Tagged…

…not electronically though I may deserve it, but by Elizabeth Baines. See her post, explaining the set up, here. Briefly, I have to share eight random and/or embarrassing facts and/or moments about myself with you, then tag eight more people to do the same thing. It’s a sort of pyramid shaming device, which looks as though it might be quite good fun, though I’d always thought that writing fiction was the most efficient way of broadcasting this kind of information. (See the details on cruising in Rome in my story in NW15 for proof of this.) Still, I’m ready to give it a go, a little later than promised. Here are the instructions:

“Each player starts with eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.”

Here goes:

1. On particularly hot days, particularly when I’m invigilating exams, my Birkenstock sandals fart.

2. I was once arrested for stealing a milk bottle (full) from a step. The fine was £6 plus the cost of a bottle of gold top. I later used the summons to make a very badly-rolled joint.

3. I have bags full of second-hand clothes in my wardrobe, bought at the local Sunday market and never worn or, indeed, looked at a second time. I must throw them out.

4. I can’t bear Joseph Conrad.

5. As a student I once said that I really liked Heinz spaghetti with lots of grated cheese in it, claiming that it was as good as ‘the real thing’, which I’d never actually eaten. I recklessly offered to prepare it for a bunch of friends, who said yes. I’ll never forget the sinking feeling as I dished it out from the pan. One of them, now famous and a bit of a foodie, has had the generosity never to mention this. (He may have forgotten.)

6. Rings make my fingers look infantile.

7. I was deflowered by a man of the cloth.

8. When I was nineteen I turned down an offer from Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself to work at City Lights Bookshop. I’ve never regretted it.

I’m not sure I can think of eight people. Let’s see.

David Isaak
Kay Sexton
Chancelucky
Vanessa Gebbie

No, I can’t. That’s it. But I’ll keep on thinking.

Language slaves

An update on the situation of university language teachers in Italy, otherwise known as lettori. The academic year looks set to begin with the usual mood of rage tempered by resignation as emails from colleagues throughout Italy relate the new attacks on the category, almost but not entirely composed of non-Italians, by the ill-educated, largely unpublished, downright stupid, short-tempered, wilfully or idly vicious caste of native professors and their administrative lapdogs.

Three emblematic situations.

In Viterbo, despite pressure from the unions and lawyers, lettori continue to be obliged to clock in, unlike all other teaching staff, because they aren’t considered teaching staff, and to fill in registers and reports of their activities, unlike all other administrative staff, because what they do is teach. For the director of the university language centre, a woman called Alba Graziano who’s published a couple of books on George Meredith (one of them in a series edited by, er, Alba Graziano), lettori are tecnico-amministrativo personnel, and that’s that, so fuck logic and the evidence of her own eyes. She probably wouldn’t recognise a language teacher if it hit her in the face (don’t tempt me), but she knows enough about protecting her turf not only to force her language slaves to have their activities timed like office staff, but also to inform them that they’re overpaid, under-worked and, in the face of the university contract, which presumably she hasn’t – or can’t – read, part-time workers, with all the effect this has on pensions rights, and so on. I don’t know how much they get in Viterbo, but it’s unlikely to be more than the €1,150 I get each month. That’s right, about £700. Poor sods. No wonder they’re demoralised.

In Rome, a colleague is told that she has to come into the university three days a week to teach her hours, something she’s been doing with great success for the last few years in two days. She refuses, pointing out to the rabid barone – responsible, god help them, for timetabling – that her contract says nothing about the number of days she has to teach but only the number of hours. All hell breaks loose. Meetings are held. At the highest level. There is much shouting in corridors as short-fused middle-aged women with too much power and money face the prospect of paradigm shift. The university isn’t concerned with the quality of my colleague’s teaching, which is recognised as being exceptional, but with punishment and the blind wielding of power. Ironically, the stick it’s chosen to beat this particular drum (and colleague) is the contract used for the short-term recruitment of professors. That’s right. Professors. Sounds familiar? When it’s in the interests of the university to treat lettori like clerks, they’re clerks. When, less often, it’s in the interests of the university to treat them like professors (i.e. when office staff get a raise and teachers don’t), they’re suddenly, briefly, hiked up a notch. Until the next time they ask for a piece of chalk.

In Bologna, a colleague asked to have extra holiday to make up for holiday lost through illness this summer, as stipulated in her tecnico-amministrativo contract. She was told that she can’t take any holiday during the period of teaching activity. Why not? Why doesn’t this contract apply to me? Because I’m a teacher? Well, yes. Er, no. But I can’t have time off because I should be teaching? I didn’t say teaching! So what do I do? Whatever you do, you can’t have time off.

Heads, they win. Tails, you lose.

Mortadella turns

The much assailed Italian PM Romano Prodi, often referred to – without affection – by his opponents as Mortadella, turned on his voters a couple of days ago from the only authoritative pulpit available: Porta a Porta, Bruno Vespa’s chat show-cum-political forum for the masses and Berlusconi’s favourite soapbox.

Probably in response to recent and entirely justified attacks on misuse of public money, lack of accountability, corruption within parliament, etc. Prodi pointed out that the kettle of the average Italian was in no position to call the pot of his/her elected government black. He didn’t refer to anything specific, aiming his comments at sons following in their well-heeled father’s professional footsteps, an Italian practice that goes back to the guilds of renaissance Florence and before. But he was clearly thinking of, among other things, the epidemic of bought exams in universities like Bari and Messina as the new academic year kicks in. This, like flu, happens every year but more people seem to have been caught with their cheating little fists in the honey pot this autumn and the university of Bari has just annulled its entry tests to medicine and dentistry, making a lot of doctors’ and dentists’ aspiring offspring very unhappy indeed.

Anybody who’s taken a state exam in Italy will know that no ruse is too complicated or absurd (or expensive) not to be considered as an alternative to studying. Dictionaries in pockets are child’s play in a country where mothers sew pouches inside their sons’ trousers to hold microscopically reduced cribs. Cell phones, needless to say, haven’t helped. But there isn’t always need for subtlety. In some cases candidates come into the room with older, wiser heads who simply do the exam for them. In others, they wander outside to consult the books they need, protected by a doting grandmother in the corridor. Attempts to discourage copying are often defeated in court, which all too often prefer casuistry to common sense. A high court decision some years ago said that it wasn’t enough to catch a student with photocopied material in his pocket; he had to be seen to be using it. In exam rooms in Italy, where people are crammed in like illegal immigrants on a fishing ketch, this is damned near impossible.

I remember during a language exam some years ago I was sure I’d spotted a small bilingual dictionary between the sturdy thighs of a female candidate. I told my female colleague, who went to ask her to hand it over. The student refused and we were treated to the unseemly sight of my colleague trying to wrestle her thighs apart, until someone pointed out that the girl would sue the university for assault if she didn’t back off.

This is not a time for dreaming…

…is the name of a video we saw this summer at the Beaubourg. It’s on the lower of the two floors, halfway down on the left and was made by Pierre Huyghe, an artist I’ve never come across before. I always find videos in galleries difficult because of the way they impose their time scale on you; they won’t let you dawdle or speed past them after a cursory glance They have the advantage and disadvantage of narrative, or narrative potential. But this one captured and held me. It re-enacts Le Corbusier’s experiences at Harvard (which must have been dreadful if this work is anything to go by) and uses string puppets. There are so many ways in which the work delights: the technical skill of the puppeteer, the emblematic yet personalised nature of the puppets, the teasing way in which it satisfies and fails to satisfy our search for narrative as it veers from one kind of representation to another, from (puppet) naturalism to symbol and archetype. If I remember correctly, Harvard is represented as an enormous malevolent black bird stalking across the stage. At one point the puppets manipulate their own puppets. There are moments of great lyricism as what seems to be an ecological undercurrent finds expression in the growth of a tree. I don’t have any photographs of it to show you (obviously), so you’ll have to go and see it yourself. You won’t regret it.

A rose is a rose

Giuseppe made friends with an Italo-French florist fifty yards down the road from the flat we were in, in Boulevard Saint Germain, and managed to scrounge three separate bunches of roses during our two-week stay. They were just the way he likes them, blowsy and open, with the petals about to fall. He calls them wild, although there is probably nothing growing that’s less wild than this kind of highly cultivated rose, with the obvious exception of much of the food we’re daily expected to eat.

Hausmann rules, but not always

One of the joys of Paris – of central Paris, at least – is the endless variation on the theme of Hausmann; street after street, quartier after quartier, of houses that follow the same essential rules of architecture, yet each with its je ne sais quoi, a colour, a detail, a proportion of window, almost identical yet not quite; harmony without regimentation, simply because it’s better that way. It makes sense.

And then you turn a corner and see two little buildings like this, squeezed into a wedge of space that’s good for nothing else, idiosyncratic, unplanned, but still with the single line of guttering to unite them, and the garret window, and the green of the smaller façade tuned into the probably mildewed roof tiles of its slightly more prosperous neighbour, although both of them have almost certainly seen better days.

Burning hills

I wrote about the fires that were devastating the hills around Fondi earlier this summer. You can find what I said here. This photograph was taken a couple of weeks after that, towards the end of July, as we were walking towards our house one night, it must have been around two o’clock. The flames effectively frame the hill, which reaches almost 500 metres above sea level. We phoned the emergency services and a harried fireman said they were putting out fires all along the coast and they’d do their best. This is what the hill looks like now.

Writing as madness

This summer, I saw a painting I’d never seen before, in the Centre Pompidou. Entitled Peinture (Ecriture rose) and covering a fair-sized chunk of wall (maybe three metres by four), it’s the work of Simon Hantai and was done in 1958-59, which makes it almost half a century old. It’s remarkable for a number of reasons, none of which can be deduced from the very poor photograph of part of it that you can see above, perhaps the most obvious being the fact that the colour pink, despite the work’s title, isn’t used at any point (as Helene Cixous has pointed out). The symbols on the canvas are references to earlier works but the body of the painting, its essential surface, is composed of writing. Hantai spent a year on the picture, working each morning to cover the entire canvas with meticulously copied extracts from philosophical and religious texts. The effect, of course, is to annihilate their meaning, but it’s also a monument to the word as object in the same way that anything produced by a pre-Gutenberg copyist might be considered to be.

Two or three days later we were in the Arab Institute near Notre Dame, an extraordinary building containing a small but fine collection. Among the exhibits was an eighteenth century Iranian copy of the Koran, inscribed on a roll with the same kind of maniacal devotion as Hantai’s, and, whatever its intentions may have been – and they were surely diametrically opposed to those of Hantai – the final effect is remarkably similar. In both cases, the actual sense of the word is subsumed in the representation of it as sign. The purpose of this Koran must have been to make the holy word available to its readers, but the manner of its transmittal renders it useless other than as totem. It disappears into the paradoxical beauty of the work as completely as Hantai’s religious and philosophical texts, written in what appears to be a variety of coloured inks – red, blue, green, but never pink.

Penis, Paris

The image is rather ghostly, but you should be able to make out the form of a rather substantial male member on this toilet-paper roll. It’s isn’t remarkable in itself. The penis, after all, is to graffiti in public toilets as Paris Hilton is to gossip magazines. But it was rather odd to find it in the Ladies at Montparnasse cemetery. Don’t ask.

Racist lunatic arrested

Good news from Brussels (and how often do you hear that?), as one of the most laughably despicable figures in Italian politics gets picked up by police after attempting to take part in an illegal demonstration against the ‘islamisation of Europe’. Mario Borghezio, the ranting turd to the right of the photograph, is a member of the Northern League and, to Italy’s shame, a European MP. He became known some years ago when he began to disinfect the train seats used by black women so that Italians could sit on them without dirtying their nylons, an action that should have led to disgrace and political oblivion but, among leghisti, had the opposite effect. He’s the kind of person you remember, and remember avoiding, from school: the playground bully who picks on the really really weak then runs to teacher for protection. He despises authority when he’s preaching to the racist rabble who support him, yet invokes it the minute he’s in trouble (you can enjoy the vision of him bending to knuckle-lick the pope on his rudimentary official site). He’s all in favour of violent ‘solutions’ when addressing the mob, and was once arrested for having set fire to the shanty home of some Romanian immigrants during a torch-lit march, a fire from which the Romanians barely escaped with their lives (two months in jail, never served), but a snivelling crybaby if anyone slaps him. And as an Italian Euro MP, he’s among the highest-paid politicians in the world. Poveraccio.

UPDATE: Diddles wasn’t given a glass of water for five whole hours. Altogether now – Poveraccio.