Go to jail. Or not.

As a sop to the thirsty for blood electorate of the Northern League, who seem to regard anyone born south of Florence as, in the words of their noble leader Umberto Bossi, bingo bongo, the Italian government recently voted in a law that severely restricts immigration into Italy and establishes that anyone who manages nonetheless to enter the country will not simply be sent home, as was the case before the new law, but will be treated as a criminal and imprisoned. Italy's prisons were lightened of a small part of their human load by a much-criticised amnesty during the previous government, but have recently been identified - by the minister of the interior, no less - as among the most overcrowded in Europe. Still, joined-up thinking isn't necessarily integral to government, particularly when one of its components is run by a rabble-rousing zenophobe (pictured above with his intellectually challenged son, or dauphin, Renzo, as they audition for a deodorant commercial).

The problem, though, was that an awful lot of the illegal immigrants already in Italy weren't hanging around street corners selling hard drugs to children. They weren't, hard though this may be to believe, involved in prostitution or organ trafficking. I know, I know, I read the papers too, but you'll have to take my word on this. Many of them were picking tomatoes in inhuman temperatures, or making designer handbags in sweatshops, or building second houses on stretches of protected coastline. They were actually quite useful. But no, despite Italy's need for tomatoes and homes, and, er, handbags, the government stood firm. Do not pass Go, it said. Do not collect £200. Go to jail.

Unfortunately, and it didn't take people long to realise this, an even larger number of illegal immigrants weren't working in factories, or cellars, or acres of improvised greenhouses. They were living in Italy's cities, in residential areas, in some cases surrounded by Italian families. They were known as colf (short for collaboratori familiari) and badanti (carers). They were cleaning floors and toilets, and looking after babies, and wiping the chins and arses of grandparents whose children didn't have the time or energy to do it themselves; who could afford to employ someone else to do it for them. They were doing - in other words - all the dirty stuff that Italian people - including their representatives in government, on both sides of the spectrum - didn't want to do. Suddenly, the need to rid Italy of these parasitical delinquents didn't feel quite so urgent.

Hey presto! Amnesty for colf and badanti. Out of all the illegal workers in Italy, these two categories have been saved from the law. Out of all the illegal workplaces, the 'family' home has been singled out as having the only legitimate need for foreign labour. What's extrordinary about this is that the decision to operate such an amnesty has created an ulterior racism within an already profoundly racist piece of legislation. It's extracted one category from the mass of people affected by the law and decided that their work has, not more value than the others, but less; that their work is just so degrading no Italian could be expected to do it. With one stroke of the pen, it's institutionalised a domestic servant class in the country. What it says is that if you're an African and want to work in a factory or a field, you can fuck off because, officially at least, we don't need you. But if you want to mop shit from a floor, step right up, because no way am I, a white European (naturally, from Florence up), going to stoop to do it. That's quite a message. I wonder if Berlusconi made it clear to Gheddafi during his recent visit to Libya to discuss 'immigration issues' that the only welcome Libyans, apart from those bearing oil, are the ones who are prepared to nurse the old and infirm to death. Or were they too busy exchanging camels for skirt?

Favourite things

One of my favourite artists (and, I admit it, a very good friend) Paola Casalino will be showing some of her work at Taunton Public Library, Taunton, Somerset, from the 1st to the 12th of September. The show's entitled My Favourite Things. One of my favourite things is a painting I have of Paola's, which hangs to my right as I work (or don't work at the moment, with temperatures still in the mid-30s). I don't know if the painting on the left will be in the show or not, but I do know that whatever Paola's chosen to exhibit will be worth seeing.

If you're in or near Somerset in the next two weeks, pop in and take a look. All the details can be found here.

Shut yo' mouth, Part Two

Silvio Berlusconi has just taken the extraordinary step of suing Repubblica on the grounds that the ten questions the newspaper has been asking him (click to embiggen above or see here) since the Papi-and-Noemi shit hit the fan last February are 'diffamatory'. His argument, or that of his weasel-faced legal adviser, Ghedini, is that the questions are 'rhetorical' and designed 'not to obtain a response' from Berlusconi but to 'insinuate in the reader the idea that the person "interrogated" refuses to respond'.

This is the kind of casuistical horseshit lawyers are paid to produce - it ought to be clear to anyone that Berlusconi's refusal to respond is not an 'idea' but a fact - so we shouldn't be surprised. What is surprising is that Berlusconi should have chosen to kick up a legal fuss now, with Repubblica beginning to feel more and more like a voice in the wildnerness here, the RAI increasingly weakened by external and self-censorship and personnel changes, and his own house rags ever more virulently on the attack, slavering and snarling like cornered rats.

The last straw appears to have been a recent piece in which a number of articles from highly-regarded foreign newspapers are quoted, describing the man as a sex-dependent tin-pot dictator in the claws of the Russian mafia. SB, who continues to insist that he has brought nothing but lustre to the image of Italy abroad, a claim that would be laughable if it weren't so readily believed and repeated here in Italy, seems to have decided to try and clamp down on the right of Italian journalists to refer to the work of their colleagues in other countries, isolating the country even more.

In the meantime, the Viagra-riddled geriatric's plans to get a little Vatican cred by dining with some cardinal or other amid the rubble of L'Aquila have been blown away, possibly by Bossi's recent attacks on the Church, guilty of taking a soft line on immigration (!) and attacks on the Vatican-controlled publication Avvenire by the Berlusconi-controlled rag magazine Il Giornale. Let them fight it out among themselves, say I.

Shut yo' mouth

Earlier this year Freedom House placed Italy 73rd in its liberty of the press league table, classifying the country as 'partly free', a status it shares with Turkey, Burkina Faso and Haiti. This is hardly surprising, given that 80% of the population receives its information exclusively through television, almost entirely controlled, either institutionally (RAI) or personally (Mediaset), by the prime minister, Silvio 'Papi' Berlusconi.

It will be interesting to see what effect the refusal by the RAI to show the trailer of a new film, Videocracy, will have on next year's Freedom House tables. Made by Erik Gandini and distributed by Fandango, one of Italy's most courageous and culturally alert film distribution companies, the film looks at the the past thirty years of television in Italy and the sidereal shift produced in its cultural role by the growth and eventual dominance of Mediaset.

The RAI has refused to broadcast the trailer on the grounds that Videocracy is not really a film at all, but a political message, transmitting an unequivocable criticism of the government, a line of reasoning that would also exclude from the definition of 'film' the work of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, not to speak of Rossellini, Godard, Nanni Moretti, Ken Loach and a hundred others. The RAI, given its well-known 'pluralism' (as in blind subservience to power), has decided that showing the trailer would require a second trailer to be shown, of a film that presented the opposite political viewpoint. It's clear that such a film not only doesn't, but couldn't, exist without the retroactive cancellation of Mediaset and, oh joy, of Berlusconi himself.

What's more, recognising that most people know what they know from their TVs, it claims that, by linking the prime minister to the country's most important commercial television company, the film not only brings up the thorny, and unresolved, issue of conflict of interest - already a cardinal sin in post-free Italy -but also suggests that "by means of the television the government could orientate citizens' beliefs, influencing them in favour of the government and ensuring their consent". Well, duh, as Homer might say.

Mediaset, needless to say, has also refused to show the trailer.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover

A fascinating interview with a great cover designer, and more, on Caustic Cover Critic, one of my favourite blogs: informative, thorughly well-researched and frequently side-splittingly funny. In this case, it's the former. The artist's name's Roxanna Bikadoroff and this wonderful cover for Flannery O'Connor's wonderful book Wise Blood is a good example of her work.

Lucky Flannery O'Connor (not words you often see together, I know).

You can read the complete interview here.

Oh my Lord!

Thinking about death and contrast in Waltham

Attention

I went to the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol yesterday. I've known about the place for years, but the last time I was in Bristol, in autumn 1975, I was looking for a job and don't remember even considering the notion of a visit to an avant-garde arts space. What I remember most vividly from that visit was, first, getting involved in a brawl while looking for somewhere to sleep, something that had never happened to me before and has never happened to me since, and sweating against the plastic lining the owner of the bed and breakfast I was staying in had slipped between the bottom sheet and the mattress of my single bed. At that time,art played second fiddle to concerns as immediate as work and a place to live, however much these concerns might have fuelled my own art later. But it's a place I've been aware of, and been intrigued by, for years, so I was keen to visit. We were there just before ten, when it opens, so we sat and looked at the water in that state of contemplative alertness to small shifts in the environment that water produces. An immensely elegant, unbearably malodorous, tramp, tall, long-boned, with the bearing of a medieval hermit, approached us and asked, in passable Italian, for a cigarette - he'd presumably heard us talking between ourselves - then thanked Giuseppe for the half packet of MS he was given with a smile of great sweetness and a lilting Grazie. And then it was time to go in, and so we did.

The current exhibition is called Sequelism. This is what the site has to say about it:

Sequelism, Part 3: Possible, Probable or Preferable Futures is an ambitious, multi-faceted project that looks into the future and at that which is yet to happen. It will consider how the inexact arena of futurology is used as a means to better comprehend the present and the past.

Well, that's what it says, and I don't want to argue with people who have far more invested in all this than I do. But what I saw was a series of objects arranged in certain ways - venetian and other sorts of blind hanging in the centre of a gallery, a fox's stuffed head on a steel pole, a row of whirring painted discs, a sheet of what looked like rubber thrown diagonally onto the floor - and it struck me how incommensurate these two things were: the aim and the artifice. I don't want to sound snippy, but even the language of the blurb betrays a certain anxiety, or woolliness, of thought. The distinction between, for example, 'the future' and 'that which is yet to happen' may be too fine for my small brain; alternatively, it may not exist. But what really struck me was the effort expended, which seemed considerable, and the effect, or value of the reward, which seemed far smaller, banal and even irrelevant.

The array of hanging blinds of various kinds, for example, could be inviting us to think about the way space is defined, is closed, is opened, is made visible and then concealed; its variability, its arbitrariness, our imposition of order upon it, and so on. The fact that some of the blinds in the installation are western and mass-produced while others are, or appear to be, the work of Asian artisans might be important. It's important if I choose to notice it, I suppose, and that's my problem with this kind of fag-end avant-gardism. It lends itself to observation as pure subjectivity in a way, say, that the Duchamp urinal didn't. Duchamp's admonishing ghost walks dolefully behind all this work but the urinal, or the bottle rack, or the defaced Mona Lisa, didn't provide the audience with a chance to prove how clever they were at reading the new significance of the artefact. Duchamp's work, where the effort was minimal and the effect enormous, was too busy telling the audience something. The wonder of that work is just how no-nonsense and didactic its aims were. You couldn't not get it, unless you were wilfully obtuse. The stuff in the Arnolfini seemed vague and smug and, well, decorative in its effort to be cutting-edge and challenging and thought-provoking. The kind of attention it asked of me was worth less than the attention the medieval tramp had given us, because in his case it had a specific aim, or the attention we gave to the water beneath our feet. It was institutionalised and up its own arse. And this was exemplified by one of the exhibits: a portrait photograph of the artist, or a good-looking model, wearing not one but three or four padded masks over his eyes. It could say such a lot, but really says very little. Oh, it's about all kinds of things, but what isn't? Finally, it says whatever you want it to say.

But maybe it's just me.

Ownership

I was party to a fascinating, albeit inadvertent social experiment a couple of evenings ago. We were still in Fondi, floored by the sweltering heat of the past month or so. Even our house, which has yard-thick walls and traditionally poky windows, had given up any pretence of keeping us cool. It felt like the only place you could breathe in the entire town was in the alley outside Maika's house, which somehow catches whatever faint breeze there is. Maika noticed this a couple of weeks ago and decided to take advantage of it by putting a small table and a chair or two outside. The alley's a dead end, just wide enough to get a car into, with a gate half-way down it. It's inhabited by local people, holiday-makers from Naples, an Indian family with their newborn baby.

It's not unknown for people to spill out of their houses into the street, although they tend to take the furniture back in when they're finished. Maika, though, left the table, covered with a cheery trattoria-style check tablecloth, outside from one day to the next. When she was there, she used it. What was interesting, and immensely cheering, was that when she wasn't there, other people did. The Indian woman brought her little boy and new baby out to sit there during the afternoon, when Maika was at the beach. A bunch of women from a flat at the end began to gather round it later on. One night, Maika came home from dinner out in the early hours of the morning and found a bunch of men playing cards round it. She asked them to make sure to leave the ashtray clean and went to bed.

What had happened was that Maika, by invading a public space, had created community. The first instinct is to consider this 'Neapolitan', this casual disregard for the public-private boundary, and that's certainly what it looked like, some scene from a De Sica film of the 50s. But the boundary in Naples, paradoxically, tends to be reinforced by this kind of thing, to favour the occupation of public by private, as though the two were inimical, as though what's ours is suddenly yours, or his, no longer shared at all.

What Maika's done, because it's in her nature, is to open that up, to allow the edge between private and public to be blurred into near invisibility, so that everyone has a sense of ownership, a respectful, even delicate, promiscuity, a sharing. It's only a folding table, a couple of chairs, a tablecloth, an ashtray. It could be anywhere. But it felt unique. People who wanted to get by as we ate our dinner waited while we moved our chairs. We were happy to put down our glasses, and stand, and smile at the baby, and moan about the heat. Nobody minded, or complained. I wouldn't have believed this tiny provisional utopia could exist if I hadn't experienced it myself.

Holiday!

I'm off on my summer hols tomorrow morning and won't be back for two whole rain-filled weeks (yes, I'm back in the United Kingdom), so try to keep your expectations low as far as my posting is concerned. This doesn't mean I won't post - I could very well produce some of my most extraordinary work - witty without being shallow, vibrant with intelligence, utterly to the point. You know, the sort of thing I turn out on an almost daily basis. It just means I may not post very much, or very regularly. Note, I say may not. As in may.

And if that doesn't keep you coming back to check, nothing will. Not even the chance of another infantile visual pun like this magazine cover from the days when men were men and boys were boys and pieces of untrimmed wood were penile extensions.

The right of the strongest

There's a typically Italian kerfuffle going on here at the moment about the authorisation of Ru486, the pill that induces abortion. It's used pretty much everywhere in the developed world, but Italy's taken its time about saying yes, for obvious reasons. It's a political issue here (yawn), which is what women tend to become when their bodies,and their right to make decisions about them, are involved. I'd call the issue ideological but that gives too much weight to the knee-jerkiness of most of the reactions here, in the world of opinion-makers, inside and outside the Vatican, if such a space as 'outside the Vatican' exists in Italy in anything but the most virtual sense (i.e blogs). Because it isn't ideological at all; it's a question of who swings what, and where. It's party lines and party funding and who gives a flying fuck about individual women and their complicated individual lives?

For some people, for example, doctors and cardinals and their various acolytes and dependents (politicians), the use of the pill 'banalizes' abortion. At this point, it might not be a bad idea to cut the crap and introduce the proviso that legal abortion is available as long as it's accompanied by a public flogging and a rather severe haircut. That way the woman won't regard it as 'banal', and will presumably think twice before having sex. Because naturally, before having sex, she'll take into account the fact that she might be able to avoid a surgical procedure and replace it with a slightly less invasive sort of medication. Good God, who wouldn't risk it, knowing that? I'm surprised Papi Silvio doesn't slip a pill into the bustarella he gives the whores he entertains in his many villas. Banal, schmanal, as long as she doesn't do a paternity suit. The chance, as they say, would be a fine thing, despite Berlusconi's latest crack that he may not be a saint, but he fucks like a god. (Yes, this is the Italian premier speaking...)

But my favourite is the comment made by Bagnasco. He's the cardinal who took over from God's ferret a couple of years ago in a PR attempt to soften the rigour of the Prada-clad One, who is currently nursing his over-stressed wrist somewhere comfortable. In the photograph above, he's the one in the red sash sucking up to the boss, in white. They're quite a picture, surounded by all that sombre but not unsexy black. These colours wouldn't matter, but they have a hierarchical significance, rather like judo. And that's what makes me laugh about Bagnasco. His reaction to the decision to allow the use of the pill was to express his bitterness that it endorsed 'the right of the strongest'. Coming from a democrat this just might have had some weight. It's certainly true that a pregnant woman is 'stronger' than a foetus, if only because she's a reasoning autonomous being and not a mere cluster of cells. Coming from a man at the highest ranks of a rigidly hierarchical structure that regards all women within its bounds as lesser beings, deprived of decision-making power and doctrinal choice, a structure that will do all it can to reduce women outside its bounds, who don't even share its faith, to the same level, as unspeaking, unquestioning vessels of God's word and man's seed, it's no longer laughable. It's obscene.

Aaah, that's better

See any difference? That's right. I've changed template here so that YouTube videos fit more comfortably, and font size so that you can read me more easily. Any so-called close friend who tells you this move towards comfort has something to do with incipient short sight or the recent ballooning of my waistline as a result of too much spaghetti alle vongole and dry white wine is a dirty rotten liar.

So don't even think about it.

Music

Thanks to Lally's Alley, who had it from Gene Wright Harris, for pointing me to this.

"Walking is a mobile form of waiting" Thomas A Clark

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Summer with the Dead

Another insane Amazon recommendation!

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

As someone who has purchased or rated Dubliners by James Joyce, you might like to know that Summer with Horses (White Cloud Station) is now available. You can order yours for just £4.99 by following the link below.

	Summer with Horses (White Cloud Station) Trudy Nicholson Price: £4.99

Product Description
Suzy, Lucy and Alexa are spending their summer holidays at the beach, enjoying the freedom of time alone with their horses. But a near tragedy involving Suzy’s beloved horse Ripple introduces a new friend into their lives and gives Suzy the opportunity to revisit White Cloud Station.

Teaser

A sneak preview of my new novel ANY HUMAN FACE, out next April, courtesy of Wordle.

Hooked

A short but enthusiastic review of Little Monsters has just popped up on Book Addicts Anonymous. You can read it, should you so wish, here.

Spam alert

Sorry, but I've had to put moderation back on the comments after a new wave of ideograms from someone called sexy. Oh dear.

Celebrity

I've been thinking about celebrity these past few days. Not the kind that 'iconises' and manipulates and destroys, Michael Jackson style; something much smaller, even laughably so, and closer to home. You may have noticed a few posts down that a local paper decided I was worth a page of its time. Latina Oggi sells around 9,000 copies a day, so it's hardly life-changing to be interviewed by it, even if you do make the second page of the home-town edition. As I said before, I knew nothing about the article until I was stopped by my local newsagent, who thanked me. What for? I asked. For the interview? What interview? And so on. I bought a couple of copies and came home to read it. It was based on a piece I wrote about Fondi last year for the Sunday Telegraph and whatever information the journalist had managed to glean from the net. There were some pretty dreadful translations in it, the kind people produce when they concentrate so much on understanding the other language they forget their own: 'orange-coloured trees' for 'orange trees'; 'fruit shops' for 'local fruit'. There were one or two moments of pure invention, such as that I've written for TV (I wish) or that I was spotted in the main street by a group of young people who recognised me as 'their favourite author' - unlikely at the best of times, and particularly so in Italy, where nothing of mine, apart from two poems over twenty years ago, has ever been published. Still, on the whole, I was pleased with and amused by the attention and thought the whole idea of an 'interview' conducted without my knowedge or agreement a bit of harmless fun. This continued over the following days, when people I knew stopped me in the street to thank me, as the newsagent had done, for having spoken well of Fondi at a time when most references to the town link it, with some justice, to the Mafia. And, really, that was it. Until I had dinner with some friends last Saturday.

There were four guests, two Italian, two English. The English friends, like me, have both lived here in Italy for several decades, and the language of the table was Italian. We'd all had a fair bit to drink by the time the article was mentioned. One of our English friends - Jane - hadn't seen it, so it was duly produced and read out, to general hilarity. At the end, though, Roberto - a film and TV director - asked me what I was going to do about the mistakes in it. Initially, I thought he was joking. But he was quite serious. It had never occurred to me that the article had any weight beyond the ephemeral fact of its local publication. He was startled. You work in communication, he said. You know full well that sooner or later someone will google you and find this article and assume that everything in it is true. They'll do that anyway, I said. But I also said that no serious journalist would regard as authoritative an article that talked about orange-coloured trees. Don't be naive, he said. Besides, this article has appeared in a paper with a specific readership (local, right of centre) and purpose (to make Fondi look good as it's battered by accusations of Mafia infiltration), neither of which you'd normally consider sympathetic. People will assume you've given this piece the thumbs-up knowing its context, he said, and Renata, who also writes for TV, agreed. Suddenly, my harmless bit of fun began to look less harmless. But I don't care one jot about local opinion, I protested. Besides, I added, adopting the classic Billie Bunter line of defence, everyone likes it. But you're public now, Roberto said, whether you like it or not. You need to be able to control what's said about you. But it's only a local paper, I insisted. Everyone will have forgotten about it in a week's time. Not if they google your name and Fondi, Roberto and Renata said. My English friends disagreed, taking my line that it didn't matter. And of course they were wrong and Roberto and Renata were right. Type in Charles Lambert and Fondi and the article is the first thing to appear, in Italian, and the fifth overall. It exists. It claims to be an interview, or to be based on an interview, with me. It represents me in a way over which I have no control. It's canonical.

And it occurred to me later, as I thought about why, despite this, I still didn't want to write to Latina Oggi and complain about the inaccuracies and the downright lies, that my reluctance wasn't just to do with a feeling that I'd be letting down all those people who'd been so pleased to see someone say a few good things about their town, in which I happen to live and about which I happened to write an article, to raise my profile, a year ago. That feeling was certainly present, and it may have been what persuaded at least one of my two English friends, Sally, who also lives here in Fondi, to think it better not to react. It marked an acceptance that we, as foreigners in a small town, necessarily value, or should value. Because isn't that the charm of small foreign towns - that they eventually succumb to us? But my line of argument at dinner was that I didn't want to correct the article because I didn't care what people thought about me, because Fondi is not my town, and because I neither have nor want to have a town that's mine. And that's much closer to the truth.

The more I think about it the more I realise that what split the table into two along essentially nationalist lines is that for me, and for my English friends, what Italian journalists write in their papers isn't quite real, just as bad language in Italian isn't quite real - the weight of it eludes us. This is partly the result of the objective shoddiness of much Italian journalism, but it goes deeper than that. Italian papers are as unreal and inessential to us as they are real, and essential, and capable of bearing and creating value, to our Italian friends. I'm not sure what this says about celebrity, but it seems to have the same ironic relationship to the phenomenon as whoever it was called their band Big in Japan. As if it mattered.

He-man's colors and he-man's patterns

My thanks, once again, to Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy for this vintage underwear ad.

Imagine

Chillingly close

Want to read a highly skilled hatchet job of the first paragraph of the Da Vinci Code? Of course you do. Not because you're jealous of the book's success and the enormous earnings of Dan Brown, of course. Or the fact that two extremely successful films have been made from his dreadful books. Or the imminent arrival of a new one.

But because you love language.

Right. So here it is. Enjoy.

Cracking collection

I just want to direct your attention to a great new reader's review of The Scent of Cinnamon on Amazon UK. It's by Brummie Reader, and it's a beauty!

Now it's your turn.

Pester, pester, pester.

Drinking through nose

If you think human rights are an optional, you should sign up to New York University Law School and the courses of its new Professor of Human Rights, Dr. Li-ann Thio, scheduled for this autumn. Want to know why? Click here.

(Immediate update. So few people enrolled for her course that it's been dropped. Which apparently makes her a victim...)

Music: MPHO sings Running up that Hill

I love this song, and I love this woman's voice, but I'm not sure about

the arrangement. What do you think?

Succour, always succour

No dears, he's broken his wrist.....

(My thanks for this wonderful image to Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy.)

big fish small pond

Well, I'm suddenly a big fish in a small pond, specifically the whole of the second page of the very local edition of the local newspaper, Latina Oggi. A journalist called Maria Sole Galeazzi claims - erroneously - to have interviewed me and has cobbled together an article from my Sunday Telegraph piece on Fondi last year and various other sources. It's not brilliantly done - the translation often makes no sense at all - but it's still very flattering. At one point she says that I'm not the 'usual VIP' but an 'important name in the current European literary scene', which is news to me. If only it were true.

If you read Italian and would like to enjoy the whole thing, click here.

One hand clapping

You've been waiting for me to post some nasty little comment about the Pope's fractured wrist, haven't you? Some spiked gratuitous remark about repetitive strain injury. A snide reference to the lovely Georg, at the holy one's side. The fact that it was the first story on the national TV news here in Italy. Maybe a jibe about the speeding nun, with the two in the back, rushing to succour his infallibility in what the Guardian bizarrely calls a 'mercy dash'. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm going to disappoint you. This post is merely to announce that I've finished a short story that's been on the boil for some time and that I'm very happy with it. Thank you.

His right wrist. Hmm. No more Roman salutes for a while then, Benny?

The face of factual

I'm not a Strictly Come Dancing fan - I prefer reality shows that incarcerate the contestants and reduce them to a state of ratlike desperation - but my heart bled a little for Arlene Phillips today when I saw that she'd been sacked from the jury. No, I didn't love Hot Gossip - on the contrary. And I didn't much enjoy her tritely alliterative, overworked comments on the odd occasions I did see the programme. But surely even she didn't deserve the comments made by the woman who gave her the boot. BBC1 controller (brr...) Jay Hunt defended the decision by saying the show needed a 'different flavour', presumably newspeak for 'younger woman', and then went on to say, in some appallingly misplaced attempt at reparation: "Of course Arlene is disappointed. But critically she is incredibly excited about moving to The One Show. She knows at some point she is going to need to do something different with her career and this gives her the opportunity to become a face of factual on the channel and to be absolutely at the heart of what BBC1 does". "Critically"? "Incredibly excited" to be moved from the most popular Saturday evening show to a programme I surely can't be the only person never to have heard of - where, "critically", she will be expected to comment on the show she's just been dumped by? But even these horrors pale beside "the face of factual". Can anything be done to help this woman? No, not Arlene Phillips (66). Jay Hunt.

Patriotism, or not

Feeling British? Try this UK citizenship test. I'm applying for an Italian passport before MI6 gets hold of my results.

My thanks for this to Marie Phillips, aka The Woman who Talked too Much. (She didn't do that well either...)

Fair cops

Salt news

Salt Publishing's campaign to stay in business by publishing great books moves into its second phase. The situation has improved dramatically thanks to the Just One Book campaign, but the war still hasn't been won and Salt continues to need all the support it can get. If you haven't bought a book yet, go to their site and find something that takes your fancy. You won't regret it. If you have bought something, here's what Chris, of Salt, has to say:

How You Can Help Us

We need to keep Salt in the public eye. Here's how you can help. If you've bought a book from Salt and you enjoyed it please continue to support us by doing two important things (they're both free):

1. Firstly, tell your friends about the Salt title you enjoyed. Recommend it to them. Tell your friends on Twitter what you thought about it. Blog about it, if you like. Pass it on in anyway you can. Spread the word.

2. Secondly, please post a brief review of the book on Amazon to help the author. Amazon reviews do work.

Thank you for all your support. It really does matter.

Very best from me and Jen
Chris

BTW, I would love to see more reviews of The Scent of Cinnamon on Amazon. Go on. Just a couple of lines and, er, five stars... For me.

Aaah, Amazon!

Another great recommendation from Amazon! Wide Sargasso Sea = Scent of a Killer? You couldn't make it up...

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

As someone who has purchased or rated Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jean Rhys, you might like to know that Scent of a Killer is now available. You can order yours for just £4.99 (38% off the RRP) by following the link below.

	Scent of a Killer Kevin Lewis RRP: £7.99 Price: £4.99 You Save: £3.00 (38%)

Review
'Fans of Martina Cole will love this' - Heat on, Fallen Angel 'A gritty detective story with a real heart' - Woman on, Kaitlyn 'Gripping, harrowing. A true triumph over tragedy' - Mail on Sunday on, The Kid 'Incredible. A fantastic story' - Fern Britton on, The Kid 'Devastating. I can't think of a story that is more sad or a story that it feels more essential to go on reading' - Allison Pearson, Evening Standard on, The Kid

RIP Mollie Sugden (and Wendy Richards)

All the news that's fit to print

The blonde in the green tee-shirt is Noemi Letizia. She's the eighteen-year-old who calls Silvio Berlusconi Papi and can't decide whether to cavort on a table in her underwear or represent Italy at the European parliament (and, let's face it girls, could you?). The man standing next to her, one hand adoringly encircling her neck, is her boyfriend. His name is Domenico Cozzolino. The older couple behind them, lips pressed together as the pressure within Vesuvius slowly builds to their rear, are the happily-married parents of Noemi, Signor and Signora Letizia, enjoying a moment's intimacy. The photograph comes from a popular Italian magazine called Chi (Who).

In the preceding paragraph the first and last sentences are true. The rest of it is nonsense. Domenico Cozzolino is not, and never was, Noemi's boyfriend. He's pimped himself on afternoon TV and is now a PR. He was asked by Noemi, who'd apparently been prompted by someone else, to pretend to be having an affair with her, indeed, to be engaged to be married. Naturally, no PR worth his salt would turn down the chance to be photographed with a household name for a mass circulation magazine, even if it does mean lying through his teeth. And talking of lying, the couple of canoodlers in the background may be Noemi's parents, but they aren't usually this affectionate with each other. They're separated and have been for some time. The photograph, like the article accompanying it, is a complete fabrication. It's a lie designed to legitimate the Letizia family and their squalid dealings with the Italian prime minister. Who also happens to be the owner of Mondadori. Which happens to publish Chi.

I don't know why I bother.

The poetry of the world

A great new review for The Scent of Cinnamon, from the Law Society Journal of Australia. You can read it here. Or, if the link doesn't work and you have a magnifying glass to hand, here:

Alternatively, you can click to embiggen, as Joe My God always says.

Happy with restraint

OK, you've crossed Iran and Jamaica (and Zimbabwe and Iraq and Nigeria and...) off your list of possible holiday venues. You'd better cross off Fort Worth, Texas, too... You don't see why? Read this.

Summit

I found this on Facebook. It comes from today's edition of The Sun. I'm assuming that anyone who follows this blog probably won't have seen the original. It's not subtle, but why waste subtlety on Silvio Berlusconi? It serves its purpose admirably.

Shorter and sweeter'n'sourer

According to popbitch (I know, I know), Michael Jackson referred to semen as 'duck butter'.

Short and sweet

A nice piece about rewriting the classics on Twitter by Michelle Pauli here. Made even nicer by her quoting John Crace's Digested Read of the New Testament. Here it is:

"Angel gets Mary up duff. Jesus chills for 30 years, gets Messiah complex and is topped. Comes back. Then I saw his face. Now I'm a believer."

Roosters

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I met up with a reading group, the Roosters Book Club, based in Rome. The intention was that I should talk about Little Monsters, which the group had all, with great generosity, not only bought but read. The meeting had been organised by Carolyn, a friend and the driving force behind the group (according to its members!). I'd remarked that it might be fun to meet up, months ago, and was delighted, and mildly disquieted, when Carolyn took me up on this rash offer. When she phoned and suggested a date, I thought, well, yes, what could be more fun? It wasn't until I was walking from my house to hers, a matter of a hundred yards, that it struck me I had no idea what I'd actually do. I'd been assured by Carolyn that all that was required of me was that I talk about myself and my book and this had seemed so self-indulgent a pleasure up to that point that I hadn't really considered what it might involve. Because, walking along Via Manzoni, from my house to Carolyn's, with a copy of Little Monsters in my hand, it struck me that, to my (dis)credit, I'm the least introspective of men and that I also have a rather non-analytical approach to the business of writing - I'm endlessly quoting Frank O'Hara's essay on Personism:

I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

Of course, I know it's not that simple, and that it wasn't for O'Hara either. But I felt exposed, and unprepared, and slightly fraudulent. Which, when I think about it, is how I feel on most occasions of a social, or professional, nature.

Well, I had a wonderful time, and if the group enjoyed themselves half as much as I did, they must have had quite a lot of fun as well. The joy about lacking the capacity - or desire - for introspection is that you treat yourself as the subject for gossip, the more scurrilous the better. You become, alas, indiscreet. And not only about your private life. Because one of the interesting aspects of being a published writer is that you know something - not necessarily a lot, but something - about the way the whole business works. The writing schedule, revision, where the characters come from, all that was important. But equally interesting, it seemed to me, were the contract, the advance, the title, the cover. This is how it should be. Good books, like hand-thrown vases and the perfect Victoria sponge, should justify themselves. What's fascinating, because it's technical. is what lies behind them; it's the invisible speed of the wheel and the coolness of the hands that finally count. Which reminds me, I must ask Carolyn for the recipe of the excellent salad we all enjoyed as soon as I'd left the hot seat and we'd moved to the dining table for lunch.

If you read this, Roosters, thnak you for breaking me in so gently. And if you're a book club and would like me to be equally indiscreet with you, just let me know. I'm surprisingly available.

Khaki shorts are an optional.

Organic crackers

Faced with the prospect of Berlusconi becoming president of all he purveys, I suppose I ought to be feeling more generous towards the idea of a non-elected royal family. They aren't all bad, after all, unless useless is necessarily a component of bad, and the Windsors, as my mother always reminds me, work very hard (although the index against which their workload is measured isn't that clear - work hard compared to what? A junior doctor? A rickshaw driver? A crack whore?). Even the House of Lords is beginning to look like a valuable corrective to an elected house of mediocrities with their fingers in the till. But Prince Charles's latest foray into throwing his weight around has really got my goat. He's used his royal connections to pull the plug on a new development designed by Richard Rodgers for an area opposite the home of the Chelsea pensioners in London. The area's owned by the Qatar royal family, which has bowed to pressure from Charlie, presumably under the impression that his opinion has some weight beyond the tea rooms of middle England, the ones that serve Duchy Original muffins. As long as he's selling biscuits, the man's just about bearable, and the shortbread really is rather good. But his views on organic farming are widely regarded as crackpot Little Englandism in a world in which the majority of people now live in cities, etc. His woolly ecumenicalism is irritating tosh, but that's matter for another post. And he's bad at architecture as well. Prince Charles' notion of what constitutes an attractive building is, bluntly, philistine. He's had it in for Richard Rogers since the National Gallery fiasco, where he muscled in to stop London acquiring an interesting new building and had it replaced by something that looks like the warehouse bit of a provincial Sainsbury's. Now he's used his royal clout to block a development that would have provided work for over 10,000 people and over two hundred affordable homes in an area of London that doesn't exactly sing affordability. You can see what Rodgers has to say about this here. The point, as Rodgers says, is not whether his plans are good or not. The point is that procedures already exist for blocking a building that shouldn't be built, and that these weren't followed. What happened was that a non-elected architectural luddite muscled in and made a couple of phone calls to a non-elected dictator who owns a large slab of central London. This shouldn't happen. I hope that Rodgers can get his show back on the road, though it's unlikely. In the meantime, Prince Charles should get back to doing what he - or his employees are - good at: baking a genteelly mean organic cracker.

Pride

You may be wondering why I haven't posted photographs of Saturday's Pride in Rome. Well, it's simple. I was visiting my mother in England and had muddled up the dates. (How gay is that?) But I have it on good authority (Peter's) that it went off well, despite the shameful 'confusion' about route, only sorted out four days before the event. The photograph in the national section of Repubblica shows a rather fetching young man in loincloth and stigmata and presumably refers to some archaic gay ritual I haven't come across in my extensive reading. Others, better informed, are shocked. There's the usual confusion about numbers: 300,000 according to the organisers, two old queens and a poodle according to the police. Whether it served its purpose, assuming one knew what that was, I don't know, but I'm sorry I missed it. Still, I've been through the snaps I posted from last year's event and that of 2007 and thought I'd revive a few favourites. Here they are.