Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Page A

Times Square), a kind of electronic shooting gallery. In short, our Americanized Italy is more like provincial, working-class America. In the toilet I think I’ve come across the first piece of obscene graffiti I’ve seen in America, but it’s not: it is a rant against the blacks, though in pessimistic vein (kick out the blacks then who’ll be the bosses? The Cucarachas). The bar is frequented by poor whites from the South who emigrated here to work in the factories.
    In Detroit I went into dodgy billiard-halls with gamblers at a table playing poker and eyeing up any strangers in case they are police. Small-time, unsuccessful gangster atmosphere like a Nelson Algren book (who I would have liked to be my guide in his home-town of Chicago, but we missed each other because in the days I was there he was not around, so I never got to see Chicago’s gangland).
    TV Dinners
    One also appreciates consumer culture better in the provinces, visiting the big Sears shops which are to be found in every town, and which sell everything, even Lambrettas (which cost more than cars) and motor-boats (in the lakeside towns now is the season when they launch the new motor-boat models for the summer). Sears were famous for their catalogue which allowed even the remotest farmers, in the days when communications were difficult, to shop by mail-order. In the supermarkets the most sensational novelty is the TV dinner: trays which hold a complete dinner, ready to eat, for those who are watching TV and who don’t want to interrupt their viewing for even ten minutes to prepare some food. There is a huge variety of TV dinners, each one with a colour photograph of the contents on the wrapper; you just have to take it out of the fridge and eat without needing to take your eyes from the screen.
    At the Israeli Temple
    Herb Gold gives a lecture on hipsters and beatniks in the temple at Cleveland Heights. It is his father who is really keen on it, because this is his son’s debut as a cultural personality in his native town, and it is also an acknowledgment of his own prestige: in the last few years Samuel Gold has become one of the leading lights of his church. The temple is not one of the twelve orthodox synagogues of Cleveland Heights, nor one of the temples of the reformed branch (a kind of Jewish Protestantism, with a very simple rite, adopted in order to reconcile Judaism with the American way of life), but it belongs to the ‘conservative’ cult, which is a halfway house between the two, retaining some of the formal aspects of the rite with an impressive, almost Jesuit openness towards other mixes. I accompany the jubilant Gold family to the service and even their most sceptical sons enjoy their parents’ satisfaction. I put on the little black cap, like all the faithful. There is a wonderful singer, both in terms of his voice and his solemnity of performance. He is accompanied by the organ, an innovation contrary to orthodoxy. The rabbi (no beard, a very open face) reads verses of the psalms and the congregation chant other verses in reply, reading from their little books, and I join in. Among the hymns in the little book there is also ‘God Bless America’, the famous patriotic anthem. The American flag stands on one side of the altar, as in all American churches, of any persuasion (here on the other side stands the flag of Israel). On the dais there are also young boys with sacred vestments and girls dressed in their best clothes who alternate with the rabbi and the cantor in reading the psalms. Halfway through the service, the rabbi commemorates those in the community who have died this week, including the journalist Spencer Irwin, and then announces Herb’s lecture. In order to give it a religious air, the conference had been advertised with the title ‘Hipsters, Beatniks and Faith’, but Herb does not mention faith, instead he says that the lack of revolutionary political ideals has led to the beatnik ideal of keeping cool, of