Andy Merrifield, John Berger and Gramsci in Rome

I’m sitting at the bar of Blackmarket Hall in Rome, a trendy food and drink hang out not far from my new home in Monti. It’s Friday night and the joint is heaving. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and a whole world spins around in my head. I’m conscious that I’ve been inactive for a few months now, feeling exhausted, a bit overwhelmed by the practical chores my recent move necessitated. My brain felt dead. Yet sitting here, amid a crowded scene of noisy, young revelers, listening to seventies funk music boom out, tunes I remember first-time around, I knew I had to try to do something creative again soon.

The feeling–a kind of urgency of the moment–was prompted by what I was reading. I had with me a copy of John Berger’s book of essays, The White Bird, from the mid-1980s, taking it along to offset my aloneness. A book is always a good cover for the solitary person in public, an effective disguise. I was in awe at how good these pieces were. White Bird’s most famous essay is “The Moment of Cubism”; but tonight, I guess I was having my “Moment of John Berger.” I remember John once telling me–or else I’d read it somewhere–that he’d hated White Bird; when it first appeared, in disgust, he threw it across the room, launched it like a missile. He never thought it any good. My God, what could he have been thinking? Was he talking about its form or content? Its content, after all, while previously published material, is as brilliant as I recall, maybe even better now than upon my first reading decades ago. [continues here]