Countdown

Recognise this? Of course you do! It's the front cover of the paperback edition of Little Monsters. It's slightly different from the hardback - my name's now larger and centred (an entirely thrilling development) and Beryl Bainbridge's generous endorsement has been replaced by a quote from the Daily Mail review saying that the book is 'beautifully written, and more compelling than many thrillers', which says something about the book (its aim) and something about marketing (not its aim). This obviously takes nothing away from my joy, which is unbounded, but I just thought I'd mention it. 

The book hits the shops on Friday, 6 February, and on this occasion I'm not indulging in wishful thinking or hyperbole because it actually will be hitting a much larger number of shops than the hardback edition did. This is because Waterstones branches nationwide (including Wolverhampton - I know, I checked) will be including it in their 3 for 2 offer, so the book should be stacked up on tables all over the country, rubbing shoulders with The Gone-Away World - Hi, Nick! (It's 3 for 2, I can afford to be magnanimous) - and all kinds of other great reading experiences. (This is what happens when I slide into promotion mode - my language goes.) And those of you who are travelling in the next few weeks should see even more copies at WH Smith Travel shops in stations and airports throughout the UK, where it will be available in their Buy One Get One Half Price offer. Yes! Naturally, since I won't be there to witness this, I'm looking forward to all your sightings, preferably with photos. So prime your mobiles...

I was going to save this post until Friday, but I couldn't wait. Now I'll have a dreadful sense of hollowness for the next four days. 

PS I wanted to call this post 'Countdown to...' well, something, so I googled 'countdown to' for inspiration and found, to my dismay, that the two most frequent words to follow the phrase, apart from Christmas, which clearly isn't appropriate except metaphorically, are 'extinction' and 'armageddon'. 

Aiming at foot, hitting foot

I've heard people say that the Westboro Baptist Church, by revealing the true face of fundamentalist homophobia, is the best thing to happen to the fight for gay equality in years. I suppose this is true in the same way that summary executions of teenage gays in Iran or the anathema of Mugabe and the president of the Gambia, whose name I have no intention of committing to memory, are 'useful' reminders of the lengths to which instutionalised homophobia can go. By this token, Ratzinger's decision to welcome back to the catholic fold a gang of befrocked negationists, otherwise known as the schismatic followers of French archbishop Lefebvre, can also be seen as a good thing as it strips away yet one more layer of whatever moral authority the man, and the organisation he represents, is supposed to possess, though it must be rather hard on those catholics who belong to the church because they believe in the message of Christ. The next thing you know he'll be recognising the authenticity of the Protocols of Zion. Why shouldn't he? Holocaust-denier archbishop Robert Williamson already does. 

A sudden calm

Well, there were moments I thought I might never make it, moments in which the idea of draggging my weary wine-addled braincells across seemingly endless virtual tundra towards the temporary succour of one more virtual oasis (if that isn't too mixed a geographical metaphor) was simply too exhausting to contemplate. And then a set of new questions would arrive, and I'd read them, and be sparked by them, and think OK, let's see what I can do with these. I'm talking, of course, about my Cyclone tour, the aim of which was to sell as many copies of my collection The Scent of Cinnamon as was humanly possible without its author moving from his keyboard. I don't know whether it achieved that aim or not - though, I hope it did - but it achieved the secondary, unvoiced, aim of forcing me to think very hard about what I do and why I do it: the equivalent of an MA in creative writing without spending a penny. My thanks to all the wonderful bloggers involved, and my final thanks to my final interviewer, renaissance man, Wendell Ricketts, writer, editor of the ongoing project and anthology devoted to working-class gay writers, Everything I Have is Blue, translator of, among other things, the theatre of Natalia Ginzburg (The Wrong Door), astute and prolific reviewer, and author of one of the very few English-language Italian-based blogs that seem to live in the same Italy I live in. You can find his questions, and my answers, here. Phew.

Baa baa black quilt

Italy might have a reputation for being one of the fashion centres of the world, but you wouldn’t think so this winter, with two-thirds of the women and half the men kitted out in the same black quilted synthetic jacket, with a rather sad scrap of fur round the edge of the hood. I don’t know which captain of industry, by which I suppose I mean designer, dreamed up this one, a garment that makes even the slimmest and most attractive of mortals look like some sort of industrial by-product used to line boilers, turned inside-out and trimmed with dead hair. But it must have kept the Chinese cat farms happy for the season, not to mention the usual “special economic zone” Vietnamese and Indonesian sweatshops. It’s a source of constant amazement to me that a country which is internationally prized for its design, originality and quality should fall so easily in thrall to the dreariest of orthodoxies, even if they are dictated by Giorgio Armani or Dolce and Gabbana, or whoever makes their design decisions for them. Two or three winters ago, the rage was utterly impractical white puffa coats trailing almost on the ground, often combined with what we used to call winklepickers. This year, in the way these things happen, it’s padded nylon and scrotty pelt at the neck that are de rigueur, women and men of all ages happily discarding the perfectly good coats they were wearing last year to don the new, apparently without a whimper of complaint despite the parlous state of the economy. Such sheep-like conformity, if it could be turned to the common good - as it was in a sense under Mao -, might actually serve a purpose in Italy, a country which has long since lost any sense of society, let alone civil society, in favour of personal, familial and, at best, parochial interests. If people could be herded in the same mindless way towards paying their taxes, or even their bus fares, who knows what social value might be produced.

Happy birthday, dear blog

I shouldn't get too sentimental about this, but today is my blog's second birthday. It's been an eventful two years for me, with publications and so on, and my blog's been beside me all the way, making useful suggestions, cheering me up when I'm down, calming me down when I'm a little too up. It's made me laugh more than once, and cry as well. It's introduced me to many new friends, and reunited me with old ones (I know, Nigel, I'm mortified, be patient a little longer), and I'm grateful for that. It hasn't always been sensible, or wise, but you expect the very young to embarrass themselves, and their parents, occasionally. So let's wish it more of the same, and more of whatever more there is.

(It isn't great but this is the only cake I could find for a second birthday. Apart from one with boobs, which just didn't feel right, somehow.)

Au revoir? I don't think so

Dropping in at Edge Hill

The penultimate leg of my Something Rich and Strange tour can be found at Rob Spence's blog, Topsyturvydom. Rob, for those of you who don't know, is a proud Mancunian, a lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University and, with Ailsa Cox, the editor of 21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, and I'm honoured to be invited. In the interview, we chat about genre, craft and what exile might involve. Talking about my story collection, The Scent of Cinnamon, Rob comments: 

"If anything is going to restore the popularity of short fiction in this country, it must be the publication of stories such as these, by turns humorous, surreal, disturbing, but always memorable." 

His last words, which I wholeheartedly endorse, are these: 

"Now, gentle reader, buy the book! "

One morning, when Pietro Citati woke from troubled dreams...

I've written about pretentious windbag Pietro Citati in the past. Enough's enough, you might think, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I hadn't come across this in the back of my copy of the Gordon Burns' novel, Alma Cogan. It's one of those lists that sometimes pop up at the end of paperbacks in the hope, and why not?, of shifting a few more units. In this case, inappropriately given that Burns' book is fiction, it's entitled "Further Biographies Available from Minerva". It's clear from the first entry that the biographer is on the right and the subject of the biography, or its title, on the left. Dickens, in other words, wrote many things but a biography of Peter Ackroyd isn't among them. Which is what makes the third entry so amusing. 

It's almost a pity that Kafka didn't write a book about Citati, if only to get his own back on the vacuous old literary tart.

Feeling thorny?

Digital cameras and cheap air travel have so much to answer for. If you find this photograph amusing you're probably reading the wrong blog or having an off day. If you don't find it amusing but would still like to see lots more photographs of people transforming fragments of the world about them into substantially larger penises than the ones they already possess, along with many other wonders, take a look at this site, entitled Photo Clichés. After which you can come back and explain to me why belonging to the second group is somehow wittier and more noble than belonging to the first.

I apologise for the title to this post. Not because it isn't funny (because, in a way that's congruous to the general mood of the post, it is), but because I sort of stole it from Photo Clichés. This is what happens when you try to be- or pass for being - original, but don't quite make it.

March for Equality

If you're on Facebook and think that equality matters (these categories don't, alas, always coincide), you might like to take part in the Online March for Equality. All you need to do is go to this site and choose an image to replace your profile picture for the next few days. It's a simple procedure and you don't even have to leave your desk, but that doesn't, I hope, make it entirely useless. Of course, if you're anywhere near the actual inauguration and can actually march that would be even better.

Isak Dinesen? Yes!

Moira Crone has just reviewed The Scent of Cinnamon at The Short Review, an essential site for anyone who cares about short, or long, fiction. It's a great review and I'm thrilled, above all because I feel not only that I've been read and understood, which is always wonderful, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that I've learnt a few new things about what I do and how I do it. You can read it, and be thrilled (though perhaps slightly less than I am), here. 

This is the first time I've been compared to Dinesen. I am without words.

Update from the very dark cave

According to a story in today's Sun, a woman in Britain who's been told that her unborn child has one body but two heads - an extreme example of conjoined twins -has decided to go ahead with the pregnancy. She's a 'staunch' Catholic, apparently, which gives her the right to do what she wants with her body, while denying it to everyone else. She's also unmarried, and appears to have no intention of marrying her partner, also Catholic and clearly from somewhere very close to her in the local gene pool, but hey, nobody's perfect. Why embrace an entire religion when you can cherry-pick? Besides, where's the money in marriage?

On a slightly lighter note, increasing numbers of god-fearing Christians in Texas are putting the fun back into fundamentalism by attending cowboy churches. Around ten percent of baptisms in the state are now conducted by men in chaps and stetsons. And that's not all. According to the MSNBC report:

At a recent Sunday morning service at the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, the Rev. Jess McCabe, a visiting pastor, held up different sizes of deer antlers to illustrate his sermon about how people grow as Christians.

"That's one thing about cowboy church — we all got room to grow," McCabe told the congregation with a smile.

Well, hi ho, Silver!

Coffee and Cronenberg

Just over six months ago, I wrote a rather snippy post about the way quality newspapers were as entranced by celebrity as their tabloid counterparts. The post was occasioned by a couple of reviews of first novels written by people who, regardless of their own ability, were also extremely well-connected in the literary world, and I was in a huff about how they got all the attention while poor little me other first novelists didn't. To my surprise, and joy, one of these novelists - Nick Harkaway - got in touch with me that very day to say that he agreed with me. Since then, we've been in touch frequently about all sorts of things, we've almost shared a spaghetti alla carbonara in Rome, I've read and been very impressed by The Gone-Away World (out in paperback on February 5th) and Nick has agreed to interview me on my Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour. You can find the interview here. I have a photograph of Nick holding a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon with a look of disturbingly manic glee on his face - a reaction I hope the book routinely evokes - but I have too much respect for the man, and his reputation, to reproduce it here.

(I'm still waiting to hear from Martin Amis's wife.)

Tease

I'm looking forward to something occasional tomorrow. (Well, later today.)

Talking Heads: Bringing down the House

A little music to get things up and running again.

Pickles

Not to be outdone when it comes to relevance and quality, Italian state television has its own version of Celebrity Come Dancing. It's called Ballando con le Stelle (Dancing with the Stars) and it has the same cavalier approach to stardom as CCD does to celebrity. Presumably on the principle that no one with a real reputation to lose would appear on the show (pace John Sergeant), it's redefined the word star to cover 'ex-spouse of star', 'glamour model', and so on. This year, though, it's gone one better (in barrel-scraping terms). It's invited Emanuele Filiberto Savoia to shake a leg on prime-time telly.

EFS, for those of you who don't know, is the grandson of the last king of Italy, forced to skedaddle after palling up to Mussolini. His father, Vittorio Emanuele, a slack-faced halfwit with the brains and moral equipment of an amoeba, managed to use his 'business' contacts under the last Berlusconi government to have the whole gang re-admitted to the country after decades of gilded exile in Geneva, Paris, Sardinia (yes, Sardinia is in Italy, but money makes borders permeable).

Since their return, Daddy Savoia has been in trouble with the law for various 'business' dealings involving gambling, sex slavery and prostitution, and, along with his son and wife, a botoxed biscuit heiress who makes Ivana Trump look classy, has sued the Italian government for moral damages. (More about this here.) EF's first bid for stardom (in the televisual sense) came when he endorsed a pickle manufacturer. Along with many others, I wrote to the company to suggest that this wasn't a wise choice and received, within seconds, a long, carefully-worded email in which the pickle makers hedged their bets, defended their decision, apologised, etc. Two days later, the ad disappeared from Italian TV screens and EF's contract was rescinded.

Since then he's entered politics, running for a party whose name I forget and registering the polling equivalent of nul points. His political sympathies remain on the market, for anyone who might regard them as a worthwhile investment. He was last in the news just over a year ago when he refused to pay a speeding fine. He refused to pay for two reasons. The first was that he wasn't driving the car at the time. The second was that the road signs weren't very clear. This is known in legal circles as the Billy Bunter defence. (As in: I never ate the cake. And, anyway, it was horrible.)

Ballando con le Stelle starts on Saturday. Waltz on, Pickles.

Scones and tales

My seventh visit on the Something Rich and Strange tour and this time I'm in Devon, enjoying a cuppa and a couple of home-made scones with Dovegreyreader as we talk about The Scent of Cinnamon. She asks me some great questions about grief, writing habits and writers I love and I answer with alacrity and a blob of clotted cream on my chin. All is revealed here. There's also a draw for two free copies of the book, but you've already got one, haven't you? Haven't you?

All sorts of fun activities

This is from Liveleak, and was first spotted by Matthew Gallaway's cousin. My thanks to them both.

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole- Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Omega Minor

I’ve just finished reading Omega Minor by the Belgian novelist Paul Verhaeghen, a cognitive psychologist now working in the States. Originally published in Dutch, this enormous novel – 700 pages of closely-printed text - was translated into English by its author, winning the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in the process. The English, like the novel itself, is constantly inventive, and slightly quirky; Verhaeghen has stated that he decided to do the translation himself after seeing the lamentable job a professional translator had done of a section of the book, and I can well believe it. It isn’t a job I’d have taken on willingly, and certainly not at the rates a work this size inevitably attracts if it’s to exist at all. It’s a sprawling, superficially confused, engagingly unwieldy sort of book that resists unity of style, that resists, in many ways, any kind of unity at all, except that provided by its existence as an attractive, slightly austere, well-made physical artefact, for which we have, once more, the Dalkey Archive to thank.

The narrative arc of the novel covers much of the last century, with key events clustering around the opposing poles of the Second World War and the destruction of the Berlin wall. Geographically, its heart is Berlin, although long sections are set in New York and Los Alamos, and one short section in an improbably glamorous Bath, a place I suspect Verhaeghen has never seen. It’s a book that barely acknowledges a world beyond that defined by mid-twentieth century Europe and the post-war diaspora, except – in the case of Japan - as a target for the nuclear bomb. There’s no reason why it should. It has more than enough on its plate as it is.

The novel opens with a description of a sexual encounter that sets the tone for most of the sex in the novel. There isn’t that much of it in terms of pages, but what there is shares a relentless, near-pornographic quality that might have something to do with Verhaeghen’s not being a native speaker. It’s a strange amalgam of the poetic, the urological and the simply weird, as in this extract from the second page:

Behold the purple head that sways so swiftly on its heavy stalk; see how it glistens with her spit and juices; watch the little crater at the top spit out its zigzag line—out shoots the slime, the whirling weathervane, the drunken comet that climbs past the stars: In the moist cloud chamber of Donatella’s room, a signal lights up in silvery white, an almost perfect circle described by the tumbling ribbon of spunk, an acrobatic snake snapping at—but missing—its own tail: an ancient Greek symbol, the latter Omega, capitalized—Ω.

This opening scene does more than establish the tone and central elements of the novel’s theme. Crucially, the sexual act is being described not by a protagonist, but by someone who observes, himself unobserved. The novel is deeply concerned with what it means to be a witness, and with the kind of power, and lack of power, this involves. It goes beyond this to question the nature and permeability of the boundaries we draw between those who act and those who watch, and how historical and personal blame should be apportioned between these two groups, taking into account the extent to which any distinction made between them might be facile, or false. Dangerous ambiguities are evoked as the novel progresses – through confession and dissimulation - and even the aphoristic moral certainty of such a sentence as “There is a world of difference between an act that is permitted and an act that is permissible” is undermined by what the novel does.

Omega Minor is designed to be seen as a book that works on multiple levels. Its refusal, for example, to utter the word God, preferring G*d, suggests that it sees itself as a sort of holy text, as one that runs the very real risk of blasphemy, or, alternatively, as a text that denies God and demonstrates its denial on the page. The action jumps, often irritatingly, from one time and place to another, often without identifying the central character or narrative viewpoint, leaving the reader to flounder for a page or two and sometimes, when a new character is introduced without warning, for considerably longer. It draws on religion, and history, both personal and political, and science both as bodies of fact and as sources of metaphor, as though there really were a mystery at the heart of things that might be revealed. Which mystery, in the end, is what provides the novel with its – for me –unsatisfactory climax. The novel’s over-written at times, and under-imagined at others, particularly when it talks about love, and I found it hard to care for anyone other than the one person who perhaps deserved it least. At the same time, and despite these misgivings, I found the book deeply absorbing, and the time spent reading it time well spent. If what I was left with was a very traditional sense of the sheer awfulness of its material, for want of a better term, rather than a new understanding of the way in which the material is being reworked, by history and time, by deniers and apologists, this didn’t detract from the very powerful impact the book made on me. It’s not damning with faint praise but its diametrical opposite to say that this book is over-ambitious. I recommend it.

Think Pink

I've just found out that Think Pink Radio of Chicago noticed my Cyclone visit to Jockohomo. Think Pink is "is dedicated to promoting queers that do things on their own–people who love this world and want to be themselves in it", which sounds pretty good to me. It had this to say about the book and the tour.

Happy New Year!

Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman

What a powerful and wonderful book this is. In deliberately toned-down and undemonstrative prose, Shearman takes the lives of average people, suburbanites, office-workers, the patiently married, the mildly disappointed, and, with one single fundamental shift of perspective (for want of a better word), creates a reality that surprises, informs and moves, often deeply. I found most of these stories compelling, touching, occasionally gut-wrenching, often funny, with a capacity to tell truths about the way we live that many far more ambitiously written books just don't have. It's the kind of book you want to press into other people's hands.

View all my reviews.

Intimacy

Some weeks before Christmas, well past the watershed, RAI2, one of the Italian state TV channels, showed Brokeback Mountain. Well, actually, it didn't. It showed a version of Brokeback Mountain shorn of its moments of intimacy. Brokeback Mountain without intimacy is another film entirely, and this was pointed out to the head of RAI2, who claimed it was all a terrible mistake - the bowdlerised copy had been prepared for another section of the RAI (presumably under total Vatican control) - and would be remedied forthwith. I've been told by a RAI director that it's damn nigh impossible that a film be broadcast without its having been seen by someone, but why should I doubt the word of a regime whore respected professional. If that's what he says, that must be the way it was.

We're still waiting to see the film as Ang Lee, and Annie Proulx, intended it, but who knows what the new year may bring. In the meantime, I discovered yesterday, from an article in the Observer, that Cuban state television has shown Brokeback Mountain without cuts. Cuba Libre.

Hohum

Warped!

A very interesting review of The Scent of Cinnamon, by literary blogger and novelist, the Gay Recluse (aka Matthew Gallaway), compares me with Keith Banner, a favourite of mine as regular readers of this blog will know, but someone whose work has always seemed to me to be working in a very different area from mine. What we have in common, for Matthew, is this:

Like Banner, Lambert likes to narrate from a dizzying array of perspectives — i.e., male/female, gay/straight (though he carefully avoids such terminology, thankfully) — and also like Banner, Lambert’s characters are not ones you’d like to consider friends...

The review goes on to say that:

we cannot read any of these stories without a sinking feeling that something bad is about to happen, leaving us with the question of whether the damage will be psychological, physical or some combination. 

Sounds good...

21

I'd like to welcome a new online literary journal, entitled 21. Produced by Edge Hill University, it describes itself as :

"a peer-reviewed, online critical journal exploring contemporary and innovative fiction. We are interested in cutting edge fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, whether in the short story, the novel or hybrid forms; in print or hypertext. This includes all literature written in English or published as translation."

The first issue contains articles about, among others, JG Ballard, Annie Proulx and AM Homes, a valuable essay by Elizabeth Baines on Anne Enright and the 'misery memoir', and an interview with me about Little Monsters (out in paperback on 6 February), along with an extract from one of the longer stories in The Scent of Cinnamon. 

What Lawrence might have called a pansy

You can find the first poem of mine to be published  in the last few years - by anyone other than me, that is - on Fiona Robyn's endlessly delightful site, a handful of stones. Thank you, Fiona, for rescuing me from such solipsism.

C'est si bon

One of the great television moments of my childhood was watching Eartha Kitt being carried onto the stage of the London Palladium, slinkily curled up on a leopardskin-clad chaise longue borne on the shoulders of muscular men in loincloths, to sing Old Fashioned Millionaire. She taught me all I needed to know - I couldn't have been more than eight or nine - about glamour, possibly too much. I also remember the thrill that the song's audacious rhyming (Cadillac/in the back - but you need the whole couplet to get the full joy) gave me. Eartha Kitt was always there for me, in a way that Harold Pinter, this Christmas's other illustrious death, never was. When she came back, powerfully, in the 80s with Where is my Man, I was waiting for her. We all were. More rhymes, more sexiness, this time laced with anguish, which made me love her all the more. Pinter's politics won him the Nobel Prize; Kitt was sent into what the US saw as exile (Europe!) for over twenty years for haranguing Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam war. This isn't to diminish Pinter's voice and what he did with it, though his poetry, which no one seems to have mentioned, was utterly awful, but the risk Kitt ran was of a different order.

Gaia

Ratzinger's festive message was unusually spirited this year. It's good to know that old age and too many tennis lessons with the lovely Georg haven't robbed the old trooper of his sense of humour. In a costume that Widow Twanky would have murdered for - and one can only imagine the sumptuousness of the under-garments - Eggs tried out a new routine to the joy of the usual fanbase of lick-spittles and Italian politicians worshipping catholics. Well, not exactly new, more a reworking of old material, but hey! a girl can't go on dancing all the time. The new wheeze is that the world's ecology is damaged less by deforestation than it is by pussy-bumping and its male equivalent. (I'd use Madame Arcati's more colourful terms for this but my mother's only feet away from me as I write.) According to the mad old slapper, gay sex is the equivalent of wiping out whole tracts of the Amazon. What he hasn't provided us with, alas, is a conversion table. For example, just how much damage does one act of consensual anal sex do in carbon footprint terms? Come on, Ratzy, we need to know. I mean, if it can be proven that a quick blow job is no more destructive than, say, uprooting a small fruit-bearing bush, at least we know where we stand. We can make a reasoned decision. Maybe we can offset the carbon cost of a weekend on Ibiza, or Lesbos, by planting a hedge of privet and growing some rhubarb. You must have people who know these things, Ratzy. You seem to be surrounded by experts on just about everything, from medicine for the terminally ill, indeed totally vegetative, to the price of bloody fish.

Today Scott Pack's top 10, tomorrow the world

After reviewing Little Monsters earlier this year and hosting my Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour a few weeks ago, Scott Pack has included The Scent of Cinnamon on his list of top ten books in 2008. You're a gentleman, Scott, and, of course, a discerning and gifted reader. Thanks!

Animal planet

Seventeen years

Earlier this year I wrote a brief post about a man called Giuliano Ferrara. Ferrara really isn't that interesting, except as an over-exposed example of chronic brown-nosing that would take some beating even in Italy, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I didn't have good reason, believe me. But I mentioned the grotesque buffoon at the time because of his typically vulgar reaction to a court decision to allow Beppino Englaro to finally cease the forced nutrition and hydration of his daughter, Eluana, after seventeen years in a state of vegetative coma. That was 15 July.

Five months later, Eluana Englaro continues to have food and water pumped into her, against the wishes of her family and against the expressed wishes of Eluana herself, when she was in a position to express wishes. During these five months, Beppino Englaro has been forced to negotiate an obstacle course of such deliberate, appalling cruelty, masterminded by the Vatican and with the all-too-willing connivance of its representatives in the Italian government, on both sides of the political divide, if such a distinction makes sense any longer in a country in which the most basic democratic rules are flouted daily. A campaign designed to prolong the agony of a man whose only interest is his daughter, supported by some of the worst Italy and the catholic church has to offer, from Ratzinger to Binetti to Ferrara and their merry gang of fundamentalist hypocrites. The final straw came yesterday, after the Supreme Court had, once again, given the go-ahead for treatment to be stopped. Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi*, ex-socialist and with the moral apparatus of a sea-urchin, announced that government funding would be withdrawn from any clinic that dared put the court ruling into practice. This was greeted by some cardinal whose name I can't be bothered to look for as "a reasonable and sensible decision", immediately making him a candidate for slow rotting in his own hell. 

The latest news is that, after having sought legal advice, a clinic in Udine is prepared to, finally, satisfy the wishes of Eluana and her father, with a team of anonymous volunteers taking medical responsibility. 

*Sacconi's wife, in the meantime, is president of Farmindustria, the association that protects the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.

This is all we need

I worried about this some time ago. It looks as though I was right to be worried. 

(From 3 quarks daily)

Sorry, you need to click on the graph to see it properly - I can't make it shrink to fit...

French Lesson

Christmas spirit: an antidote

Popbitch has made me laugh and given me a fair number of things to talk - and blog - about over the past few years. They now have a book out, with some of the choicest material to have graced their emails and various other enticements, which I won't go into here. The BBC won't promote it, apparently because the word bitch might offend, so I thought I'd step into the breach and do my bit. I realise my audience is slightly smaller than that of breakfast-time radio (and whose fault is that!?), but I am free and I don't send round nosy vans to see what you're up to. Well, rarely.

You can buy the book here.

Last blast before Christmas

John Self has done my Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour proud on his Asylum blog, where I rub shoulders with some of my favourite writers, such as James Kelman and, barely a spit away, Penelope Fitzgerald. It's thrilling to see his critical eye turn its gaze my way. You can read his review of The Scent of Cinnamon, along with the interview, here. Among other things, he compares me - favourably - with Roald Dahl's adult fiction and suggests that maybe you can have too much of a good thing...

This is my sixth Cyclone interview in six weeks and it's to the credit of my interviewers and their fabulous questions that I continue to find myself with things to say, things I didn't even know I knew until I was asked. This time I talk about the first story I ever wrote, and reflect, among other things, on why I'm still a child and why the idea of 'community' - as in gay or ex-pat - gets my goat...

Something Rich and Strange will be taking a short break to allow me to enjoy Christmas in a mindless, unexamined way, after which it kicks off once more, on 6 January with a visit to dovegreyreaderscribbles. See you there! (Don't worry, I'll still be around in the meantime, whining and so on. I'll also be posting a review of a rather extraordinary book I'm nearing the end of at the moment. Only 250 pages to go...)

Herman Dune: My Home is Nowhere Without You

A Christmas suggestion

Books. Because a scented candle never changed anybody's life......

Everything I Have is Blue

I've just finished reading the anthology Everything I Have is Blue (helpfully subtitled: Short Fiction by Working-class Men about More-or-less Gay Life). It's edited by Wendell Ricketts, who also contributes a gripping short story of his own and a final, finely written and thought-provoking essay. With the exception of Wendell himself and one of my favourite writers, Keith Banner, most of these writers are new to me, although I have come across CAConrad on various networking sites and enjoyed what I've seen of his work. This doesn't mean they haven't published; most of them have rich and varied writing careers, described at the back of the book. It's more likely to mean that the kind of writing they're involved in is marginalised. Marginalised initially as gay writing and, subsequently, in class terms as writing that appears to fail to tell us what we want to know: that we're young, beautiful, rich and infinitely desirable. I've been thinking a lot recently about the non-consolatory function that gay writing might perform, mostly in the context of my virtual tour for my own short stories, and so it's exciting to see how this immensely varied group of writers work with their material to talk about lives that are demonstrably less than perfect, by which I mean recognisable as human.

My favourite pieces in the collection are probably those that work at the interface of gay-straight lives, such as the opening story by C. Bard Cole or Marcel Devons' tale about Scotty taking his boyfriend home to meet his parents. More than any other, I loved My Special Friend by Christopher Lord, and not only because the reading of it coincided with a dispute about Christmas trees chez moi. I found the final story in the collection, a long piece by James Barr, interesting as a story and even more interesting in a socio-historical sense; for me, at least, it illuminated the background to Brokeback Mountain, which must be the most famous story ever written about working-class gay men, while offering a sort of alternative to that story's historical hopelessness. It's the nearest story in the book to what I've termed consolatory, but even here the hero's forced, through one of those timely accidents fiction depends on, to think about, and come to terms with, his sexual and emotional needs.

What's refreshing about the book as a whole, though, is that it offers not only scenes of deprivation and desperation, but also possibilities of happiness that aren't shallow, self-defeating or unattainable, and it does this with warmth, intelligence and skill. I'm least happy with the stories in which a sort of poetic take on lives of hardship and squalor seems to glamourise rather than portray those lives, a stance that comes across, to me anyway, as inverted consolation. I'd also say that the sub-culture depicted in, for example, Skins, powerfully evoked though it is, isn't working-class at all, but sub-proletariat and as ghetto-ized in its way as the flashier world of 'beach reading'. But what the book does, to its enormous credit, is foreground these issues, and it does so by bringing together some fine and exciting writing. You can click on the link above to order the book, read more work by other great writers and contribute to Wendell's ongoing project. You won't regret it.

Nel mezzo del cammin

Five down, five to go. The latest leg of my Something Rich and Strange tour is posted today on Vanessa Gebbie's News. I've been a fan of Vanessa's work for as long as I've been blogging (and here's the proof), well before we found ourselves rubbing shoulders in the Salt stables. So it was, as they say, both a privilege and a pleasure to answer her questions on two of the longer stories in the collection. They're both set on Mediterranean islands, so pack your sunglasses.

Next week, it's the turn of John Self at Asylum, followed by a well-earned three-week break before dovegreyreader scribbles. So while I prepare myself for their questions, you will have all the time you need to do some Christmas shopping. Vanessa has made some very wise suggestions about possible gifts...

Lamed vovnik

This comes from a very moving article by David Horovitz, in memory of his daughter, Sarah. 

In Jewish lore there is a legend of the lamed vovniks, the thirty-six just men on whom the existence of the world depends (Sarah would have had something to say about the gender prejudice of that). According to the legend, God had become so disgusted with his creation that he was determined to destroy it. But an angel came to plead with Him and to ask for a reprieve if she could find thirty-six just men in the world. In every generation, so the legend goes, there are always thirty-six just men – the lamed vovniks on whom its continued survival depends. The lamed vovniks are not conscious of who they are. They perform their acts of compassion and love out of the purity of their hearts. And the rest of us owe the world to them.

You can find the article here.

Lovely things

And talking of Christmas shopping, if you're in Rome next weekend and would like to buy something rather special, come along to Vicolo dell'Atleta 5 (Trastevere) after 5 pm, and take a look at what's on offer. I'll see you there!

Money

Well, it's good to be reminded once again who really runs Italy. When it emerged that the Treasury was planning to reduce the amount of funding provided by the Italian state to catholic schools, it took no more than a few hours for a papal hissy fit to change their minds. According to Ratzy, the church's right to our money is 'inalienable'. Well, I'd have preferred the word 'indefensible', but there you go. You don't argue with the boss.

(Seen here, preparing a primal gift for Christmas.)

Witchcraft

Thank you, Jesus' General, for this.

How not to approach an interview situation

The beard is definitely not a good idea.

From The Smoking Gun.

Questionnaire

• What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
  
• When and how did you decide you were a heterosexual?
  
• Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
  
• Is it possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
  
• Do your parents know that you are straight? Do your friends and/or roommate(s) know? How did they react?
  
• Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Can't you just be who you are and keep it quiet?
  
• Why do heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into their lifestyles?
  
• A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual. So you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?
  
• With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
  
• Statistics show that lesbians have the lowest incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Is it really safe for a woman to maintain a heterosexual lifestyle and run the risk of disease and pregnancy?
  
• Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?
  
• Would you want your child to be heterosexual, knowing the problems that s/he would face?

If you'd like to know more about this questionnaire, click here. From Joe.My.God. 

Remember: no Salt, no flavour

Dithering about what to buy people for Christmas? I know times are hard, but, let's face it, what are friends and family worth? Something between a fiver and £14.99, with a 33% discount? I guessed as much.

So all you need to do is click here and buy your loved ones, and their loved ones, one or - why not? - two or three of the fabulous books produced by Salt. I'm assuming you've got a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon. What do you mean, you haven't! Shame! Order one this minute! You'll be doing yourself a favour. More to the point, you'll be helping one of the bravest, most adventurous presses around at the moment, in the UK or anywhere else, to continue to produce books that don't just look good, very good, but actually do you good. (I have a medical certificate to prove this.)

I won't make any recommendations, but these are just some of the Salt books I've read - and loved - this year, in no particular order:

Elizabath Baines: Balancing on the Edge of the World

Simon Barraclough: Los Alamos Mon Amour (shortlisted for the Forward Prize)

Katy Evans-Bush: Me and the Dead

John Wilkinson: Down to Earth

Vanessa Gebbie: Words from a Glass Bubble

Isobel Dixon: A Fold in the Map

Douglas Oliver: Arrondissements

David Gaffney: Aromabingo

Tania Hershman: The White Road

And just to show that I've put my money where my mouth is, I've ordered and can't wait to receive:

Jay Merill: Astral Bodies (I read with Jay earlier this year and she was wonderful!)

Matthew Licht: The Moose Show (I'm intrigued, and slightly turned on, by his podcast)

Andrew Duncan: Origins of the Underground (I'm in the introduction to this, by the way, and Andrew didn't even tell me! This is your chance to explain yourself, Andrew...)

Casting away

I've been having a discussion with Giuseppe today. He's finally read The Scent of Cinnamon because a translator friend, Isabella Zani, has rendered it - superbly - into Italian. After over 22 years together (tié Ratzy!), this is the first time he's really read anything of mine and, to my relief, he loves it. In fact, he loves it so much he wants to see it filmed. In fact, he wants to see it filmed so much he's already decided on the director and the actors for the two main roles. 

His choices? Ang Lee (director), Tilda Swinton (Miriam), Daniel Day Lewis (Joseph). Needless to say, these three jobbing labourers in the world of cinema are twiddling their thumbs in shabby bedrooms and waiting for my call. But I'm not sure they're the ones I want. Giuseppe says I should ask you. So that's what I'm doing. If you've read the story and think you have a better idea, let us know.  

Iran, Jamaica, Vatican, Sudan....

Surprise news from the Holy See. Someone called (Father) Federico Lombardi claims that the Vatican's refusal to endorse a proposal for the UN that homosexuality be decriminalised, signed by all EU states, presumably including Poland (!), does not mean that it approves of the death penalty for homosexuals. Phew. Its position on waterboarding hasn't yet been announced. 

While we're waiting, read Wendell Ricketts' comment on the whole sordid business here.

Grooming

An interesting experience yesterday. I came across a reader's review of Little Monsters on the Waterstones site. It starts like this:

I wasn't sure I would like this book. A tale of a young girl setting up home with her uncle sounded terribly seedy.

Hmm. Seedy. It goes on to say:

The story is narrated, in reflective mode, by Carol Foxe, the young girl in question, whose dad has murdered her mum so is put into the 'care' of her selfish and hard-hearted aunt Margot and attentive Polish uncle (Joey) Jozef who live over the pub they run. HIs friendliness towards her as a child - come to the basement, come for a walk, I have something to show you, don't tell your aunt - all smack of grooming. The intention may have been to give an air of innocent caring and concern towards the young girl but it struck me as highly inappropriate.

I'm all in favour of complex texts offering - even requiring - multiple readings, but I wonder if anyone else has seen Jozef's behaviour as 'inappropriate'. And I wonder, in this context, what 'inappropriate' means. It's revealing, I think, that the reviewer distinguishes between what she perceives, quite rightly, as the author's intention, to 'give [Jozef] an air of innocent caring and concern', although innocent doesn't seem to me to be a particularly useful (or appropriate) word here, and what she, on the other hand, reads as a series of acts intended to set Carol up as sexual prey. What's even more interesting is that she doesn't notice how much more like 'grooming' Carol's behaviour towards Kakuna is, although here too it would be reductive to see their relationship merely in these terms. Perhaps this kind of behaviour is more appropriate between a woman and a girl. But if novels are concerned with - and judged by their adherence to - what's appropriate, where does that leave fiction? Reading this review made me feel that what I'd written could have been reshelved as a misery memoir if I'd only had the sense to grasp what Jozef was really up to. 

Cyclone tour: stage four

My Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour, to celebrate the publication of The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories, goes from strength to strength. This week's event is hosted by Jim at Jockohomo Datapanik and it's a corker. I talk about the gay aspects of the collection, something that hasn't really been touched on before. If you want to know what turned me on as a teenager, and what turns me on now as a reader, this is the place to go. Plus you'll get the chance to explore Jim's many other interests, which include, in his own words: Painting, making art, music, writing, design, bodybuilding, wrestling, new media, photography, sports, architecture, computers, technology, museums, food, travel, languages, lacrosse, mountain biking, film, Warhol, pop culture, op art, biceps, books and blogs +. 

He also has a dog called Sam.

Nest week, I'll be dropping in on Vanessa Gebbie here. Don't miss it.