Hangmen and Cities of Happiness

These are David Mitchell and Enid Blyton. If you'd like to know what links them, click here.

Identity bracelets...

...and the Antipodes. Confused? You needn't be. Just click here.

We do it for the villa in the Bahamas...

...obviously...

Cheat death...

Or not... 

Manners maketh man...

... so where do allotments fit in? Find out here.

I love you past speech

This is Eros, the god of love. If you'd like to know where he hangs out, click here.

Low Moon

This is an image of a low moon. If you'd like to know what it has to do with poetry and ghosts, click here.

Sixty Two

Somebody likes The Scent of Cinnamon very much indeed. Want to know who? Click here.

Evil, the banality of

Not the most attractive looking man you'll ever see, but there's nothing that distinguishes him from a thousand other petty bureaucrats, the kind of people you see in offices throughout Italy, helping or hindering their fellow citizens, as the case may be. His name is Massimo Sensini and he's the elected (Northern League) mayor of a small town called Fossalta di Piave, 40 miles north of Venice and the place where Ernest Hemingway was injured during the First World War. Among its 4000 inhabitants is a four year old girl of African origin,whose father, after years of working in the local industry, was recently made redundant and is now working in Belgium, sending home what he can to support his wife and four children in Italy. The little girl goes to the local school, called 'Il Flauto Magico'. It's an all-day school and the children have their lunch there, paying a certain amount for the privilege. The little girl's mother asks for help from the local authorities to pay for her daughter's lunches (she's already paying 50 euros a month for the teaching and other services provided). But the council can't help.

The teachers at the school - there are five of them, all women - decide to forego their own lunch in turns and give it to the girl. Everything's fine until the mayor hears about it from the social services. He summons the school principal, a certain Simonetta Murri, to condemn the 'gross irregularity' of the situation and accuse the teachers, effectively, of stealing council property through their 'misuse' of lunches assigned to them, an act that incurs 'a loss of revenue for the municipality'. The principal agrees. The teachers are told that if they continue to deprive the education system of five lunches a week, they will be disciplined. The little girl now does only half a day at school, going home for lunch and staying there for the afternoon, deprived of 50 percent of an education that she, more than anyone, needs if she is to belong to the country she lives in and to which her father has contributed as a worker and tax-payer in the past.

Needless to day, according to Sensini and Murri, this has nothing to do with racism. For Sensini, the lunches are part of the teachers' salary and it is illegal to auto-reduce one's salary. For Murri, all children are equal and what would she do if all her pupils wanted free lunches? Has anyone else asked for a free lunch? Well, no, not yet. The speciousness of these arguments is self-evident, but what strikes me most about them is that these two people, insignificant in themselves yet given the kind of responsibility over others that can make lives worth living or not, are behaving in the same way as other people, in other places and at other times, whose small, considered acts of brutality, sustained by an indifferent or conniving structure of power, have led to their fellow citizens being seen as less than human. Food's such a basic need, and the act of offering it such a basic human act, enshrined in all cultures as hospitality. How ironic that notions of law and principle and equality should to be used to rip an offered plate from the small hands of a hungry child.

Dark times, dark tales

Fancy something a bit creepy for the weekend? Need some advice? Click here.

words, words, wordle

Want to see what I've been up to recently? Well, here it is.

Ouch!

If you want to know what this instrument of torture has to do with Any Human Face, click here.

Transformations

Girls made out of flowers, brothers becoming beasts and breeding, David Beckham an object of blind irrational worship. What is the world coming to? Find out here.

And if you want to see some seriously demented whimsy, google for images of Blodeuwedd...

Shockheaded Peter

Want to know more about the man who wrote Struwwelpeter? Click here.

Never Let Me Go

I've just posted a review of Ishiguro's novel (not the film, which I haven't seen, and probably won't see) over at my other blog - the serious one I save for talk about books... You can find it here. And if you haven't read the book, or seen the film, try not to think too hard about the implications of the picture on this post. I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.

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.

Hello Goodbye Hello

If you visit this blog on a regular basis, you'll have had a disappointing few months, and I apologise. I've been in the UK for personal reasons that I haven't really wanted to talk about here, and the various things that so preoccupied me seem to have lost their immediate relevance. My two black beasts - Berlusconi and Ratzinger - feel far away, despite the latter's attempt to beard me in my lair this summer, and the ongoing farce of Italian politics is, well, precisely that. To my shame, I can't even summon up a more than ordinary outrage at homophobia, perhaps the result of watching programmes like Strictly Come Dancing and X Factor, where being gay sometimes seems the rule rather than exception. I've also come to hate the look of this blog, and don't like the new templates being offered (this is technical stuff - fellow bloggers will understand). SO... I'm up and off to Wordpress, where I will apply the old formula: a change is as good as a rest, and see what happens. I'll be taking all the old stuff with me, so don't despair, you'll still be able to see what I thought about Maria Vittoria Brambilla (don't care? Don't worry, you're not alone..). I've packed. I'm ready to go. From today, you'll find me here.

Words

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I've heard people complain that the use of the word 'gay' to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the 'homosexual life style' had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don't know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn't have enough money to wrest the term 'tea party' back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be 'political'. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

Fusion, Wolverhampton style

Seven day wonder

I'd often been intrigued in the past by an ad in the LRB inviting me to spend some time in a large old country house near Girona, in Catalonia, with the author Charles Pallisser, working on the art of fiction-writing. How pleasant it must be, I used to think, to be able to sit around in the sun with like-minded people and a writer who was not only published but had actually written a book I much admired (The Quincunx), not to speak of cooling off body and brain in a convenient swimming-pool, eating local foodstuffs and drinking local wine. It was the stuff of dreams.

And then I published my own first book, and then my second and I began to wonder if it wouldn't be even more fun to go as the writer, and sit around in the sun, etc. This year, to my joy, that's exactly what happened when the ad, in a sense (and through Sandra - thank you, Sandra!), got in touch with me to tell me that Lee Pennington, a man of many and considerable talents, and the brains and heart behind the operation, had invited me to be one of the guest authors on his Seven Day Wonder book-lovers' week in early September. When I heard from an earlier guest that she'd had a great time, I was even keener.

I wasn't disappointed. I was one of four people to be invited. Clare Dudman was the first, to talk about her most recent novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees. It's a fine book, honest and beautifully written, and I'm sorry I missed her. Next up was Adam Nevill, currently reinvigorating British horror with Apartment 16. He was there when I turned up late from Girona airport, to be greeted by pasta, wine and general conviviality, and seemed far too sunny and simpatico a man to have conceived such a dark and disturbing work. Someone once asked me how I managed to live with my imagination, and I may have asked Adam that same question.

The final author to be invited, Ann Cleeves, arrived while I was talking to the group and stayed, as I did, until the end. It was a joy to have time to talk a little shop, and discover, among other things, a shared admiration for Fred Vargas. You can see me here on the left, momentarily distracted by the view from the latest and possibly last of Ann's gripping Shetland novels, Blue Lightning.

Events like these may be built around books, but they live or die by the energy and good will of all those who take part. I have everyone to thank for the welcome we received. Lee, Debbie and Rob, who made sure that the food played as central a role as the reading, and to all of the book-lovers, whose interest and enthusiasm, and discretion, made it a pleasure to be read, and discussed, and finally, with the softest of kid gloves, given the literary equivalent of the third degree. They couldn't have been kinder, or more generous. Now all I have to do is write another book in time to get invited back...