Summit

I found this on Facebook. It comes from today’s edition of The Sun. I’m assuming that anyone who follows this blog probably won’t have seen the original. It’s not subtle, but why waste subtlety on Silvio Berlusconi? It serves its purpose admirably.

Shorter and sweeter’n’sourer

According to popbitch (I know, I know), Michael Jackson referred to semen as ‘duck butter’.

Short and sweet

A nice piece about rewriting the classics on Twitter by Michelle Pauli here. Made even nicer by her quoting John Crace’s Digested Read of the New Testament. Here it is:

“Angel gets Mary up duff. Jesus chills for 30 years, gets Messiah complex and is topped. Comes back. Then I saw his face. Now I’m a believer.”

Roosters

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I met up with a reading group, the Roosters Book Club, based in Rome. The intention was that I should talk about Little Monsters, which the group had all, with great generosity, not only bought but read. The meeting had been organised by Carolyn, a friend and the driving force behind the group (according to its members!). I’d remarked that it might be fun to meet up, months ago, and was delighted, and mildly disquieted, when Carolyn took me up on this rash offer. When she phoned and suggested a date, I thought, well, yes, what could be more fun? It wasn’t until I was walking from my house to hers, a matter of a hundred yards, that it struck me I had no idea what I’d actually do. I’d been assured by Carolyn that all that was required of me was that I talk about myself and my book and this had seemed so self-indulgent a pleasure up to that point that I hadn’t really considered what it might involve. Because, walking along Via Manzoni, from my house to Carolyn’s, with a copy of Little Monsters in my hand, it struck me that, to my (dis)credit, I’m the least introspective of men and that I also have a rather non-analytical approach to the business of writing – I’m endlessly quoting Frank O’Hara’s essay on Personism:

I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”

Of course, I know it’s not that simple, and that it wasn’t for O’Hara either. But I felt exposed, and unprepared, and slightly fraudulent. Which, when I think about it, is how I feel on most occasions of a social, or professional, nature.

Well, I had a wonderful time, and if the group enjoyed themselves half as much as I did, they must have had quite a lot of fun as well. The joy about lacking the capacity – or desire – for introspection is that you treat yourself as the subject for gossip, the more scurrilous the better. You become, alas, indiscreet. And not only about your private life. Because one of the interesting aspects of being a published writer is that you know something – not necessarily a lot, but something – about the way the whole business works. The writing schedule, revision, where the characters come from, all that was important. But equally interesting, it seemed to me, were the contract, the advance, the title, the cover. This is how it should be. Good books, like hand-thrown vases and the perfect Victoria sponge, should justify themselves. What’s fascinating, because it’s technical. is what lies behind them; it’s the invisible speed of the wheel and the coolness of the hands that finally count. Which reminds me, I must ask Carolyn for the recipe of the excellent salad we all enjoyed as soon as I’d left the hot seat and we’d moved to the dining table for lunch.

If you read this, Roosters, thnak you for breaking me in so gently. And if you’re a book club and would like me to be equally indiscreet with you, just let me know. I’m surprisingly available.

Khaki shorts are an optional.

Organic crackers

Faced with the prospect of Berlusconi becoming president of all he purveys, I suppose I ought to be feeling more generous towards the idea of a non-elected royal family. They aren’t all bad, after all, unless useless is necessarily a component of bad, and the Windsors, as my mother always reminds me, work very hard (although the index against which their workload is measured isn’t that clear – work hard compared to what? A junior doctor? A rickshaw driver? A crack whore?). Even the House of Lords is beginning to look like a valuable corrective to an elected house of mediocrities with their fingers in the till. But Prince Charles’s latest foray into throwing his weight around has really got my goat. He’s used his royal connections to pull the plug on a new development designed by Richard Rodgers for an area opposite the home of the Chelsea pensioners in London. The area’s owned by the Qatar royal family, which has bowed to pressure from Charlie, presumably under the impression that his opinion has some weight beyond the tea rooms of middle England, the ones that serve Duchy Original muffins. As long as he’s selling biscuits, the man’s just about bearable, and the shortbread really is rather good. But his views on organic farming are widely regarded as crackpot Little Englandism in a world in which the majority of people now live in cities, etc. His woolly ecumenicalism is irritating tosh, but that’s matter for another post. And he’s bad at architecture as well. Prince Charles’ notion of what constitutes an attractive building is, bluntly, philistine. He’s had it in for Richard Rogers since the National Gallery fiasco, where he muscled in to stop London acquiring an interesting new building and had it replaced by something that looks like the warehouse bit of a provincial Sainsbury’s. Now he’s used his royal clout to block a development that would have provided work for over 10,000 people and over two hundred affordable homes in an area of London that doesn’t exactly sing affordability. You can see what Rodgers has to say about this here. The point, as Rodgers says, is not whether his plans are good or not. The point is that procedures already exist for blocking a building that shouldn’t be built, and that these weren’t followed. What happened was that a non-elected architectural luddite muscled in and made a couple of phone calls to a non-elected dictator who owns a large slab of central London. This shouldn’t happen. I hope that Rodgers can get his show back on the road, though it’s unlikely. In the meantime, Prince Charles should get back to doing what he – or his employees are – good at: baking a genteelly mean organic cracker.

Pride

You may be wondering why I haven’t posted photographs of Saturday’s Pride in Rome. Well, it’s simple. I was visiting my mother in England and had muddled up the dates. (How gay is that?) But I have it on good authority (Peter’s) that it went off well, despite the shameful ‘confusion’ about route, only sorted out four days before the event. The photograph in the national section of Repubblica shows a rather fetching young man in loincloth and stigmata and presumably refers to some archaic gay ritual I haven’t come across in my extensive reading. Others, better informed, are shocked. There’s the usual confusion about numbers: 300,000 according to the organisers, two old queens and a poodle according to the police. Whether it served its purpose, assuming one knew what that was, I don’t know, but I’m sorry I missed it. Still, I’ve been through the snaps I posted from last year’s event and that of 2007 and thought I’d revive a few favourites. Here they are.

RIP Harold Norse

I’M NOT A MAN

I’m not a man, I can’t earn a living, buy new things for my family.

I have acne and a small peter.

I’m not a man. I don’t like football, boxing and cars.

I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm around my friend’s shoulder.

I’m not a man. I won’t play the role assigned to me- the role created

by Madison Avenue, Playboy, Hollywood and Oliver Cromwell,

Television does not dictate my behavior.

I’m not a man. Once when I shot a squirrel I swore that I would

never kill again. I gave up meat. The sight of blood makes me sick.

I like flowers.

I’m not a man. I went to prison resisting the draft. I do not fight

when real men beat me up and call me queer. I dislike violence.

I’m not a man. I have never raped a woman. I don’t hate blacks.

I do not get emotional when the flag is waved. I do not think I should

love America or leave it. I think I should laugh at it.

I’m not a man. I have never had the clap.

I’m not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine.

I’m not a man. I cry when I’m unhappy.

I’m not a man. I do not feel superior to women

I’m not a man. I don’t wear a jockstrap.

I’m not a man. I write poetry.

I’m not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I’m not a man. I don’t want to destroy you.

Harold Norse

Dressing up

A new ‘security’ law, which only looks like a knee-jerk reaction, is about to be passed here in Italy. Like most laws of this type, it protects – or is intended to appear to protect – the law-abiding citizen from the other, almost certainly not a citizen, who presumably ought to be abiding elsewhere, obedient to some other less-civilised legislation. One of the nastiest of the many nasty provisions in the new decree is that it allows citizens to gang up, don uniforms and strut around the place enforcing, you guessed, the law. This doesn’t mean they’ll be muscling their way into boardrooms or bank headquarters or mafia hideouts, after the real criminals. They just won’t have time. They’ll be too busy hanging round parks and council estates, patrolling the odd bus station in their fabulous outfits, a pot pourri of home-tailored Nazi fantasy gear (cue Prince Henry) with a touch of Tom of Finland for good measure. The cute little symbol at the top of the post is some nonsense that means a great deal to shaven-headed thugs who think they’re the master race and absolutely nothing to the rest of us. But it might be worth memorising it. Because if the person who’s kicking your head in has got one on his bicep, either tattooed or sewn on by his granny, you haven’t got a leg to stand on (ouch!). He’ll be legal.

Names

A footnote to my last post. Googling for images of house sparrows I found myself with an infinite selection of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow but surprisingly few pictures of the actual bird (in the first three pages, 3 birds to 51 Depps; it gets better later on). And it reminded me of a small boy I know who thought mice were named after the computer thingymabob.

The fall of the sparrow

I was in my local post office here in Fondi a few days ago, waiting to pay an overdue bill. In the past this would have meant trying to guess which queue contained the fewest problem cases, ususally pensioners or people trying to send sums of money to places the PO clerk can’t spell, or has never heard of, and has to check with a colleague, who’s similarly challenged. But they’ve introduced a number system now and installed some rows of wooden chairs with a rather Scandinavian feel to them, strung along a blue metal bar like Alvar Aalto-designed birds, though the older women are wary of sitting on them and still regard the notion of respecting numerical order as a fundamentally flawed way of doing things. So there’s always a free seat, hwoever busy the place is. I usually take a book and try to get some reading done. This time I had a water bill to pay and a novel by Nigel Balchin called The Fall of the Sparrow, in the 1957 Companion Book Club edition, still with a leaflet inside describing the next books to be published – Hammond Innes and Nancy Spain. I bought it because I’d read – and enjoyed – the same author’s The Small Back Room a couple of years ago and because I’d opened the book on a scene with an evidently gay character, and wanted to see how the book dealt with the issue. I was four when it was published, fourteen when homosexuality was made, restrictively, legal. the title refers to the verse from Mathew: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

But none of this is what I want to talk about, except in the oblique sense, I suppose, of how people are treated, how we’re organised and accept infringements of our liberty for some presumed greater good. It would be more to the point to say that this was the day after the European elections, in which the Northern League dramatically increased its vote here in Italy and the BNP won two seats for Shit (see below) and his shifty chum. A day in which the idea that empathy and awareness of the other’s needs might play a useful role in the way we conceive society and politics was rejected by a sizeable number of voters; in which civil society was more of a chimera than it had been the week before in whole swathes of united Europe. Because while I was sitting on my plywood chair, not actually reading my book but with it open in my hand, distracted by the blip that indicated the number had changed and my turn was approaching, with my imagination half absorbed by a genteeler world in which I would have been illegal, with a TV screen advertising post office products and reporting the results, an old man went up to the counter. Small, neatly dressed, someone who’d spent much of his life outside and was now retired. I didn’t hear the initial exchange. The first thing I heard was the old man say, ‘Thirteen euros.’ He’d come for his weekly, or monthly, pension, more probably the latter. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Thirteen euros,’ impatient for him to go. He paused, then asked her, ‘Why? Why only thirteen euros?’ She shrugged, tapped at her keyboard. ‘Conguaglio,’ she said. A conguaglio is the term used to describe what happens when the final reckoning shows that something has been over- or underpaid and is adjusted accordingly. In this case, his pension. He repeated the word. She counted the money out, pushed it across to him, then spread her hands. ‘Un conguaglio,’ she said again, as though he hadn’t heard, or understood. He picked up the thirteen euros and looked at them for a moment before folding them carefully and sliding them into a small purse he’d taken from his breast pocket. ‘What shall I do now?’ he said, to no one, to everyone. And he didn’t expect an answer because he’d already turned and was walking away from the counter towards the door as the woman pressed her little button, and a blip summoned the number after his.

Numbers are wonderful things.