Carlo's friends were the people he went to school with at Bronx High School of Science, brainy kids who shared his interests and lacked the provincial outlook of City Island, said Sonya Petrukhin, one of Carlo's classmates and a close friend of both Carlo and Andrew.
Dramatically altering a heretofore provincial outlook, establishing lofty goals, being permitted to take out sophisticated, often challenging books, had enhanced my lonesome existence well beyond measure.
One can start with the rather provincial outlook that many Czechs inherited from the past, when the country had been ruled from Vienna, Berlin and Moscow for several centuries.
The experience abroad appears to have given him a less provincial outlook than other top Taliban figures, many of whom had never left greater Kandahar until capturing power in the 1990s.
As Marina Warner, chair of the judges for this year's Man Booker International prize, put it recently: "Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook".
"Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook," she will say, as she reflects on the two years she has spent reading fiction from around the world to judge the Man Booker International.
For outsiders used to dealing with the savvy, English-speaking figures of the previous left-wing regime, such as the outgoing president Aleksander Kwasniewski, the new lot, largely monoglot and provincial in outlook, may prove a shock.That is one minus.
The British can be "oddly provincial in outlook" when it comes to literature, the writer and academic Marina Warner is due to say, as she calls for more translations to be made of literature from India, China and across the Arab world.
We live in an age of contradictions: we are consumed by globalisation and its effects, and yet mainstream media are in many ways more provincial in their outlook.
"The big commercial metropoles can be extremely provincial in their outlook, and several of the writers we read are nomadic, willingly or unwillingly part of the contemporary world's diasporas, while imaginatively, they inhabit places far and wide besides those which the body occupies or birth allotted," she will say.
To his credit he deploys a wider range of cultural reference than many jobbing music critics ("Ali Akbar Khan, Thomas Bernhard, Björk, James Brown, [and] Mark Rothko" all come pouring out in one extraordinary outburst) but his outlook is provincial in two important ways.
