I hadn’t realized Mussolini was a school teacher. That might explain a particularly energetic pocket of what I’ve been fielding, of which there are not many. Varoufakis’s meteor career from academia to finance minister is another. Colau to mayor, but after five years, if I’m not mistaken, of hard-driving daily activism. Montessori is the main subject of the new number of Initiales whose launch I attended last night. It turns out she was pro-Duce until 1934 when he tried to impose uniforms on school children. She denied him and left Italy for Holland.
There was a Montessori in the school I went to though I didn’t myself attend. I had been to pre-school elsewhere. Something of the exploratory ethos of Montessori’s methods certainly had an effect on my kindergarten and perhaps even more strongly when it got down to serious first grade reading. Miss Bale was my teacher that year. Story time was always a highlight of the day. She was a great reader with a contagious weakness for Roald Dahl. We had these activity books called Programmed Readers that you worked through with a wax pencil you used to fill in answers to blanks on a plastic screen that you would wipe off with a towel after checking your answers and before turning to the next page and its activities. Each student went at their own pace. When you turned the book in to get the next one, Miss Bale would do a random check of a page or two to make sure you had learned. At some point of our progress, I got in a bit of a race with Fred Karem—who also happened to be the first person I knew to use a computer. I forget who made it first to Book 22, but I know that it and the following book (number 23, the last two in the series) were dedicated the first to Greek and the second to Roman gods and goddesses. They were pretty magical. Zeus Jupiter, Hermes Mercury, Aphrodite Venus…I was happy to get to know them.
Our school had a Montessori—I think both my sisters went—but we also had a « dress-up » day, Friday, when boys had to wear a coat and tie and girls had to wear a skirt or dress. Like most kids, I hated those days. It wasn’t until I started indulging fetish many years later that I was able to gather up and redeploy a lot of that pent-up energy into pleasure. I certainly could not have done so, or at least would never have done so as openly and extensively, were it not for my almost decade long analysis. Is it from or in spite of that corner of my topography that we arrived so confidently several different times at a « both », a « same » concerning myself? « Les pouvoirs révolutionnaires du même ». I wrote that in a grant proposal sometime way back. I have yet to get the money, but I do remember Laurie’s look away smile when somewhere in the depths of February 2016, she warned me to watch out for the tricks of the imaginary.