This book is a collaborative effort, with Cookie providing the text, and her husband Vittorio Scarpati providing the pictures. This page is still under development, but reprinted here is Cookie's introduction:
PUTTI's PUDDING
The work reproduced here is from three notebooks of drawings, the visual diary of my husband Vittorio's four months of bed-ridden confinement in the hospital. He has captured his plight on paper.
As I write this, his life more or less hangs in the balance, both of his lungs are collapsed, a complication of bouts with the pneumonia specific to AIDS. He's attached by tubes to two machines called pneumo thorax suction pumps. A tube the circumference of an American nickel coin is affixed into a chest incision that goes into the pleural lining of his lung.
Bubbling with water like tropical fish aquariums, these strange looking clear plastic machines drain the excessive fluid from his lungs while also inflating them, thus keeping him breathing.
Out of sheer boredom with the time passing, Vittorio asked for pens and pads to draw. With his indomitable spirit and vitality he set about rendering his reality through his talent. With a sensitivity and wisdom few possess, and with his amazing sense of humour never failing him, he put himself through his art.
Even the doctors were incredulous at this man's strength of will. They told me that most other patients in similar circumstances would have given up after two months.
Through these drawings he has conveyed all of this and made it manifest. Seen chronologically this is a journey of extreme pain made bearable by his sublime imagination. It's the story of a trip along the paths of Vittorio's fantasies and for a man who hasn't felt the warmth of sunlight or the sweet breezes of fresh air for four months, there's a lot to create in the inward eye. From limitations come finally an emancipation, a disengagement with restraints. From the realization of the depths of his plight, comes a reach toward a pinnacle of inspiration.
Here is the work of not only a brave and courageous man, but the true mytho-poet, the rhapsodist, the utopian.
There is no where to go but up.
