Keeping in Touch

There is also the utterance

of the fool’s music to be listened to

with as great attention as you

give your own

 

flat or mysterious dreams.

Invention on the edge of the void.

Stars on the line speak tersely of

‘creative accounting’

 

and it touches us for this evening

I too should like to be loved.

That fricative dark I

swallow, dropping

 

the net where it may.

Its curious bifocal effect, like

observing the casual panorama of language,

is literally an effect

 

in passing, its

every phenomenon is regional, reading

off foolish grids into truth

and the metaphors

 

we love as our own, revealed.

A humane, political loneliness,

the clouded mirror over the entrance,

your eyes looking up

 

and rounding on the asymptotic line,

which is also without end

as placid space mimics itself.

And I don’t have to

 

apologise or make myself scarce

because I am not the subject

of their concern,

but also a spectator.

Under the Day

In the early light of the morning,

for instance, it remained as a wish to be

companionable and was straightaway

erased and there was the pentimento

 

which was only a come stain on the sheet

fondly ‘remade’ as a model for future

delight-filled emotional hours in the

company, in the company of admiring

 

stares where you are smaller than,

hiding behind, what is looked at, more

concealed than what is concealed in your

arms, which is merely restless and

 

anxious to be gone into the dark,

that silvery mind that reflects your

slightest wish and pushes the tentative

on. Into action and the great claims

 

made for it and pearly days lit from

an almost notional above and, hanging

over that, the pestering and abuse

and the layers of differently coloured

 

sand in the bottom become oddly

confused as the lowest levels percolate

up, like wanting it hard and often.

And the vigilantes also prefer this hour.

Hey Sarah Palin

Via Jesus’ General

Chances of Death

Another word cloud from Wordle. This time round it’s a novel of mine called Chances of Death. You’ll be reading more about this in the future. Just click on the image to enlarge (or embiggen, as Joe.My.God says…

God help us

“Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again … Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

Sarah Palin debates.

Tengo famiglia (2)

I had occasion to write about nepotism in Rome’s first and largest university, La Sapienza, almost a year ago, when investigations were being conducted into the university’s dean, Renato Guarini, and some confusion about a nine-million-euro tender for an underground car park and his daughter’s university career. You can find the details here. At the end of the post, I commented:

The cherry on the cake? The deputy dean and head of the faculty of medicine, a certain Luigi Frati, whose votes were decisive in Guarini’s election as dean, has also been investigated for nepotism. His wife and two children all work, you guessed it, in his faculty.

That was last October. Now, as elections for a new dean come to their close, Dr Luigi Frati has emerged as the winner with 53% of the vote. An article in today’s la Repubblica (I can’t find a link for it) adds some piquant new details to his family’s academic career. For example, his wife, now full professor in the medicine faculty, used to teach literature in high school. Well, let’s be generous. A lot of writers have been doctors. Maybe she does courses on Chekhov (‘Medicine is my lawful wife.’). Or on Italo Svevo and substance addiction. Frati’s daughter, also a full professor in papà’s faculty, has a degree not in medicine but in law. OK, we all watch CSI. Maybe she has the seat in Horatio Crane studies. Or maybe, just maybe, she’s benefited from the oldest career structure in Italy, otherwise known as nepotism. 

I’m sure you know that nepotism comes from the Italian word nipote (indicating niece/nephew or grandchild) and that it was used to describe the way popes promoted their illegitimate children. These days, in Italian universities, they don’t have to be illegitimate or even children – practically any family member or hanger-on can expect to get a leg up onto a chair of one sort or another, regardless of faculty. It’s not as though anyone expects them to actually do anything. Italian universities are probably unique in the free world for their failure to measure themselves against other universities, whether in Italy or abroad. Italian universities were evaulated at national level, using internationally recognised and objective criteria, for the first and, so far, only time in 2006. This evaluation would make interesting reading if it were published but that hasn’t happened. Clearly, the experience was so dispiriting for the Italian academic world that it’s unlikely to be repeated in the near future. 

In the meantime, Frati’s family are ben sistemati. And they aren’t alone. Forty percent of university teachers in Messina share a first name and surname with teachers in some other university in the region. In Naples, the percentage is around 35. In Rome, it’s slightly over 30. These people aren’t all necessarily related but the odds are good. At the university of Bari, 42 out of 179 teachers have close relatives in the same faculty. And think about this. A study conducted by Roberto Perotti into competitions for posts in Italy’s economics faculties found that the most important factor of success, by a wide margin, was already belonging to the faculty in which the job was up for grabs. Scientific production, measured in terms of publications in recognised international journals, played no part at all. 

The Beat: Mirror in the Bathroom

http://www.youtube.com/v/UTNpaaPHENE&hl=it&fs=1

My rat friend, Sheila

I’ll say it again. If you don’t read Jesus’ General religiously, you’re missing out. His latest piece on McCain is, well, awesome. Read it here. And here’s a teaser:

A few years back, I saw a Matlock episode where the origin of the word “crisis” was mentioned. Apparently, if you look at the original Sanskrit character, you’ll find that it’s composed of two symbols, the Sanskrit characters for “photo” (cri) and “opportunity” (sis).

Lest we forget

Phone rage

I got a phone bill over the weekend. My phone bills are paid through a credit card so I normally just glance at the amount and file (i.e. throw onto the table in my study in the hope that all paper of this kind will eventually become compost and render itself useful). This time, though, I glanced at the amount and didn’t file, but went into mild panic, followed by more severe panic. Instead of the usual €100-ish sum the bill was for almost €250. OK, this isn’t bank-breakingly large, but it isn’t that welcome either, arriving, as it did, on the same day as a final demand for two water bills, a gas bill and a post-final demand for a TV licence we didn’t pay some years ago, along with a threat to seize the car. What put me in a particularly bad mood was that it didn’t make sense. I pay a fixed charge, which covers pretty much everything I do. My first suspicion was that a smallish boy who’d helped dogsit this summer had made a few naughty phone calls. Well, I’ve been there too, and changed country rather than settle up, so I was prepared to forgive him. But I had to be sure. 

It took me an age to track down the guilty calls but, finally, after negotiating one of the most appallingly badly designed websites I’ve ever seen, which is saying something in Italy, I found that the calls (6) weren’t to sexy chatlines at all, but to a flat in Paris. And then I remembered a friend of mine calling her daughter, who lives in Paris, on the very days the calls were made. I pay a fixed monthly charge for calls abroad, which means I can natter carelessly to my family and friends in England, or anywhere in Europe, when I should be working. So why should these calls have cost so much? Cue call centre.

Two hours later, I discover that, as a result of a decree issued by the Italian Telecommunications Authority some time ago to protect people from unwittingly making expensive calls via the Antilles or wherever, calls with certain prefixes, including the prefix 00339, are considered ‘highly critical’ and charged accordingly. I don’t know what they mean by ‘highly critical’, but I do know that, whatever it is, it doesn’t apply to Lisa’s perfectly harmless home line. Now, I didn’t do law at university, but basic logic tells me that a decree designed to protect people from being conned out of large sums of money shouldn’t have the side-effect of dramatically increasing the cost of phone calls to private landlines in a neighbouring European country, when those calls are already covered by a fixed charge. Simple, no? Apparently not. 

The helpful (honestly) person at the call centre suggested I contest the charges, and that’s what I intend to do. I’ll also be putting in a bill for the earnings lost as a result of the hours wasted on a website that ought to be closed down and a helpline designed to reduce even the most patient of men (me) to a state of inchoate rage. And in the meantime my credit card will have paid the bill.