Writing in Rome

If you’d like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I’ll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.

Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here

Don’t miss this interview either…

The Wonder of Whiffling

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a book called Toujours Tingo by, as I said then and will repeat now, the splendidly named Adam Jacot de Boinod. The book, a sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, trawls the world’s languages for the wise, witty and inconsequential, gathering, among other gems, such terms as chapponage – the act of sliding a finger into a chicken’s backside to see if it is laying an egg – and womba – the smile of a sleeping child.

Well, Mr Jacot de Bionod has done it again. His new book, entitled The Wonder of Whiffling is a mine, once more, of the kind of information you never imagined you needed and, once it’s acquired, will wonder how you lived without.

To put you in the mood, here are three questions that only this book can answer:

A parnel is:

a) a species of seabird

b) a priest’s mistress

c) the lining of a cassock

To call pigs to their food, a 19th century Irish farmer would say

a) hurrish

b) pleck-pleck

c) poa poa

An applesquire is

a) the son of a cider-maker

b) an orchard’s bookkeeper

c) the male servant of a prostitute

If you’d like the know the answers to these, along with a host of other lexical wonders, I wholeheartedly recommend The Wonder of Whiffling.

Personality politics

Local elections are coming up in Fondi and the walls of the town are plastered with advertising for the candidates for town mayor. They tend to appear in pairs, like teenage girls on a first night out. They use as few words as possible and prefer those words to have purely feel-good value. The bald man on the top right, for example, is saying yes to transparency. Beneath him the woman with the pleasant smile is suggesting that we start again, though to do what isn’t specified. The man with the glasses on the bottom left is saying yes, you can, which is very generous of him, although, once again, I wasn’t aware that his permission was needed. The girls on the top left have nothing at all to do with Fondi, or politics for that matter, but I felt like including them, if only to contrast their very focused plea with the vote-catching vacuity of the mayoral candidates around them.

What’s even worse is that, in their frenzy to attract the punter, these mayoral candidates haven’t seen fit to indicate their political allegiances. Where do they stand on all that other duller stuff, like job opportunities and how local money is spent and, sorry though I am to bring this up, the role of organised crime in local government? I mean, I’m all in favour of transparency, but not if it’s the transparency of De Meo’s spiritual father, Saint Silvio of Berlusconi. And knowing that yes, I can might make me feel empowered at the outset, but it starts to lose its appeal if the person enabling me thinks money-laundering, or illegal parking, or building a villa on public land, are some of the things I’m empowered to do.

I think I’ll vote for the Faith Tones. They not only have fabulous hair – I know where they stand.

A writer’s life

I just make Facebook friends with fiction writer Viet Dinh and what’s the first thing I do? Steal this cartoon from his excellent blog, that’s what.

How do I live with myself?

For PC users everywhere

Customer care

I was leaving the FAO building in Rome a few days ago when a display of half-price books caught my eye in the international bookshop there, run, I believe, by the Lion Bookshop. The last thing I need is more books, so naturally – in the way these vices perpetuate themselves – I stopped to see what was on offer and found some nice new Penguin editions of a handful of Maigret novels marked down from €10 to €5. I’m a sucker for Simenon (I can’t believe I just typed that), so I picked out four and walked into the shop to pay. There were two women behind the counter, neither of whom showed much inclination to attend to me, so I waited in my usual polite way until one of them took the books off me in a crabby, ill-humoured way, as though I’d interrupted her in some more rewarding task. I told her, in English – it was, after all, an international bookshop – that they came from the half-price box outside. Ignoring me, she asked her colleague – in Italian – who had put the books there. Pat, said the other woman. She had no right, snapped Crabby. I can get full price for these books. Well, I don’t know, said the other one, you’d better ask Pat when she gets in. She can’t just take books off the shelves and put them in the box when she feels like it, continued Crabby. The other woman shrugged. Well, you’ll have to tell her yourself, she said, while I stood there, wallet in hand, waiting for the discussion to finish. Eventually, I asked Crabby, also in Italian, if she intended to sell me the books or not. My intention, if not my tone, was ironic. She clutched the Maigrets to her chest. I suppose I can give you a 30% discount, she said, in a tone that suggested I’d been caught in the act of extracting a tenner from her purse. Normally, if anger is a cooking technique, I’m more of a pot roast than a stir fry, but this time my temper flared and I told the woman I wouldn’t have the books if she gave me them, and left. But I wish I’d made her sell them to me at the full discount, if only out of spite. What she’s done, of course, is make it unlikely that an incorrigible book-buyer (me) will use the shop again; she’s also responsible for this post. On the other hand, she did save €6.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realise I shouldn’t have been surprised. The main branch of the Lion Bookshop is notorious for its ill-mannered staff and over-priced stock, despite its claim to be an important reference point for the English speaking community. Perhaps someone should tell them about the Almost Corner Bookshop.

It should be part of the deal

I was going to do a simple post today, celebrating my blog’s third birthday. But I’ve just received an email that I thought I’d share with you instead. It comes from someone who doesn’t sign his (her?) name but shops at Waitrose and mails from the address ckr@waitrose.com. The subject is “It should be part of the deal that I as an individual is (sic) told the book I am reading is written by a homosexual.”

Had I known you were homosexual I would not have chosen to read your book. But once bitten…………. etc! Your plea (read this) for others to see reason and accept homosexuality falls on deaf ears with myself and the majority of people. The recent years of outpouring of vile homosexual promotion from every corner, has done them no favours whatsoever. Instead we now know “homophobic” attacks have never been greater. I am not in anyway supporting this, just reporting facts.

But why should we (the general public) be forced to agree with such depravity. When gays become unwell, as they will, it is of their own making. They bring about their own demise. Penetrating the anus, the bodies sewage system is an extraordinary low life act. Why would anyone ever want to engage in any activity that involves their own and others faeces?! It is the most direct way to pass life eroding disease from one individual to another.

The only cure for A.I.D.S is to stop the debauchery that causes it.

I’m not sure which of my books ckr has read, but I hope the experience wasn’t too distressing (or, indeed, faecal). In the meantime, it might be worth considering some sort of colour code indicating the sexual preferences of all authors to protect such delicate readers. And why stop at authors? Why not doctors? Busdrivers? It should be part of the deal….

Fear and loathing in Empoli

This sign, which forbids entry to all Chinese who don’t speak Italian, can be found* in the window of a clothes shop in Empoli, near Florence. In an Italy that seems to have woken up and found itself racist and can’t quite work out why, this looks like just one small tile in an increasingly large and ugly mosaic, if that isn’t too colourful a term for the phenomenon. But there’s an interesting and, to my mind at least, partly mitigating, story behind the sign. The owner of the shop, Gino Pacilli, says that he’s sick and tired of Chinese customers coming into the shop, examining the way the clothes are made, trying them on, refusing to speak Italian when he asks them if he can help, leaving without buying or saying Grazie. He claims that they’re simply checking out the competition and looking for items they can profitably make copies of, undercutting the legit producers from whom he buys his stock (almost certainly made in China). It’s certainly true that there’s a massive presence of Chinese sweatshops, invariably both illegal and exploitative, producing clothes in the Florence area, and that the Chinese community is the least interested of all ethnic communities in integration, to the point of concealing its birth and death rates from the local authorities so that documents can be recycled (Chinese immigrants to Italy rarely die, in official terms at least). So, while there’s no doubt that the sign is ostensibly racist, there’s also a sort of exasperation and anxiety behind it that shades the issue grey, just as the Rosarno riots two weeks ago were shaded grey by the social context in which they took place, the presence of organised crime, the absence of the state, and so on – a presence and absence from which both local people and immigrants suffered on a daily basis, and in which they were all, without exception, complicit. In this type of situation, blanket accusations of racism may be as compromised, and ineffective, as the racism they’re attacking. In the meantime, Pacilli says that no more Chinese customers have entered his shop – a sure sign that they do in fact read Italian. If that were the case, of course, they could enter with impunity. But whoever said fear and its consequences were logical?

* The sign has now been taken down and Pacilli has apologised to the Chinese community about any offence he might have caused. Which solves precisely nothing.

Wrap it up

This sculpture, outside the House of Deputies in Madrid, may look like a Christo but it’s just been wrapped to protect it from damage during the works taking place in the square (I imagine). Christo prides himself on the fact that all his work is temporary and that he has no existing artworks. If public works take as long to complete in Spain as they do in Italy this statue looks set to remain under wraps for longer than anything ever covered by the well-known Bulgarian packager and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, now alas dead. I can’t help wondering if her body was cremated or embalmed in some way. The earliest example of meaningful wrapping I remember was Lon Chaney’s Mummy. And now I really must take a nap.