Get rhythm when you get the blues. So sings Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) in the movie Walk the Line. I know, it came out years ago, but I saw it for the first time only recently on Sky Italy. Fortunately, they don’t dub the music in Italian versions of foreign films, so I was able to hear Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon singing their own versions of Cash and June Carter. By some quirk of TV programming Walk the Line turned out to be the first of several movies about musicians – singers mostly – which various Sky channels have shown recently and which, taken together, are a wonderful tribute to American popular music. The others? Not sure I have their titles straight, but Hallie Barry playing Dorothy Dandridge, Gwyneth Paltrow playing a fictional (I think) country singer, and several unknown to me really good African American and white actors playing in the story of Chess Records (Cadillac Records), featuring Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Chuck Berry and more. [The founder of Chess records is one of those white guys who crossed the color line in the 50s and 60s to bring black music out of its ghetto. Another was the recently deceased Porky Chedwick of WAMO radio in Pittsburgh.]

Some highlights from the films: Dorothy Dandridge hiding under the piano at a Hollywood party with Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner, her colleagues and apparently friends, who are still remembered and revered while Dandridge is all but forgotten.  Beyonce belting out her exquisite version of Edda James, tears streaming down her cheeks. Paltrow showing some remarkable vocal talent and unsuspected (by me) raw sexuality as she sings and moves to “Shake That Thing.” June Carter throwing her can of orange soda at Johnny and the drunken boys in in the band as she reads them out for their unprofessional behavior. And the one that I keep coming back to whenever nobody can hear me – Carter (Witherspoon) and Cash (Phoenix) doing a bang up job on “Jackson”:

We got married in a fever

Hotter than a pepper sprout

We been talking about Jackson

Ever since the fire went out

For all the things one could say about these movies and the music that runs through them, only two are important to me right now. The singers portrayed in these films and the actors who play them are shining examples of amazing talent, which, despite so many obstacles and so much misfortune, brought joy to millions of people. And the music they wrote and performed is a fantastic human resource for the rest of us. Get rhythm when you get the blues!

Numbers can be deceptive and they are always subject to manipulation, but they do tell you something. And these days Italy’s numbers indicate that the country is not only broke, with a national debt over 130% of its GDP, but that it’s broken.

• Unemployment among “young people” age 15-25 is over 40%
• Over half of the corruption in the 27 member European Union happens in Italy
• 180 billion euros of tax evasion annually
• 32 tax amnesties in 34 years
• 808 billion euros in hidden income have been discovered but only 69 billion have been recovered
  

And of course there are facts more significant than numbers. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax evasion on August 1, 2013. Now almost seven months later, the sentence of 1 year of “socially useful work” has still not been executed. Last week, when the President of the Republic held consultations with leaders of political parties concerning the formation of a new executive, the second largest party was represented by Silvio Berlusconi, a convicted criminal.

But let’s get back to some numbers that are not directly related to the economy.

Over the last three years, there has been one murder every 2-3 days of a woman killed by a man, usually a man with whom she has had an intimate or family relationship.

At a time when innovation is the buzz word on everybody’s lips, Italy is losing 9,000 university graduates annually to emigration and thousands of small businesses close each year.

Through the early 1990s, voter turnout in Italian elections was well over 80%. In Sunday’s regional elections in Sardegna, turnout was about 40% and national polls show upwards of 40% of respondents planning not to vote in the next parliamentary elections.

Public services are running on empty, literally. Trials are frequently delayed because vans transporting imprisoned defendants don’t have enough gas to make it to the courthouse. School teachers can’t make photocopies and have to supply their own chalk. Parents supply the toilet paper for the school bathrooms.

Italy has been sliding downward for a while. It has now gone ten years with virtually zero economic growth. This is not the kind of situation that lends itself to quick solutions such as changing the prime minister. What’s needed is leadership in all sectors of society but the numbers do not indicate that leadership is something Italians can count on.

I intended to post something long before this but I’ve been caught up in a long and complex transition. On December 10th I taught my last classes at Rutgers and my wonderful semester at the state university of New Jersey came to an end, just as we were beginning to learn about Chris Christie’s efforts to turn the GW Bridge into the bridge to nowhere (Pittsburghers will recall the real bridge to nowhere). Then on December 18 I got off the plane in Rome and hit the ground running into the last month of moving prep, which offered the added pleasure of trying to codgel, persuade and bludgeon plumbers, electricians, painters and carpenters into finishing the “ristrutturazione” of our new dwelling. Under the Tuscan Sun be damned, artisans are the same the world over, and they never answer their cell phones.

In any event, the transition has now unfolded into its final phases. We slept in the new place on January 16 and our furniture joined us on the 17th. Now it’s just us and 200 boxes ready to be emptied and fond memories of George Carlin ranting about “stuff.”

So this transition will soon be over. But it has offered the occasion to realize that our moving into this house is also a moving into the final phase of a bigger transition. As two great friends are fond of saying, “life is lived in the transition.” A helpful piece of wisdom that can be taken one step further: life itself is a transition. From what to what has certainly been the object of a lot of speculation but I don’t think anyone really knows. The only sure thing is that all the translations we live through are followed by other transitions which we hope to live through. Eventually we won’t and in the meantime all we can do is hope that the pleasant transitions, like my semester at Rutgers, last longer than the unpleasant ones.

Walking back to my apartment here from the supermarket this afternoon, admiring the reds and orangish yellows of the autumn trees, I was struck by just how comfortable I feel here. My sister Liz, who found and furnished this apartment for me, and is now recovering from a leg amputation, is just one of the many people I wish I could share this place with in person. But let me share here, in no particular order, a few of the sensations I’ve experienced here in these last couple of months that have impressed me.

Conservative and Reform synagogues, Catholic and Protestant churches within a block or two of each other with congregations worshipping in peace. The sound of children chatting and laughing together as they walk to and from the neighborhood school together, unaccompanied by an adult and seemingly free from fear of kidnapping, school shootings and all the rest of the terror that makes parents in so many places insist on driving their kids to school. Innumerable squirrels, birds, geese, and even a few deer populating the neighborhood and sharing the shade and food production of its enormous and plentiful beautiful trees with its human inhabitants. The annual weekend garage sale with quietly chatting pedestrian shoppers greeting each other on the sidewalks and driveways. The main thoroughfare with a Kosher pizza place and a Kosher Chinese, a couple of Jewish delicatessens and diners alongside Peruvian, Greek, Italian, Thai and Japanese restaurants whose owners are in fact Peruvian, Greek, Italian, Thai and Japanese. And the laundries and dry cleaners are Chinese. The supermarket with Kosher, “Spanish” and organic food sections whose black, brown, and oriental cashiers and shelf stockers smile and say “how are you today sir, can I help you with something?” And there’s a lovely river 5 blocks away and a huge park with two baseball fields, tennis courts, a soccer field and just some empty well-maintained land and ponds where you can do nothing in peace and quiet.

I suppose this sounds like the Pangloissian report on life in Highland Park and so be it. But I was convinced before I came here that such neighborhoods didn’t exist anymore, that they were a thing of my childhood and had since disappeared. Then again, the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where Liz and I and our siblings grew up was called Highland Park. Have I happened into the Twilight Zone?

I’m taking a course this fall called “Principles of Second Language Acquisition.” After more than twenty years as a teacher of English as a foreign language to adult Italian learners it was time I got some formal training in my profession. What I’ve been learning might be of interest to those (adolescents and older) who would like to learn a second or third language.

Popular wisdom on the age factor in second language (L2) learning is that children learn much faster and become much better users than adults. But recent comparative studies of young (pre-pubescent) and older  L2 learners have provided some new hope for older learners. It seems that when it comes to L2 learning, children and their elders are a bit like the tortoise and hare. 

Children get off to a head start but they go slower though ultimately farther than older learners who, contrary to the popular wisdom and despite a late start, learn faster and well, while rarely going the distance to “near-native performance.” What is it that accounts for the different pace and range of L2 learning? According to one recent scientific article, the determining factor is not age, except perhaps to the extent that age contributes to the creation of a less nurturing learning environment. 

Typically, immigrant children and the children of immigrant parents are immersed in an L2 learning environment which includes playmates and classmates as well as teachers and care givers who are native speakers. They thus spend most of their time outside the home in a native-speaking environment, where they are regularly provided with comprehensible and interesting L2 input which, as they meet and make new friends, they are highly motivated to transform into interesting and comprehensible L2 output. (Sorry about the scientific jargon; what we’re talking here is speech). Immigrant parents and adults, on the other hand, tend to spend most of their time in immigrant community L1 (their native language) environments where they have less opportunity and incentive to use and acquire L2. 

There are cases, however, where the old hares act like the younger tortoises, achieving near-native proficiency, and that is when they are in a learning environment that effectively keeps them young. When highly motivated adult learners are exposed to a naturalistic L2 environment  -- an environment where they are naturally exposed to and spurred to use L2 speech -- their age and previous learning experience can actually be an asset. Older L2 learners  are better equipped  than young learners, because of their accumulation of previous learning experience, to notice gaps in their knowledge and pay conscious attention to grammatical form in processing the L2 speech that is present in the environment. My teaching experience contains a good example of this. Italian army officers involved in NATO operations in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s spent months in an English-speaking work environment and were able to consolidate and dramatically improve their knowledge and communicative use of English. They were motivated, disciplined and experienced learners who took full advantage of a nurturing environment.

Considering the results of the most recent research and my own experience as an L2 learner and teacher I think it is fair to conclude that age is indeed a factor in L2 acquisition. But while older learners generally do not achieve the “near native” proficiency levels attained by younger learners, age may even be a learning enhancement factor for motivated learners in a nurturing, naturalistic L2 environment. So, if you want to learn a second language in your post-adolescent years, age is not an excuse. Take a few months or a year and go take a course where your chosen L2 is spoken by the people you’ll be living with.  A nurturing L2 environment can turn an experienced, late-starting hare into a long-distance, fast-finishing tortoise.

Tomorrow is the start of the semester here in New Jersey at Rutgers. 

These next four months will be by far the longest time I've spent in the United States in 28 years, since I moved to Italy in 1985. I've been here two weeks now and it’s clear that a lot has changed since 1985 but despite globalization it is striking how far ahead of Italy the U.S. is with the spread of information technology.  The other day I looked on the web for auto insurance and partially filled out two forms for quotes, leaving them unfinished, before going out to do some shopping. When I got home I had two voice mail messages from insurance companies asking me if I needed any help filling out the forms. Nothing like that has ever happened to anyone I know in Italy. 

There have been countless other examples of the omnipresence of IT over the past two weeks. But plenty of IT doesn’t necessarily mean plenty of I. Not once in the past two weeks have I seen or heard a news story about Italy and several well-informed and sophisticated people have asked me the name of the current prime minister or if a photo I’d sent them by email was actually Silvio Berlusconi. All the data zipping around seems to block out more information than it brings in.