Witchcraft

Thank you, Jesus' General, for this.

How not to approach an interview situation

The beard is definitely not a good idea.

From The Smoking Gun.

Questionnaire

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

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

Remember: no Salt, no flavour

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

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

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

Elizabath Baines: Balancing on the Edge of the World

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

Katy Evans-Bush: Me and the Dead

John Wilkinson: Down to Earth

Vanessa Gebbie: Words from a Glass Bubble

Isobel Dixon: A Fold in the Map

Douglas Oliver: Arrondissements

David Gaffney: Aromabingo

Tania Hershman: The White Road

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

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

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

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

Casting away

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

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

Iran, Jamaica, Vatican, Sudan....

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

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

Grooming

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

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

Hmm. Seedy. It goes on to say:

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

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

Cyclone tour: stage four

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

He also has a dog called Sam.

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

Lessons in democracy

The Honourable Maurizio Ronconi, deputy for the UDC, just can't stomach the victory of Vladimir Luxuria on Isola dei Famosi (more information about this can be found here). He says it's 'simply scandalous' that state television should transform a transsexual into a national heroine. Rather worryingly for a man who's been elected to parliament in a country that still claims to be a democracy, he doesn't seem to have grasped the basic democratic notion that the person who gets the most votes gets the bacon. Even if he or she is an unsuitable model for young people, as Ronconi claims. So listen up, Maurizio. It wasn't the naughty old disrespectful diseducational RAI that chose Vladimir, it was 56% of the voters who chose to invest a euro in choosing who'd win, whether or not they also pay their TV licence. This is how democracy works in the real world, Ronky, whatever might happen in the corridors of the UDC, so get used to it. One day you might also be exposed to a genuine popular vote. I can't wait.

The merest whiff

A very small taste of my presentation a week ago at Rome's John Cabot University. It comes from the opening of The Scent of Cinnamon. I'm not being a tease (although I can be): this really is all that was filmed.

What I'd like to do to Berlusconi (while we still can)

You may already know this, but I've just discovered a whole sub-genre on YouTube of actions being filmed in slow motion. I had no idea. Some of them are intensely lyrical. Others aren't. This one, for example, isn't.

The dark side

I'm not sure how much of this, from today's NYT, I understand, but it certainly feels exciting. Here's an extract:

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

Richer and stranger...

Don't miss the third leg of my Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour, at Scott Pack's essential blog, Me and My Big Mouth. I'm answering questions on order, sequence and, well, order again, which makes it sound a lot drier than it is. It's actually quite lively. Go and have a look and you'll see what I mean. And if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I'll get right back to you...

Stop press: Luxuria wins IdF

Well, it's not Obama, but I'm happy to report that Italy's most famous transgender politician-cum-actor-cum-a-host-of-other-things, Vladimir Luxuria, has just won the Italian version of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, known here as Isola dei Famosi (Island of the Famous). It's less creepy-crawly than the UK version, but lasts ten weeks instead of three, requiring massive patience from both its public and the participants. Vladimir's victory over a strikingly attractive 24-year-old Argentinian called Belen Rodriguez, who may be famous now but certainly wasn't when the programme started almost three months ago, is a sign that in Italy, unlike many other countries, the people are way ahead of the politicians that represent them. Voting for Martina Navratilova or even Brian Paddick is one thing. Voting for a pre-op transsexual who's admitted to a period on the game, transformed a coconut shell into a makeshift handbag and represented Communist Refoundation in parliament is, I think you'll agree, another. 

Over to you, Ratzinger.

A maid looking through the keyhole

There's a lovely piece by Peter Popham in today's Independent about the background to Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Here's an extract from it, with an interesting observation on how artists - some artists - gather their material: 

The film caused a huge scandal when it came out, and narrowly avoided being banned. At the premiere, one outraged signora spat in the director's face. "We were furious with him," says Olghina, "because it wasn't a decadent city. Fellini, who comes from Rimini, based the film on gossip. He wasn't yet part of the city's life – he was like a maid looking through the keyhole." Yet no one denies that Fellini crystallised an amazing vision of Rome.

So long as men can breathe

I’ve just finished Warwick Collins’ new novel, The Sonnets, which draws its inspiration from Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence and the circumstances in which it was written. It’s a brave man who decides to narrate an episode from Shakespeare’s life in the first person - who opts, in other words, to impersonate the man himself - and an even braver one who pens a couple of extra sonnets at crucial moments in the narrative, but Collins pulls off the first with considerable elegance and skill, and the second by the skin of his teeth, which is, as Collins himself acknowledges, only natural. Shakespeare wouldn't be Shakespeare if he didn't, finally, resist imitation.

The book weaves a context for some of the most famous sonnets, providing an entirely plausible sequence of events to explain the various mysteries surrounding their writing, although I admit to having a vested interest in Shakespeare’s presumed bisexuality, which gets short shrift here. What impressed me most about the book, though, wasn’t the way in which the sonnets are contextualized, psychologically adroit though this was, but the dramatic handling of Shakespeare’s relations with a bunch of finely-drawn characters, each with his or her role to play in the hothouse atmosphere of the poems' creation. Not only Southampton, whose initial foolhardiness and growing maturity are convincingly portrayed, but a host of other, minor and major, players.     

The parts of the book I enjoyed most, in fact, were the central chapters, a series of encounters in which Shakespeare is obliged, pretty much against his will, to take part in the world of political and dynastic intrigue surrounding his patron, a world of ever-increasing menace. If the sonnets are the framework around which the novel is constructed, its heart seems to me to be in these meetings, where Collins shows his extraordinary capacity to create both character and narrative tension through dialogue, something he demonstrated to great effect in his earlier novel, Gents. I particularly liked the scene with Southampton’s mother, but conversations with Lord Hunsdon and his mistress, and Master Florio and his wife, are just as effective, and chilling.   

If I have one tiny qualm about the novel, it’s the wink towards the modern reader’s greater knowledge, as Shakespeare stumbles towards the familiar line, ‘If music be the food of love, play on…’ - if only on the grounds that the final version is the only one that scans properly. But that’s a very small quibble indeed with such a gripping and intelligent book. 

Hormonal communism

An interview with one of my favourite writers, José Saramago, in today's Guardian online - presumably the Observer? Well worth reading. Here's an extract:

Still a Communist party member, Saramago describes himself as a "hormonal communist - just as there's a hormone that makes my beard grow every day. I don't make excuses for what communist regimes have done - the church has done a lot of wrong things, burning people at the stake. But I have the right to keep my ideas. I've found nothing better." Yet he did write in 2003 that, after years of personal friendship with Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader "has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams". In Reis's view, "Saramago lives his communism mostly as a spiritual condition - philosophical and moral. He doesn't preach communism in his novels." His fable of consumerism and control in a globalised culture, The Cave (2001), shows the focus of life shifting from cathedral to shopping mall. But for Jull Costa, its strength is in his "writing so humanely about ordinary people and their predicaments".

Scent of Cinnamon launch

Well, after a heated Facebook debate on what to wear, I decided to do sober but casual, as befits the Aula Magna Regina of John Cabot University. Carlos Dews, writer, friend and professor of English Language and Literature at JCU, presented me with his customary charm and generosity, and then it was over to me. I read The Scent of Cinnamon and The Growing, then answered questions about influences, surprise endings and, er, dogs. Books were sold, and signed, and I had the pleasure of seeing old friends and making new ones. I can't wait for the next one. This is a large, shamelessly unveiled hint to anyone who might have a venue and some spare bottles of wine. I'm your man. I also do weddings... (Though not, alas, in California.)

People who look like you

Erin O'Brien's written a great post about bigotry and interference. You can read it here.

Incoherence and the market

According to tonight's news, pirated copies of Gomorrah, the prize-winning film based on Saviano's exposure of the Camorra, the organised crime network in the area around Naples and beyond, are being sold, in cellophane wraps and with falsified government seals, by the Camorra in the area around Naples. Saviano, in the meantime, is in the deeply ironic position of hovering on the brink of an Oscar nomination while risking his life on a daily basis, threatened with death for having brought shame on - and attracted media attention to - the Camorra. In the area around Naples. And beyond.