The Vanishing Point of Heaven

Frequently Asked Questions

Babel: It’s like learning a new language.

Is towerofbabel.com a religious site?

Over the years Babel has been mistakenly assumed to be everything from a Christian site to a Satanic cult. Despite the Biblical domain name, Babel has no affiliation with any organized religion. Even though the story of the tower of Babel is in the Bible and although you may find content on the site having to do with any number of the world’s religions, and even though we respect an individual’s very private and personal quest for spirituality as well as the teachings of all of the prophets throughout history, Babel is merely using the historical legend of the tower of Babel as a paradigm with which to bring people together, regardless of their religious affiliation. We’re about consolidating languages and cultures, races, classes, genders, sexual orientations and ages. What Babel is NOT about is condoning any religion’s attempt to hide behind the word of “God” as an excuse to discriminate against other languages, cultures, races, classes, genders, sexual orientations and ages.

What is towerofbabel.com?

Babel is an attempt to rebuild the tower of Babel and thanks to the World Wide Web gather together the languages of the world.

Two years in the planning, a year in the building and officially online since March 4th, 1998 Babel was originally built on a 486 33 Mhz PC with a 28.8 modem using nothing but FrontPage, Photoshop and email.

What started out in 1995 as Uspan’s Circle of Critics film review website featuring the Frugal Critic, Papa Villone, Mr. Subliminal and the Roadside Movie Companion and was heralded by the Seattle Times as one of the Top 4 film review websites in the Seattle area soon evolved into Babel, the multilingual, multicultural online journal of arts and ideas.

All these years later Babel, global in its vision, progressive in its outlook, and diverse in its selection of content which is in-depth on both contemporary affairs and historical legends, has flourished into an open source community of writers, artists and translators examining multicultural ideas and literary criticism with content in dozens of languages. Topical yet ancient, inclusive yet independent, and with well-informed writers all over the world, in the eight years that Babel has been online hundreds of volunteers have offered their services to build Babel into one of the most provocative, intelligent, humanitarian exchanges in cyberspace, and since 2001 has been recognized by the United Nations as one of the seminal Social and Human Sciences Online Periodicals, as well as by such organizations as the World Policy Institute, the Monthly Review, Governing.com: The Resource of States and Localities, the Bellevue Literary Review, and the Midwest Book Review, with hundreds of volunteer translators translating the content of hundreds of contributors from all walks of life into their native languages.

Towerofbabel.com started in January 1996 as a spinoff of USPAN’s film review website Circle of Critics on Wolfenet’s servers in Seattle and then changed to Speakeasy’s servers across town in 1998 before switching to LRSE’s servers in Joliet, Illinois. The site is currently hosted by Dreamhost in Brea, California.

The root domain holds all of the content from the original site and there are 255 subdomains based on the two letter designations of languages with each subdomain configured with a MySQL database ready to install any of Dreamhost’s one-click installs.

The Babel Yahoo discussion group has over 350 members. Malcolm Lawrence, Founder/CEO and Editor-In-Chief of towerofbabel.com has over 20,000 direct connections on LinkedIn with a towerofbabel.com Group with over 1600 members and each month invites new members of that group to join the discussion list. He also has over 1600 friends on Facebook with over 800 members of the Babel Group there. Over 800 friends on TakingITGlobal and is currently the 80th most active user out of its 200,000 members. 300 friends on the InterNations site, and over 9000 friends on MySpace.

What was the Tower of Babel?

(Genesis 11:1-9, King James Version - 1611)

1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

2. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.

4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

5. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The story as found in Genesis 11:1-9 is of a time when the whole human race as a united humanity spoke the same language and formed one community. The supposed one language is also known as the Adamic language. Throughout history several authors have pointed out that some language was the original one and the rest were corruptions. This has been the case with Hebrew and with Basque.

This community settled in the land of Shinar, not far from the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq. Here they built a city and a tower of such materials as a great river-basin would afford and the genius of man could manufacture. (In Pieter Brueghel’s 16th century painting of the tower he set it in his native Belgium.) This was done to make a great center about which they might gather, and to obtain for themselves a name.

God came down to investigate the purpose of all this unusual enterprise. The self-confidence and unity of the people was prominent everywhere. Fearful that the accomplishment of this project might embolden them to still more independent movements, God said, “Let us go down, and there confound their language.” An angry and vengeful Old Testament God didn’t want everyone getting into heaven so he confounded the languages of those who were working at its building, so they were not able to understand each other and the project failed.

One language became many until confusion among the people reigned. Some say the Internet itself is the new tower of Babel. There is no implication that God directly destroyed the efforts of the builders; presumably, the building fell into disrepair.

Consequently they were scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth; “and they left off to build the city.” After that time, people moved away to different parts of Earth. The story is used to explain the existence of many different languages and races. The name of it was therefore called “Babel,” because there YHWH confounded the one language of Earth.

What does the word ‘Babel’ mean?

The noun derives from two roots: “bab” (”gate”) and “el” (”God”), “the gate to God”; but in the Hebrew language there is a similar word, “balal”, which means “confusion”. However as baa words are said by babies anyway (along with maa and paa words), this last ‘balal’ may be a coincidence.

The name “Babylon” is from Akkadian Bāb-ilu, which means, “Gate of God”. Its Hebrew version however, “Babel”, sounds similar to a word for “confusion”. This site has been identified with Babylon, but there are different hypotheses on its precise location.

There is a connection with Pentecost in Acts, in as much as there the Holy Spirit reverses the Babel process and enables people to speak languages they do not know.

It has become a potent symbol of overambitious projects destined to end in confusion. Images of unfinished buildings reaching towards the sky can be found in religious art.

What kind of content is featured in Babel?

Contributors may add any content having to do with the world of the arts and sciences and are encouraged to do so with the support of graduate programs of colleges and universities worldwide. We have everything from Wendy J. Rohrbacher’s Masters thesis from the University of Alaska Anchorage (Re)Invention And Contextualization In Contemporary Native American Fiction, to roundtable discussions on The New Man. What’s up with that? and The State Of Classical Music: A Prognosis For Its Future In The 21st Century featuring Hugh Downs, to a full series of feature articles on The Battle of Seattle…Not To Mention The Rest of The World: Everything you always wanted to know about the World Trade Organization, what the riots in Seattle were all about, and why it’s been the world’s best kept secret; to our Troubadours section filled with interviews with folk music performers by Ontario disc jockey Jan Vanderhorst.

Babel is primarily web-based?

Babel is an open source project with close to 300 voluntary translators in 75 languages (with over 1000 translators just waiting for funding (you can see the resumes of the translators who have already done work on the site right here); over 100 content contributors; 200 on the interactive mailing list; all of them arranged on a slashcode supported website designed to be a robust interactive threaded discussion forum.

What is the future of Babel as a website?

Whereas Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia being built by thousands of volunteers who can work directly on the site whenever they want thanks to the MediaWiki code on the site (as well as varying levels of security which gives some volunteers more access to do things than others), Babel is transitioning from being a slash blog into a slash wiki (once there is enough money to be able to afford a dedicated server which would be necessary for MediaWiki code because it would increase server demands dramatically) as an online academic journal dealing primarily with the arts but also every academic discipline there is.

For those who aren’t affiliated with an educational institution or already have their degrees, Babel provides an opportunity for worldwide exposure for their work as well as being translated into as many as 75 languages.

Rather than being an online university, Babel will instead be an opportunity for scholars from whichever institution they work with to share ideas (such as the short stories, essays, travelogues, masters or doctoral theses they’ve already written) and collaborate with each other without the political attitude of non-cooperation encouraged by major universities or publications. By triangulating Babel with a Management of Technology department which is comprised of a Business Department, Engineering Department and Information Management Department they will form the cone at the top of other liberal arts and science graduate programs which will be able to use the resources of Babel, with not just multicultural studies and languages departments but also integral pillars for the structure of the tower such as English, journalism, art, history, art history, architecture, web development and computer sciences departments as well as the imagineering fields, since they’d all be needed as resources for the full vision. Graduate programs initially sought will be:

Arts & Humanities

Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, French, German, Music, Philosophy, Spanish & Portuguese

Biological Sciences

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology; Ecology, Evolution, & Behavior; Molecular/General Genetics; Neurosciences; Engineering; Biomedical Engineering; Chemical Engineering; Civil Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Industrial Engineering; Materials Science; Mechanical Engineering

Physical Sciences & Mathematics

Astrophysics & Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Geosciences, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics/Biostatistics

Social & Behavioral Sciences

Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology

Using those pillars to rest Babel on and then approaching other non-traditional public liberal arts colleges all over the world seeing if they’d like to be a part of the Babel vision as well.

Does Babel offer internships?

The main idea as far as triangulating Babel with other liberal arts colleges is concerned, is by offering opportunities for internship programs via Babel to offer students practical experience in such fields as:

* Art
* History
* Art History
* Journalism
* Translation
* Proofreading
* Creative Writing
* Computer Science
* Web Development
* Multicultural Studies
* The Imagineering fields

Babel offers these internships both to help students prepare for a potential career and to apply and build upon skills learned in the classroom.

How does Babel work with colleges?

Projects are assigned by trilateral agreement between the student intern, the head of the particular department at the undergraduate or post-graduate student’s educational institution, and Babel. Upon completion of the project, the assignment is reviewed for accuracy by a faculty member of the department at the educational institution. The revised assignment is then returned to Babel.

What kind of non-profit business model is Babel using?

Structured as a non-profit organization and using the business model of the Green Bay Packers, yet also incorporating the bylaws of Wikipedia, everyone who volunteers to work on the site will have a chance to be a member of the site/company, as well as to have the chance to own stock in the site/company which will not pay dividends like the Green Bay Packers. Therefore everyone will literally be able to own part of Babel and ensure it’s prosperity. Volunteers can be stockholders but stockholders do not have to be volunteers.

Who’s behind Babel?

As a member of LinkedIn, I, Malcolm Lawrence, the Founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Babel since January 1996, currently have over 12,000 connections with over 1300 of them members in my towerofbabel.com Group and over 160 endorsements. There are currently 275 volunteer translators in 75 languages translating whichever content they wish of over a hundred contributors into their own native language, with another thousand resumes just waiting for funding. To ensure standards of excellence are maintained validation comes from professionals accredited as bachelors, masters or doctors in their language skills from universities, educational institutions and companies they’ve worked for all over the world. 37 Babel Regents guide the erection of the tower.

That’s a lot of people. Is there anybody else involved?

Another 200 people comprise the Babel mailing list which is inspired by that scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the elders sit around campfires passing down to others the information and wisdom of the books they’ve each memorized. Any subscriber to this list may discuss anything which deals with the world of arts and ideas, languages and linguistic issues, world affairs, or cultural trivia (because trivia is the molecular level of history). Any member may post in any language. Updates of when new content and new translations are posted on the site are also sent to the list.

Is it true there are posts about everything from George W. Bush to women pirates and from paleontology to astronomy?

To get an idea of the things discussed on the list, click here for the archives. One of the Arabic translators, 50something Neal Robbins who lives in Arkansas, served in the US Air Force and was stationed in Turkey for a year where he learned Turkish and used his Arabic language skills learned in college, sends posts to the list on a regular basis dealing with everything from ancient philosophers and paleontology to ancient Middle Eastern, Far Eastern and European history.

Do you have a PowerPoint presentation I could watch?

Yes, we do. A PowerPoint video inspired by the work of David Byrne and Michel Gondry. Don’t forget to turn your speakers up.

For the Arabic version click here

For the Basque version click here

For the Cebuano version click here

For the Croatian version click here

For the English version click here

For the Esperanto version click here

For the French version click here

For the German version click here

For the Greek version click here

For the Hebrew version click here

For the Hungarian version click here

For the Indonesian version click here

For the Portuguese version click here

For the Argentinean Spanish version click here

For the Guatemalan Spanish version click here

For the Mexican Spanish version click here

For the Vietnamese version click here

Where is Babel physically located?

Babel World Headquarters is currently located in Bellevue, Washington with eventual plans for the offices of the company to be built in a full-scale erection of the tower of Babel in the Brueghel painting which will house a printing/publishing/production setup. The Imagineering page tells the rest of the details of the building.

A full scale replica of the Tower? As part of a theme park, too?

Imagine turning the legendary Bruegel painting of the tower of Babel into a three dimensional reality as the focus of a non-profit multilingual, multicultural theme park dedicated to the riches of culture and the world of arts and ideas. A theme park for the rest of us. Like a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground. Taking the basic passion behind an idea like the Experience Music Project in Seattle and Frank Gehry’s structure for it but broadening the scope so it’s not so narrowly focused on just rock and roll. I mean, if there is serious money devoted to things like the Dracula theme park in Romania and the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando….

Imagine a year round arts festival with a building of the Tower of Babel in, say, Magnuson Park in Seattle, near the Soundgarden sculpture, with an outdoor stage near the waterline. A skate park. A cybercafe in the middle of a huge new and used bookstore ala Powells in Portland, with a huge bulletin board where people could leave their contact information all divided up into sections of the world. A theatre for plays and a theatre for films, different double features every night. Independently run pubs and restaurants from all over, Italian, Greek, Thai, Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese etc. Literary readings and a set of brick catacombs (like Fellini’s in Utrecht) where you can see rock bands, jazz, alternative country, classical… Floodlit at night like the Colosseum in Rome. Be able to rappel up one side of the Tower. A language school for all of the world’s languages and a press for multilingual books. The Green Tortoise would have a stop there.

In the early 90s Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel started talking about a theme park they were all going to make but they never said much more about it and I haven’t a clue whatever happened to the idea. But I was enchanted just thinking of the possibilities of the theme park those three would have dreamed up. The tower of Babel theme park will be as imaginative, challenging, interesting and dynamic a project as the one they first envisioned.

Publishing the online journal in print, translated into all of the world’s languages, with original works of fiction, travel writing and cultural writings from inside of the three dimensional tower of Babel which is not only a festival theme park for the rest of us, but a place where you can get fully accredited college credit for work done for the tower, in coordination with other colleges and universities across the planet is the main goal of Towerofbabel.com

This tower is a work in progress. More details will be explained soon.

Thank you all, for your time, work, patience and any donations you may be able to give to Towerofbabel.com.

Malcolm Lawrence
Editor-in-Chief
Babel: The multilingual, multicultural
online journal and community of arts and ideas.
http://www.towerofbabel.com
————————————————————
Babel: There’s a heaven above you, baby.
———————————————————

I spent three weeks in Rome over New Years Eve 2000 visiting old college friends who had moved there in January 1999. It ended up being a Babel summit meeting or reunion of sorts. These are the notes I took:

Yves, his wife Sienna and their son Marcel had moved to Rome in January 1999. A week before I arrived (on the 27th of December), Andrew arrived in Rome from Vienna to spend the holidays with Yves and Sienna. Andrew quit his job temping at a law firm in downtown Seattle in September and flew to Vladivostock with his father and they then took the Trans Siberian to Moscow and then after his father flew home a month later, Andrew kept traveling on through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Warsaw, Budapest and Vienna before getting to Rome for the holidays. He met a woman in Moscow through a Russian personals site before he left Seattle and ended up getting engaged to her when he was in Moscow. The wedding will be sometime this year in Moscow and after they honeymoon in Spain she’ll accompany him to Seattle.

A few days after I arrived in Rome, Bryan joined us after spending a few months in Galway and a couple of weeks in Normandy.

A couple of weeks after New Years Andrew and Bryan rented a car and drove over to the Adriatic coast of Italy before taking a ferry to Croatia and then on to Bosnia and Prague.

Yves’s wife Sienna Reid is a portrait painter (she’s been working with nudes for years now and is going to have her first gallery show in Rome in the spring. She’s been hanging out in Rome with an art critic for the New York Times. I’ve had a profile/interview and online gallery walk of quite a few of her nudes on the Babel site for over a year now.), and their 8 year old son Marcel(lo) who is already correcting his parents Italian and who was also born on Valentines Day, like me.

Yves is now a tech writer for the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization which is a branch of the United Nations) and plays in a band called The Station Masters (Capo Stazione) with three other Romans; the 21 year old early Genesis fan Gionluca on bass; 30 year old Lou Reed aficionado Alessandro on drums; and 33 year old Bruno on lead guitar and harmonica who is totally blazing and a huge Sonic Youth fan.

I got to watch them rehearse three times in Gionlucas folks garage since they had no gigs while I was there, but they were just interviewed on Italian TV last week. They also have some MP3s out. They’re incredible, they drift in and out of perfection all the time. Just at that point where they’ve been playing long enough so they now know what everyone can do. One of the nights I watched them practice was right after spending the day at St. Peter’s basilica and the Vatican museums. I thought that was a nice way to encompass the past, the present and the future all in one day.

For New Years Eve itself Yves and Sienna had a dinner party in their flat where there were 12 of us (Yves, Sienna, Elizabeth, Andrew, Bryan, Anny, Bruno, Gionluca, Alessandro, Marizia, Raniero and I), but we were enjoying ourselves so much (blasting Prince’s 1999 with Bruno cavorting around with Sienna’s blue fun fur and Yves wrapping a red feather boa around his neck) that we didn’t actually leave the apartment until about 11:30! We were going to head over to Piazza Venezia, which is the Roman equivalent of Times Square which usually is a nice long walk. So we walked to the Colosseum and got there in about ten minutes and then joined the flow of other party revelers and jogged and then ended up running to Piazza Venezia and got to the square itself and finally saw the readerboard countdown right when it was at forty seconds to midnight! Phew! Just by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins.

It was INSANE, THOUSANDS of people, EVERYONE with a champagne bottle. Fireworks going off everywhere. According to some friends of friends of Bruno’s there was a party across the river, towards the Vatican, so we all held hands and arms to create a serpentine so we could get across the square without losing anyone, and if anyone did get lost Yves had on the red feather boa still which ended up being the navigational stroke of genius of the night.

After we managed to trample across the piazza with broken bottles EVERYWHERE we stopped by a carousel that played The Blue Danube over and over and over and climbed aboard for a few spins while Bruno’s friends went to meet up with some other friends of theirs who returned a half an hour later and we continued our trek to the party.

At this point Elizabeth was starting to silently fume because no one had told her that we were going to be walking so far that night. Unfortunately Elizabeth (who looks not unlike Bettie Page) was wearing a very elegant Chinese dress with the absolute last shoes you would want to be wearing if you were going to be walking clear across Rome on New Years Eve. It got to be so bad that she ended up being practically held up by Yves and I on the way to the party. By the time we finally did get to the party she had to stop and sit down on the pavement in front of the building for about fifteen minutes just to keep her composure.

We finally went up the few flights into the party and the apartment was beautiful. Six or seven bedrooms, a gigantic library with books all the way from the floor to the sixteen foot high ceilings, gorgeous furniture and a DJ keeping the party lively with a couple of cd walkmen hooked up to the living room sound system. As you danced you could even look out of one of the open windows and see the cupola of St. Peters basilica not more than half a mile away. We danced and ate and drank until dawn when suddenly there appeared a man playing the Irish bagpipes and a young woman playing a bodhrain accompanying him as she sang what Maria Lamkin explained to me weeks later is an old Roman tradition, when the gypsies would come into town and tell the tales of yore.

At six in the morning we all decided that it was about time to go home so we bid farewell to the host, Massimo, who, like Sienna, is also a painter, so we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and headed out into the first day of the new century.

No one really knows why we left at six rather than waiting until seven which is when the subway would have been running again, but off we hoofed it anyway and it didn’t take too long belong Elizabeth was sore again because of her wrong shoes, so Yves and I took turns holding her up as we all walked back to San Quintino. We got a good deal of the way home before Elizabeth just couldn’t take it anymore, so the rest of them walked back and I waited with Elizabeth for three quarters of an hour until Yves returned with the motorino, still with the red feather boa around his neck!

When Yves showed up we all three managed to perch ourselves on his Vespa and slowly but surely got back into traffic, and we were oh so close to home when who should come up behind us blowing their horn but the Carabinieri, the military police. So Yves pulls over to the side off the road and one of the officers asks him “Where are you from?”

Yves replies: “America.”

The carabinieri asks “Her?”

Again, Yves said “America.”

“Him?”

“America.”

The carabinieri looks down and says “I know what happens in America and if you tried to get away with this in America they would mess you up. What do you think this is? That you can do anything because its the new millennium? If one of you get off the motorino right now nothing will happen to you.”

“Hey Malcs, get off.”

“And if he gets back on up the road a ways then you all will be in trouble. Got that?”

So as Yves and Elizabeth started off home, I did too, but on foot. I didn’t care, though. It was only a 15 or twenty minute walk and I remembered that I had to get some cigarettes on the way home anyway, and what with all of the night in my system still I sure was feeling fine, especially since it was the first morning of the new century and it was a clear, fresh and sunny morning at that.

I hadn’t walked more than five minutes before who do I see bombing down the other side of the street but Yves, still with the red feather boa on, saying “Malcs, wait right there” while he turned around and came to pick me up.

By the time we got back to his apartment everyone else had gone to bed except for Bruno and Anny, and now Yves and I, so we stayed up another hour or two talking.

New Years 2000 in Rome was my best New Years ever. I even got to walk through the Jubilee holy door at St. Peters. I really didn’t think the Sistine Chapel was that big. And that ceiling is not to be believed. Almost makes you wish that they had a scaffolding set up so you could climb up and get closer to it because its so much farther away than what youre used to in all of the art books. The guards all jump anytime anyone tries to use a flash. But the restoration is absolutely amazing. So clear, so colorful, such visual acuity. Beautiful. (All over Rome there was proof that they must have just taken the scaffoldings off everything. Elizabeth, (Sienna’s 18 year old second cousin from Port Townsend who is staying with them for convenience, especially since 8 year old Marcel(lo) needs a baby sitter sometimes. She also shares Yves birthday of August 2nd), told me that only a couple of weeks before I got there the Trevi Fountain had been covered up. I’ve seen many films that show the Trevi Fountain and there is no way that you can get an idea of just how large and impressive it is until you’re actually there. Its the back end of a large building that is the end of an aqueduct and its magnificent. The horses are gigantic, as are the statues. Such gleaming white, now, too. And the thing is, there are no good camera angles because there’s not much room in front of it because its right by other city blocks, which explains why no matter how hard photographers and film makers have tried, it just doesn’t seem to work.

Getting back to the Vatican Museums though, I must say the Raphael rooms were my favorite. The entire rooms are frescos. The entire rooms. All the way down to the floor molding. Wow. And the colors, again, are just so rich. You could spend years in the Vatican Museums.

As I already knew Id be going back to Rome again I didn’t try to see everything in the mere few weeks I was there. (I also didn’t feel rushed to get out of Rome and go to Florence, Venice, Naples or Sicily because with all that I know about Florence (alone) I could easily spend three full weeks there, and the thought of just spending a couple or a few days in Florence or Venice (on my own, to boot) just didn’t sound very appealing to me. Especially because you can spend forever in Rome (much like London) and not even realize you haven’t left the place.)

I thought about going back again a day or two later to the Vatican but it was just before my last weekend and I didn’t get to go back. Its very strange realizing that Vatican City is only a hundred acres or so and only has a thousand people living there. It makes you turn to the dictionary to actually look up what the definition of country really is. Then, of course, you realize that Mussolini separated Rome from it in 1929 in a Fascistic attempt to dilute the church’s reign over Italy. Its so funny seeing the Swiss Guard in their little courtier uniforms, the same ones they’ve been wearing for 400 years.

I also got to meet two of Babel’s Italian translators when I was there. Maria Lamkin has been sending in bimonthly reports for the last year about what are the upcoming art exhibits all around Italy. She’s also written pieces about what the Italian traditions are for Natale, Capodanno and Befani (Christmas, New Years and Epiphany). Maria came up from Gaeta to visit with us once and Anny Ballardini came down from Bolzano for Capodanno. Anny is responsible for most, if not all, of the Italian translations on the site, including all of the Gallery section. She translated my entire first novel, Estrelica & Vic, into Italian for me last summer, bless her heart, after reading it and falling in love with it. Only took her three months, too. She’s also almost finished translating Yves’ short stories into Italian so he can try to get a publisher in Rome lined up. She’s also managed to get a woman in charge of the Southern Tyrolian Province interested in funding Babel.

I also met a friend of Sienna’s named Ilaria (the Italian version of Hillary) who was having her own gallery show in Rome when I was there and managed to get Sienna introduced to the person who secured her own show. Ilaria is having a gallery show in Frankfurt right now and once she returns I’m going to start getting some of her scans up on Babel.

Suffice it to say that I fell in love with Rome. It happened pretty quickly too. I knew as much when I suddenly felt as if I had no pressure to see as many things as I possibly could in as short a time as possible. I knew I would be going back so I was able to appreciate the city in a completely different way. And what with being able to stay with friends who live there who have been there long enough to have their own Roman friends, I got taken to all sorts of obscure restaurants with great food at amazing prices that are far from the beaten path, as well as some pretty hip clubs and discos none of the tourists would know about. It reminds me of London is so many ways that I think I fell in love with it in the same way that I fell in love with London. There just must be something about cities that are older than the hills that really appeals to me.

The traffic in Italy is not to be believed. I think the penalty for road rage offenders in this country should be to banish them to Rome. The roundabouts in Rome make the ones in London seem polite. Its a free for all. There’s a very complicated system of reading the eyes and gestures of the other drivers and pedestrians. You jockey at red lights like its time for pole position at NASCAR. Its insane.

Well, that’s how the Babel founders ushered in the new century. Andrew just got back to Seattle last week, in fact he called me today and I’m going to be meeting him tomorrow. Bryan came back to Seattle briefly to do his taxes and regroup for a month but he’s back in France now hoping to work on an organic farm for the spring and summer. Yves is, naturally, in Rome still.