The bit about using Google Docs and sharing the link for people to watch is turning into something interesting.
So interesting, in fact, that I plan to do this at least three nights a week, starting this week.
Tomorrow.
No, OK, I know, I know… I’ll start tomorrow…
But I will. Continue reading
OK, this one is complicated, so we’ll have to be careful. It’s one of those rabbit hole things where you know where you start, and not where you are going to end up.
But let’s try.
And we’ll start from the bottom, and climb up the rabbit hole: our story sort of begins in 1950, when an 11-men gang of robbers hits the Brink Building in Boston, Mass. stealing 2.775 million dollars of the time (over 28 million at the current rate) – the largest robbery in American history.
Five years later, they made a movie based on the Brink Building Robbery – a noir called Six Bridges to Cross, featuring Tony Curtis (Clint Eastwood had auditioned for the part, but was rejected).
And three years after that, in Italy, a group of small-time criminals saw the Tony Curtis movie and thought… why not?
On the morning of the 27th of February 1958, seven men attacked a money transport in Via Osoppo, Milan.
They hit (literally, they crashed into it with a truck) the armored van and made good their escape with 500 million Lire (back then, the average monthly salary for a white collar job was 50.000 Lire).
The heist was carried out in full daylight, without shooting a single bullet and under the eyes of the people living on the street. Famously, while the guys were loading the loot on a car, a lady shouted from a window “Go get a job!”, to which one of the men replied “What do you think is this we’re doing?”
They were caught, and for six years their trial made the headlines. And when they were finally sentenced to jail, in 1964, the public was sort of let down: the guys were working class lowlifes, common people, and they had beat the system and stuck it to the Man. The money they had stolen belonged to a bank, and the crime elicited little sympathy: like Berthold Brecht wrote, if robbing a bank is a crime, then what is founding one?
The press had a field day, of course, and called the robbers The Academy of Crime and also I Sette Uomini d’Oro – the Seven Golden Men.
And this is where our story really begins. Continue reading
I’ve just finished translating The Last House in the Valley, the second story in my very loose and occasional Tales of the Frontier.
The first tale, if you remember, was posted last summer, and was called The Demoness with White Hair.
In that case, it was the development of a short piece I had written as a test for a publisher (they never called back).
In this case, it was a story I wrote in a few hours and then handed to my friend Hell for an editing, the lot online and live.
The story some wanker deleted, and wrote Sickening.
Now you might wonder, is it truly sickening? Continue reading
It’s September the 30th, and Karavansara has just topped 6000 views this month.
This is the highest number of views since we started, six years ago. It’s actually six times the number of views we had on our first month.
So, first of all, thank you for being my readers.
The average number of views per months has grown from 33 to over 200 over six years. This means that Karavansara is growing, but it is still a small blog, and that’s fine. But even keeping it small scale, there is room for improvements.
In the next months I’ll work to keep the numbers growing, of course, but without sacrificing the quality, if any, of my contents. I’d like of course Karavansara to be faster, better, stronger, and I’ll work on it – just as I’ll work to increase the number of my Patrons on Patreon, by improving the contents I’ll offer as rewards.
It’s going to be a busy autumn.
And I have a question for you, or two. Continue reading
Halloween is creeping closer, and it’s a good opportunity to roll out a few reviews of books I read over the last few months.
Like, for instance, William Meikle’s The Watchers trilogy.
Meikle is one of the most reliable authors in the supernatural horror/thriller genre, with a side of sword & sorcery, and one of the first writers I started reading when I got my Kindle reader.
William Meikle got some absolutely undeserved bad press last year, when a noted critic singled him out during a rant review of an anthology. It was unfair, wrong-headed and inelegant, but that’s critics for you, I guess.
For this writer, William Meikle is good.
Case in point, The Watchers, a work that dos not only underscore the skills and imagination of the author, but represent a perfect read for those who are tired of a certain type of horror and want to try something different. Continue reading
Karavansara 