Head overhead

Head over heels

Gob-teased

The last place you’d expect to find a review of the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 is in what purports to be a review of the 2008 collection – just out. But the Manila Standard Today is clearly a paper that ploughs its own furrow, and all the better for it. Particularly in the case of this review, which doesn’t only concentrate on last year’s anthology rather than the new one but focuses on two stories in it, one of which is The Scent of Cinnamon. You’re probably as tired as I am of seeing praise heaped on this story (don’t worry, I’m joking), so you needn’t go and read it. I’ll just quote a phrase – a love story of heart-rending proportions – as a possible amuse-gueule.

PS. I thought I’d check the spelling of ‘gueule’ – how could I fail to after the spiky post below – and I found this fascinatingly complete (as in, containing strictly irrelevant but nonetheless fascinating information) definition, on Everything2:

In the most literal sense, amuse gueule translates from the French as an amusement for the mouth – but not a mouth in the human sense – amuse bouche would be used in that case (which indeed it sometimes is). It seems that gueule means a non-human mouth, either that of an animal or more intriguingly, a gun. When used in reference to humans, gueule is a slang term, roughly translating as gob. It gives you an idea of the playfulness of the dish.

(Sic) as a parrot

Watching daytime TV yesterday (yes, I’ve been staying with my mother), I noticed spelling mistakes in two consecutive ads. In the first, for a removal company (I think), ‘geographical’ was spelt ‘georgraphical’ (note the intrusive ‘r’). In the second, claims were being made for a detergent that would clean all surfaces, including stainless steal (sic). I found my temperature rising.

Does this make me Lynne Truss? Or am I becoming sad in my own quiet way?

A question of style

Yesterday’s Independent had two stories that reflected each other in the revelatory way skewed mirrors sometimes do. The first had to do with Naomi Campbell, who is still spitting fire about her treatment at the hands of British Airways. She denies that the company has banned her from its flights, and her luggage from Terminal Five. It has, however, ‘disrespected’ her. In the Devil Woman’s own, reported, words:

Someone from British Airways asked that I return to fly with them but this will not occur so early. I am speaking for all those that have been disrespected.

As a teacher of English (‘in my spare time’, according to the still mysterious ‘Luke Rocchi’), I wouldn’t know where to start with a text like this. Its sheer unnaturalness suggests machine translation from some arcane bureaucratic dialect. I may be quite wrong, of course; it may simply be the way people chat to one another in the world of high fashion. As in: Jean Paul asked that I share a line of coke in the back room but this will not occur so early. I particularly like the second sentence, which bears no logical connection to the first but smacks of Ms Campbell in what she probably imagines to be Nelson Mandela mode. Naomi, champion of ‘all those that have been disrespected’. It’s good to know she’s prepared to speak up for all the little people whose luggage also went astray but who didn’t have sufficient elegance or promptness of spirit to gob in a copper’s face.

A few pages later in the same issue there’s an article about the cosmetic surgeon, Martin Kelly, who died unexpectedly, and tragically, a few days ago. Kelly spent a fair amount of time reconstructing the septums (septa?) of people who share Ms Campbell’s world and habits, but he also, and principally, dedicated himself to people who don’t, including a small girl in Afghanistan, whose face was so deformed the local Taliban considered her a ‘devil child’ and wanted to have her stoned to death (with stones, not cell phones). Thanks to Kelly’s work, she is no longer a devil child. Now 11, she wrote to thank him:

First of all I say hallow to my doctor Moten Kalli. I’m Hadisa Husain from Afghanistan. I’m at school now and I’m very happy. I don’t have any problem and I’ll never forget you, and I’m waithing for my next opration. Thank you.

The spelling might not be perfect, but for efficacy of communication Campbell could learn a thing or two from it. No disrespect intended.

Palomino Blitz: I can’t recall

Ballarò etc

If you’re in Italy tomorrow, speak Italian, have a television, and care about the lettori situation, don’t miss Ballarò on Rai Due around 9 pm.

If any of the above conditions do not apply, I suggest you do something more rewarding with your time.

Like waste it on Facebook, for example. I swore I’d not fall into the maws of another over-hyped time-devouring virtual monster (Yes, I did visit Second Life; no, I didn’t go back), but Baroque in Hackney lured me in with promises of nylons discounted Salt books, including hers (eyes right), and how could I say no? As a result, I’ve just spent half an hour becoming a fan of, among others, David Boreanaz (and I’m not sure I can even spell his name). Is this any way for a 54-year-old published author to behave? Now she thinks she can make it up to me by sending me a picture of a flowerpot with some rather odd flowers sticking out of it. Hah! I may have to retaliate… A zombie hug? A poke? (If only I knew what they were.)

Still, I now have 34 friends. Not bad.

Quotas: footnote

It looks like it’s all to do with numbers. How many people come in, how many people are forced to leave. Alemanno says he’s going to expel 20,000 illegal immigrants from Rome and I wonder how he arrived at this number, the way I wonder how Stalin arrived at his daily quota of traitors to be arrested and tried and murdered. Do these people use pins, or dice, or multiples of their birth date? And if the numbers don’t tally, what then? If there simply aren’t enough clandestini? Or too many?

Numbers are part of the rhetoric. The number of Italians who want gipsies expelled, according to a recent opinion poll, is 61 in every hundred. And yes, that includes the 70,000 gipsies with Italian citizenship (as potential expellees, obviously: they’re hardly likely to have been asked their opinion on the matter). But what was the question, and how was it framed?

On Annozero the other night, a middle-aged man from, I think, Morocco said that immigrants weren’t chattels, to be bought and sold, but human beings. He went on to accuse Roberto Castelli, ex-Minister of Justice, of being a delinquent. This is the kind of language that’s used all the time during political debates on Italian TV; it’s actually tamer than most. It isn’t unusual to hear politicians merrily calling each other shits on prime time telly. Normally nobody bats an eyelid; at worst, there’s some muttering about vulgarity in the next day’s papers. On this occasion though, Santoro, the ringmaster, silenced the man (physically, by turning his microphone off) and, using the familiar ‘tu’ form, said he was doing his cause no good and should be more careful before he spoke. Castelli was then allowed to use this act of lèse majesté as an example of how ‘they’ come over here, insult us, think they have the right, etc. etc.

But how many people watched the show?

Quotas

We live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it. A few months ago, after reading about the treatment meted out to refugees in Britain and thinking about the mood of anti-refugee rage I encounter so often when I’m there, I wanted to write a short piece on how Italy, despite the xenophobic legislation enacted by the previous Berlusconi government and the lackadaisical failure of its successor to address the issue, still maintained a sense of the shared humanity of the other – faint, flickering, barely enough to light a cupboard by, but still, despite everything, alive. You could see it in the tone of TV news reports when people died while crossing the Mediterranean in boats that should never have been allowed to leave their harbours and the port of Lampedusa was paved with body bags. The images we saw were of kids who didn’t look old enough to have left home, never mind homeland, shivering in blankets, drinking something hot, wondering what now? The attitude wasn’t approval, far from it, but there was an ounce or two there of understanding, and of pity. I wanted to talk about this, and about how often ordinary people, on buses, at markets, would refer to immigrants, whether legal or not, as poveri Cristi. They might not want them, but they recognised them. I’ve seen all kinds of people step in when police try to arrest the Africans selling their pirated CDs and fake Louis Vuitton handbags and Dolce e Gabbana shades.

I don’t think this is true any longer. I think the mood has changed and that what looked like a sort of prelapsarian innocence – because, of course, it wasn’t innocence at all, but nuanced and humane – has now been lost. It would be easy to point a finger at the Northern League and its shameful exploitation of racist sentiment in the north, where half the factory workers are illegal immigrants and 100 percent of the live-in carers, without whom the old and ill would be institutionalised or alone, come from outside Italy, from the Ukraine and Indonesia and Brazil. It would be easy to blame the press, which for political motives or worse, has exaggerated the criminal impact foreigners have had, devoting pages to Romanian hit and run drivers and paragraphs to the home-grown kind. It would be easy to blame the last government for its failure to understand the extent to which the agenda – in this as in everything else – was being set by others, which crucially underplayed the security issue, which flip-flopped between the draconian measures taken in Bologna by Cofferati, ex-darling of the left, and the ill-thought-out laissez-faireism of those who wanted to woo the radical youth of the centri sociali, paying lip service to both. It would be easy, finally, to blame the tiny percentage of immigrants who do rape, and murder, and plough down pedestrians in cars they’re too drunk to drive.

They’re all to blame, I suppose, and the people who came to Italy to improve their lives, and those of their families, and who, in doing so, have also improved the lives of those around them by doing jobs nobody else wants at wages nobody else would accept, by looking after the people we don’t have time for, for whatever reason – well, those people are going to have to sit out the storm, hoping their papers, if they have them, are in order, contributing to a national insurance scheme that would soon be belly-up without their money, being humiliated on a daily basis by people who now feel what they had in common with the other has somehow been rubbed away by a too daily contact, by too much friction. On Rai 2’s Annozero last night, someone commented that what we really want from immigrants is for them to work from Monday to Friday and then to disappear until they’re needed again, and this was wryly accepted by almost everyone there. And now there’s a comment on my THES article about lettori in Italy, which shocked me, by someone who left the country because he couldn’t take the racism here. And it makes me wonder how I managed not to see it for so long.

Duh revisited

Well, my piece on lettori has led to a predictable hoohah, most of it occasioned less by me than by the mysterious “Luke Rocchi” – mysterious not for any intrinsic value the person might possess, but because of the fact that he/she doesn’t seem to exist. Google the name and you get an Australian who makes sculptures from wood, and very nice they are too. Turn Luke into Luca and you get lots of candidates, including Mr Gay, but nobody seems to be working in an English university. Plus the fact that whoever Luke/Luca is, he/she seems to know rather more about me than is comofrtable. Anyone who reads my blog will know that I’m a fairly open – and well-thumbed – book, but I’ve never spoken about my lack of a PhD, because the occasion for doing so has never arisen. So how does he/she know? There’s a level of personal malice in the person’s comment that suggests we may have known each other. It’s clear from the language that the writer is a native speaker, and knows a lot about lettori up to but not beyond the European court decision. I also wonder how he/she found the article. As a ‘university teacher in England’ he/she may simply read THES every week, in which case the research into me, my novel, my ‘prestigious publications’ and my blog came later, to garnish the bitter dish; but it seems more plausible to suppose that ‘Luke’ read my blog first and then the article. Who knows?

Of course none of this supposition would be necessary if ‘Luke Rocchi’ had the courage and, indeed, decency to use his/her own name instead of skulking behind a pseudonym.