RIP Harold Norse

I'M NOT A MAN

I'm not a man, I can't earn a living, buy new things for my family.

I have acne and a small peter.

I'm not a man. I don't like football, boxing and cars.

I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm around my friend's shoulder.

I'm not a man. I won't play the role assigned to me- the role created

by Madison Avenue, Playboy, Hollywood and Oliver Cromwell,

Television does not dictate my behavior.

I'm not a man. Once when I shot a squirrel I swore that I would

never kill again. I gave up meat. The sight of blood makes me sick.

I like flowers.

I'm not a man. I went to prison resisting the draft. I do not fight

when real men beat me up and call me queer. I dislike violence.

I'm not a man. I have never raped a woman. I don't hate blacks.

I do not get emotional when the flag is waved. I do not think I should

love America or leave it. I think I should laugh at it.

I'm not a man. I have never had the clap.

I'm not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine.

I'm not a man. I cry when I'm unhappy.

I'm not a man. I do not feel superior to women

I'm not a man. I don't wear a jockstrap.

I'm not a man. I write poetry.

I'm not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I'm not a man. I don't want to destroy you.

Harold Norse

Dressing up

A new 'security' law, which only looks like a knee-jerk reaction, is about to be passed here in Italy. Like most laws of this type, it protects - or is intended to appear to protect - the law-abiding citizen from the other, almost certainly not a citizen, who presumably ought to be abiding elsewhere, obedient to some other less-civilised legislation. One of the nastiest of the many nasty provisions in the new decree is that it allows citizens to gang up, don uniforms and strut around the place enforcing, you guessed, the law. This doesn't mean they'll be muscling their way into boardrooms or bank headquarters or mafia hideouts, after the real criminals. They just won't have time. They'll be too busy hanging round parks and council estates, patrolling the odd bus station in their fabulous outfits, a pot pourri of home-tailored Nazi fantasy gear (cue Prince Henry) with a touch of Tom of Finland for good measure. The cute little symbol at the top of the post is some nonsense that means a great deal to shaven-headed thugs who think they're the master race and absolutely nothing to the rest of us. But it might be worth memorising it. Because if the person who's kicking your head in has got one on his bicep, either tattooed or sewn on by his granny, you haven't got a leg to stand on (ouch!). He'll be legal.

Names

A footnote to my last post. Googling for images of house sparrows I found myself with an infinite selection of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow but surprisingly few pictures of the actual bird (in the first three pages, 3 birds to 51 Depps; it gets better later on). And it reminded me of a small boy I know who thought mice were named after the computer thingymabob.

The fall of the sparrow

I was in my local post office here in Fondi a few days ago, waiting to pay an overdue bill. In the past this would have meant trying to guess which queue contained the fewest problem cases, ususally pensioners or people trying to send sums of money to places the PO clerk can't spell, or has never heard of, and has to check with a colleague, who's similarly challenged. But they've introduced a number system now and installed some rows of wooden chairs with a rather Scandinavian feel to them, strung along a blue metal bar like Alvar Aalto-designed birds, though the older women are wary of sitting on them and still regard the notion of respecting numerical order as a fundamentally flawed way of doing things. So there's always a free seat, hwoever busy the place is. I usually take a book and try to get some reading done. This time I had a water bill to pay and a novel by Nigel Balchin called The Fall of the Sparrow, in the 1957 Companion Book Club edition, still with a leaflet inside describing the next books to be published - Hammond Innes and Nancy Spain. I bought it because I'd read - and enjoyed - the same author's The Small Back Room a couple of years ago and because I'd opened the book on a scene with an evidently gay character, and wanted to see how the book dealt with the issue. I was four when it was published, fourteen when homosexuality was made, restrictively, legal. the title refers to the verse from Mathew: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

But none of this is what I want to talk about, except in the oblique sense, I suppose, of how people are treated, how we're organised and accept infringements of our liberty for some presumed greater good. It would be more to the point to say that this was the day after the European elections, in which the Northern League dramatically increased its vote here in Italy and the BNP won two seats for Shit (see below) and his shifty chum. A day in which the idea that empathy and awareness of the other's needs might play a useful role in the way we conceive society and politics was rejected by a sizeable number of voters; in which civil society was more of a chimera than it had been the week before in whole swathes of united Europe. Because while I was sitting on my plywood chair, not actually reading my book but with it open in my hand, distracted by the blip that indicated the number had changed and my turn was approaching, with my imagination half absorbed by a genteeler world in which I would have been illegal, with a TV screen advertising post office products and reporting the results, an old man went up to the counter. Small, neatly dressed, someone who'd spent much of his life outside and was now retired. I didn't hear the initial exchange. The first thing I heard was the old man say, 'Thirteen euros.' He'd come for his weekly, or monthly, pension, more probably the latter. The woman behind the counter said, 'Thirteen euros,' impatient for him to go. He paused, then asked her, 'Why? Why only thirteen euros?' She shrugged, tapped at her keyboard. 'Conguaglio,' she said. A conguaglio is the term used to describe what happens when the final reckoning shows that something has been over- or underpaid and is adjusted accordingly. In this case, his pension. He repeated the word. She counted the money out, pushed it across to him, then spread her hands. 'Un conguaglio,' she said again, as though he hadn't heard, or understood. He picked up the thirteen euros and looked at them for a moment before folding them carefully and sliding them into a small purse he'd taken from his breast pocket. 'What shall I do now?' he said, to no one, to everyone. And he didn't expect an answer because he'd already turned and was walking away from the counter towards the door as the woman pressed her little button, and a blip summoned the number after his.

Numbers are wonderful things.

Shit, scared

Bible-based marriage

I posted this on Facebook a few days ago, but I don't want anyone to miss it, so I decided to put it here too. 

A question of style

The very day Barack Obama was in Cairo, addressing the Islamic world in an attempt to heal wounds and, against all odds, build new bridges, Silvio Berlusconi was addressing a considerably smaller audience in Milan, complaining that there were too many immigrants in Italy. Milan, he said, looked like a town in Africa. Too much Sardinian sun, Silvio? 

Big Mike

Sandro Bondi is a professional politician with a degree in philosophy. He started out in the Italian Communist Party (PCI), working as an insurance agent, then became mayor of Fivizzano and swiftly transformed the town council, and himself, into Christian Democrat lackeys. He left the PCI soon after. In 1994 Bondi met Berlusconi and was hired to deal with the great buffoon's personal correspondence, a task he no doubt performed with dedication and alacrity, although it's hard to imagine SB committing anything of importance to a medium as potentially damaging as paper. In 2001 he was the man behind the hagiographical Una Storia Italiana, a pack of half- and downright lies designed to hoodwink the Italian electorate into voting for the lecherous old crook. Unfortunately, it worked. 

Despite having no apparent aptitude for cultural matters - although he does write excruciatingly banal verse - Bondi is now minister of fine arts in a country that possesses two-thirds of the world's art treasures. But don't worry, he isn't alone. One of the first things he did as minister was hire a certain Mario Resca, initially as consultant and then as director general of the country's museums. Before taking on this important role, Resca was CEO of McDonald's Italia. So that'll be two McBacon Menus and a Michelangelo to go. 

And talking of Michelangelo, Bondi and Resca seem to have got themselves into a bit of a mess with the recent purchase of the dead Christ above. Sixteen inches tall, it cost over three million euros, which is too little for a genuine work by Michelangelo and too much for something by a less famous contemporary. Some art historians defend it, others don't. The artist rarely worked in wood and almost never worked at such a small scale, which doesn't rule out the attribution but does invite caution. What's indisputable is the lack of caution in the way the statue has been put to use. It's become part of the Berlusconi circus, travelling up and down the country in much the same way as Noemi, delighting the President here and wowing the plebiscite there. The pope loves it, which isn't surprising. What's even less surprising is that the Corte dei Conti - responsible for auditing state spending - sniffs a rat. As the New York Times said, back in April:

Prosecutors for Italy’s National Audit Office are now looking into the purchase to determine whether the state overpaid for the object, and Renaissance art experts will be asked whether it should be credited to Michelangelo.

Many have spoken out already.

“The attribution wrongs Michelangelo, as well as the history of 15th-century Florence,” where there were at least a dozen skilled artisans capable of making crucifixes like the one in question, said Francesco Caglioti, a specialist in Renaissance sculpture, who believes that the crucifix is typical of those made in such workshops, and is worth about 100,000 euros, or about $129,700.

“Unfortunately, my colleagues have forgotten that, and every time something beautiful emerges, they attribute it to a famous name,” Mr. Caglioti said. “It would seem like everything done in Renaissance Florence can be attributed to 10 people with a thousand hands.”

Back to the Big Macs for Resca? Somehow, I doubt it.

Partiality

Italian state television has room for just one programme of investigative journalism. It's called, all'inglese, Report, and it's presented by Milena Gabanelli on the minority channel, traditionally controlled by the left in the political carve-up that characterises all aspects of Italian life, RAI Tre. Each week, the programme examines some area of glaring injustice in Italian life, usually establishing that responsibility lies with an unholy alliance of politics in the widest sense and organised crime. Not that it's always unholy; if there's a third element with its nose in the trough it tends to be the Vatican. During the last series, Gabanelli and her team investigated the 'social card', the Anglicism invented by Berlusconi and his finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, to describe a sort of pre-charged credit card to be issued to the poorest Italian citizens. It's not exactly money because it can't be used where the cardholder chooses, but only where it's accepted. It's also an extremely good way of keeping tabs on people's spending, which can't be a bad thing for the man who not only controls the government and much of the media but also has a large slice of the country's advertising under his sticky little belt. 

But the thrust of Report wasn't so much the essentially undemocratic nature of the card, or the fact that so few people were entitled to it and that, of these, even fewer had received it. It was that the creation and distribution of the card generates a substantial amount of more or less invisible earnings, and costs, for a variety of bodies, state and not, involved in the process. It's a bad, incompetent and possibly corrupt use of public money and whoever stands to gain won't be one of the nation's poor. This hasn't stopped Berlusconi patting himself on the back about it these past few weeks. It's just one of the ways in which, according to SB, Italians are rendered immune from the international economic crisis as a result of his quick thinking and Tremonti's even quicker fingerwork on the accounts. OK, there are the usual nay-sayers. But who, after all,watches Report? Certainly not PDL voters.

In the finance ministry, however, the programme has touched a more delicate nerve. Tremonti (ex-tax lawyer, specialised in fiscal evasion and with an office in Switzerland) has made an official complaint to the parliamentary commission responsible for keeping an eye on the doings of the RAI. He hasn't complained about the facts presented in the programme - he can't, because they're all true and supported by documentation. What's irritated him is the programme's 'philosophy'. Apparently the information presented is 'partial'. The interviews have been 'edited'. The aim of the programme is to discredit the economic policy of the government. This is unacceptable, given that the RAI exists to provide a 'public service'.Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that, while self-deluding politicians all over the world probably identify government policy with public service, few would express quite so clearly the notion that public service broadcasting should exist purely and simply as a medium for defending - indeed, extolling - the activities of the government in power. Try telling that to the BBC. The second is that one of the right-hand men of Berlusconi, a man who has made a gross and vulgar art out of lying to the public by providing 'partial' information and 'edited' versions of the truth with an almost Stalinesque panache, is in no position to accuse Gabanelli - or anyone else - of being biased. 

Yes, my neighbour...

Last word? I don't think so

Quoted

To my surprise and pleasure, I've been quoted by la Repubblica today. You can read the article, about the way Berlusconi is being represented by the foreign press, here. The reference is to the comment I left on Geoff Andrews' ten questions for the corrupt buffoon at Open Democracy, which continues to attract commenters, almost exclusively Italian , in their hundreds.

Democracy at work

Children and religion. Following on from the post below, it seems that not only the Dalai Lama doesn't get it. A scientific high school in Cesena, in Emilia Romagna, has suspended one of its maths teachers for two months without pay. Why? Because he distributed a questionnaire to 70 of his students asking them which they'd prefer to study: catholicism, the history of religions, or human rights. Most of the kids chose human rights (65%), followed by history of religions (24%). That left a mere 11% into catholicism. This didn't go down at all well with the local scholastic authorities, who demanded a six-month suspension of the offending teacher, Alberto Marani, a period that was subsequently reduced to two. The full story, for Italian readers, can be found here. Among the readers' comments is one from an ex-student who claims that the school is effectively run by Opus Dei, which makes Marani's act not just culturally relevant but also a gesture of reckless, exemplary folly. All power to him.

Whoops!

Looks like the Dalai Lama got his kids mixed up. The reincarnation of Lama Yeshe has decided he'd rather study film and behave like, well, a normal twenty-four-year-old. You can hardly blame him. According to this article in today's Guardian, he had a horribly deprived childhood. The last detail is particularly blood-chilling:

According to the foundation biography, another leader suspected Torres was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe when he was only five months old. In 1986, at 14 months, his parents took him to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The toddler was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually "enthroned".

At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin.

More questions for SB...

...can be found in this excellent piece by Geoff Andrews. 

Here we go again

Last year, for the most absurd reasons (a choral recital in a nearby building, if I remember rightly), under evident pressure from the Vatican and the post-fascist mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, Rome Gay Pride was denied the use of Piazza San Giovanni. The mean-spirited sods are trying it on again this year, eleven days before the march is due to take place, in an attempt to effectively cancel the event. I've been asked to pass this message on to you by the SUPPORT ROMA PRIDE 2009, and that's what I'm doing. If you don't want Rome to look like Moscow or Tehran, you know what to do. And if you're on Facebook, you can join up here. 

Dear friends,

As some of you already know the 13th of June is the date of Roma Pride 2009, but at the moment, only ten days before the event, we still have no authorized route for the final parade and march. Yesterday the police autorities again denied authorization, for the third time, with reasons that are no more than absurd excuses.

As well as the usual Pride issues, such as visibility, rights, non discrimination and equality for LGBT people and communities, we face a conservative attack on basic democratic and civil rights, as guaranteed by the Italian Constitution and the international conventions. Again Piazza San Giovanni has been denied because of the veto of the Vatican and clerical authorities. However, last year's route from Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Navona has also been denied this year, making it almost impossible the march to take place, and damaging the democratic and civil rights of all Italian citizens, not just GLBT people.

We really need moral support from all of you, and from abroad.You can support Roma Pride 2009 by writing your personal or associative support to romapride@gmail.com (you can send a copy also to me at a.maccarrone@mariomieli.org), by spreading and forwarding this message to other people, above all other groups or associations, GLBT groups, Pride organisers, activists for civil and human rights, politicians, journalists that may be interested in this topic, and by creating mobilization or any other kind of useful iniative at any level.
If you are a journalist or have web sites, blogs, newsletters or acces to any other media, please help us byspreading this information.

Thank you for your support and help,

Andrea Maccarrone

A message from Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones says:

“Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we don't have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t you? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us.”

Dylan: Mr Tambourine Man (1964)

Forty-five years ago. I was ten years old when this took place. Had I even heard of Bob Dylan? My first Dylan album was The Times They Are A'Changin', the title song of which I would sing at the top of my still unbroken voice until my parents lost their temper with me and told me to shut up or they'd leave me wherever the car happened to be. This was a Byrds song though, and I didn't hear Dylan do it until years later. It's wonderful. I'm awed. Again.

Answers in Genesis?

What on earth did Sweden do to deserve this? Presumably we could find out by visiting the site responsible for this hoarding, placed in a rather colourless corner of, I imagine, the United States. But I don't think we'll bother, do you?

BGT, last word

Salt news

I'm sure you've been following the Salt Just One Book campaign, and I hope you've supported it. If you haven't, and need a final incentive, other than a visit from some rather shady friends of mine early one morning, this might just do the trick. It's the latest offer from Salt, and it's a winner:

A THIRD OFF ALL SALT TITLES THROUGHOUT JUNE

We're now giving you a huge 33% off ALL books till the end of June. Use the coupon code G3SRT453 when in the checkout to benefit. Don't forget if you spend £30 or $30 you get free shipping too.

Please continue to spread the word, and spread news of this offer. Please don't let up. It's been extraordinary, but we're not out of danger yet. Every penny goes into developing Salt's books and services. We want to start a new children's list, and offer more resources to teachers and schools. We want to extend our publishing in new areas including our translations programme, we want to offer you more free magazines online. We want to help develop more support for debuts with the enhancement of our Crashaw and Scott prizes. We're planning audio books, ebooks and new videos for you. We only want to move forward, to develop and expand what we do and deliver great books in new ways to you and yours.

We need your support throughout June. We'll try and organise more readings and promotions with our authors. Virtual book tours. More launches. We'll work with bookstores to bring you short story and poety evenings. Stick with us throughout June and we can do something astonishing. That's the power of Just One Book — we want you to be a part of it. Follow us onTwitter look for #SaltBooks and #JustOneBook. Join our Facebook Group. 

And have a giggle at the vid, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s

Oh, and one last special offer — Catherine Eisner’s magnificent crime novel, Sister Morphinefor £7.50 plus P&P, simply enter coupon code EISNER in the UK checkout http://bit.ly/8rHDa

Watch out for more special offers throughout June.

Snip snap snip

For someone whose media empire is based on vulgarity, indiscretion and an obsession with what famous people get up to in their spare time, assuming that's still a meaningful concept, Silvio Berlusconi's attempt to block the publication of photographs taken at one of his Tiberian extravaganzas in Sardinia seems a bit mean-spirited. Particularly as, according to SB, the photographs are not damaging, and show people, in the great man's own wonkily grammatical words, "during absolutely private moments which are completely legal." I wonder what he means by damaging. Come to that, I wonder what he means by private and legal. Official photographs of one of his Sardinian knees-ups a couple of years ago saw him surrounded by a bevy, as the cliché has it, of young beauties, draped on and around him like piglets round a sow. They were published, I believe, in one of his house magazines, Panorama if I remember rightly, or possibly Chi. These didn't seem to be a problem. Obviously, the mood has changed since then, as moral clouds gather around the hairpiece of the anointed leader. But the fact that the incriminated photographer, a certain Antonello Zappadu, has handed over the snaps of his own free will after having tried to flog them to, that's right, Panorama suggests that they really are innocent images of the rich and the lovely in moments of legal intimacy. So why all the fuss? Surely it can't be a warning to other photographers that their less innocent work should be discreetly destroyed? Surely not? I mean, that's the way the Mafia behaves.

Teddy Thompson sings Ain't No Sunshine

One of my favourite songs done by one of my favourite singers.

Bestsellerdom

Don't blink or you'll miss it, but The Scent of Cinnamon has made the Amazon top 100 short story list. OK, I'm 93rd, but I'm in very good company, rubbing shoulders with Somerset Maugham, Alice Munro, Henry James et al. I'm delighted!

Some are more equal

Remember the ministries in 1984? The Ministry of Peace, responsible for war; the Ministry of Love, responsible for torture? Most governments are more subtle about this sort of thing, but Italy, a country that enjoys subtlety in so many guises, from moral hypocrisy to Andreottian dissimulation, has taken a cruder leaf out of Orwell's book. The Ministry for Equal Opportunities is now explicitly discriminating against gays. During the last government, minister Barbara Pollastrini instituted a web site listing the various groups that suffered discrimination for reasons of religion, health, nationality, sexual orientation and so on. The new minister, ex-calendar girl Mara Carfagna (seen here on government business), has removed all reference to homophobia from the site, presumably on the grounds that, under the wise and caring governance of such gay-friendly politicians as Berlusconi, Bossi, Calderoli etc. the phenomenon no longer exists in Italy. Like racism and sexism and all those other nasty -isms, it's been smoothed away and replaced by a feeling of general wellbeing and love towards one neighbour, ideally a 17-year-old blonde with acquiescent parents. What other reason could there be? To prove my point, she's also got rid of a commission set up by Pollastrini, for LGBT rights. Clearly there's no more need for it. What a wonderful world we live in. And I've just heard some Northern League apparatchik on television say that the fact that the centre for illegal immigrants on Lampedusa is now empty is a clear indication that government policy on immigration is working. This is like claiming that an empty hospital is working by ignoring the dead and dying refused admittance. 

Maybe the art of subtlety isn't entirely dead.

Holiday advice

Just in case you were wondering where to go this summer...

Family holidays

According to the ex-boyfriend of Noemi Letizia, the 18-year-old knicker model and would-be member of parliament who refers to Silvio Berlusconi as her 'papi', Noemi was invited to one of SB's villas in Sardinia last summer, along with 30 or 40 other teenage girls, to enliven the emperor's evenings. Noemi and her friend, Claudia, were seventeen, which, in legal terms, is old enough to fuck entertain powerful men and be rewarded for it, albeit with the connivance of the girls' parents, but it would be interesting to know a little bit more about the male guests at the villa. It's hard to imagine SB enjoying all those angelic faces without a little masculine solidarity to make him feel like one of the boys. So who kept him company? Politicians? Businessmen? A clutch of accommodating journalists? Cherie Blair says that SB's jaunty bandana ruined her and Tony's photo-opportunity - or should that be holiday? - some years ago in the same villa, or another: he has so many. I wonder if she knew about the joy division in the bungalows round the back.

Why Italy is boring

I admit it. I've been putting this off. Partly because I'm no authority on Italy and don't want to pass myself off as one. I just live here, along with 60 million other people, many of whom have greater claim to be considered Italian experts, if only by blood. Partly because it's so complex and I have only one small, slightly frazzled brain, which just doesn't seem powerful or contorted enough to deal with the full Byzantine horror of it. Partly because no one pays me for my opinions so why should I share them? (OK, this is a sort of joke.) But mostly because the situation in Italy is just so bloody boring I can't be bothered to think about it in any constructive way. It's easier to swear and rant. There's a poster in Fondi at the moment of a man called Something Cardinale (I can't remember his first name; it may even be Something). He's a gloating, pomaded oaf with a big knot in his tie, so he's clearly on the side of SB (Silvio Berlusconi - Slimy Buffoon: take your pick); he's running for the European elections for some made-up party with some cheesy name I also can't remember. His slogan is La Politica del Fare. This means, as you can probably work out, "The Politics of Doing", and is supposed to lend the man some semblance of resolve, the air of someone who gets things done, although it's about as empty as a slogan can be unless the nature of what gets done is made clear elsewhere. It isn't. It can also be flipped on its back to become L'Affare della Politica, which means "The Business of Politics", business in the basic money-making sense. How to make a packet from politics, in other words. His grinning face is staring down from massive mobile hoardings parked all over town, illegally for the most part. He's bound to be elected, which means he'll become one of the most highly paid politicians in Europe. Italian Euro MPs get three times their UK counterparts, even though the average Italian salary has recently slipped behind that in Spain and Greece; it's just over half the UK average although most supermarket prices are higher here than in your local Tesco's. He's bound to be elected because Fondi votes en masse for SB and his cronies and has done for the past ten, fifteen years. The town's part of the feudal fiefdom of a man called Claudio Fazzone, an ex-driver for a Christian Democrat politician, now a senator, under investigation for corruption and association with the Mafia. And all this is boring, because everyone knows it. Everyone knows that Fondi council was supposed to be dissolved because it's been infiltrated by organised crime, and that it won't be until after the elections, if ever, because if something works, why fix it? Everyone knows that the people accused of complicity are up for re-election and that the old idea of politicians being in some way accountable to the electorate or, at least, prepared to defend themselves in public or answer journalists' questions is just so first republic, so last century. Politicians, or politicians like SB, don't answer questions; they insult the questioner. And this is just so boring after a while, because it's actually quite important that certain questions receive some sort of answer. You've heard about SB's latest spot of bother with an under-age girl called Noemi. He refuses to say how and when and in what circumstances he met her and her family. He refuses to explain why he lied about the details of his presence at her 18th birthday party. He refuses to say why she was present at an official dinner last autumn, alongside various luminaries. He refuses to justify his refusal to answer these questions and others, apart from by a vague appeal to his right to privacy. Which is pretty rich from a man who used his own hagiography for electoral purposes a few years ago, sending a copy of his 'life story', at his own expense, to every household in Italy, as glossy a bundle of half-truths and downright lies as anyone could want. And everyone knows this, and no one cares. And this is boring. And it's boring, finally, that the prime minister of a country can be accused of corruption by a public court and not stand down, and not respond to the accusations, and insult the courts and call the judge a radical extremist. And no one cares, except a handful of foolish, snobbish elitists, in the words of SB's lawyers and lackeys, elitists who nonetheless make up a good third of the country, who are currently standing behind a semi-opaque glass wall, screaming and clutching their faces in Munch-like fashion, unable to make themselves heard above the money-rattling, self-congratulatory clatter of the dominant culture. And it's so boring to have to tell them they've lost out, they're old hat, they've missed the boat on 'security' issues and 'what the people want', they've made themselves redundant with their in-fighting and cuddling up to the Vatican and ambiguity. Because this is also true. But I'm no authority on Italy. Italy's bored by politics. The sooner it can all be handed over to the grasp of one strong man the better. SB wants the number of MPs to be reduced to 100, which is a step in the right direction and will no doubt also save him a considerable amount of money, with fewer palms to grease and MPs' wives to find work for in state television until their lovely lingerie-model daughters are old enough to be made into ministers. Which is also boring.

Potato

I chose the potato to portray human faces because of the many striking parallels.  Not only is their skin porous like ours, but their skin texture and color is very similar, and like us, they come in different sizes, shapes and forms.   Potatoes grow, live, and then decay, mirroring the ephemeral existence and fragility of our own human nature.

(Ginou Choueiri)

Chaka Khan Ain't Nobody

The sexiest song ever. The sexiest singer. The sexiest, er, leopard-

skin dress. And boots. Just plain sexy.

Salt

Salt Publishing, as you may know by now, has been savagely hit by the credit crunch and is now in officially dire financial straits. All, however, is not lost. If every human being currently alive on the planet orders a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon just one Salt book, Salt will be saved and, indeed, in a position to challenge the media domination of Murdoch, Branson and Berlusconi, not to speak of other more savoury characters. This isn't likely to happen, but it wouldn't hurt to get the ball rolling. You can order direct from Salt or from whichever bookshop you prefer. And if you live outside the UK and are ordering online, Book Depository is almost always cheaper than Amazon, as I never tire of pointing out. Naturally, you won't just be doing Salt a favour; you'll also be doing yourself one. I won't recommend any one in particular, because Salt doesn't do duds.

Just in case

Just in case you weren't quite convinced by the short piece in the Bookseller a couple of weeks ago, here's confirmation from my agent, the wonderful Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann, that Picador really have bought my new novel. That's ANY HUMAN FACE. Just in case. I'd love to post a picture of the cover as well, but let's not jump the gun. 

As someone who has purchased...

Another wacky recommendation from Amazon:

As someone who has purchased or rated Flush: A Biography (Oxford World's Classics) by Virginia Woolf, you might like to know that Letters to a Love Rat is now available.  

The mail continues with snippets from reviews of others book by the author of Letters to a Love Rat:

'You'll laugh your way from cover to cover' RTAe Guide on Confessions of a Demented Housewife 'Side-splitting' Irish Independent on Confessions of a Demented Housewife 'Hilariously written ... will keep you laughing all the way' Woman on Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife 'An accomplished romp through the chaos of family life' Irish Times on Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife

'Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife"? So it's obviously going to appeal to Virginia Woof fans, right?

Chi mi ama mi segua

I don't want to sound like Berlusconi but I was beginning to develop a bit of a Christ complex. Not because I'm disrespected, as the capo dei capi might say, but because every time I looked to see how many followers this blog had, I saw the number 13. Fortunately, Michael Sean Morris (thank you, Michael!) has come along to make the number slightly less canonical. But don't let this discourage you if you'd also like to follow me. You can never have enough followers. Right, Silvio?

Berlusca at stool

If you'd like to see lots more of these and you're on Facebook, join the group Brinda con Papi. You won't regret it.

Warthog

Toop-down

Talking about the kind of odd things logarithms can throw up, the banner ad on my gmail page at the moment offers me a quick link to "Toop Exhumation Services - The most experienced exhumation company in the UK." As in toop-down, bottom-oop?

Now where did I put my grandfather?

Rainforest fever

I've had some pretty weird recommendations from Amazon before but this one takes the biscuit. 'As someone who has purchased or rated Brideshead Revisited', I'm now being offered a discount on the new James Kelman. I'm sorry? What next? As someone who rated or purchased Hotel du Lac, I might enjoy 69 Things To Do with A Dead Princess?

PS The links will take you to the Book Depository. Tié!

All hail, all hail

Two interesting news items in the Italian press today. The first says that Freedom House, which evaluates press freedom throughout the world, has classified Italy as 'partly free'. It's at 71st place, alongside Benin and Israel, a surprisingly high position given the parlously servile state of most Italian journalism. The other item is a no doubt independent poll on how much Italy adores its tinpot duce Berlusconi. His popularity rating is now at 75%, putting him higher than Obama and approaching the dizzy heights of unquestioning adulation enjoyed by, well, Kim Jong-il. Whose country, coincidentally, also does rather badly in the Freedom House charts.

Author is gobsmacked, over the moon, er

Well, it's official. Click here for details.

Proper

There's an interview with Ishiguro in today's Guardian, during which the interviewer, Decca Aitkenhead, says: "I wonder if some of his (Ishiguro's) semantic unease stems from a worry about the popular perception of short stories as not quite "proper" literature." And it struck me that one of the problems of the general reluctance to read short stories - according to Ishiguro, in the same interview, the UK market market for short fiction is a fourth that of novels, though I would have put it lower - isn't that it's perceived as not quite proper, but the opposite; that short stories are seen as "literary" in a possibly off-putting way. The popular perception of short stories is that they may be short but they aren't stories - they're would-be poems or exercises in style of some kind. When short stories really were popular - in the days of Somerset Maugham and Daphne Du Maurier - their status as literature wasn't an issue. People read them to see what would happen next. I can't help wondering, as well, if the fairly high figure for short story sales in the UK that Ishiguro quotes isn't skewed by the presence of, among other things, Stephen King's short fiction, which is often, incidentally, far more highly regarded than his longer work.

Artichokes

42022

Well, my plea (see two posts down) has had some effect. Little Monsters is now ranked at 42022 at the Book Depository. Whoever you are, thank you! 

The Moose Show

A very quick post to recommend a book that deserves more than a cursory nod, and I hope to find time in the next few days to nod in more complete fashion. It's The Moose Show by Matthew Licht, a collection of stories that bowled me over. They're tough, funny, endlessly surprising, oddly heart-warming. A joy to read. 

The link is to Book Depository. The Moose Show, like Little Monsters, has no sales rank. Yet. I think you know what to do.

A plea for David (and me)

I've just had a rather ungratifying experience. Checking up on online sales of Little Monsters (a vacuum activity familiar to anyone who's ever published anything, most often carried out when more important things need to be done), I noticed that Book Depository had no sales rank for it. In the light of recent history over at Amazon, and despite the fact that Little Monsters - bar the usual priest - is pretty much LGBT-free, I smelled a rat. I wrote a rather snippy mail to ask what was going on. The following day, I received a mail from Tom, customer service manager, who said:  

"This title does not yet have a sales rank, as we have yet to sell any copies. Sales ranks are calculated on the number of copies of books sold."

I felt this big. No, smaller. And then I wondered why so many people automatically go to Amazon when Book Depository is often cheaper and almost always cheaper if you're outside the UK, has pretty much everything you could want (i.e. all my books) and is the David to Amazon's Goliath. So I'm just reminding you. Shop at Book Depository. And help me get a sales rank for Little Monsters. Someobody out there must need a copy!

And just to show how serious I am, I've deleted my Amazon link for the book. So now it's up to you...

Small unsexy boxes

I've decided to moderate all comments made. This isn't because I dislike obscenity, sacrilege or political disagreement. On the contrary. But I don't intend to clear my posts of dozens and dozens of small empty boxes interspersed with the occasional group of letters, received from someone called, no doubt inappositely, Sexy. I might regret this, but there you are. It's a risk I'm prepared to take.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was

Over at Eratosphere, Tim Love has kicked off a fascinating discussion on child narrators in adult fiction. As part of his thoughtful and stimulating introduction, he's quoted from interviews conducted during the Cyclone tours that Elizabeth Baines and I completed earlier this year, Elizabeth to publicise her collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and I (me?) to do the same with The Scent of Cinnamon. The links will take you to the Book Depository, rather than Amzaon, which needs to be taught a lesson after its appalling recent conduct. And here's a random picture of a child, in non-narrating mode, just to make the post look a little livelier. 

If it walks like a duck

If you're a fan of Ben Goldacre but don't have the new paperback edition of Bad Science, you can still read his chapter on vitamin pill quack and Aids charlatan, Matthias Rath, by clicking here. Believe me, it'll be time well spent.

It's all in the name

Brilliantly spotted - and titled - by Jane in Stoke Newington (and I hope we're not trespassing on Ms Baroque territory, particularly as it's her birthday today!).

Phew

Have you been paying attention to the widget on the right?

Summer

Click on the image to see the whole thing.

Cruiseboat diplomacy

Travelling

It happens so rarely, I feel I ought to share it with you. Earlier today, I travelled from Rome to Birmingham (which isn't the part that's rare, so keep reading) and the journey went smoothly. Not relatively smoothly. Smooth in an absolute sense. At the moment, no airline company has accountants that can make sense out of a direct link between the two cities, so travellers are forced to find more circuitous routes. This is increasingly common; a friend of mine is about to fly from Rome to Bournemouth via Gerona as though it were the most natural thing in the world. So each time, with enormous effort, I find new ways of getting from A (Rome) to B (Birmingham) and back.

This visit, the cheapest option was Swiss (ex-Swissair), via Zurich, incidentally one of the most attractive airports I've ever seen. I've done this before, and enjoyed certain aspects of it very much. After a hundred low-cost flights the simple fact of being offered a free coffee and croissant and a piece of chocolate with the letters SWISS embossed on it made me feel as the Queen must have felt when receiving a personal iPod from Obama. Finally, I'm worth it. But it doesn't quite compensate for the manic rush from one terminal to another in the 45 minutes deemed sufficient by Swiss, with a Security Control, like Cerberus, in the middle. Today there was a man with a head shaped like Fester (Fester's head, that is) and the most charming, desperate, arm-waving way of saying No you must make the queue HERE I've ever come across.

In the past, I've missed more connections than I've made, often because of 'technical problems' at Rome's Fiumicino. Zurich airport, as I think I've said, is lovely, but five hours there bites significantly into a weekend visit to a place that isn't Zurich airport, that isn't even Swtitzerland, wonderful though it no doubt is. Today, though, we left Rome on time. We arrived in Zurich slightly before time. Fester notwithstanding, I passed through Security Control (a second time) on time. A slight hitch occurred when a passenger with special needs had to be disembarked from our plane before we could board it. As far as I could see, and judging from the limousine with the number plate SWISS ONE that carried the sheikh-like figure off, the special needs were closely linked to significant wealth, but Switzerland has always had a special understanding of the special needs of the rich.

Still,we made it up. We landed on time. I went through the fabulous iris-reading thingumajig at Birmingham airport and IT WORKED. The shuttle to the station was waiting for me, the train I had to catch gave me just the time I need to make a very satisfying call (of which, more news anon). I even had the right change for the bus that brought me, triumphant and ON TIME, to my destination. I feel blessed.

And so, two countries away from where I woke up this morning, to bed.

No Red Stripe no cry

A crate for fruit

Update: If anyone thinks this is a gratuitous slur on the Pontifex and his sexual preferences and doesn't speak Italian, the slur is actually worse than they may have thought. The name of the wholesale fruit and veg dealers on the side of the plastic crate in the top picture is PAPA & L'AMANTE (which, translated into English, reads POPE AND LOVER). Papa is a fairly common name in these parts, L'Amante rather less so; the combination was too good to miss.

The Specials: Ghost Town

Even though you are who you are

An extraordinary tale from Mark Doty's blog.

The world

I got this from Joe.My.God, who got it from See My Briefs, who got it from their friend Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. 

(You need to click on it to see the whole thing. Dont ask me why, ask Blogger. I just do what I'm told.)

Naples, 21-22 March 2009

Apologies

If you're wondering a) what the odd little widget to the right, the one with the numbers and the blue bar, is all about, and b) why my contributions to this blog are so erratic these days, well, there's one answer to both. I'm working on a new novel, entitled ANY HUMAN FACE, my progress on which is being measured by the aforesaid widget. (The figure of 85,000 is a purely hypothetical final word count.) Everything else is being pushed to one side. But believe me, it will be worth it. And, meanwhile, please don't give up on me - keep dropping in (if only to see how many more words I've written). I'm sure I'll find time to express irritation about any number of things before the novel's finished and I resume normal service. Be warned, Ratzy!