Running Babel to advantage

Like some mythological beast, the university language centre I work in is about to undergo what looks like its final metamorphosis.

Its first director treated it as a centre of power and money cow, running the place as an occasionally benign dictatorship until she was crossed by higher forces. (The disadvantage of wielding power in a feudal set up is that there’s almost always someone nearer to God than you are; in this case, the Magnificent Rector, as they’re touchingly known in Italy.)

Director No. 1 was replaced by a woman whose sense of self-esteem is so highly developed she was once seen stamping out of the Bank of Italy screaming, I’ll have you closed! (For the benefit of my Italian readers, Vi faccio chiudere!). She stuck it for fifteen months, during which the place ran on auto-pilot.

And now we have Director No. 3, a law professor. He’s going to be supported by something called a giunta. (Translates as junta: among its definitions is: Military dictatorship, a form of government wherein the political power resides with the military.) In theory, this will give him the expert didactic advice he’s going to need in order to run a centre devoted to the teaching of foreign languages at university level.

The startling thing about the junta is that not a single member of it is a professional language teacher. We haven’t even been asked.

Yet no one here seems to think it startling at all. This is a state of affairs that would be hard to imagine in a university in any other country in the world.

A question of priorities

It‘s interesting that the Anglican church appears to prefer the homophobic Archbishop Arsehole of Nigeria to the rather more gay-friendly Episcopalians in the States. It‘s none of my business, of course, but wouldn‘t it be a little closer to the message of their founder (I’m referring to Jesus, not Henry VIII) to support a gospel of love and good will to all men? And wouldn‘t it be doing a Christian service to the many hundreds of thousands of gay men and women being persecuted in Africa by Arsehole and his torture-happy cronies if the Anglican church showed a little more compassion and a little less self–interest?

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Another great story by Vanessa Gebbie, in the Steel City Review. The Marc Lowe piece is pretty fine as well.

Phylogenetic, ontogenetic… As long as our mothers love us

Berlusconi totty, Mara Carfagna, ex showgirl transformed into member of parliament for the capo’s ‘political’ party,Forza Italia, announced a couple of days ago that gay couples couldn’t be considered families because they were ‘constitutionally sterile’. Tell that to a broody lesbian with a turkey baster.

More to the point, as a national legislator (Zeus help us!) she appears to be saying that all childless couples should be denied legal recognition. This would exclude all women after menopause from the joys of holy wedlock, not to speak of those born sterile, soldiers and otherwise whose balls have been blown off in Iraq, bearers of defective genes who choose not to reproduce, etc.

It’s a curiously dumbed-down version of biological determinism dressed up as ‘natural order.’ It certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with spirituality. But, of course, this isn’t what she means. Sterility isn’t the issue. Gayness is.

And her homophobia was echoed in yesterday’s Repubblica by Vittorio Mathieu–historian and philosopher we’re informed by the paper–who announced that he’s writing a paper about homosexuality. Before you get too excited, let me give you a foretaste. Apparently, homosexuality can’t be phylogenetic, because ‘the species would die out.’ Well, not necessarily, old chum. As this book says:

… more and more detailed studies of animals in their natural environments made it increasingly difficult to discount all sexual interactions in animals among members of the same sex as exceptions, as idiosyncrasies, or as pathologies. Slowly, but steadily, a quite different picture emerged. A recent encyclopaedic volume by Bruce Bagemihl (1999) on animal homosexual behaviour provides evidence that hundreds of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, spiders and other invertebrates engage in same-sex sexual activity. Clearly, what was once thought to be an aberration appears to be a behavioural pattern that is broadly, albeit unevenly, distributed across the animal kingdom (see also Dagg, 1984; Sommer, 1990; Vasey, 1995). Indeed, within a select number of species, homosexual activity is widespread and occurs at levels that approach or sometimes even surpass heterosexual activity.

But for university professor Vittorio Mathieu, Opus Dei acolyte and contributor to neocon mouthpiece Studi Cattolici, homosexuality must be ontogenetic, i.e. ‘a regression to a certain stage of development or the state of remaining in that stage’. In other words, we haven’t grown up properly. We’re stuck in some early pubescent dick-sucking time-warp. It’s an oddly Freudian position for a Catholic to adopt but, as the saying goes, the enemies of my enemies are my friends. Next thing you know he’ll be saying our mothers made us. Well, he’s certainly giving us the wool.

Guess what! My spell-checker doesn’t recognise neocon. It suggests coconut as a valid alternative…

Fancy a cracker?

According to one of the weirdest sites I know (and only available in Italian, I’m afraid), the world is even filthier than we thought. Sexual imagery and language is everywhere. Nothing is safe. Even a humble biscuit has its own dirty little message concealed among the crumbs. What do you mean you can’t read it? It says SEX! Now spit it out this minute!

The site (otherwise known as Centro Culturale San Giorgio) also does a nice line in fundamentalist homophobia. But I think it’s had quite enough attention already, don’t you?

The house above the cork forest (4)

Things go from bad to worse. It turns out that the land attached to the house is surrounded by common land, the boundaries of which are time-honoured but undefined. There seems to be a goat path running along the north-eastern edge and curving down to the well, which doesn’t belong to the house but to anyone who wants to use it. It will pass across the area Joost plans to pave and convert into a patio. What do you mean? he says. Anyone? He can’t believe it. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn. E. shrugs and tells me to explain that it doesn’t matter, if it’s common land it’s as much his as anyone else’s. Besides, once he’s bought the house he can get the boundaries sorted out. Or ignore them. He can even buy the right to the common land. Everything can be done as soon as he’s bought the house. He has to buy the house. But Joost shakes his head. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn.

Afternoons are spent with pots of paint, the four old men leaving strings of conflicting red blobs on stones, the trunks of trees, odd clumps of grass, like join-up-the dot drawings drawn on a giant scale. Joost looks around him with a sort of weary unbelieving desperation. Inside the house, the rain has started to coat the upper floors in mould. He’s holding his little map still, now covered with pencilled lines, but nobody’s interested in the map. Even the surveyor, who drew the thing, seems to regard it as an object of little value, as though it were less reliable than hearsay. He nods when Alessandro, or one of his brothers, starts to talk about a stream that’s no longer there, as though its ghostly presence were still decisive. What stream? says Joost.

Joost sends me emails at the rate of five or six a week, from all over the world. Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Prague. But wherever his body is, in whichever international hotel or airport or sushi bar, his mind is on the house above the cork forest. He wants us to set up meetings with the vendors, their immediate relatives, their neighbours. He wants to know how much it would cost to have a certain kind of window shutter. He wants new maps drawn up and faxed.

He wants closure. And who can blame him?

Cameroon, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Sudan, Zimbabwe, etc.

Being gay is still a crime in 75 countries, and punishable by death in nine. If you’re reading this blog you’ll probably feel this is a bad thing and want to sign a petition for the international decriminalisation of homosexuality here. Go on. You’ll be in good company. Where else does Elton John rub shoulders with Noam Chomsky? Lily Tomlin with Desmond Tutu? Martin Amis with Christopher Hitchens? (No, hang on. They’ve made up.)

No sign of Tom Cruise, though…

Layered dog

I just clicked on the next blog. It’s in Japanese (I think) and features fish, both fried and alive, and a rather beautiful dog. I couldn’t resist this photograph (actually, of two beautiful dogs). I know I have my own dog and should be posting photographs of her (and I will, Toffee, I will) but, in the meantime, let’s enjoy this.

Copernicus got it wrong…

…according to Warren Chisum, the chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee. He has hard evidence of, you guessed it, a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament by inventing the absurd notion that the earth goes round the sun.

The mouthpiece of an organization called The Fair Education Foundation, Inc. (enjoy their Fixed Earth website here), Chisum has been distributing his memo to fellow legislators in an attempt to convince them that evolution and the Copernican revolution are hare-brained pie-in-the-sky faith-based hogwash. Projection?

It’s rather like the Pope accusing lobbies of trying to influence the legislative process in Italy…

Strained relationships

Italian judges, particularly those in Milan, have been making themselves unpopular with the rich and powerful (read Berlusconi and his cronies/sponsors) for quite some time. But now they’re taking on the big bad wolf itself: The CIA. Along with the ex-head of the Italian secret service and a netful of smaller fish, 26 CIA agents are about to be tried for their involvement in a case of ‘extraordinary rendition’. They don’t even have to be extradited. Italian law can try people in their absence. For more information read here.

Whatever the result, and it’s unlikely that anyone will actually end up in jail, this might turn out to be as big a legal landmark as the Pinochet arrest in London. It also coincides with strong popular feeling against government plans to extend the US military base near Vicenza, as well as the irritated reaction of Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s foreign minister, to a rather cheeky letter from a cabal of ambassadors (US, GB, etc.) complaining about Italy’s lack of commitment to cleaning up Afghanistan.

Bush must be wishing Berlusconi hadn’t lost the last election…