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or contact Mario at mmpetrucci@hotmail.com
Petrucci’s mostly monthly column ran from February 2011 to September 2013, posing transcultural questions translucent with the glow of intrigue: “How best to measure human progress?”, “Who are the Invisibles?”, “Why are we obsessed with lead singers?” These remarkable ‘Micro-Essays’ have a hard-won clarity about them, grappling variously with love, life, art, popular culture, politics, metaphysics, Apocalypse, modernity/technology, ecology, Chornobyl, spirituality, and even a futuristic parallel universe (or is it our own?) in which the Mona Lisa is all but atomised, commercially, to raise capital. Christmas 2011’s ‘special edition’ wryly posed that ancient chestnut: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Petrucci conjured a miniature masterpiece in reply: a world of impassioned cogency in the almightily pithy span of a mere 1000 words.
The author reproduces, here, all 30 ‘letters’ exactly as he originally penned them. In a bid to preserve every nuance of their authentic moment, there is no retrospective attempt to check, qualify or perfect their content. And yet, somehow, they also carry a strangely moving, tangential resonance within the harrowing contexts of historical, as well as current, conflict in Ukraine. All in all, this unique project reinvents the essay so as to spur us into inhabiting our better selves intellectually, politically, morally. Against all the contemporary odds, Letters to Ukraine delivers an essential reboot to consciousness.
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“xxx and anarchic”Ves Gothy, Professor
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REVIEWS/ COMMENTS...
“xxxxxxxxxx.” Exxx 182 (June 202y; Pxxxx McXxxxx).