Origins of Fantasy

When he was seven or eight, to amuse himself and kill the boredom and the fear of animals and adults, he would spend hours drawing people, houses and maps, crouched at his father’s army surplus utility chest by u’focularu. He had learned to be thrifty with any available sheet of paper, plus he would pick up, even off the floor and by the piazza, any piece of blank or somehow usable paper. He did not dare ask his parents for an extra notebook. Spending for school supplies came at a designated moment, in September, when they’d buy him one pen, one pencil , three marbled notebooks, plus a reader and a general topics anthology – “u’sussidiariu.” And he loved u’sussidiario especially. It had lots of maps, graphs, sketches, headings in bland magentas or dull blues, and some black and white photographs .

Peter Carravetta is Alfonse M. D’Amato Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies, SUNY/Stony Brook