Shades of Alan Turing

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but unacknowledged plagiarism can leave a slightly bitter taste in the first begetter's mouth. In mine, at least. A story I wrote some years ago, called SOAP, has popped up in a number of places after being published by the online magazine East of the Web.

Generally they're student crib sites where for every 1,000 words you copy you have to provide a 1,000 words of new material. I suspect this is true of this site, which doesn't seem to open any longer, though I may be wrong. The story obviously has no value in terms of student assignment, so it's both a random and an innocuous sort of intellectual theft, and not worth bothering about.

But I'm more intrigued by this site, owned by Doctor Bojan Cukic of West Virginia University. As professor of computer science and electrical engineering, he seems to have used my story to develop some kind of code based on sequences of six letters. I've written to ask him what he's up to.

I'll let you know if he replies.

Fasten your seatbelts...

Well, it’s better than nothing. The proposed new bill to regulate civil unions isn’t perfect, but compromise isn’t intended to produce perfection - what compromise is intended to produce is the illusion of perfectibility. The only people whose noses are seriously out of joint are the non possumus brigade, whose episcopal hissy-fitting has influenced the form of the bill (and some of its substance), but not, if the metaphor isn’t too inappropriate, induced its abortion.

It remains to be seen whether further trans-Tiber dealings will prevent the bill from becoming law. The neo-theo-dem-cons on the centre left (and God only knows what they’re doing there) can sigh with relief that the bill doesn’t institute a separate register for civil unions, alongside – and in competition with - that for married couples. But it’s unlikely that their spiritual mentors will settle for such an Italian solution.

I see a bumpy ride ahead.

Blair yes, Zapatero no

It's odd that whenever people want to attack the idea of 'gay marriage' the stick they use to beat it with bears the smiling Bambi head of Zapatero. The fact that civil partnerships have also been introduced to England under Tony Blair is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Maybe Blair's work in other fields, such as warmongering, has exonerated him.

Big foot, big mouth...

Berlusconi does it again. Not content with upsetting his long-suffering wife, he's managed to alienate a fair slice of the Forza Italia vote by announcing that all gays vote left.

If only this were true.

Towards the watershed...

The latest news is that a Cabinet meeting this afternoon may reach a decision on the civil union bill. Let's hope it isn't in Latin.

God's ferret strikes again

Cardinal Ruini appears to have made use of L'Avvenire, the Vatican newspaper, in his latest offensive against civil unions. An unsigned editorial (but undoubtedly the ferret's work) threatens that the kind of legal recognition of unmarried couples likely to be proposed by the government would be a "watershed that will inevitably weigh on the future of Italian politics".

The editorial declares "Non possumus", a formula apparently last used in 1860 by Pius IX to reject the unification of Italy and the usurpation of the church's authority. If this isn't interference in the internal political affairs of a neighbouring state I don't know what is. Rosy Bindi, Minister of Families and co-drafter of the bill, said, "I don't speak Latin." Unfortunately, a lot of other people in parliament do.

In the meantime, Cardinal Poletto of Turin claims that the new law is the devil's work, announcing that "there is no doubt the devil exists." One of the ways in which he works, apparently, is to induce people to sin by means of legislation decided to "tear the family apart."

Blimey.

Women in wartime

If you happen to be in Amsterdam in March, don't miss this exhibition of photographs by Patrizia Casamirra. They're powerful, necessary works, moving yet unrhetorical. They deserve a wider audience.

How to become a full professor in Italy

a) Wait until the university in which you work as a lecturer invites applications for a full professorship.
b) Write a book of no academic value by throwing together work from other books and stealing material from colleagues further down the food chain.
c) Have the book published by the university you work for, as a piece of original research, in a limited number of copies. Say, 250. Publication paid for by the university.
d) Present the book as a publication entitling you to the position.
e) Be interviewed by friends and colleagues, including those who authorised the publication.
f) Get the job.
g) Let 247 unsold copies of the book gather dust in the office of a colleague while you stalk corridors and shout at underlings. Barone.

Bulgarian charm

Bulgaria joined the EU this year and we were lucky enough to have a Bulgarian friend (Hello, Izzy!) in our house on New Year's Eve. This meant not only that we celebrated twice (once at 11 and once at midnight, given the difference in local time), but also that we were given this Bulgarian good-luck charm. It's about the length of my forearm, made of wood and wool and is, I think, particularly intriguing because it's not just symbolic but actually, at least in part, genuinely edible. There's a chilli pepper, a ring of bread, corn, both popped and unpopped, and what seems to be a double strand of sliced dried garlic. With a packet of pasta and some oil you'd have all you need to make a plate of spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino.

Legless

I've been fretting about an article I read a few days ago, written by a woman with something now known as body identity integrity disorder (BIID). This is apparently short-hand, if that isn't too loaded a term, for the overwhelming and obsessive need to amputate a healthy limb in order to feel 'whole'.

Susan Smith, the name given the woman, has already managed to 'kill' a leg and have it surgically removed, with the complicity of her husband, long-suffering as she is. I don't want to attack the woman in question, who clearly has sufficient problems of her own to address, but I'm disturbed by the conviction she holds that she has somehow been denied her right to a normal life by the medical establishment's refusal to amputate her legs for no good reason.

The arguments she uses aren't really arguments at all. She works by analogy. "A hundred years ago, it was taboo to be gay in many societies, and 50 years ago the idea of transsexuals was abhorrent to most." She might as well have said that five hundred years ago tomatoes were considered poisonous and women with third nipples were drowned as witches. What she means, of course, is that she can't have what she wants and these two categories, gays and transsexuals, can. And it isn't fair. She hates her legs and she wants them amputated and her need, no doubt sincerely felt, has been defined as a syndrome, which makes it objective and transactional in the market place of human rights, so why can't she have them cut off?

But she's optimistic:

I think BIID will stay taboo until people get together and bring it out. I have tried to make the condition more understood but it is difficult to get a case out in the open by yourself. My psychiatrist went to a meeting last year in Paris, and many doctors there told her that they had operated on people who needed an amputation under mysterious circumstances, and how happy the person was when they woke up. It led them to believe that perhaps BIID is more prevalent than people think.

And another pot

A painted one this time. A pot that looks like an egg, a seed, the head of a spermatozoon. Giuseppe did it some years ago now and I want it as the cover of a book I still haven't written. But I'll know it when I find it.

Violent passions, horror and suspense

I've recently been discussing Paul Bowles with Brian Howell (Hello, Brian!) on Zoetrope and it sent me off to re-read a couple of his short stories in The Delicate Prey.

Hmm. I'm still not convinced by Bowles, but I love the cover of my copy, the 1956 US paperback edition, bought in Rome many years ago from a German second-hand book dealer who was later arrested for rape.

The blurb on the back of the book continues in much the same lurid vein:

HAUNTING HORROR

This is an unusual and fascinating book. It exposes the violent impulses that lurk in the hearts of primitive and ruthless men and women. In seventeen shocking stories, Paul Bowles masterfully reveals strange and twisted passions in exotic corners of the world.

Along the top runs the legend ...Good Reading for the Millions.

What's hardest to imagine now is a world in which this kind of thing wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

Pots

I've got three small ceramic pots by Christiane Perrochon that are among the loveliest things I've ever owned. They're no more than four or five inches high. In the photograph, they're standing on my study floor and I've only just noticed how the colours match. I've had them for years, don't know how much they're worth, don't care. All I know is that I'd like some more.

Love tiff at Arcore: Correction

A couple of days ago I said that Berlusconi had been caught flirting with a starlet employed by his television company, Mediaset. Whoops! What I should have said was that he'd been caught flirting with an ex-starlet employed by his television company, Mediaset, and now member of parliament employed by his own party, Forza Italia.

Same woman, different job.

The house above the cork forest (3)

It should have been so easy. Of course house-buying is more complicated in Italy than elsewhere, by which I suppose I mean northern Europe, as Joost, our Dutch friend, certainly did. But we'd been through it ourselves, twice, friends had bought houses in Fondi and Rome and Milan, it hadn't been that exhaustingly complex, just long-winded. When E. said two or three months at the most, we added one on for luck. Done deal by Christmas, we thought.

The house is flanked on one side by a place for parking cars and on the other three by unfenced land, peppered with olive and fig and pomegranate and vines that produce small strawberry-flavoured grapes with hard skins, and harder rocks heaving up through the rough grey-green grass. There's the well I mentioned earlier, round and hatted, like a relic from a stone age settlement, and a stone-built oven, and the roofless remains of what might have been a stable for a mule, also in stone. Joost and Anna wanted to know what came with the house. The owners smiled and nodded and shook their heads, worryingly not in unison. One of the brothers, the oldest, said the well was his and then said that it wasn't, and then said that it was but that he didn't want to sell it. Each time we went the putative boundaries changed.

This kept us busy for a good six months. Land register maps seemed to offer a solution until we tried to establish how they actually corresponded to the land itself. Goitrous Alessandro, the one who may have owned the well, glanced at our map upside down for a moment then brushed it away with a beatific smile and began to clamber onto the top of a rock, waving his stick towards the road below. Da qua a la, he insisted, while Joost stared hopelessly at the map and Anna gathered figs.

The neighbours, who may be related to the owners, asked us in for their home-made wine and salami, pouring the former into jam jars rinsed in a bucket, slicing the latter against a wool-clad bosom. As we drove past their barn on the way back to the road we saw the head and forelegs of a dead dog sticking out from the straw, like a trophy on a wall. It was still there two weeks later.

A blacker list

I suppose it's inevitable that, as you get older, the people you most admire should begin to die at an alarming rate. I've just been looking through some English newspapers I bought over Christmas and found The Independent's Year in Review obituary spread.

The big league names - Muriel Spark, Freddie Trueman, Robert Altman - I knew about. But it's the second division that twitches the heart. Ivor Cutler, the thinking man's Spike Milligan. Jackie Pallo, memories of Saturday afternoons spent watching my father watching wrestling, his legs dancing up and down, his hands clenched into fists, head weaving, working far harder and with more authenticity than anyone on the screen. Lynne Perrie, her gin-soaked Christian fundamentalist in Coronation Street so harrowingly awful the soap antes were definitively upped and, I suspect, her career ruined. Raymond Baxter, Tomorrow's Mr Know-all. Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose garden of words I've never seen.

And down there with the rest, in the catch-all list at the bottom of page 46, acknowledged as ever but denied the attention she deserves, as ever, there's Sybille Bedford. I wonder what she'd have done with the trial of Milosevic. Who, needless to say, like Pinochet, warrants a paragraph to himself.

A blacklist, or should that be lavender...

Thank you so much, Love God's Way! What a helpful list this is if you feel like listening to a little gay-friendly music. There's something for everyone, from the Scissor Sisters to Barry Manilow.

Barry Manilow?

My acknowledgements to popbitch for this.

Three Stages in Learning to Fly

Read this, a short piece by Vanessa Gebbie. It's wonderful.

Love tiff at Arcore

I'm not quite convinced by this story. Berlusconi's wife has suffered in silence all these years, even putting up with her husband's insinuations that she's having an affair with Massimo Cacciari, philosopher and Mayor of Venice. Now she loses her marital rag because he's been caught flirting with a starlet (employed, not surprisingly, by Mediaset, B.'s TV empire) on a programme broadcast by, you guessed it, Mediaset.

Given that all publicity is good, this won't do Berlusconi any harm at all. It's given him a chance to talk about the value of marriage, respect for the family, etc. at a time when these issues are front page. Some of his best wife jokes are already being recycled. He's a comic, a little bit naughty, a devoted husband, a flirt. What's not to vote?

Old Mother Benedict

Seen in a restaurant in Cologne, opposite the cathedral, during World Youth Day 2005. Would that Rome were Cologne!