Foot and mouth disease

I’ve been on the point of writing something about the whole paedophile scandal for a couple of weeks now, but really, why bother? The Vatican is doing such a good job of shooting itself in the foot – yes, that’s right, the one it’s managed to jam into its own mouth – that additional comment from me seems superfluous. Let them get on with it, say I. Ratzinger and his gang of frocked deniers have managed to anger just about everyone and mollify no one so far, something I’d never have dreamed of achieving with my own humble sniping from my own very small rooftop 100 miles away from Ground Control by the Tiber.

So I’m not even going to comment on the latest nonsense from a certain Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (seen here with friends), who claims that a clear link has been found between paedophilia and homosexuality but not between paedophilia and celibacy (except perhaps to point out that if you’re celibate, darling, you’re not having sex with anyone). In fact, the only clear link I can find in this whole sad business is the one between a bunch of frightened old men whose authority is being challenged and the spouting of malicious bullshit.

And that’s not a comment. That’s science.

Lech Kaczynski dies in plane crash

One dwarfish homophobe less in the world (calm down – I’m talking about the one on the left). Of the evil Polish ex-child stars, Lech is the straight twin; his even more repulsive brother, Jaroslav, is the one rumoured to be gay. He’s still alive.

Still, as the Tesco ads always say: Every little helps.

Take your partners

The nearest I got to any seriously engaged reading during my three years at Cambridge was probably every Thursday when NME came out and, in the company of friends and a pinch or so of grass, we gathered in my room in South Court and subjected each article to the sort of analysis we should have been applying to Samuel Richardson or the Paris commune. It’s hard to imagine now, but NME in the early and mid-1970s was a pretty cutting-edge publication, on the look out for music that would meet its journalists’ (and readers’) intellectual needs and more than fed up with the bombastic, overweening, cod-classical trash – Yes, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, (shudder) Queen – available at the time. So all our ears pricked up when news filtered through of a band, except we didn’t refer to them as a band, called the Sex Pistols. Long before they’d recorded anything we followed their antics and the antics of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, including his attempt to resurrect the New York Dolls, an act of such majestic awfulness they could neither survive nor be allowed to die. I never heard the Sex Pistols live – their first gig was a few months after I’d graduated – but I saw Johnny Rotten once, thrillingly, outside a pub in Charlotte Street and I managed to acquire a tee-shirt from Sex, with a hardcore gay orgy silk-screened on the front – a tee-shirt I still have but, unsurprisingly, no longer wear.

A couple of years later I was visiting an aunt of mine in the Midlands. Steeleye Span were playing in town that evening and, for old times’ sake, I went to their concert. It was the night Elvis Presley died but that isn’t why I remember it. I remember it because the concert I didn’t go to that evening was one of the dates of the last (real) Sex Pistols tour in the UK. I didn’t go because they were performing under a different name to avoid being banned, and I couldn’t have read my NME closely enough that week; I’d slipped out of the loop. In those years, I saw pretty much everyone on the punk and post-punk scene, from X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Buzzcocks and Generation X to Wire and the Gang of Four, but I still regret missing the Pistols for Maddy Prior.

I was in Portugal when Sid Vicious OD’d on heroin, two months after the death of Nancy Spungen. A voice on the BBC World Service announced that Mr Sidney Vicious had been found dead at the age of 21, etc. I wanted to shout out that Vicious wasn’t his real surname but found myself crying instead. It was a low point in my life and it felt as though something messy and possible, some sort of dirty inchoate hope for a different sort of future, had been definitively stifled. By the time I was back in Britain, the world had changed, or mine had, and I found myself wearing a suit and working for a medical publisher’s near Tottenham Court Road. The man I was working with, it turned out, had shared a flat with Malcolm McLaren and an actress, I think a midget, who’d worked in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. He shook his head when I asked him what it had been like. When I insisted, he mouthed the word ‘drugs’, and shook his head a second time.

And that slight degree of separation was as close as I got to McLaren, apart from buying his music when a lot of other people had probably stopped. Which doesn’t quite explain the sadness I felt this morning when I read that he was dead. It’s not like the death of Sid Vicious, but something has gone, a smidgeon of naughtiness and fuck-you-allness that won’t come back easily or be found in quite the same guise as it was in McLaren’s joyfully sleazy post-situationist stance, and a wide-open and essentially generous eye for the main chance in a world that tends to seize its opportunities, and then close them off, in a meaner and somehow more self-interested way than he did.

Interview

Patricia E. Fogarty of TheAmerican | inItalia interviewed me recently, about Little Monsters and Any Human Face, along with the whole business of living and writing abroad. As you’ll see, I’m snugly placed between a piece on the highly regarded Italian actress Margherita Buy and an article about the eastern coast of Lake Como. You can read the interview here.

To heaven with a handgun

Would you buy a used apocalypse from these people? More information here.

“By Monday, the Stones’ house stood empty, its front door ajar and two dogs still tied up in the muddy yard, which was littered with dilapidated furniture, a washing machine and tires.”

Via Parlamento

I took this photograph on the day it was announced that the leader of the regional parliament of Sicily was being investigated for Mafia connections. He isn’t the first: his baby-faced predecessor was famously photographed offering his partners in crime a trayful of cannoli – a local delicacy – to celebrate his conviction for a similar crime a couple of years ago. This street looks sufficiently nondescript to house the gang of self-interested delinquents that currently run the island (“by special statute”), but the real parliament sits, from Monday to Thursday each week, in a wonderful structure, shared with an Arab tower and a room of extraordinary beauty known, like a child’s nursery, as ‘Roger’s Room’, some distance from here. You’d think from the hand-written nature of this street sign that someone is making an ironic comment on the absence, or shabbiness, of the Sicilian parliament, or a suggestion that the damn thing simply go away. But this really is the name of the street, although I’ve no idea why. In a city where signposts are lamentably few, this small square of cardboard is probably no more than a private gesture of good will.

Biofeed? No thanks!

The next time you’re thinking of adding a little extra fertiliser to that rubber plant in the corner of the living room, consider these monsters from Piazza Marina in Palermo and think again. (I’m just there for purposes of scale.)

Author Blog Awards

I’d like to thank whoever nominated me for the Author Blog Awards. I’m not sure how this works but it looks as though you can vote for me, raising my profile and readership to new heights. There are quite a lot of us angling for your vote, so don’t feel too bad about clicking elsewhere; I’ll understand.

The finest dead

Well, what an unsettling experience. Our last afternoon in Palermo and we found ourselves up near the Capuchin monastery, the one whose catacombs are filled with the dried and mummified remains of some of Palermo’s most important citizens. Originally, the catacombs were reserved for friars, the first one – Silvestro of Gubbio (see right) – being placed down there in October 1599. More recently, the tunnels beneath the convent became the place to be – and be seen – for the cream of Palermo society and I’ve no doubt large sums of money changed hands before the defunct were allowed in and prepared for eternal display. It can’t have been a pleasant process, if the description at the entrance is at all accurate. The bodies were seated on marble racks in a room called the colatoio (the dripping or draining room), which was then sealed hermetically until the perishable parts of the body had putrefied sufficiently to drain away and gather on the floor underneath. The corpses were then removed to another room, the drying room, where they were cleaned with vinegar and dressed, often in clothes of their own choosing, before being inserted into niches in the appropriate section and held in place by a wire at the neck. Some bodies have been replaced by straw-filled sacks; others, like Silvestro, have arms and even legs. Some have been embalmed – a two-year-old child who was placed there in the 1920s might have died last week.

All in all, it’s a peculiarly dispiriting and discomforting place, perhaps because so many of the ideas behind it are foreign to us, and find us ill-equipped to deal with them; we’re surfeited by so many ways of not seeing the dead that to have them ranked before us in their hundreds, dangling from their hoops of wire or stacked, in some cases appearing to strain forward as if to press home the question of our being there, is an assumption of intimacy we’re not prepared to take on. I’m not sure what I expected, but what came to mind first was the banality of it, the déjà vu of it. These dead resemble heavy metal sleeves and George A. Romero extras; if you stare at them too long they seem to move. Some of them have crumbled into semi-dust, others are almost intact. The saddest ones, for me, have wisps of hair and moustaches. Those skulls that retain their covering of skin often appear to be howling, presumably the result of the skin shrinking and pulling their jaws open. These bring to mind the almost dead of the camps, the shamelessness and the desperation of those faces as the allied troops rolled in. It’s both hard to remember and hard to forget that what we are looking at are human beings who have died. But, after the shock and the thrill and the fascination, what struck me most was the indecency of their display, of their desire for it, and of our attention. It’s not a moral or spiritual lesson – I don’t feel it taught me anything useful about how to live or die – so much as one of decorum, which is being offended. Every third corpse or so a sign says NO FOTO NO FILM but this doesn’t seem to deter anyone, and is presumably only there to increase the sale of postcards in the shop above. In any case, the people who chose to be preserved here would probably have welcomed an audience.

Soft-selling Scent of Cinnamon

I suppose it’s just possible that one or two of you out there might not already own a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories. It’s all right, I don’t want to know your names. All I want to do is tell you that you can now buy the prize-winning collection in paperback. It’s just as big and fat and full of goodness (and a pinch of wickedness too) as it was in hardback, but it costs less! You can buy it direct from Salt at only £8.79 by clicking here.

Which means you no longer have any excuse. Right? So what are you waiting for? Come on…