If you'd like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I'll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Writing in Rome
If you'd like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I'll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
The Wonder of Whiffling
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a book called Toujours Tingo by, as I said then and will repeat now, the splendidly named Adam Jacot de Boinod. The book, a sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, trawls the world's languages for the wise, witty and inconsequential, gathering, among other gems, such terms as chapponage - the act of sliding a finger into a chicken's backside to see if it is laying an egg - and womba - the smile of a sleeping child. Thursday, 4 February 2010
Personality politics

Wednesday, 3 February 2010
A writer's life
I just make Facebook friends with fiction writer Viet Dinh and what's the first thing I do? Steal this cartoon from his excellent blog, that's what. Saturday, 30 January 2010
Monday, 25 January 2010
Customer care
I was leaving the FAO building in Rome a few days ago when a display of half-price books caught my eye in the international bookshop there, run, I believe, by the Lion Bookshop. The last thing I need is more books, so naturally - in the way these vices perpetuate themselves - I stopped to see what was on offer and found some nice new Penguin editions of a handful of Maigret novels marked down from €10 to €5. I'm a sucker for Simenon (I can't believe I just typed that), so I picked out four and walked into the shop to pay. There were two women behind the counter, neither of whom showed much inclination to attend to me, so I waited in my usual polite way until one of them took the books off me in a crabby, ill-humoured way, as though I'd interrupted her in some more rewarding task. I told her, in English - it was, after all, an international bookshop - that they came from the half-price box outside. Ignoring me, she asked her colleague - in Italian - who had put the books there. Pat, said the other woman. She had no right, snapped Crabby. I can get full price for these books. Well, I don't know, said the other one, you'd better ask Pat when she gets in. She can't just take books off the shelves and put them in the box when she feels like it, continued Crabby. The other woman shrugged. Well, you'll have to tell her yourself, she said, while I stood there, wallet in hand, waiting for the discussion to finish. Eventually, I asked Crabby, also in Italian, if she intended to sell me the books or not. My intention, if not my tone, was ironic. She clutched the Maigrets to her chest. I suppose I can give you a 30% discount, she said, in a tone that suggested I'd been caught in the act of extracting a tenner from her purse. Normally, if anger is a cooking technique, I'm more of a pot roast than a stir fry, but this time my temper flared and I told the woman I wouldn't have the books if she gave me them, and left. But I wish I'd made her sell them to me at the full discount, if only out of spite. What she's done, of course, is make it unlikely that an incorrigible book-buyer (me) will use the shop again; she's also responsible for this post. On the other hand, she did save €6.Friday, 22 January 2010
It should be part of the deal
Had I known you were homosexual I would not have chosen to read your book. But once bitten............. etc! Your plea (read this) for others to see reason and accept homosexuality falls on deaf ears with myself and the majority of people. The recent years of outpouring of vile homosexual promotion from every corner, has done them no favours whatsoever. Instead we now know "homophobic" attacks have never been greater. I am not in anyway supporting this, just reporting facts.
But why should we (the general public) be forced to agree with such depravity. When gays become unwell, as they will, it is of their own making. They bring about their own demise. Penetrating the anus, the bodies sewage system is an extraordinary low life act. Why would anyone ever want to engage in any activity that involves their own and others faeces?! It is the most direct way to pass life eroding disease from one individual to another.
The only cure for A.I.D.S is to stop the debauchery that causes it.
I'm not sure which of my books ckr has read, but I hope the experience wasn't too distressing (or, indeed, faecal). In the meantime, it might be worth considering some sort of colour code indicating the sexual preferences of all authors to protect such delicate readers. And why stop at authors? Why not doctors? Busdrivers? It should be part of the deal....
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Fear and loathing in Empoli
This sign, which forbids entry to all Chinese who don't speak Italian, can be found* in the window of a clothes shop in Empoli, near Florence. In an Italy that seems to have woken up and found itself racist and can't quite work out why, this looks like just one small tile in an increasingly large and ugly mosaic, if that isn't too colourful a term for the phenomenon. But there's an interesting and, to my mind at least, partly mitigating, story behind the sign. The owner of the shop, Gino Pacilli, says that he's sick and tired of Chinese customers coming into the shop, examining the way the clothes are made, trying them on, refusing to speak Italian when he asks them if he can help, leaving without buying or saying Grazie. He claims that they're simply checking out the competition and looking for items they can profitably make copies of, undercutting the legit producers from whom he buys his stock (almost certainly made in China). It's certainly true that there's a massive presence of Chinese sweatshops, invariably both illegal and exploitative, producing clothes in the Florence area, and that the Chinese community is the least interested of all ethnic communities in integration, to the point of concealing its birth and death rates from the local authorities so that documents can be recycled (Chinese immigrants to Italy rarely die, in official terms at least). So, while there's no doubt that the sign is ostensibly racist, there's also a sort of exasperation and anxiety behind it that shades the issue grey, just as the Rosarno riots two weeks ago were shaded grey by the social context in which they took place, the presence of organised crime, the absence of the state, and so on - a presence and absence from which both local people and immigrants suffered on a daily basis, and in which they were all, without exception, complicit. In this type of situation, blanket accusations of racism may be as compromised, and ineffective, as the racism they're attacking. In the meantime, Pacilli says that no more Chinese customers have entered his shop - a sure sign that they do in fact read Italian. If that were the case, of course, they could enter with impunity. But whoever said fear and its consequences were logical?Thursday, 14 January 2010
Wrap it up
The case of the haunted scrotum
Want to know more about this? I thought you might. Well, you can find out all any decent-minded person (or, indeed, andrologist) might need to know by clicking here.The art of public speaking...
...as exemplified by Sarah Palin on Fox News, when asked what she thinks about Obama's slump in the poll numbers:"Of course they're sinking. It was just a matter of time before more of that reflection of the people's uncomfortableness that they feel towards this administration is manifesting in these poll numbers," she offered.
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Nintendo
Coming home on the train from Rome last Friday evening, I put on my earphones and then, as I invariably do, fell asleep. When I woke up, half an hour later, the train was somewhere between stations, the lights in my carriage were off and all I could see in the darkness was the face of the young woman sitting opposite me, illuminated by the screen of the Nintendo she was staring down at, like a Georges de la Tour Madonna.









