Notes on an AI-Generated Version of The Makioka Sisters

Warning Signs ~ Example Passages ~ Patterns ~ Contrast ~ Unnatural Rhythm ~ So What?

Ukiyo-e Women Facing a Digital Wave

I purchased this version of The Makioka Sisters: Sasameyuki on Amazon as something to read before an upcoming trip to Japan. What I discovered was that I had unknowingly bought what reviewers identify as an AI-generated, heavily condensed retelling of The Makioka Sisters, rather than Tanizaki’s novel in its established English translation. This post is about: “How do you know something is wrong before you know what is wrong?”

Warning Signs

There were many warning flags that in retrospect are obvious that I’m listing for the inevitable next time:

1. The book was very cheap. Cheaper than other novels I’ve purchased on Kindle in the past
2. The AI-generated version kept popping to the top of the Kindle results. Why? I should have asked but didn’t. There are legitimate English Kindle editions, but every time I followed a link to one, Amazon told me: “This edition of this title is not available for purchase in your country.” I’m in Italy. I wanted a Kindle version. This one was available. I got discouraged looking further and, apparently, decided that was enough due diligence. It wasn’t.
3. The AI-generated version was surprisingly short at 160 pages. I noted it but didn’t think to check until later.
4. The AI-generated version contained introductions to sections that set the scene and describe words used in the summary. Not that I didn’t appreciate the scene setting, but I found it odd. Again, I only noted it. I would later see that these were included because the text was so summarized and condensed that you needed these introductions to understand what was going on.
5. The events unfolding in the lives of the sisters were very abbreviated and cliff-notes like. I thought: was Tanizaki's prose really this spare? No, it wasn’t. The thought entered my mind, but I only noted it. What an idiot I was.
6. Certain phrasing in the AI-generated version started leaping out at me. Phrasing that was exactly the same as phrasing in my Duke Loop stories. See The Loops of August and Velvet Squabs and Flat-Arc Heroines. I initially thought “huh, what a coincidence!?” What an idiot. See the examples section below.
7. There were discrepancies in the plot that caught my attention and made me go back to make sure I had read correctly. In one scene, the second sister is going somewhere in a taxi and upon returning is on a train. Possible, yes, but odd. Or in another scene, a woman’s family (brother and mother) were said to remain in an apartment but then a paragraph later that apartment passed to someone else. These may not be discontinuities in the real work, but in the AI-generated version, they were.

In retrospect, I should have looked at the reviews carefully (I didn’t) and seen the warning signs and just purchased a physical copy. But being in Italy and wanting an English version, this wasn’t practical.

In summary, the seven issues above fall into three categories:

• Commercial/bibliographic clues: suspiciously cheap; prominently surfaced on Kindle; radically short.
• Narrative clues: explanatory section introductions; summary-like treatment of events; continuity problems.
• Linguistic clues: “specific quality,” negative contrast, “which is to say,” literary anthropomorphism, abstract aphorisms.

It’s mostly the linguistic clues that the rest of this post will talk about.

I have effectively trained my ear by reading/listening a lot of generated Duke Loop material. So, when the same rhetorical machinery turned up masquerading as Tanizaki, I felt uncomfortable but couldn’t name it because it kept thinking it was Tanizaki.

This experience with this AI-generated work recalls some point from the article: AI Slop—How Every Media Revolution Breeds Rubbish and Art | Scientific American I’ll pick three points from the article.

(1) Slop refers to low‑quality, mass‑produced content, especially AI‑generated material that is churned out without care or audience demand. References to AI “slop” go back at least to 2022, but the term was popularized in 2024 by the technologist deepfates and subsequently picked up by developer Simon Willison.

• This AI-generated version of The Makioka Sisters has been churned out, and I would say without care. Several reviews of the Kindle book claim this.

(2) While much AI SLOP is forgettable, some AI‑assisted creations are original, surprising, and even museum‑worthy.

• This AI-generated version of The Makioka Sisters, after some thought, does not add value. You would do better with well-written cliff notes or an essay about the book.

(3) The cost of producing AI slop has collapsed to near zero, while the burden on audiences can be high, including cognitive overload and doubts about authenticity.

• Cognitive overload for me in this case was: something is wrong, I can’t figure it out and it took several hours of research to reach this conclusion. So, an overload and waste of time ultimately.

Example Passages the AI-generated Version 

I’ve pulled some passages from the AI-generated version and highlighted the words that were trigger words for me, that is I read them and thought, this sounds AI-generated.

Example 1
She had been friends with all three Schultz children, but her friendship with Rosemarie was the central one — the intimacy of girls the same age who have found in each other the specific quality of being understood — and Rosemarie would be gone for some months yet.

Example 2
January of 1939. The new year arrived with the specific quality of new years in Ashiya: the cold clean air off the mountain, the harbour visible on clear days in the particular blue of January, the neighbourhood with its shutters up for the holiday and the streets quieter than usual, the small domestic ceremonies of the season observed with the attention the Makioka women brought to all ceremonies, which was to say the attention of people for whom the ceremony is the point, not the pretext.

Example 3
The Ashiya house in autumn had the specific quality of the season in that part of the world: the mountain visible above the residential terraces, its vegetation going from the summer green to the autumnal layering of colour that the Rokko range performs in October, a gradient of russet and gold visible from the upper windows of the house on clear days.

Example 4
Spring of 1940. Taeko had been in the state of managed semi-estrangement from the household for several months when Oharu arrived in the kitchen one morning with the specific quality of expression — the quality that the Makioka household had learned to read in Oharu over three years — that meant she knew something she had been instructed not to tell.

Example 5
The way Taeko’s attention, when Itakura was in the room, had a specific quality that was not the way she attended to anyone else. The way he listened when she spoke — not the polite attention of courtesy, but the full, exclusive attention of someone for whom what the person is saying is the most interesting thing in the room.

Example 6
Outside, beside the track, a line of cherry trees was in full flower — white and pale pink, the colour of something seen at the edge of a good thing, the specific Kansai spring cherry that blooms briefly and falls briefly and is, while it is, precisely what it is and nothing else.

Example 7
The word fell into the sitting room with the specific weight of something that changes the shape of every other thing in the room.

Example 8
What she found instead was someone with an unexpectedly light quality — not lightness of character, but of manner, a social ease that was genuinely earned rather than performed, the ease of a man who has been trained in medicine and has learned from that training to put people at their comfort.

Example 9
The Schultz family had been, for the past two years, the specific variety of gift that is produced by good neighbouring — not intimacy, exactly, but proximity of the comfortable, undemanding kind that gives daily life its texture: the children’s voices through the fence, the shared acknowledgment of weather, the particular pleasure of being known by someone whose knowledge of you is based on observation rather than history.

Example 10
The illness resolved, eventually, in the way these things resolve: gradually, incompletely, then one morning more completely than the morning before, and then, by degrees, gone — or not gone exactly, but retreated, become manageable, become the kind of thing that Etsuko would carry quietly and that her family would carry quietly with her.

Example 11
She went in the same kimono she had come in, on the Tuesday morning train, with a composure that had about it, this time, a quality that was very slightly different from its usual quality — not more settled, exactly, not more resigned, but something that Sachiko could only describe as: she knows we tried.

Example 12
The Sunday dinner in Kobe — at a sukiyaki restaurant in the Motomachi district, not the formal grandeur of the Oriental Hotel but the warmer register of a neighbourhood establishment that managed its private rooms with comfort rather than ceremony...

Example 13
He had about him the quality of a person who is interested in the world in general, which is different from — and considerably rarer than — the quality of a person who performs interest.

Example 14
Tatsuo, in managing the aftermath, had handled the correction with the efficiency of a man who confuses efficiency with wisdom, which is to say badly: quietly, without consulting the sisters, in a way that produced a small correction in the newspaper that was read by considerably fewer people than had read the original item, and that satisfied nobody.

Example 15
[Scene setting material] The novel is narrated, for the most part, through Sachiko’s consciousness — which is to say, through the consciousness of a woman who is warm, perceptive, somewhat anxious, and possessed of the particular limitation that afflicts people who love too many people simultaneously: the inability to be entirely honest with any of them.

Patterns

Let me be clear, I used AI to help me analyze these passages and help me understand what I am seeing. However, I did not let AI write this.

I’m digging into this because I wanted to understand what I experienced. What I began to realize was that none of these devices is particularly unusual. Human writers use all of them. What bothered me was the frequency with which this text used these devices, until what might have been normal writing moves to feel unnatural and annoying. The same rhetorical machinery of the Duke Loops turned up masquerading as Tanizaki, because they both (in my opinion) heavily lean on AI assistance.

Let’s take the phrases and styles often seen in the passages above.

Pattern: “specific X”
What it does: Promises precision
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: “Specific quality” signals that a finely observed distinction is coming, but the phrase itself is vague. It announces precision before actually supplying it. Just give it.

Pattern: “not X, but Y”, “not X exactly, but ...”
What it does: Creates contrast and refinement.
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: It gives the impression that the writer (!) is correcting an inadequate first thought and arriving at something subtler. Repeated often, it becomes annoying. It’s not a surprising rhetoric device, but the frequency is.

Pattern: “which is to say”
What it does: Interprets the previous clause.
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: The narrator explains its own prose instead of allowing the reader to infer it. It leaves no room for slow development; it cashes the check immediately.

Pattern: “particular / specific / kind / quality / way”
What it does: Categorizes an experience.
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: Creates pseudo-taxonomic precision: everything seems to belong to a finely distinguished category. Creates false precision.

Pattern: “landscape ‘performs,’ year ‘arrives’”
What it does: Adds literary elevation
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: Ordinary description gets an automatically poetic verb. Everything object is an actor. Fine occasionally; conspicuous when it becomes the default setting to emulate “fancy” writing.

Pattern: “balanced clauses and em dash usage"
What it does: Provides elegant rhythm.
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: The sentences are almost too continuously composed. Different situations keep producing the same rhetorical architecture.

Pattern: witty aphorisms, often psychological that normal people don’t just churn out
What it does: Supplies apparent insight.
Why it starts sounding AI-generated: The prose reveals universal truth about “people who…” without really building up to it. Human novelists do something similar, but not at the frequency I was finding here in AI-generated text and not the need to always extract meaning.  

Contrast

In the passages selected we see a lot of: “You might think X. But actually Y” and “Not X exactly, but Y.” This does several things that are not all desirable:

• Produces nuance in the sentence.
• Gives the sentence movement. There is a little before-and-after.
• Creates cognitive friction if overused.
• Comes across as slightly artificial about being repeatedly told what not to think in order to understand what to think. Instead of simply showing you Y, the sentence constructs an unnecessary X, so it can provide a refinement.

In recent notes for Using GPT-6 | OpenAI API there is a suggestion for reducing jargon and stock phrases in writing. The suggestion is with a prompt that you should use: “Do not use contrastive framing such as "X, not Y" that introduces an unprompted alternative that the user didn't ask about.” A great way of saying, don’t tell me something if this isn’t what I need to focus on.

This is interesting because OpenAI itself is explicitly identifying the tendency we hear and offering a prompt to suppress it.

The article Why Does AI Keep Saying "It's Not X, It's Y"? says “In classical rhetoric, this construction is called antithesis, or negative-positive parallelism. It works by first negating a familiar assumption, then replacing it with something supposedly more expansive or profound.” The article suggests that AI picked up the “not X, but Y” habit partly from human writing and then had it reinforced by human feedback. A contrast can make an answer sound nuanced and thoughtful, qualities human raters may reward. The result may be a useful rhetorical device getting rewarded often enough that the model starts reaching for it far too frequently.

The reinforced learning explanation interests me because it points back to human involvement. The “not X, but Y” habit is not something AI invented on its own. Models first learn the construction from human writing and are then further tuned using human judgments about which answers seem better. The article argues that if polished, contrastive answers tend to sound nuanced or thoughtful to human raters, that preference can be reinforced. So perhaps this isn’t an AI tic at all, but a human rhetorical preference amplified until it becomes annoying.

Unnatural Rhythm

One thing that has also bothered me about AI-assistance is the number of clever aphorisms and what I would say are clean resolutions. I always feel a bit annoyed and awed at the ease at which they are churned out. It’s unnatural in human writing (at least mine). They go something like this:

• observation -> qualification -> elegant conclusion
• observation -> contrast -> elegant conclusion
• description -> generalization -> elegant conclusion
• event -> interpretation -> insight or elegant conclusion
• announce precision -> qualify -> observation

Used sparingly, these patterns are interesting. Used a lot, you notice the mechanism more than the writing. And I notice thinking of these rhythms as formulas applied, like we are mathematically constructing prose. And worse, it becomes exhausting.

So What?

I can’t say I didn’t learn a something from the AI-generated version of The Makioka Sisters, but I feel I ultimately wasted time and didn’t get the real voice of the author (and translator).

Identifying and trying to name the things that bugged me about the writing, I can better help myself when using AI assistance. I have, for sure, overused it in this very blog and am not proud of it. I’m in the process of trying to learn how to use AI assistance without overusing it.

I’ve often think of “keeping my voice” in the age of AI assistants, making sure the AI voice doesn’t take over. I’ve tried to understand in this post, and in a small way, what that AI voice is. It’s a voice that has some of the characteristics given above, like lots of uses of contrasts and intense formulaic writing. These, plus many more not mentioned, seem to lead to two contradictory outcomes. AI-generated prose:

• Closes down (or reaches) meaning almost too quickly/concisely/conveniently.
• While over-explaining some things to the point of being repetitive.

Human writing obviously can do the same; close down quickly and overexplain as well as use the patterns/devices shown above. What I still find hard to explain is the difference when these devices accumulate. 

It’s not that AI prose is bad at any one given sentence, though some sentences might raise an eyebrow. It’s that the whole taken together is where you feel it. It is in all the sentences taken together that a reader senses something missing, and the mechanism.

Perhaps what I have raised here is just a snapshot in time and will go away with newer AI models. Or perhaps it is baked in. As AI might say, not what we see today, but something different— which is to say time will tell. (I’m just not as good at it!)

Mare | Montagna | Mare | Montagna - 4 Days in Abruzzo

Logistics ~ Vasto: the hinge ~ Day 1: Mare ~ Day 2: Montagna ~ Day 3: Museo e mare ~ 

Day 4: Montagna (Molise) ~ Conclusion: Mare + Montagna ~ General Photos ~ Food Photos

  

  
Top left: Trabocco Cungarelle - Vasto.
Top center: View from Vasto (CH), Abruzzo.
Top right: View from Agnone, Molise - looking west.

Bottom left: Spiaggia di Punta Aderci, Abruzzo.
Bottom center: Trabocco di Punta Aderci.

Bottom right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro - Vasto, Abruzzo.

We took a road trip to Abruzzo recently, choosing Vasto as a base for exploring the Costa dei Trabocchi. The plan, to the extent we had one, was mostly about the sea: trabocchi, swimming, some walking along the coast, a few towns, good lunches.

Four days later, the trip had settled into a rhythm we hadn't planned:

Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna

Vasto became the hinge. One day we headed down toward the Adriatic. The next day we turned our backs on it and drove toward the Majella and the hill towns inland. Then back to the sea, then back to the mountains.

Anything roughly an hour from Vasto, sometimes a little more, was under consideration. That gave us a large piece of southern Abruzzo and, eventually, a bit of neighboring Molise.

A lot of the trip was based on feeling rather than a checklist. We didn't arrive with a need to see the highest peak or complete a famous trail. But almost from the start, the mountains rising behind the coast exerted a stronger pull than we expected. They were just there, always visible or implied, turning what we thought would be a coastal trip into something else.

Logistics

We drove from Bergamo, about 675 kilometers each way. We passed through five Italian regions: Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Le Marche, and Abruzzo.  For comparison, it's like driving from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina and passing through six states and that is about the length of the trip one way. 

The route was A4 east toward Verona, A22 south toward Modena, a short piece of the A1, and then the A14 down the Adriatic side of Italy. The Italian autostrada numbers are straightforward enough until European road numbers start appearing on signs as well. The A4 around Verona is also part of the E70; the A22 is part of the E45; and farther south the A14 becomes part of the E55. These European routes overlay the Italian road system, which can make a route look as if it is changing names when the asphalt underneath you has not changed at all.

• European Route E70 includes Autostrada A4 (Serennissima)
• European Route E45 includes Autostrada A22 (Brenner motorway)
• European Route E55 includes Autostrada 14 (Adriatic motorway)

Our tolls came to about €52 one way.

This was a long drive, six to seven hours without getting too ambitious about stopping. We did stop at the Bauli Autogrill near Verona, which gets a mention here mainly because it has extremely clean bathrooms. 

Later we got off the autostrada for lunch and a walk around Santarcangelo di Romagna before continuing south. (On the way back, our midpoint stop was Forlì.)

We had considered flying and taking the train. Both were perfectly possible. But because we don't own a car, a long drive is still something of a novelty for us. There is something pleasant about watching the geography change and talking while it does.

Vasto: the hinge

We pulled into Vasto at around 7 p.m. on a Sunday and found the historic center hopping. In fact, it may have been the most action we saw during our five nights there.

We stayed at BluOnlyHotel on Via Adriatica, a pedestrian street running along the eastern edge of the old town. Calling it a street almost undersells the location. It functions as a long balcony above the slope, with the Adriatic out in front of you and Vasto's historic center immediately behind.

One of the first things you notice walking along Via Adriatica is something that isn't there, the church of San Pietro.

The Resti della Chiesa di San Pietro consist largely of the surviving Romanesque portal and wall of a church that once stood among a whole row of buildings here. In 1956, a major landslide struck this side of Vasto. San Pietro was badly damaged, and the church was eventually demolished in 1959, leaving its façade as a kind of open-air memory of what had occupied the space before. The landslide began on February 22, 1956 and permanently altered this edge of the historic city.

Below Via Adriatica is the Parco Muro delle Lame, today partly occupied by sports facilities and paths dropping toward the sea. We initially wondered about the word lame. It isn't referring to blades. In parts of the central Apennines, lama was historically used for certain kinds of slope movement or landslide, which is appropriate here.

Standing on Via Adriatica that first evening, looking east, we felt we had chosen exactly the right place for exploring the coast.

What we didn't know yet was that we were, in a sense, facing the wrong way. Half of the trip would happen over our shoulders.

Day 1: Mare

The first day was dedicated to the thing that had ostensibly brought us here: the Costa dei Trabocchi.

A trabocco is a wooden fishing structure built out over the sea and connected to land by a narrow walkway. Long arms extend from the platform and support a large net that can be lowered into the water and then raised when fish pass over it. The important point is that the fisherman can work from the structure without going out to sea in a boat.

There are many stories about the origin of the trabocchi and even about the origin of the word itself, so it is better not to be too definite about either. What is clear is their practical purpose. They offered coastal families a way to fish while avoiding some of the risks of taking a small boat onto the Adriatic. Over time they became one of the defining images of this part of Abruzzo, and today some have been converted into restaurants.

From Vasto we walked downhill through the Muro delle Lame area until we reached the former railway corridor, now part of the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi, the long cycling and walking route that follows the coast.

This was our first proper encounter with the coastline at walking speed. All told, from Vasto down to the Via Verde, north for a while and then back again, we covered only about seven kilometers. Bikes would have taken us much farther, but we were content to explore slowly.

And there was plenty to distract us.

Besides the trabocchi, along the shore there were enormous blocks filled with rounded pebbles that looked vaguely like deteriorating concrete. They weren't. They were natural conglomerate that had broken away from the geology above and landed on the beach looking suspiciously man-made.

Then there were the tall stands of cane growing beside the path. We started wondering about Arundo plinii and Arundo donax, particularly the latter, the giant cane we associate with coastlines, disturbed ground and marshy places. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

Interspersed among the cane grass were a few squirting cucumber - Ecballium elaterium.   

And offshore were three structures we kept staring at. They turned out to be the Rospo Mare oil platforms, about eighteen kilometers east of Vasto and barely visible, along with the Alba Marina, the floating vessel used to store production from the field.

Conglomerate, cane grass, and oil platforms are the kind of things that can occupy us for quite a while.

For lunch we went to Trabocco Cungarelle, getting the full experience of walking along a narrow wooden passage to eat above the water on one of the structures we had spent the morning trying to understand from the land. The structure has some give, and even on a relatively calm day you can feel the structure sway slightly during our lunch.

Later we drove north to explore Punta Aderci, the large coastal reserve north of Vasto. It was odd to see rolling, manicured fields reaching down to the ocean. On the beaches, there were informal driftwood shelters that looked like teepees.

We didn’t swim at Punta Aderci, but headed back south toward Vasto and swam at Spiaggia di San Nicola, but it wasn't one of those swims that causes you to emerge from the water announcing that you have just discovered the Mediterranean for the first time. It was passable. Oddly, that informed our next day's journey.  

By the end of the day, the coast hadn't exhausted our curiosity. Instead, it made us start wondering more about what lay behind it. And it was decided: that the next morning we would drive inland.

Day 2: Montagna

Our first stop on day 2 was Guardiagrele, at the foot of the Maiella. We had put it on the day's itinerary as a pleasant-looking town on the way toward the mountains. Instead, we ended up staying much longer than expected.

Guardiagrele has a long tradition of artisan work, particularly metalworking: wrought iron, copper and goldsmithing. It is associated with the medieval goldsmith Nicola da Guardiagrele, and those traditions are still part of the identity the town presents today.

We learned more about that not in a museum but through conversations we had during our day there.

We spoke for a long time with the widow of one of the town's last traditional copper workers. Then there was another long conversation connected with Pasticceria Palmerio and one of Guardiagrele's more famous contributions to Italian pastry.

This is one of the pleasures of travel that is impossible to schedule. You can schedule the duomo for 10:30, but you can't schedule talking with somebody for an hour because one question leads to another.

Somewhere along the way we also learned about Modesto Della Porta, born in Guardiagrele in 1885. He was a tailor by profession and a poet by inclination, writing in Abruzzese dialect about ordinary village life with humor, satire and a fair amount of melancholy. His 1933 collection Ta-pù, lu trumbone d'accumpagnamente: poesie in dialetto abruzzese (often formatted in standard Italian as Ta-pù, il trombone d'accompagnamento: poesie in dialetto abruzzese) made him an enduring local figure. The Italian word for trumpet is tromba, the title specifically uses trumbone (trombone) to emphasize a deeper, background instrument rather than the leading melody of a trumpet. The ta-pù referring to the bass notes or rhythmic thumping sound of a brass instrument playing an accompaniment part (like an "oom-pah" sound in a town band).

We like local heroes of this sort. The national canon of Garibaldi, Alighieri, and Gramsci have plenty of room elsewhere. When you arrive in a town and discover that one of the people it still celebrates was a tailor who wrote dialect poetry, you immediately know a little more about the place.

Lunch was at L’Osteria Romantino, a casual and satisfying affair. The day’s events conspired to have us have our dessert before lunch at Palmerio. Oh well.

The Guardiagrele specialty we had at Palmerio is called le sise delle monache, literally "nuns' breasts." They are soft sponge cakes filled with pastry cream and covered in powdered sugar, traditionally formed into three rounded peaks. There are competing stories about both their invention and the name, as there should be with any pastry called nuns' breasts. What isn't disputed is their close association with Guardiagrele and with the Palmerio pastry tradition.

We then continued toward Pennapiedimonte. Or tried to.

For about half an hour we found ourselves stopped because the Giro d'Abruzzo was passing through the area. The 2026 race was being held September 15–18, and we had managed to intersect it on our mountain day.

There isn't much to do when a bicycle race has appropriated your road. You wait. You wait for the waves of support cars, police, and more support cars, wondering if the riders will ever pass. Then the helicopter signals their arrival. Everything passes and the quiet of the countryside returns.

Eventually we reached Pennapiedimonte with a very modest plan: park, walk to the Belvedere Balzolo, admire the view, and perhaps poke around a little.

The word balzo can describe a ledge, shelf or steep place on a mountainside, which is a good description of what happens here: the land suddenly opens into the deep valley of the Avello below you.

We were not planning a serious walk. We walked anyway.

One path led to another, and the terrain kept drawing us farther into the valley toward the Cascata del Macarone della Pila. By the time we returned to Pennapiedimonte, our quick look from the belvedere had turned into roughly 13 kilometers of hiking.

Beautiful and unexpected. Those might be the two words that best describe the day and, increasingly, the trip.

We had driven inland because the mountains looked interesting from Vasto. Instead, we got metalworking, dialect poetry, nuns' breasts, a bicycle race and a 13-kilometer walk we hadn't planned to take.

The sea was beginning to have competition.

Day 3: Museo e mare

After the previous day's unexpected hiking, we returned to the coast, although not immediately. We spent the morning in Vasto itself, including the Musei Civici di Palazzo d'Avalos.

Palazzo d'Avalos sits right at the edge of the old city facing the Adriatic. Its civic museums cover a surprising amount of ground: archaeology, paintings by the Palizzi family and others, contemporary art, historic costume, and the Neapolitan garden overlooking the sea. There was also a temporary exhibition, Mitografie Postmoderne, that pulled us rather unexpectedly into Italian painting from the 1980s to the present. The exhibit presented curated selection of works from major figures associated with Anachronism, pittura colta, and visionary realism spanning from the 1980s to today.

We have a weakness for civic museums. The best ones don't necessarily contain universally famous objects. Instead, they explain something about the place outside the museum doors.

Here the archaeology takes you backward beneath modern Vasto to Roman Histonium and earlier settlements, while the art collections pull you forward again into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a relatively small space, the town gets taken apart and put back together.

Nearby we went into Santa Maria Maggiore, where our attention was promptly diverted by an elegantly dressed skeleton. Why not?

Beneath the main altar is the body of San Cesario Martire, displayed in a glass case and dressed as a soldier-martyr. The church's own history says the relics were given to Cesare Michelangelo d'Avalos in 1695 and subsequently kept at Santa Maria Maggiore. The presentation belongs to the tradition of the corpi santi, relics from Roman catacombs that were dressed and displayed as early Christian martyrs. The visual certainty of the uniform is greater than what can actually be known about the biography of the person whose bones are inside it.

We went into the church expecting architecture and came out thinking about what happens to a person's identity several centuries after death. May our skeletons end up elegantly dressed in some church.

For lunch we went to Da Ferri, an Osterie d'Italia recommendation, and were not disappointed. We ordered one of the local specialties, brodetto alla vastese, or lu vrudatte in dialect. This is fish is cooked in an earthenware pot and, importantly, isn't stirred with utensils while cooking. You eat the fish first. Then, when what remains in the pot is mostly its intensely flavored tomato-and-seafood broth, the waiter arrives with spaghetti and drops it in. A lunch with a second act. We like.

Afterward this satisfying lunch, we continued north toward Fossacesia and the Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.

The abbey occupies a spectacular promontory above the Adriatic. There was an early monastic presence here, with the abbey developing around the turn of the first millennium and becoming an important Benedictine center. The name in Venere is traditionally connected with a Roman sanctuary dedicated to Venus that once occupied the site, although no architectural remains of that temple survive.

The setting does much of the work. You have the Romanesque church, monastery and cloister, but beyond them the land simply drops away toward fields and the Adriatic. We stopped and enjoyed the breezes under the pines with two shakertos in front of us.

It was another reminder that our coast and mountain categories weren't really separate. From the abbey you see both at once.

We ended the afternoon back at sea level, swimming at Spiaggia di Torricella. This swim was better. The beach was nearly empty, the water clearer than what we had found on our first coastal day, and we could swim around and look down at fish in the water. We were happy.

Day 4: Montagna (Molise)

With one full day left, there was no debate about the direction. Inland it was.

By now the pattern had established itself. Our first mountain day had not been an aberration. Given another free day, we again preferred to turn away from the sea.

This time we also broke the geographic premise of the post by leaving Abruzzo altogether and drove to Agnone, in Molise.

Agnone is famous for bells, specifically the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli. The Marinelli foundry is described as the oldest bell foundry in Italy and one of the oldest in the world, with a bell-making tradition stretching back many centuries.

The word Pontificia is not just an advertising flourish. In 1924, Pope Pius XI granted the foundry the privilege of using the papal coat of arms. The museum and foundry visit is a good example of a subject that sounds specialized until someone explains it properly.

A traditional bell mold is built in layers. There is the inner core, the anima; then the falsa campana, a temporary full-size model of the future bell; then the outer mantello. Decorations and inscriptions are formed in wax. Eventually the false bell is destroyed, leaving the space into which the molten bronze is poured.

So you build a bell in order to destroy it so that you can make the bell. Got it? We approve of processes with this level of complication.

The tour also wandered into the larger history of bells, including the enormous Tsar Bell in Moscow, cast in the eighteenth century at more than 200 tonnes. It never rang. A fire and subsequent thermal shock caused a huge section to break away before the bell could ever be used.

Afterward we had lunch at Locanda Mammì, just outside Agnone. Chef Stefania Di Pasquo's restaurant has a Michelin star, but what we remember most was how naturally it seemed to belong where it was. We were sitting among the rolling hills and farms of Molise eating an eight-course menu built around ingredients from the same landscape.

The food was elegant without feeling precious, the portions generous enough that an eight-course lunch remained recognizably lunch.

So the day produced two discoveries: how bells are made, and that perhaps we had been underestimating Molise. 

And then we drove back to Vasto. Again.

On the drive back, we thought of a man we met in Agnone. Wandering a backstreet to go see La Porta Storta, we met an old man, Constantino. For fifteen minutes he told us about the street we were standing on, in front of his house. The sculpture above the lintels and then invited us into his foyer to see a tribute to the Madonna and clearly proud to show off his house. He was slightly disappointed we didn't accept his offer to come up for coffee. Only fifteen minutes but such a strong image remained in our heads.  And they say Il Molise non esiste (Molise doesn't exist). We think it very much is alive. (Abruzzi e Molise). It only became its own distinct, autonomous region in 1963, making it one of the youngest regional entities in the country.)

Conclusion: Mare + Montagna

Each evening we returned to the same town, parked and walked Via Adriatica to our hotel. From Via Adriatica, the Adriatic was still in front of us. Below were the Muro delle Lame, the former railway line and the coast we had originally come to see.

Behind us were Guardiagrele, Pennapiedimonte, the Majella and, farther away, Agnone.

That was the surprise of the trip.

We hadn't discovered that the sea was disappointing or that the mountains were somehow "better." It was the proximity of the two that made the area interesting. A morning could begin in a town hanging above the Adriatic and end with us walking farther than intended into a mountain valley. The next day we could reverse direction and swim.

Vasto worked because it sat between those possibilities. We had chosen it as a base for the Costa dei Trabocchi. By the end, what we liked most was the hinge.

Mare → VASTO ← Montagna.

Then turn around and do it again.

General Photos

   

Left: Arundo donax at Spiaggia di San Nicola, Vasto.
Center left: Arundo donax along the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.

Right left: Arundo plinii at Punta Aderci.
Right: Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium).

    
   

Left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto - San Cesario Martire

Center left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto
Center right and Right: Co-Cathedral of Saint Joseph - Vasto

  
Left: Natural conglomerate on the coast near Vasto.
Center: View from Spiaggia Toricella.
Right: Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.

  
Left: Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Center: View from Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Right: View from Agnone (Isernia), Molise.

  

Left: View from Vasto - night - looking toward Termoli.

Center: View from Vasto - day - looking toward Termoli.

Right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro in Vasto.

  

Left: Trabocco Cungarelle from the coast.
Center: View from Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: One Rospo Mare platform and storage vessel 18 km from the coast.

 

Trabocco Cungarelle.

  
Left: Guardiagrele - Bust of Modesto Della Porta.

Center: Guardiagrele - Monumento Modesto Della Porta.

Right: Guardiagrele - Panorama dal Giardino della Villa Comunale.

   

Left: Tracks for hike from Pennapedimonte into Valle dell'Avello.

Center left: Walk from Vasto to explore Via Verde dei Trabocchi.
Center right: Palazzo d'Avalos - Giardino Napoletano - Vasto, Abruzzo.
Right: Palazzo D'Avalos - Mitografie Postmoderne Exhibit.

Food Photos

  

da Ferri (Vasto) dishes including appetizer and brodetto alla vastese.

  
Locanda Mammì - amuse-bouche and starter with trout.

  

Locanda Mammì - deer with peanut and plum sauce, risotto with nettle, and peanut dessert item.

  

Left and center: Dishes at Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: Le sise delle monache at Pasticceria Palmerio in Guardiagrele, Abruzzo.

Travelmarx Fall 2026 Playlist - Each Day

A composite image of 36 albums used in this playlist.

Ah, the anticipation of Fall crispness and the end of a scorching summer. Cool mornings and sharper light. And, the anticipation of what may unfold for the better or for the worse as we round the bend of this year.  (I've always seen the year as a shape with bends. That's for another post.) Anticipation itself can be paralyzing and feel like a weight. We remind ourselves to take each day as they come, preparing the best we can but not forgetting to live in the present. Phew, end of sermon. Spotify link

Lau Ro - album "Cabana", track "Each Day"
sweet93 - single "Stars Above"
Sterling Grove, Ellyn Woods - single "White Sails"
KATZROAR - album "UNDERWORLD", track "Heart (Give a Little)"
The Durutti Column - album "Renascent", track "Sargasso Sea"
Lord Echo - album "Rarities 2010 - 2020: Japanese Tour Singles", track "In Your Life - Lisa Tomlins Version"

The Karminsky Experience Inc - album "Snapshot", track "The Sea"
Steve Hensby Band - album "Astronomers Aren't Morning People", track "Jupiter"
José Junior - album "Spanish Leather", track "Projections"
Dele Sosimi, The Estuary 21 - EP "The Confluence EP", track "Mo Ṣe B'​ọ​́​lá T​á​n"
The Deadbeats - album "Lounging", track "Funky For You"
Tim Love Lee - album "Just Call Me 'Lone' Lee", track "Twilight Reservation"

Antena - album "Versions Speciales - Camino Del Sol", track "Bye Bye Papaye (Lexx Mix)"
Air - album "The Remixes, Vol. 1", track "Casanova 70 - The Secret of Cool"
Freak Heat Waves - album "Mondo Tempo", track "Off My Mind"
Project Gemini - album "Colours & Light", track "Colours & Light"
Nicolas Godin - album "Concrete and Glass", track "The Border"
Pete Josef - album "Lifeline", track "Utopia"

Alex Kassian - EP "Body Singer", track "Trippy Gas"
Scrimshire - album "Listeners", track "Theme for Us"
Officer John - single "You"
Alex Kassian, Spooky - EP "Orange Coloured Liquid", track "Orange Coloured Liquid - Part II"
TORCH SONG, William Orbit - album "Toward the Unknown Region", track "Blue Night - 2022 Remaster"
Space Dimension Controller - album "Love Beyond the Intersect", track "Love Beyond the Intersect"

Hoover - album "The Lost Outlaw Album", track "Take My Hand"
The Confederate Dead - album "It Was Meant to Happen", track "Where Flowers Grow"
Assaf Spector - album "All The Changes", track "Five O'clock Mirage"
Assaf Spector, Brian J Gitkin, Carol C - EP "Peony Dreams", track "Peony Dreams"
Solju - album "Ođđa Áigodat = New Times", track "Ealloravddas"
Various Artists - album "Xen Cuts", track "Down & To The Left" (Amon Tobin)

Lauer - album "Know You", track "You Know"
Damien Jurado - album "All Are Welcome In: A Return to Maraqopa (Redux)", track "Plains to Crash"
Common Saints - EP "Equinox", track "Equinox"
Marcoca - album "Soliloquy", track "Stranger on the Loose"
Israel Nash - album "Israel Nash's Rain Plans", track "Who in Time"
Locust - album "Truth is Born of Arguments", track "I Become Overwhelmed"

Velvet Squabs and Flat-Arc Heroines

The Duke Loop - Heroine Hero Loop

I'm currently stuck in a Duke Loop: long-form historical romance stories on YouTube involving misunderstood heroines, emotionally constipated dukes, disputed inheritances, tenant farmers, and an improbable number of carriages fitted with velvet squabs. In this post, I’m not going to discuss the addictive nature of these stories, algorithms, or how these algorithmic pulp-fiction pieces are produced, though that is interesting and maybe for another post. Instead, I would only like to address the story lines of these pieces, and why these story lines appeal to audiences and to me.

The stories are set in an elastic version of 19th-century England, somewhere between the Regency and Victorian periods. The heroine is not initiated; she is authenticated. In storytelling terms, she has something close to a flat character arc: rather than changing fundamentally herself, she holds steady while the people and circumstances around her change. In other words, the heroine travels through the plot, but not very far through the self.

This is in contrast to the Hero’s journey, also known as the monomyth, a common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.

The hero myth was popularized by Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987):

• Campbell’s basic structure is: separation → initiation → return
• For our purposes, we can see this as: ignorance → challenge → transformation → wisdom

The Duke Loop stories have an emotional cycle something like this:

• misrecognition → suffering → endurance → revelation → recognition → reversal

I became curious about why this altered story cycle is so satisfying to watch. The hero’s journey can be restated as this: “I can be tested, change, become more capable, and emerge as somebody different.” A Duke Loop story is typically this: “I don't need to change. I am already good. Other people simply haven't recognized it yet.”

The Duke Loop stories consistently state that the problem isn't the heroine. Eventually the evidence will come out. Everyone will realize how wrong they were. And the people who treated her badly will have to watch while somebody important recognizes her value.

Do members of the audience actually identify with the heroine, imagining that they too are right while the world stubbornly fails to recognize it? Some surely do, but I don't think the stories require that much identification.

For those watching or listening, it might be closer to something like "Those awful people are going to get what they deserve, and I want to see it happen." The heroine can therefore function less as a richly (a generous term if you have seen the poor quality of some of these stories) imagined person than as an empty-enough vessel for moral identification. Making the heroine more psychologically complicated could damage the easy formula. Give her moral ambiguity and punishment becomes less satisfying. The one-dimensionality isn't necessarily an accidental failure of characterization. It may be part of the mechanism.

So what do I get out of it? Am I susceptible to this story arc? Am I at a vulnerable time in my life? After all, I did write about being lightly observed and being okay with that. That was before I fell into the Duke Loop. It seems suspiciously related. Was I targeted? My fan snaps shut. I grasp my reticule. I’ve been exposed! Like all things binge and cringe, this too will pass.

The stories don't necessarily make the audience (including me) self-righteous. But they repeatedly offer the pleasurable experience of occupying a position in which righteousness never needs to be questioned.

A transformational story asks: What must I learn? A vindication story–like a Duke Loop story–asks: When will they finally realize I was right? And repeated exposure to the latter gives you a form of narrative pleasure that requires remarkably little self-interrogation. And there you have it, the crux of it. How much work do you want to do watching a story? How much thinking and self-reflection do you want if you are just want something to lull you to sleep or help you escape the world for one hour?

In a nutshell: the audience temporarily occupies the morally privileged position in a Duke Loop story. Other people are wrong. The heroine’s (your) suffering demonstrates her (your) virtue. Recognition is coming.

I will end this post with more Duke Loop story vocabulary, which I find entertaining The vocabulary is a smorgasbord of estate management and descriptions of situations and characters in our fictitious universe. Enjoy!

• Carriage interiors with velvet squabs.
• A plucky village girl tending a turnip field who then become a duchess.
• Drainage concerns in low-lying fields.
• Tenant farmer contracts.
• Stern housekeepers named Miss Hawthorne.
• Stewards of the estate that can be kindly, incompetent, or thieving.
• Solicitors and magistrates listening on the other side of the door.
• Bored dukes attending balls that function as thinly disguised marriage markets.
• The price of good beeswax candles.
• Cream colored vellum with a good wax seal.
• The endless rain hitting London windowpanes.
• The library as the center of the action in the love story. (This I like!)
• Appropriate distance between lovers.
• The aunt-chaperone in the room.
• Almost smiles on lips of dukes.
• Dark grey, stormy eyes.
• A heroine in a gown from three seasons ago.
• A turned dress or pair of gloves.
• Buying meat on credit from the butcher.
• The cramped bedroom under the eaves.
• Forearms corded with muscles.
• Low, rusty sounds from dukes that are laughs.
• Using someone’s Christian name.
• A kiss tasting of cold rain and tea.
• Hessian boots.
• When Michaelmas is and how many days are in a fortnight. 
• To have your breath hitch.
• Breath pluming in cold air.
• A room that smells of cold toast and impending doom.
• To truly be seen by someone.
• A sharp-eyed dowager duchess.
• Holland covers over furniture.
• A japanned box with a secret compartment.
• Two and twenty equals twenty-two.
• A cravat tied with mathematical precision.
• A dowager getting sent to a dower house.
• A fresh sheet of foolscap to take a note.
• The benefits of a well-sprung coach.
• A heroine in a dove-grey dress.
• A carefully husbanded fire.
• Being turned out without character.
• Getting sent to Fleet Prison.