Boys will be boys

If you look in an English-Italian dictionary for a translation of the word ragazzo, you’ll find ‘boy’, followed by ‘boyfriend’, ‘young man’. Italians of all ages frequently use the word to address a group of friends, the irony more evident as the age of the group increases. But it’s a good word on the whole, a word that expresses affection and solidarity, particularly when it’s addressed to people who fall outside its strict chronological range. So it’s been interesting in the past few days to see how the media use the word. 

Italy’s seeing a lot of street violence at the moment, or, at least, the media are paying a lot of attention to it. All news is mediated and it would be naive to pretend otherwise, but there’s an interesting distinction that needs to be made between two kinds of mediation, particularly with television reporting. The first is the air of general obedience to whoever holds political sway within the country or, more importantly, to the editor in control of the specific news programme for which the journalist works; invariably a political, or party, nomination. Bruno Vespa, a TV journalist who’s tough with the weak and supine with the powerful, once referred to the Christian Democrats as his editorial point of reference, although he’s certainly revised that view with each election and is now lapping with his usual zeal from the bowl provided by Silvio Berlusconi. This doesn’t only happen in Italy, of course, and not all journalists can be tarred with the same brush, but independent monitoring organisations confirm the sense that the news in Italy has, let’s say, a marked tendency to bend with the prevailing wind.

The other kind of mediation is linguistic. Among the stories that have been used to distract attention from the economic crisis and the bare-faced indifference of the government to issues not directly linked with Berlusconi’s vendetta against the judiciary system are a series of rapes and an act of violence against a homeless person. Most of these rapes have been committed, as far as we know, by Romanians, usually young men, usually in groups. The act of violence, during which a homeless 35-year-old Indian, trying to sleep on a bench in Nettuno station, was first insulted, then beaten up, then covered with petrol and set alight, was also committed by a group of three men, ranging in age from 16 to 29, but these happened to be Italian. The Romanians are, without exception, referred to as Romanians. The Italians, who may be facing a charge of murder if the man dies, which seems likely, are defined as ragazzi. 

Leaving Navtej Singh Sidho, recently made unemployed and evicted from his lodgings, with third degree burns over much of his body, the 29-year-old ragazzo sent a celebratory text to friends in Roman dialect: “Gli amo fatto la festa“. (In standard Italian, this would be “Gli abbiamo fatto la festa“). Fare la festa is an expression that translates as ‘Give somebody a warm welcome’. The irony in Italian is bad enough; in English it becomes almost unbearable.

In England – now!

I’m not actually in England right now, but everyone else seems to be posting photographs of snow and I had this picture my sister sent me, which actually looks like a black and white photograph apart from that wonderful  slash of vivid swimming-pool blue, and I didn’t want to feel left out, sitting here in my study, looking out on a cloudy grey sky that may be producing snow in the hills to the east of here, but won’t be doing that where I live because it almost never does, watching the breeze lift the butterfly chimes on my neighbour’s balcony and the still-flowering lantana on my own, and so I thought, why not?  

Countdown

Recognise this? Of course you do! It’s the front cover of the paperback edition of Little Monsters. It’s slightly different from the hardback – my name’s now larger and centred (an entirely thrilling development) and Beryl Bainbridge’s generous endorsement has been replaced by a quote from the Daily Mail review saying that the book is ‘beautifully written, and more compelling than many thrillers’, which says something about the book (its aim) and something about marketing (not its aim). This obviously takes nothing away from my joy, which is unbounded, but I just thought I’d mention it. 

The book hits the shops on Friday, 6 February, and on this occasion I’m not indulging in wishful thinking or hyperbole because it actually will be hitting a much larger number of shops than the hardback edition did. This is because Waterstones branches nationwide (including Wolverhampton – I know, I checked) will be including it in their 3 for 2 offer, so the book should be stacked up on tables all over the country, rubbing shoulders with The Gone-Away World – Hi, Nick! (It’s 3 for 2, I can afford to be magnanimous) – and all kinds of other great reading experiences. (This is what happens when I slide into promotion mode – my language goes.) And those of you who are travelling in the next few weeks should see even more copies at WH Smith Travel shops in stations and airports throughout the UK, where it will be available in their Buy One Get One Half Price offer. Yes! Naturally, since I won’t be there to witness this, I’m looking forward to all your sightings, preferably with photos. So prime your mobiles…

I was going to save this post until Friday, but I couldn’t wait. Now I’ll have a dreadful sense of hollowness for the next four days. 

PS I wanted to call this post ‘Countdown to…’ well, something, so I googled ‘countdown to’ for inspiration and found, to my dismay, that the two most frequent words to follow the phrase, apart from Christmas, which clearly isn’t appropriate except metaphorically, are ‘extinction’ and ‘armageddon’. 

Aiming at foot, hitting foot

I’ve heard people say that the Westboro Baptist Church, by revealing the true face of fundamentalist homophobia, is the best thing to happen to the fight for gay equality in years. I suppose this is true in the same way that summary executions of teenage gays in Iran or the anathema of Mugabe and the president of the Gambia, whose name I have no intention of committing to memory, are ‘useful’ reminders of the lengths to which instutionalised homophobia can go. By this token, Ratzinger’s decision to welcome back to the catholic fold a gang of befrocked negationists, otherwise known as the schismatic followers of French archbishop Lefebvre, can also be seen as a good thing as it strips away yet one more layer of whatever moral authority the man, and the organisation he represents, is supposed to possess, though it must be rather hard on those catholics who belong to the church because they believe in the message of Christ. The next thing you know he’ll be recognising the authenticity of the Protocols of Zion. Why shouldn’t he? Holocaust-denier archbishop Robert Williamson already does. 

A sudden calm

Well, there were moments I thought I might never make it, moments in which the idea of draggging my weary wine-addled braincells across seemingly endless virtual tundra towards the temporary succour of one more virtual oasis (if that isn’t too mixed a geographical metaphor) was simply too exhausting to contemplate. And then a set of new questions would arrive, and I’d read them, and be sparked by them, and think OK, let’s see what I can do with these. I’m talking, of course, about my Cyclone tour, the aim of which was to sell as many copies of my collection The Scent of Cinnamon as was humanly possible without its author moving from his keyboard. I don’t know whether it achieved that aim or not – though, I hope it did – but it achieved the secondary, unvoiced, aim of forcing me to think very hard about what I do and why I do it: the equivalent of an MA in creative writing without spending a penny. My thanks to all the wonderful bloggers involved, and my final thanks to my final interviewer, renaissance man, Wendell Ricketts, writer, editor of the ongoing project and anthology devoted to working-class gay writers, Everything I Have is Blue, translator of, among other things, the theatre of Natalia Ginzburg (The Wrong Door), astute and prolific reviewer, and author of one of the very few English-language Italian-based blogs that seem to live in the same Italy I live in. You can find his questions, and my answers, here. Phew.

Baa baa black quilt

Italy might have a reputation for being one of the fashion centres of the world, but you wouldn’t think so this winter, with two-thirds of the women and half the men kitted out in the same black quilted synthetic jacket, with a rather sad scrap of fur round the edge of the hood. I don’t know which captain of industry, by which I suppose I mean designer, dreamed up this one, a garment that makes even the slimmest and most attractive of mortals look like some sort of industrial by-product used to line boilers, turned inside-out and trimmed with dead hair. But it must have kept the Chinese cat farms happy for the season, not to mention the usual “special economic zone” Vietnamese and Indonesian sweatshops. It’s a source of constant amazement to me that a country which is internationally prized for its design, originality and quality should fall so easily in thrall to the dreariest of orthodoxies, even if they are dictated by Giorgio Armani or Dolce and Gabbana, or whoever makes their design decisions for them. Two or three winters ago, the rage was utterly impractical white puffa coats trailing almost on the ground, often combined with what we used to call winklepickers. This year, in the way these things happen, it’s padded nylon and scrotty pelt at the neck that are de rigueur, women and men of all ages happily discarding the perfectly good coats they were wearing last year to don the new, apparently without a whimper of complaint despite the parlous state of the economy. Such sheep-like conformity, if it could be turned to the common good – as it was in a sense under Mao -, might actually serve a purpose in Italy, a country which has long since lost any sense of society, let alone civil society, in favour of personal, familial and, at best, parochial interests. If people could be herded in the same mindless way towards paying their taxes, or even their bus fares, who knows what social value might be produced.

Happy birthday, dear blog

I shouldn’t get too sentimental about this, but today is my blog’s second birthday. It’s been an eventful two years for me, with publications and so on, and my blog’s been beside me all the way, making useful suggestions, cheering me up when I’m down, calming me down when I’m a little too up. It’s made me laugh more than once, and cry as well. It’s introduced me to many new friends, and reunited me with old ones (I know, Nigel, I’m mortified, be patient a little longer), and I’m grateful for that. It hasn’t always been sensible, or wise, but you expect the very young to embarrass themselves, and their parents, occasionally. So let’s wish it more of the same, and more of whatever more there is.

(It isn’t great but this is the only cake I could find for a second birthday. Apart from one with boobs, which just didn’t feel right, somehow.)

Au revoir? I don’t think so

Dropping in at Edge Hill

The penultimate leg of my Something Rich and Strange tour can be found at Rob Spence’s blog, Topsyturvydom. Rob, for those of you who don’t know, is a proud Mancunian, a lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University and, with Ailsa Cox, the editor of 21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, and I’m honoured to be invited. In the interview, we chat about genre, craft and what exile might involve. Talking about my story collection, The Scent of Cinnamon, Rob comments: 

“If anything is going to restore the popularity of short fiction in this country, it must be the publication of stories such as these, by turns humorous, surreal, disturbing, but always memorable.” 

His last words, which I wholeheartedly endorse, are these: 

“Now, gentle reader, buy the book! “

One morning, when Pietro Citati woke from troubled dreams…

I’ve written about pretentious windbag Pietro Citati in the past. Enough’s enough, you might think, and I wouldn’t bring him up again if I hadn’t come across this in the back of my copy of the Gordon Burns’ novel, Alma Cogan. It’s one of those lists that sometimes pop up at the end of paperbacks in the hope, and why not?, of shifting a few more units. In this case, inappropriately given that Burns’ book is fiction, it’s entitled “Further Biographies Available from Minerva”. It’s clear from the first entry that the biographer is on the right and the subject of the biography, or its title, on the left. Dickens, in other words, wrote many things but a biography of Peter Ackroyd isn’t among them. Which is what makes the third entry so amusing. 

It’s almost a pity that Kafka didn’t write a book about Citati, if only to get his own back on the vacuous old literary tart.