Thought for the day (not necessarily part of a series)

Today’s thought comes from the collection of Georges Perec’s occasional writings, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (beautifully translated by John Sturrock). It’s part three of a short piece called The Countryside.

Nostalgic (and false) alternative

To put down roots, to rediscover or fashion your roots, to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant, appropriate, millimetre by millimetre, your ‘home’: to belong completely in your village, knowing you’re a true inhabitant of the Cévennes, or of Poitou.

Or else to own only the clothes you stand up in, to keep nothing, to live in hotels and change them frequently, and change towns, and change countries; to speak and read any one of four or five languages; to feel at home nowhere, but at ease almost everywhere.

Animal sense

And when you’ve finished considering the dolphin, consider this.

Hot

One of the great pleasures of sitting at a computer for hours on end pretending to edit reports about food security in the Philippines is that you can nip over to Marie Phillips’ blog every now and again. It’s a particular treat at the moment because she’s following Strictly Come Dancing. (Good God, did I write that?) I see the programme once every four weeks, which is rather like watching a horse race through a gap in the fence. Or it would be if Marie didn’t keep me up to date. It’s been a secret treat up to now, but when she wrote that Nathalie ‘bounced around the stage like a hot cocktail sausage in a mouth’ I felt I had to share it with you. And just to celebrate Craig’s long overdue departure here’s a photograph of him smiling. As are we all, Craig, as are we all.

Disease is not mass

If you have a scrap of rationality and the merest modicum of scientific knowledge, here’s a video which will make you laugh until you weep. You just have to get to it before the lawyers pull it down.

Thank you, Rob.

When you despair…

…of people, consider the dolphin.

Scum rising to the top

Last night’s edition of Anno Zero talked about Fondi, the town I’ve lived in for the past eight years. Anno Zero is one of the programmes Berlusconi accuses of being fazioso, a holdall term that roughly translates as not being shamefully unbalanced in the speaker’s favour. It’s taken a while to look at what’s been happening here, but it was good to see an entire edition dedicated to a situation that really would be unsustainable anywhere outside Colombia (and I apologise to any Colombian readers I may have immediately – I speak with the sort of ignorance about elsewhere normally exhibited by the current Italian government). People who haven’t been to Fondi may have the impression that it’s a sleepy market town, not quite on the coast, and that’s certainly an attractive picture and, in some ways, true. Fondi has always been predominantly agricultural and remains a market town – it now has the largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Italy, and among the largest in Europe, a couple of miles from the old centre. This means that Fondi is also, in economic terms, a very rich town, or one, at least, that sees inordinate amounts of money change hands on a daily basis.

The police chief of Latina, the provincial capital, recently conducted an investigation into exactly what this involved and came to the conclusion that the local administration had been infiltrated by organised crime to such an extent that it was no longer viable, and should be removed. The dossier went to the minister responsible, Roberto Maroni. This isn’t that unusual a situation in Italy, where illicit relationships between the Mafia and government are as common as those that take place in Putin’s bed at Villa Certosa. The normal procedure is for the ministry to rubber stamp the dossier and dissolve the council, barring the incriminated public servants from future public office.

On this occasion though, thanks to the obstructionism – still unexplained – of three cabinet ministers, the rubber stamp wasn’t applied. Maroni, instead, asked for ‘clarification’ of the accusations. The clarified dossier, which said exactly the same as its predecessor, duly returned to Maroni’s desk some months later. Where it sat for as long as it (in)decently could. Finally, when the dirty rotten business was beginning to attract too much unwelcome attention and there was nothing the government could do but give in and send the whole gang home, said whole gang – mayor, councillors, functionaries (those who weren’t in jail, that is) – upped and resigned. This not only made it impossible to dissolve the administration en bloc, but meant that all those who resigned could stand again at the next elections, something that will almost certainly happen.

The building you can see in the photograph above – a monument to post-fascist vulgarity with a touch of Luxor thrown in – is the new town hall. I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time, but one’s heart sinks at such ugliness. Still, it was illuminating to discover last night that when its construction was open to tender only one company applied, and that this company was actually a consortium of companies, some of them with extremely dodgy pasts. Companies – and individuals – involved in public works in Italy are obliged to produce a document attesting to their Mafia-free status, a procedure that would have excluded these companies – and the entire consortium – at the outset. Or it would have done if the person responsible for checking hadn’t ‘forgotten’ to ask them for it.

Now anyone who lives here knows that Italian bureaucracy doesn’t do oversights – it will drive someone into the grave for a piece of carta protocollata – so this isn’t very convincing. Not even Claudio Fazzone seemed convinced last night. Fazzone used to be a driver for a Christian democrat senator years ago. Now he’s a senator himself, with hand-tailored suits, more money than he knows what to do with, villas scattered like confetti around the globe, the privatised water of the entire region in his fiefdom and the look of someone used to getting his own way. He’s got a mean, tight little face, like something attached to the bladder of his head to scare people off. He’s the kind of man who threatens to sue whoever disagrees with him, who waves sheafs of paper around in lieu of argument. Mind you, compared to some of the ex-members of Fondi council he’s Isaiah Berlin.

An Anno Zero journalist tried to interview some of them, starting with the mayor, who told him to fuck off and then accused him of being maleducato. Then there was the ex assessore di cultura, a barrel-bellied martial arts instructor who could barely manage a whole phrase in standard Italian and whose CV apparently includes a spell as bodyguard for a Mafioso. Basically, as squalid a bunch of low-life crooks as you could wish to meet… There was a wonderful moment when the journalist was stalking the mayor along the echoing corridors of the new mausoleum to democracy that’s been built on what used to be a small but respectable park, asking him dificult questions and being roundly ignored. (This was just before the fuck off moment.) Finally, the mayor seeks refuge in an office and tries to slam the door behind him, and the door doesn’t quite fit the door frame. It rattles and shudders, but has to be jammed into place. The grandiose and unnecessary building has been thrown up so shoddily that the bloody doors won’t close! Hallelujah!

And a footnote for those who follow Italian politics. It was great fun to see the Berlusconi- Fini conflict mirrored in a small but revelatory way by Fazzone and one of Fini’s lieutenants, the unfortunately named Bocchino (don’t ask – but if your dictionary gives ‘cigarette holder’, get a new one). Fazzone – fat, arrogant, litigious, vainglorious, intolerant, smugness and distrust stamped all over his ugly face. Bocchino – reasonable, logical, persuasive, disturbingly plausible. I’m no great lover of Fini or his colleagues, but what a pleasure it was to see Bocchino’s distaste as Fazzone blustered beside him, a distaste so evident that even Fazzone must have realised that, perhaps uniquely, he didn’t have a single crony there to back him up. Like monkey, like organ-grinder?

Asswipe party

See these people? See how happy they are? They’re down on their knees, clutching their hands together in prayer, waving their mass-produced, church-funded banners! They’re ecstatic with religious fervour! They’ve won their apocalyptic battle! They’ve beaten off the evil perverted hordes! Every thread of synthetic fibre on their overfed bodies is twisting in virginal delight at the victory of natural law! Look at the fat one in the middle! She’s creaming her impeccable jeans! There’s no way she’s going to let other tax-payers get their hands on her tubby little rights, or children (Because that’s what they want! They want our kids!)! Look at the priestly one on the left with his neat sticker and his would-be workman’s overalls, whose hand’s all scratched up by the entirely natural bifocals of the old bat on the floor! (Because God made bifocals! God made comfort wear!) He’s the one who passed the collection plate during mass to stop those sick faggots having the right to hospital visits! Hallelujah! Look at the skinny one with the skinhead haircut, who’s sublimated his filthy desires and has never, no never, had sex with a man! Oh joy! Oh fucking joy! Oh fucking fucking joy!

Yes, I’m annoyed, too annoyed for subtlety or wit, by the results of the Maine referendum on marriage equality. I don’t live in Maine, and have never considered doing so. And the presence of these asswipes (thank you, Wendell), celebrating the success of a referendum that cancels the rights of a substantial minority of tax-payers, without any reduction in the taxes they pay, is unlikely to make me change my mind. Everything that needs to be said about the kind of god these people worship has already been said (by, among others, Xenophanes*), so I won’t repeat it, but it is worth repeating that the moral high ground in this issue isn’t where they’re holding their squalid little party. It’s somewhere else, somewhere very far away from where they’re gathered, somewhere they’ll never, in their wildest dreams, be able to reach. And it’s a far better place.

*if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,

And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own

Strange fruit

Two items in today’s newspapers here that throw an oblique light on each other and on Italian society as a whole. The first is about the decision of the Ku Klux Klan to conduct a recruitment campaign in Italy on the grounds that recent government legislation against immigration provides a more attractive model (in KKK terms) than that of any other western government. This fertile ground has been prepared by the notoriously racist Northern League, with the connivance of their Berlusconian cronies, and an almost inaudible demurral from the opposition, presumably on the ignoble principle that defending immigrants on your own patch does no elected politician any good. (Recent anti-immigration laws here have been roundly condemned by the United Nations and the EU, but have no doubt gone down a treat in BNP headquarters.)

The second is an EU ruling that crucifixes should not be displayed in classrooms, following a case brought by an Italian woman whose request that the cross be taken out of her children’s classroom was ignored at every level of the judical system. The government, which now has to pay the woman 5000 euros for ‘moral damage’, will be appealing. The Vatican, in the meantime, is ‘pausing for reflection’. This decision will no doubt be grist to the mill of those who whine on about ‘islamification’, although the woman who brought the original complaint was defending the right of her children to be educated in a superstition-free zone rather than one in which a variety of nonsenses jostled for space. Good luck to her. Good luck to us all. If the EU’s ruling is ignored or overturned, what’s to stop all the new KKK recruits dressing their children like the unfortunate tyke in this photo?

IMPAC

I’ve just discovered that Little Monsters (still available from all good booksellers) has found its way onto the long list of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It’s a very long list indeed, but it’s still a pleasure to have been nominated (by Stockholm Public Library, no less) and my fingers are crossed for the next stage: the short list, announced on 14 April 2010.

Masai root juice

If you need help with problems regarding your love life, business activities, personal enemies and sexual equipment (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?), happen to live in or near Johannesburg and have a spare nine euros in your pocket, this post from the always interesting WH in SA might be just what you need.