Hohum

Warped!

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

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

The review goes on to say that:

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

Sounds good...

21

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

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

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

What Lawrence might have called a pansy

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

C'est si bon

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

Gaia

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

Today Scott Pack's top 10, tomorrow the world

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

Animal planet

Seventeen years

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

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

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

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

This is all we need

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

(From 3 quarks daily)

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

French Lesson

Christmas spirit: an antidote

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

You can buy the book here.

Last blast before Christmas

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

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

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

Herman Dune: My Home is Nowhere Without You

A Christmas suggestion

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

Everything I Have is Blue

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

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

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

Nel mezzo del cammin

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

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

Lamed vovnik

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

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

You can find the article here.

Lovely things

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

Money

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

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