 2003. Tenne in casa per molti anni la bandiera di guerra del Savoia cavalleria, che aveva raccolto da un suo camerata caduto e poi la donò al museo del reggimento. Una loro delegazione era presente al funerale e quella bandiera l’avevano deposta sulla sua bara prima della messa.

 

Hiroshima 6 August 1945 – Nagasaki 9 August 1945

70 years ago Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by nuclear bombs. The first was working with Uranium and the second with Plutonium.  There  are still several  misconceptions surrounding that tragedy within a tragedy, false ideas which are still going around today. On the technical side those bombs marked the high point of the Manhattan project which had involved 200.00 people with an estimated investment of 2.5 billions USD.

No one knows exactly how many people died because of them. In Hiroshima alone perhaps 70.000 on the first day and 200.000 in the next five years.  The US was already pounding all the largest cities of Japan with conventional aerial bombings, but some of the American strategists thought that the campaign will lead to nothing, only indiscriminate killing of civilians, leaving the armament sector standing. One of the worst bombing was that of Tokyo of 14 August 1945 – mark this date, after the nuclear bombing! – which lasted 14 hours and involved 1.014 bombers unloading 60.000 tons of bombs on the Japanese capital. At the same time the Japanese radio was broadcasting the voice of the Japanese Emperor announcing their surrender. That was a sort of final and useless fireworks display to close the war. When all was over was Harry Truman who later promoted the idea that the war was ended by the atom bombs and that after all they saved lives by consuming lives..

It is true that the estimates for a land invasion – scheduled for the 1st of November 1945 – would have involved American casualties as high as 1 million. The battle of Okinawa of 21 June 1945 had ended with the loss of 12.000 Americans lives, a price too high to pay for the Americans. At that time the Japanese army still had 4 million soldiers able to fight and had hundreds of Kamikaze planes ready to be thrown into battle. This is the American version of the events, a recurring theme, repeated in documentaries, books, articles and films.

But is it really all true? Modern historiography seems to tell another story. The war for Japan was clearly directed by Tokyo but due to poor communications, fallen telephone lines, roads out of use, the enormity of the atomic bombing could not be appreciated in a matter of 2 days by the people who directed the war, first among them, Emperor Hiro Hito. It was in fact the Soviet declaration of war of the 8th of August was a stronger shock than the bombing of Hiroshima, the Russian intervention was the final sign that all was lost for the Japanese. It is interesting to note that in 1946 Albert Einstein said that in his opinion the atomic bombs had been used to quicken the end of the war before the attack by Stalin, which at that point was absolutely not welcome by the US and he also thought that with Roosevelt alive he would have never authorized the use of the bomb.

Japan for months had been desperately looking for a way out. The Japanese refusal to surrender did stem from the declaration by Roosevelt at Casablanca on January 1943 about a surrender ‘without conditions’ which went down well with his electorate at home but basically meant nothing. Such words surprised even Churchill when they were uttered and were soon picked up by the press. But Roosevelt did not mean it, at least not literally. Since mankind experienced warfare there had always been conditions, no matter how harsh they might have been. The meaning of Roosevelt words was that they were resolute to win at all cost. The problem was that he died soon after and his successor, Truman, was forced to take them literally.

For Japan it would have been enough an agreement leaving the Emperor on the chrysanthemum throne – as the United States finally conceded – and they would have raised the white flag. This opinion was shared by all the men in Truman’s team except one, the most powerful and influential one, Secretary of State James (Jimmy) Byrnes – a complex man who could be a perfect case-study for a psychoanalyst. Byrne was a man full of hate, unfulfilled ambitions, egotist, who despised Truman for having taken the position of President when he though he had already pocketed it.

It is an historical fact that Churchill, MacArthur, Leahy, Grew, Eisenhower, Stettinus, Nimitz, Stimson and many other were pressing Truman – since at least May 1945 – to include the ‘Emperor Clause’ in the peace feelers presented to the Japanese Government but because of the negative influence of Byrnes that was never done. Those men could see that the real enemy at that time was the URSS not the wretched Japanese army. Japan was destined to be their ally as they had been during WWI. But the irresolute Truman, unable to think differently than Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, he proposed a ultimatum to Japan on 26 July 1945 but again the ‘Emperor Clause’ was missing. The Japanese Government, after having discussed it, seeing that nothing knew was in it, refused to answer. Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki used a term that is still famous in diplomatic circles give a ‘mokusatu’ that means ‘answer with silence.’

General Eisenhower objected about using the bomb and he later wrote in his memoirs: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

President Truman’s Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy wrote: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…[I]n being the first to use we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

The famous hawk, Major General Curtis LeMay stated shortly after its use: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb…the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz stated publicly two months after Nagasaki that: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace…The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint.”

Adm. William F. Halsey also stated publicly: “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…[the scientist] had this toy and they wanted to try it out.”

We close here with the somber words of Willard H. Reeves, a chaplain in the American navy.

‘That evening we quietly met for dinner. We knew well before the launch of the bomb that the enemy was defeated and they were looking for peace. There was sadness lingering in the air at the though that Hiroshima had been destroyed for nothing. At the end an officer broke the silence: ‘Why?’ was all he could say…When I returned home, after the war and I was telling my story, people looked at me in bewilderment. They had all been convinced by the press and by the statements released by people in Government’s that the launch of the two bombs had been necessary to end the war.’

The truth is that the atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not shorten the war of a day.

 

 

Michael Sue. The Man in Blue.

Michael is well known in the denim world because he was and still is a trend-setter and, after so many years in the trade, his passion for indigo remains unabated. He has recently moved to China, a country he sees as the new frontier of fashion. Michael, during his long career, had been going through highs and lows – in the eighties he was living in a large villa on the peak going around in a vintage Vicarage remodelled Jaguar and he has wonderful stories to tell about that time. His enthusiasm for art, fashion and life is still contagious but it took me years to convince him to be interviewed. We meet in a small French bar in Hollywood Road, on Hong Kong island, where we have a long conversation.

 

Michael, where are you from?          

I was born in a small village in southern China, in 1948, near Guangzhou in Guangdong province. My father was a businessman who had spent more than 20 years away, opening a grocery business in British Guiana – today, independent Guyana – before I was born. He returned to China, after the Japanese war, to re-build our home. But our family moved to Hong Kong in 1950, and then back to British Guiana in 1952. My mother was a farmer and a simple housewife who took care of our family during my father’s frequent absences.

How was life in British Guiana?                                                                                                                                              

I was there from 1952 until 1962 and growing up as a child in British Guiana was a blast! There was much to explore in Georgetown – the capital City – and the virgin jungles which surrounded it. We were going fishing along the coast in the Atlantic Ocean, or in the Essequibo river, which is a tributary of the great Amazon. We were living immersed in that primitive nature, and we had no fears as children…only the desire to explore and seek adventure everywhere! Schooling was according to the British system, and very disciplined! We were taught Latin and the Scriptures from an early age when everything was ‘beaten’ into us, sometimes quite literally! Caning was the common way. Each wrong spelling was a ‘whack’ of the cane on our little hands! By the age of 13, I was already primed for writing the GCE ‘O’ Levels exam, at Oxford, England. Then all that Paradise came to an abrupt end in 1961: a civil war broke out in the Country between the East Indian population who supported Cheddi Jagan’s political party and the Black population who supported the Burnham party. Looting and burning was everywhere before Britain could dispatch troops from the UK to take back common all over the country! My family’s business was looted and I left with my mother to London, England, in 1962.

Quite a change for you!

Yes, indeed and then began ‘a decade’ of my life which most people only read about in magazines, but I guarantee they cannot even imagine half of those realities and experiences! That was the ‘swinging London’ years, the fabulous Sixties! Once a ‘Chinese Jungle Bunny’ I was suddenly transformed into a MOD (short form for modern, and indicating the unconventional way of dress in London: my note) there I was immersed deeply into the ‘youth movement’ and lifestyle which had revolutionized the World, and tore apart the old establishment! Old values were challenged or over-turned by this generation of youth…and by ‘fashion, music, sex and drugs’ those were the new religion! Everything moved super-fast. The schools were, well, ‘loads of fun’– to tell you the truth I was satisfied that I had already received some formal education beaten into my skull back in Guyana. Then in 1967 I enrolled into the London College of Fashion for a 3-year course in Men’s Fashion design and tailoring. I loved it so much that school that I pushed myself into completing the course in a hurry and took the City & Guilds exam after 2 years only. My tailoring teachers were all from Saville Row, and I was making Cashmere jackets to my liking! I started to work part-time at Stanley Adams boutique in King’s Road, and one shop next to Carnaby Street. Stanley became my mentor and he took me to visit the Sehm Trade Shows in Paris, as well as shops in all the best boutiques of St.Germain Des Pres area for learning about new trends and ideas. I remember MacKeen, Bob Shop, Daily Blue, Lothars, New Man, just to quote a few. Then, back in London I would design and cut our own styles exclusively for our boutiques. We were competing with the best shops of Carnaby St. in its heyday! The like of Lord John, John Stephens, Take 6 , Village Gate, Mr.Fish, Irvine Sellars and, mind you, they were the best clothing shops in the world. In 1971 I was offered a prime position by a wholesale Company called Just Jon in the Great Portland Street area to design Girl’s pants, jeans to sell to Top Shop and Miss Selfridge primarily. Every week we would take new offerings to them and solicit orders – for private labels – to be produced domestically and usually within 2 weeks!. The Company also had an import division which brought in tees and sweaters from Hong Kong. I met these suppliers and started to freelance designs and developed products from Hong Kong for clients I was in excellent terms with. Stirling Cooper, Simon Shirts, Chelsea Girl, Louis Caring – for Jump angora sweaters.

During one of my sales outings, I visited Marshall Lester who was not interested in “anything in my suitcase” but handed me a pair of “bleached indigo jeans” with hand-embroidery that his wife had picked up in St.Tropez. He told me that if I could “replicate” that “finish and look’ I can have the ‘biggest order of my life.’

I guess that that was the turning point in your life, which you mentioned to me before…

True, it was something unforgettable but also the beginning of formidable challenges because I could also ‘smell’ the potential of that product! After 4 poor attempts from Hong Kong, finally I personally ‘doctored’ an un-washed sample they had sent me – it had been bleached and scrubbed with pumice stone and then my wife embroidered it to perfection, looking very close to the original sample. I went to show it to Marshall the next day, and he fulfilled his promise. He wrote a P.O. to me for 750,000 units without pre-selling one single piece. I notified the Hong Kong office, and I was on a plane to Hong Kong 2 days later! That was my new beginning, because I would spend the following 18 years in Hong Kong!                                                                                                                                                                       

Michael, which year was that?                                                                                                                                               

It was 1972 when I landed into Hong Kong and where I had my first ‘sweatshop’ experience! My challenge was set on manufacturing 750,000 pcs of denim jeans for Marshall Lester with no supporting industrial set-up. During those years there were no ‘garment-washing’ facilities as yet, and our method was to ‘pre-wash’, bleach, and SUN-DRY the fabric on Diamond Hill using bamboo poles, following the same method for drying cotton yarns or other fabrics. If it rained we had no fabrics to cut! We had tried to dry the fabrics using machines but the effect was too flat and lacking the washing wrinkles we needed for our products. We were the ‘denim kings’ in Hong Kong back then and everyone wanted to replicate our process or make our productions. We decided to share our knowledge with a good friend, his name was Jimmy Yip who would go on to start the brand Faded Glory in the USA market and then the Bang Bang brand and shops in Hong Kong. I then became a partner in Skiva boutiques and factory in Hong Kong with Kamau Shiu until I teamed with a Canadian group – Brodkin Industries, and Carsilco – to establish the brand Freego for the American market. At that same time brands like Britannia, Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein jeans were born. And America was fast becoming the largest market in the world for all things related to Blue Jeans with names like Guess, Jag, Bum Equipment and hundreds of brands which then followed. In order to protect all of Freego’s R&D, I had established Keoma International offices, and as well opened several garment-making factories to do our productions (Three Dragons, Magnificent Garments Ltd, Bo Fully for garment-dye factory, all between 1980 and 1989. These were the Golden Years for the fashion industry in Hong Kong. After 2 serious health issues – once in Thailand during a vacation with my family, and once in Hong Kong – I decided to emigrate with my family to Toronto, Canada in 1989. A failed business venture there – the Canadian market was not ready – plus many years of consultancy work between Toronto, Montreal, and New York had become just “repetitive” work. I was itching to come back to Asia and China, and to find new challenges as well as continue my life’s work in fashion, look for fresh pastures and learning The China Market. I thought that the innovations never stop appearing. And each cycle is somehow fresh and different!

Which are you latest ventures in China?                                                                                                                        

The latest? Well, the launching of the brand ‘People in Blue’ (PIB) with our own retail shops in China. We started in 2013 and it had been an incredible ‘learning experience’ about people and diversity of a huge market. About the vastness of the China’s market as a whole…yet each province is like a Country in Europe, with different cultures and levels of worldly knowledge. Different tastes, body sizes, superstitions, all different! I would like to introduce another level of denim into China, and Europe will be my inspirations! Vivre le jean nouveau, un grand classique que l’on peut mettre à toutes les occasions! China is tired of the cheap & cheerful styles, or too much of the purist aspects ( which they don’t understand anyway!). This will be my new working program!

I say thank you to Michael, who is travelling back to Guangzhou but he promise that he will tell us more about his time in London and Hong Kong at the beginning of the denim industry. It is because of few pioneers like Michael that Hong Kong became the largest denim and blue jeans production centre of the world, at a time when China was still shut.

September, 1945. W. S. Churchill was on Como Lake.

Was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini shot on orders issued by Winston S. Churchill? Was Mussolini privy to secrets which could have damaged the reputation of the British statesman? Was Mussolini in possession of compromising documents which could have changed the common reading of Italy’s intervention into the war? Damning documents which had thus to be seized and destroyed?

Thousand of articles and books had been published in Italy – and new ones do appears every year – since the end of WWII trying to prove or disprove such assumptions, a thing which may surprise non Italian readers.

I have myself given a small contributionby publishing an historical novel in Italian in which a young and promising secret agent going by the name of James Bond is sent to Italy to meet Mussolini to get rid of the compromising papers and then kill il Duce. Mine is just a novel, mind you, but on writing and researching it I had strongly sided with the ‘believers’.

Benito Mussolini, during his last days on the Garda Lake, had indeed made claims of possessing some documents which could have been used to find an honourable way out of the war for Italy and he hinted several times with people around him, that he had a special channel with Churchill. However it is possible that he had made it up, transforming his delusion into a sort of ‘secret weapon’ desperate, as he was, to snatch an honourable way out of what appeared to him, since 1942, certain defeat.

Winston Churchill lost the election in 1945, contrary to all polls and expectation, and on July 26 , 1945, he resigned as Prime Minister. Then he decided to go to Italy to paint and relax. He went on Como Lake in North Italy, right were Benito Mussolini, 4 months before, was captured by communists partisans and where his luggage and all the documents he was carrying were stolen and then shot, in never-clarified circumstances.

We have an incomplete record of what Churchill did during his stay in Italy because he took with him his personal doctor, Lord Moran, who was keeping a diary which he  published 1966, after the death of his famous patient, and in spite of the furious opposition of his widow, Lady Clementine, who did not want her husband being  shown in all his human weaknesses. Finally, only parts of Lord Moran diaries were published, parts which were deemed to possess greater historical importance.

They left Northold airport on a Dakota plane and after 5 and half hours they landed in Milan and were promptly escorted by  Major Ogier of the  4th Hussars to Moltrasio, after Como, at Villa Donegani, just a few miles away from were Mussolini was arrested and mysteriously shot with his mistress, Clara Petacci. Donegani was an Italian industrialist who had been put in jail in San Vittore penitentiary at the end of the war, accused of having been close, perhaps too close, to Mussolini. It seems that Donegani saved his own skin because of Churchill’s intervention, who had him released from detention. Donegani’s name often surface in the documents’ trail left by Mussolini papers.

Most of the time Churchill remained occupied by reading minutes and copies of despatches he had carried with him – so Lord Moran tells us – having in mind to write down his memoirs. This is only a  partial truth because we know that he took away several boxes of secret documents from the War Ministry and gave them to a team of historians who wrote his 6 volumes historical opus. He did not write them but he got a Nobel Prize for it, while getting rich  in the process.

After two weeks in Moltrasio, Churchill and his entourage moved to Liguria and then Nice, in France, finally getting back to England. During his stay he did not only paint or went through his files but took long trips, by car, to nearby places. It appears that he even  visited the house of the director of a small bank in Dongo where the documents contained in Mussolini briefcase had been stored for a night, right inside their vault, put there temporarily by the same partisans who had arrested him. Such kind movements by Churchill did not go unnoticed in Italy and over the border: in fact a Swiss newspaper printed a cartoon showing Churchill sitting in front of the fire at Donagani’s villa, while throwing documents into the flames. The fact that he indeed moved around can be gleaned by watching paintings which Churchill published in a small volume entitled ‘Painting as a pastime’ published in 1948. They were probably completed during the following months after having sketched them in Italy.

 

Starting from the upper part, left:

September, 1945, lakeside scene, Lake Como

September, 1945 village near Lugano

September, 1945 church by Lake Como

September, 1945 the Mediterranean near Genoa

1945, Lake Lugano

Book Presentation on 30 July at the Dante Alighieri of Hong Kong. Leonardo Da Vinci.

A successful book presentation was held at Soc. Dante Alighieri of Hong Kong for my latest book: ‘Leonardo da Vinci: A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy’ Lascar, 2015.
Please see it at http://www.lascarpublishing.com/leonardo/
The presentation was then ended with a Q&A section and book signing.
(Here I am with the famous bass opera singer Dr. Derek Anthony)

Kevin Guffy. A Great American Artist Living in Hong Kong

Some say that Hong Kong is a cultural desert but perhaps we are blind and deaf and we don’t to see greatness where greatness is to be found. We line up to enter huge theatres with an horrible acoustics and expensive prices to listen to the likes of Elton John and Bocelli, just because they are famous and cool.

I was at the FCC with my wife, Donatella, last night and we went down to Bert’s to listen to Kevin Guffy: he had had started at 8 PM but at 10 PM there were several seats empty, because people had already left. Then the guitar and the voice of Kevin struck me, he was playing a soul-rock so well that I though it was someone’s else’s recording. But then I had to admit that it was all live and when one hour later it was time to close the performance I felt extremely sorry to see him go, because I had lost myself into his music. Kevin has the great American spirit in him: unaltered, untarnished. I stood up and I went to tell him what I had felt.

Back home I studied his website.

http://www.kevinguffy.com/

Kevin is from Portland, Oregona and had a guitar in his hands since when he was a kid. He began performing professionally at age 12 as a guitarist and violinist. He played with bassist John Mazzacco and with the great bassist Ben Wolfe, Diana Krall, Wynton Marsalis and Lester McFarland formerly with the band of Jeff Lorber and the Crusaders, Jim Pepper,  Jeff Lorber’s bassist Lester McFarland and Ben Wolfe just to quote a few.

We are lucky to have Kevin in Hong Kong, where he plays, teaches, writes his own songs and performs regularly in several locations. Hong Kong is a desert no more!

The Best 6 Books on Hong Kong

Here is my list. I know that some will disagree – but I am stopping at 6 to let you add 4 more. Perhaps it is too classic, but here they are, in order of subjective importance:

1. THE PAINTED VEIL by Somerset Maugham                                                                                  A novel published in 1925. The title comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet which begins “Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life”. Originally the main characters were called Lane not Fane but a couple of that name in Hong Kong successfully sued the magazine publishers of the initial serialised version for libel and won £250. To avoid similar problems after A. G. M. Fletcher, the then Assistant Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong, also threatened legal action, the name of the colony was changed to Tching-Yen. Later editions reverted to Hong Kong but the name Fane was kept for all editions.This novel was first serialised form in five issues of the Cosmopolitan (November 1924 – March 1925). William Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer.

2.

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY by John le Carré.                                                                   It is a spy novel published in 1977 by British author and former spy David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le Carré.

3. LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDOURED THING by Han Suyin.                                                    Set in 1949–50 Hong Kong, it tells the story of a married, but separated, American reporter Mark Elliot who falls in love with a Eurasian doctor Han Suyin originally from China only to encounter prejudice from her family and from Hong Kong society. Hán Sùyīn; 12 September 1916 or 1917 – 2 November 2012) was the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou (Chinese: 周光瑚; pinyin: Zhōu Guānghú). She was a China-born Eurasian, a physician, and author of books in English and French on modern China, novels set in East and Southeast Asia, and autobiographical memoirs which covered the span of modern China. She lived in Lausanne until her death.

4. HONG KONG HOLIDAY by Emily Hahn.                                                                                      It was published in 1946. Hahn (Chinese: 項美麗, January 14, 1905 – February 18, 1997) was an American journalist and author. Called “a forgotten American literary treasure” by The New Yorker Magazine, she was the author of 52 books and hundred of articles and stories. Her writings in the 20th century played a significant role in disclosing Asia to the West. Even this wonderful book set in Hong Kong during the Japanese the first part of the Japanese occupation has been forgotten and never reprinted since the first edition. Hahn was a bizarre caracter, an extremely beautiful and intelligent woman who kept two monkeys in her apartment in Conduit Road. Colonel Boxer, the british historian, abandoned his wife and daughter to marry her.

5. THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG By Richard Mason.                             This is a 1957 novel. The main characters are Robert Lomax, a young British artist living in Hong Kong, and Suzie Wong, the title character, a Chinese woman who works as a prostitute. Richard Mason (16 May 1919 – 13 October 1997) was a British novelist.

 

5. HONG KONG by Jan Morris, was first published in 1988.                     She was born James Humphrey Morris, on 2 October 1926 and she is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–78), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. She is a trans woman and was published under her birth name until 1972, when she transitioned from living as male to living as female.

Book on Leonardo Da Vinci Presented at the HK Medical Association

On the 23rd of July I presented my book ‘Leonardo Da Vinci. A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy’ Lascar’ Publishing, 2015 (http://www.lascarpublishing.com/leonardo/)  at the Hong Kong Chinese Medical Association’s[1] private room in Central. Chinese dinner will follow.

Date: July 23rd (Thursday)

Time: 18:30 to 21:30

Venue: The Hong Kong Medical Association, Private Room

Address: 2/F., Chinese Club Building, 21-22 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong

This presentation was reserved to a restricted group of executives and professors who are members of the ‘Executives’ Global Network (HK) Limited’ directed by Dr. John Wong, an international association dedicated to building business relationships and share knowledge.

[1] The Hong Kong Medical Association, formerly called the Hong Kong Chinese Medical Association, was founded in 1920 with the aims to maintain and improve standards of medical practice in Hong Kong, and to foster friendly relations both professionally and socially amongst all registered doctors in Hong Kong, irrespective of race, colour or creed.

 

Death of E. L. Doctorow, a master of historical fiction

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 — July 21, 2015) – a master of historical fiction – died at 84 in Manhattan of lung cancer complications, according to his son, Richard. His death is a great loss for the literary world.  He was born in the Bronx to parents of Russian descent who named him after Edgar Allan Poe.

“Actually, my father liked a lot of bad writers, but Poe was our greatest bad writer, so I take some consolation from that,” Mr. Doctorow said in 2008. “He died many years ago. My mother lived into her 90s, and I remember asking her in her old age — I finally dealt with the question of my name — “Do you and Dad know you named me after a drug-addicted?”

His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father, David, had a store for musical instruments in the old Hippodrome building in Midtown Manhattan; his mother, Rose, played the piano. Though the family struggled for money, Edgar had a childhood he later described as pleasant, with stoop ball games in the street, summers at camp, frequent trips to the theatre and the Museum of Modern Art and a general immersion in the perfervid atmosphere of intellect and culture that distinguished New York even more than it does today.

“As a boy I went matter of factly to plays, to concerts,” he recalled in a mid-1990s interview with The Kenyon Review. “And as I grew up I was a beneficiary of the incredible energies of European émigrés in every field — all those great minds hounded out of Europe by Hitler. They brought enormous sophistication to literary criticism, philosophy, science, music. I was very lucky to be a New Yorker.”

“The distinguished characteristic of E. L. Doctorow’s work is its double vision,” the critic Peter S. Prescott wrote in Newsweek in 1984. “In each of his books he experiments with the forms of fiction, working for effects that others haven’t already achieved; in each he develops a tone, a structure and a texture that he hasn’t used before. At the same time, he’s a deeply traditional writer, reworking American history, American literary archetypes, and even exhausted sub-literary genres. It’s an astonishing performance, really.”

Graduated with honours in 1952 and then went for a master at Columbia University, was then drafted into the United States Army. He served as a corporal in the signal corps in Germany 1954–55. He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company, where he later said to have read so many ‘Westerns’ scrips that he was inspired to write one which became his first novel, ‘Welcome to Hard Times’.

Doctorow spent nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand among others; from 1964, as editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, he published works by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy.

In 1969, Doctorow left publishing in order to write full time, accepting a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel (1971), a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Doctorow’s next book was Ragtime (1975). Loon Lake (1980); Then World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989); The Waterworks (1994); ; The March (2005); two books of short fiction, ‘Lives of the Poets I (1984); City of God (2000); Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993); Creationists (2006). Homer & Langley (2009); Andrew’s Brain (2014);

“The March” (2005) was Doctorow’s farthest reach back into history, and it expanded his geographical reach, populating the destructive and decisive Civil War campaign of General William T. Sherman — the capture of Atlanta – with a plethora of characters. Black and white, wealthy and wanting, military and civilian, sympathetic and repugnant, they are a veritable representation of the American people.

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‘Ci servono delle nuove caffettiere!’ dice mia moglie con tono prerentorio mentre passeggiamo per Verona. A me quelle vecchie, in puro alluminio, prodotte da un ditta artigiana di Baveno, sul Lago Maggiore, paiono buone abbastanza, ma quando la propria moglie raggiunge una conclusione tanto netta è bene non opporsi frontalmente e accettare subito di scambiare il vecchio con il nuovo. Entriamo alla Coin di Verona, sezione casa e ne usciamo con due piccole caffettiere. Una Alessi ultimo modello per 1 tazza e una Bialetti per 3 tazze. Il loro aspetto e le funzioni speciali ci hanno conquistato. La Alessi è il modello Ossiadiana disegnata da Mario Trimarchi, una linea creata imitando l’omonima scheggia di vetro vulcanico. La Bialetti invece possiede un chip elettronico nel coperchio che le permettere di suonare musica quando il caffè sale. La cassiera ci avverte subito di fare attenzione a non bagnare il chip, un eloquente segno che hanno già ricevuto delle lamentele.

Mettiamo le due caffettiere nel bagaglio e c’imbarchiamo per Hong Kong e, non appena rientarti in casa, corriamo a farci dei caffè per vincere il jet lag. Ma qui cominciano le dolenti note. O meglio di note la Bialetti non ne manda proprio: cambio la batteria, la muovo, ma non c’e’ nulla da fare. Resta muta! E questo non è tutto: il suo becco è stato chiaramente sotto-prorzionato rispetto al flusso e quindi, se non si è super attenti, il caffè scivola sul corpo della macchina e spilla sulla tovaglia. A me questo capita spesso, a prescindere – come direbbe Toto’ – ma che succeda pure a mia moglie dimostra che c’e’ davvero qualche cosa cdi strutturale, che non funziona.

Profondamente deluso mi butto sulla Alessi, ma anche qui abbiamo dei problemi: la caldaia per l’acqua è troppo capiente rispetto al contenitore superiore e dunque tende a tracimare. Insomma bisogna farsi un ristretto ogni volta, se non si vuole allagare il fornello!

Non posso fare a meno di pensare a quel che mi dicevano, con un sorriso derisorio, tanti anni fa degli amici tedeschi: ‘Roba italiana, bel design ma… es klappt nicht.’ Non funziona! E il pensare a questo mi fa arrabbiare. Mi chiedo se nelle due ditte sopra citate non abbiano un semplice artigiano – un Mr. Buonsenso – che sappia modificare e mitigare le creazioni dei propri artisti per rendere funzionali i prodotti?

Forse in Italia è davvero morto il buon senso, l’amore per quel che si produce, la voglia di far le cose per bene, per il puro piacere di farlo. Questo, in fondo, lo si capisce da certe piccole cose, anche da semplici machine per il caffè, che per essere prodotte non richiedono certo i calcoli d’un ingegnere della NASA. Forse il dio delle piccolo cose è morto?