Live Bait - Softcover

Fabio Genovesi is the author of three novels and is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and La Lettura, the literary supplement to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. He also writes for film and has contributed articles to Rolling Stone.
 
Michael F. Moore is a scholar of Italian literature. His previous translations include three novels by Erri De Luca and new trans-lations of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi and Agostino by Alberto Moravia. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.

Galileo was a moron because he said nature’s an open book, and the book’s written in the language of math. So in his opinion everything in the world and in life—all the people and trees and shells and starfish and seahorses and traffic lights and jellyfish—can be broken down into numbers and geometric figures. What a load of bullshit. If I said it, everyone would tell me to shut the fuck up, and they’d be right. Except Galileo said it so it must be true since he was a genius and lived in a time when everyone was a genius or an artist and didn’t waste time at the grocery store, the post office, or the corner bar... they were busy thinking up poems or paintings or, in this case important scientific laws.
 
Bullshit. In Galileo’s time they didn’t have bicycles. They didn’t have electricity, and when they had to go to the bathroom they’d use this nasty bucket and then dump it out the window into the street without even looking to see if anyone was walking by. They didn’t even know how to make ice—can you believe it!—and there used to be people who came down from the mountains selling snow, and people used to buy it!
 
And here we are acting like once upon a time everything was fantastic and deep and nowadays we’re just a bunch of morons...and it’s true, we are morons, except the way I see it we always have been morons, from the caveman days up to this afternoon, when Stefano and I are standing here by the ditch counting.
 
And if we want to compete to see who’s the biggest moron of all, then I’m about to become the world champion.