Travel Report: EPT13 Malta, Day 5 -- Back to Valletta

Today on the European Poker Tour I moved over onto the EPT Malta Main Event to help cover Day 1b of that one. Had the late shift, though, and so had a chance early in the day to truck back over to Valletta with my friend and colleague Howard to explore a little more.

On my first day here I only walked a short way into Valletta proper, only really grabbing a bit to eat with Gareth and not exploring the area too greatly. So it was very nice to get back over and to do so with Howard who not only has been here before but has done some actual travel writing about Malta and so provided lots of information about everything we saw.

We took a cab over that let us off at the Upper Barrakka Gardens, and we initially stepped over to the Saluting Battery that looks out over the Grand Harbour. We were there a little early for the midday salute, but greatly enjoyed the view looking back across the water into the city. Howard explained some of the history surrounding the building of the battery by the Order of St. John back in the 16th century and the story of the “Great Siege” of 1565 when the Ottomans were famously held back there.

From there we took the short walk through the very crowded streets (especially for a Monday, we thought) to St. John’s Co-Cathedral where we joined hundreds of other tourists going inside for a look.

Built in the 1570s by the Order of St. John and dedicated to John the Baptist, the exterior doesn’t seem all that immediately striking, featuring a somewhat plain style. It kind of looks like the battery, really, and I’m reading that “fortress”-like appearance might have been intended somewhat as it was built just after the Great Siege. Step inside, though, and the interior’s dazzling decoration is quite stunning, with every inch of the carved stone walls, marble floors, and painted ceilings filled with artistic expression full of symbolism and/or contributing to various narratives.

The audio guide helped explain the certain aspects such as the painted vaulted ceilings, the tombstones in the floor, and the intricate tapestries hung all about. I took a few photos, though none are particularly great (that’s one of mine up above from the battery, which you can click to embiggen). Better to watch this short video that more or less replicates much of what I saw (with a soundtrack added and minus the huge crowd):

The highlight, though, were the paintings by Caravaggio, in particular the famous oil painting of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist depicting his execution. (No photo/video allowed where those were, so they aren’t in the video.) It occupies the far end of the Oratory, taking up the entire wall and inviting the close study it deserves. Indeed, after a lengthy time looking upon it and discussing it, it was almost difficult to leave and look at other Caravaggios on the adjoining walls, it casts such a gripping spell.

We did leave, however, and after exiting the cathedral did some more walking. As we did I recalled how Caravaggio had also painted at least one work depicting card players, called The Cardsharps. I had that in mind because of having recently gone back over some of the history of Cassius M. Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings for an installment of Poker & Pop Culture, for which some have suggested Coolidge modeled the canines and their holding of cards after Caravaggio (and some other artists).

Not far from the cathedral is the Casa del Commun Tesoro where Malta’s first post office was once located. In the early 19th century the British used the building for certain governmental administrative work, and as a plaque on the outside explained the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge worked there as the Acting Public Secretary from 1804-1805. That led me to discuss having in the past taught “Xanadu,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” some of the Biographia Literaria and other STC works, and studying still more like “Christabel” and “Frost at Midnight.”

If I’m retracing our steps correctly, from there we circled back through more busy streets in search of a lunch spot Howard remembered, but unfortunately was closed on Mondays, then proceeded back around to the Lower Barrakka Gardens and then walked back up the coastline to where we originally began. I may get one more chance to get out and about (have one other late shift coming up, I believe), but regardless it was a fantastic opportunity to get a look around and absorb even just a small bit of Malta’s rich history.

By the time we were in the cab heading back over to the Portomaso Casino we were already talking poker again, and the day provided some interesting battles as well, the most significant of which you can read about over on the PokerStars blog. No “Great Siege” mind you, but some spirited defenses and attacks nonetheless.

On the Importance of the The

I was thinking this morning about a Wallace Stevens poem and a class in modern American poetry I had as an undergraduate.

Like a lot of what we read in that course, the poem was especially challenging for someone barely 20 years old to appreciate. The professor was fantastic, however, and successfully convinced me over and over why the problems these poets were exploring -- linguistic, artistic, historical, psychological, philosophical -- were worth considering. And were, in fact, often fascinating.

The poem I thought of is called “The Man on the Dump” and like a lot of the poetry we read in that course features a great deal of physical description, in this case of seemingly scattered shards of items in a trash heap. Besides a fairly constant feeling of befuddlement, the main, decades-later impression I retain from that course was the unending stream of stuff in those poems -- all of the descriptions of things like Eliot’s yellow smoke or Williams’s red wheelbarrow or Frost’s wall with a frozen-ground-swell erupting at its base.

I’m not going to pretend to possess any special insight about these poems. After being sincerely intrigued for a semester by Pound’s puzzles, Larkin’s larks, and Plath’s plight, I made a hasty retreat back to the 18th century in grad school to study long novels and satire instead. But as I say, a few of them stand out starkly for me, mostly because of those images like the withered flowers strewn among the dirt and tin cans and old mattresses in Stevens’s poem.

The real reason I thought of Stevens’s poem was because of the way it finishes. It ends with one of those weird poetic punch lines -- you know, like a question about telling the difference between the dancer and the dance. Coming at the end of a series of rhetorical questions, the speaker asks “Where was it one first heard the truth?” He then concludes with a two-word sentence that either answers the question or perhaps clarifies it somehow: “The the.”

No, that’s not a typo. The first “the” is a definite article, and the second “the” is (seemingly) a noun. That explains the grammar of the sentence, anyway. Meanwhile, to pinpoint what the the is referring to -- a physical location? a point of origin? objective truth? -- is hardly as simple a matter. As I recall we took the better part of an hour working on that problem in class.

Later I’d think back fondly on that discussion. The particulars of it have long faded, but I still get a kick out of the sheer audacity of spending that much time talking about a single word -- and perhaps the most mundane, pedestrian word in the English language at that.

The poem and the class rushed back to mind today after having had a quick back-and-forth with someone about whether or not to include the word “the” in something he had written. I liked that exchange. It proved something I already knew about both of us, namely, that we both cared about language and thought a word like “the” to be worth discussing.

After all, deciding to use the “the” takes a stand, to give a different, more particular status to the noun coming after the article. It’s a decision that shouldn’t be made casually.

It’s an all-in push. It’s the the.