Burn book burn

The woman on the left of this photograph - the one who looks as though she's just heard someone fart - is called Elena Donazzan. She's a ferventissimo Catholic and member of Berlusconi's Freedom Party (no, that's the political party, not the ones with 14 overpaid whores dressed as nurses and a gaggle of septuagenarian cronies who ought to know better). This is a contradiction in terms that ought to exclude her a priori from holding any sort of public office, but it appears to have become a criterion for it in some parts of Italy, as though hypocrisy were no longer an inconvenient truth of politics but its essential nature. She's responsible for education in the Veneto region, a Northern League stronghold. The Northern League isn't too fond of Roberto Saviano, internationally respected author of Gomorra, possibly because he's suggested that the north, and its politicians, is not only not immune to Mafia activity but is up to its neck in it, something the south-hating trolls of the Lega would rather not hear. So it's no surprise that Saviano's work should have been removed from the library shelves of the region. After all, what are libraries for if not to propagate the dominant viewpoint?

Now Donazzan, inspired no doubt by the invigorating scent of burning paper, has issued an edict to the region's schools announcing a further round of censorship. This time it's the turn of all those authors who signed a petition in 2004 against the extradition from Brazil of Cesare Battisti, an ex-terrorist convicted in absentia and on rather dodgy grounds of terrorist activity conducted in the 1970s. These authors are referred to, with audible distaste, as intellettuali, perhaps the dirtiest word in the Lega lexicon. What's odd though is that no one has seen fit to say who these blood-stained intellectuals actually are, neither Donazzan nor the newspapers, like Repubblica, that, while deploring the edict, exercise their own inadvertent censorship. So, in case you're interested, the list includes Daniel Pennac, Luther Blissett (now Wu Ming), Massimo Carlotto and Pino Cacucci. You can find a more complete list here.

Red bull? Papal bull? Plain bull...

Thanks to the efforts of one humourless Sicilian priest (Father Marco Damanti, if you care), who's played the blasphemy card and scared Red Bull into compliance, you'll no longer be able to see this harmless advertisement on Italian television.

Never mind, you can see it here.

I have seen the best minds of my generation...

... run for cover at the threat of very large fines. Like American radio station WBAI, which last week decided not to broadcast Ginsberg's Howl to celebrate its 50th birthday. More information here.

Why let the government censor you when you can do it yourself?

Blood and sperm

An exhibition in the once-red city of Bologna has been closed after complaints of abominable blasphemy from the catholic church. The offending collective was named La Madonna Piange Sperma (The Madonna Weeps Sperm). This would be unremarkable if the reference were to Mrs Ritchie née Ciccone, who has surely done this and everything else that can conceivably be done with sperm, bar produce it herself. But, rather naughtily, it isn't. As the original Madonna's representatives on earth, the local Bishop and various other ecclesiastical (and not) bigwigs have huffed and puffed and the show has duly been taken down. The organizers have managed to defend the right of art to say whatever it pleases while rubbing their foreheads on the ground in abject apology. The church has staged an expiatory mass, the high camp solution to gross offence. And so everybody's happy.

Oddly enough, when a garden statue of the Madonna wept blood some years ago in Civitavecchia, blood that was subsequently analysed as male, the church was more circumspect. I quote from a site called Visions of Jesus Christ:

The city's bishop, Monsignor Girolamo Grillo, said the statue cried in his hands.

"We have not proclaimed that the tear-shedding of the Madonna was miraculous," Grillo told the ANSA news agency Sunday. "But the facts speak for themselves." Corriere quoted the Rev. Stefano De Fiores, a Madonna scholar and professor at the Vatican's Gregorian University, as concluding: "There's the hand of God here."