Una Vita Vagabonda

[R]Road Trip: Day 2 in the "Don't Say Gay" State

2011-05-23T01:36:00.017+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]The Feast (sic) of Little Italy in Jupiter, Florida

2010-10-23T18:35:00.008+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Tiziano Ferro - "Sono Omosessuale" (Shock of the Century)

2010-10-05T22:13:00.025+02:00

Leggilo in italiano.

-----------------------

Mostly what I want to say is, "Thanks, Tiziano."

I wish you hadn't taken so long. I wish you hadn't felt the need to try to throw people off with stories of tormented heterosexual love that didn't work out. I wish you'd been a little braver a little sooner.

I wish, too, that the editor of the book in which you come out -- Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (At Thirty, A Talk with Dad) -- the Milan-based Kowalski Editore, hadn't decided to avoid all mention of the words "gay" or "homosexual" in its online fluff. (See, e.g., (http://www.kowalski.it/news/tiziano-ferro-dal-20-ottobre-in-libreria-trentanni-e-una-chiacchierata-con-papa/).

But still. Thanks. Coming out isn't easy. Not for an ex fat kid from Latina, in the wilds of the Lazio Region in Italy (think Grants Pass, Oregon, or Lawrenceburg, Kentucky); not for actor Sean Hayes (who still has his knickers in a wad because "people" actually made him say it); not for anyone. Once you've done it, though, you wonder what took you so long.

This week, when gaznqueers across the U.S. are reeling from the recent suicides of four kids who were apparently tormented to desperation by their peers and largely abandoned by their teachers, their schools, and their communities, visibility like yours means even more.

If you find a way to turn your new visibility into a means to give hope to queer and transgender kids in Italy, where the Gay-Basher-in-Chief lurks in Prada and ermine, that would be nothing short of miraculous.

So thanks, Tiziano. And welcome. We've been here waiting for you all along.

---------------------------------
Ferro: "I'm gay and I have the freedom to be able to say so."
by Gino Castaldo
English translation by Wendell Ricketts

ROME – It took years, but after endless torments, existential crises, and doubts of every kind, Tiziano Ferro has published his personal journals—fifteen years of reflections now collected in a volume entitled Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (At Thirty, A Talk with Dad), published by Kowalski Editore and available in bookstores beginning October 20. In the book, Ferro tells the story of his entire life, from his struggles with bulimia to his difficulty in coming to terms with his homosexuality, from his paranoid isolation to his failure to find love as a result of inability to accept himself for who he was. The journal contains passages of disarming honesty.

Tiziano Ferro is here on every page as he puts an end once and for all to the endless speculation regarding his homosexuality—and, more generally, to the ironclad reserve with which he has surrounded himself in recent years. His coming out would seem to be an immensely liberating act—one born, as he himself recounts, in a conversation with his father and in the decision to enter therapy and to progressively expand the desire for honesty to his closest friends and, finally, to the public. "I’m happy,” Ferro says, “and I have the freedom to be able to say so.”

As Ferro tells it, his self-negation cost him many a difficult year, his international success notwithstanding and notwithstanding the dedication he experiences, as passionately as ever, for his craft. And now he seems to be on the brink of an entirely new life. Being gay is no crime, and Ferro’s rebirth begins with this reflection—an obvious one perhaps, but not so obvious that we can take it for granted.

---------------------------------

SU "REPUBBLICA"
Ferro: "Sono omosessuale e ho la libertà di poterlo dire"

Esce il libro-diario della popstar. Dopo il successo, ma anche dopo crisi esistenziali e dubbi di ogni genere, racconta la sua vita, dalla bulimia alla difficoltà di accettare la sua omosessualità. "Ma ora vivo meglio"
di GINO CASTALDO

ROMA - Ci ha messo anni, ma dopo tanti tormenti, dopo crisi esistenziali e dubbi di ogni genere, Tiziano Ferro ha deciso di pubblicare i suoi diari, quindici anni di appunti personali riuniti in un libro intitolato Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (ed. Kowalski nelle librerie dal 20 ottobre) nel quale racconta tutta la sua vita, dalla bulimia alla difficoltà di accettare la sua omosessualità, dall’isolamento paranoico all’incapacità di amare dovuta alla non accettazione di se stesso per quello che era, con passaggi di una disarmante sincerità.

C’è tutto Tiziano Ferro in queste pagine, mettendo fine una volte per tutte alle voci ricorrenti sulla sua omosessualità, e più in generale al riserbo assoluto di cui si era circondato in questi anni. Il gesto sembra essere un atto fortemente liberatorio, nato, come racconta lui stesso, da una chiacchierata col padre, dalla decisione di iniziare un percorso terapeutico e progressivamente di allargare questa voglia di sincerità prima agli amici più intimi, e poi al pubblico. "Sono felice, è la mia libertà di poterlo dire".

A causa di questa negazione, racconta Ferro, ha vissuto anni molto difficili, malgrado il successo internazionale di cui ha goduto e malgrado la passione ancora oggi inalterata per il suo mestiere. Ora, sembra, gli si pone davanti una vita completamente nuova. Essere gay non è un crimine, e la sua rinascita parte da questa ovvia, ma a volte non scontata, considerazione.

(05 ottobre 2010)

[R]Italia II: The Disdetta

2010-09-05T11:54:00.023+02:00

Those who have been paying assiduous attention to VitaVagabonda will recall the Rants of 2007 (Trasloco and Promesse di Marinaio), in which bitter complaints were lodged against the entire heinous, sanity-extruding process of moving house in Italy, with special opprobrium reserved for the Italian phone company, Telecom, and its staff of mental defectives, penis-heads, and chronic underachievers.

(In Italy, they don’t even have the excuse that their call centers have been farmed out to 14-year-old foundlings in Bangladesh; Telecom’s representatives are rigorosamente Italian and have all been pledged to the Fraternity of the Sisyphean Triumvirate—Incompetence, Indolence, and Indifference!)

Since it was so much fun last time, you might well wonder why we’re moving again. Well, because it’s called Vita VAGABONDA, that’s why.

Today’s subject, Possums, is the disdetta—the cancellation of services. Of course, as everyone knows, when you move you have to turn off the phone and the electricity and cable, and that’s no less true in Italy that it is in civilized countries.

What makes Italy different is that every service provider has a different way to go about it, and to learn the very special procedure that the gas company, the electric company, the cable television provider, and your phone/internet provider has prepared for you, you must call each of them individually to find out.

No, this information is not written on their internet sites. Their internet sites, instead, are almost entirely given over to a) advertising the additional services that they would very much like you to acquire and/or b) bragging about how environmentally conscious/helpful/experienced/efficient they are.

Each of these calls requires an average of 20-30 minutes, most of which is taken up in listening to the incessant repetition of neuron-sapping music, interrupted every minute or so by a recorded voice warning you that the implications of hanging up would indeed be dire. Still, there are only so many times you can listen to the chorus of “Waka Waka” before you can no longer resist the urge to search the internet, as long as you’re just sitting around waiting, for a site that tells you how to construct car bombs.

(The Italian post office, PosteItaliane, on the other hand, plays you “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which we heard on a permanent loop for 56 minutes during a recent call. It’s better than “Waka Waka,” but only just.)

In any case, here is a transcript of an actual call to ENEL, the company that so kindly provides us not only with electricity but with the most incomprehensible bill ever conceived by the depravity of the human mind:

-- Hello? I’m calling because we’re about to move and need to turn off our electricity.
-- What is your customer number?
-- [Customer number provided.]
-- Can you confirm your name and address?
-- [Name and address confirmed.]
-- One moment, please.
-- [Four minutes of silence.]
-- Are you still there?
-- Yes.
-- [Four more minutes of silence.]
-- Are you still there?
-- Yes.
-- Um, by the way, we’re moving on the 25th, but if it’s easier, we could just close out our service at the end of the month.
-- No, no. If you cancel service now, your electricity will be shut off when you hang up from this call.
-- Oh, I didn’t understand that. So we can’t schedule service to be shut off as of the date of our move?
-- No, you have to call on the day when you want service to end.
-- Ah, OK. In the meantime, I didn’t want to forget to give you the forwarding address for the final bill.
-- You want your final bill to go to a different address?
-- Well … yes. As I said, we’re moving.
-- You should have told me that earlier.
-- Isn’t it sort of normal, though? I mean, if people move, they don’t keep receiving mail at the old address….
-- I’ll note it in your file, but there’s no guarantee they’ll send the final bill there.
-- But how …
-- When you call back to cancel your service, you should remind them.

The Scorecard

ENEL (electricity): We have to call on moving day, hoping they manage to get the final bill to us (which one might suppose would serve their own interests, but whatever). There was, by the way, the option of blocking the meter as of the day of our move, but that would cost us the equivalent of about $50 (and would then cost the next person another $50 to unblock). Much better if we get our landlord to transfer the account directly into his name, a process that’s called the voltura. I won’t even go into what’s required to conjure the arcane magic of the voltura.

HERA (gas and water): Ditto—we must call on moving day to cancel. Since, however, the water is still in the name of our landlord’s mother, who died shortly after we moved in, and since HERA demanded a copy of her death certificate in order to transfer the water bill into our names, a document we obviously weren’t in a position to provide, the water bill remained in her name and thus it will remain. Why they transferred the gas to us but not the water, I shall never understand.

SKY (cable TV): We must send a fax, followed by a certified letter, followed by the delivery of the decoder box and remote to an as-yet-undisclosed location, at which point we will be relieved of our contractual obligations. If they feel like it.

TELECOM (telephone/internet): And here was the surprise of the century. Telecom was the only utility willing to take our word for it—they noted the date of cancellation and said they’d send the final bill to a forwarding address. Maybe they decided they’d screwed with us enough up front. On the other hand, we’ve paid the equivalent of about $3.75 per month for more than three years for a service called “4Star” that we never ordered and have never used and yet have never, despite six different attempts, succeeded in getting Telecom to remove from our bill. So, for the $135 we’ve spent needlessly, I’d say we deserved a gentle good-bye from the phone company that Lilly Tomlin must surely have had in mind when she invented Ernestine. [“The next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”]

The Upshot

Keep in mind, through all this, that utility bills in Italy come only every two months and that there are rate changes for gas, water, and electricity during virtually every billing cycle that make it impossible to understand what you’ve been charged for or whether the bill is accurate. In addition, at the cessation of a utility contract there is frequently what’s called a conguaglio, Italian for “we’ve just realized we’ve under-billed you for the last eleventeen months and would now like you to pay us the difference, which amounts to approximately half your annual salary.”

One of the outcomes of all of this is that renters continue to have a relationship with their ex-landlords long, long after they’ve moved, because bills continue to arrive that Alexander Grothendieck would have a hard time deciphering. When we left Bologna in Fall of 2007, for example, our landlord didn’t return our deposit for six months, after he had managed to assuage his fears that a new bill or an unanticipated conguaglio would not suddenly appear.

A Pause to Reflect

Once one has finished the last of the phone calls and the tremors have abated, there always comes a calm moment in which one can pose the question that ought to be embroidered onto Italy’s flag: “Why does no one change this dreadful system?”

The answer, by my lights, is three-fold. First, because Italians would do anything rather than rise up, call their lawyers, refuse to pay their bills, and just plain go on strike. Second, because Italian consumer-protection organizations are toothless and ineffective (indeed, the concept of consumer protection in Italy is so deeply primitive that it’s considered a big triumph if you don’t find pig shit in your sausage).

And finally because utilities are monopolies and Italian consumers have, literally, no choice but to buy services from them, accepting dreadful treatment, outrageous rates, and generally poor service in the bargain. No private entity exercises any tangible power as a watchdog (on the analogy, e.g., of CALPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group, whose motto is “Standing up to Powerful Interests”), though many federations and associations and groups (and federated groups of associations) exist.

At a governmental level, the office of the Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico (the Minister for Economic Development) should theoretically be occupying itself with consumer issues; as a practical matter, however, not so much. (The ministry, meanwhile, has been without a leader since its former head, Claudio Scajola, resigned in May 2010 in the wake of an only-in-Italy scandal: Scajola claimed that his fabulous, million-dollar apartment in Rome, complete with view of the Colosseum, had been paid for by a developer, allegedly in exchange for favors in the assignment of building contracts, entirely without his knowledge. In yesterday's SKY TV news poll, 75% of respondents opined that naming a new Minister for Economic Development should be a top government priority, though I'd be willing to bet that not one in 100 has the slightest idea what the Ministry actually does.)

If you sense an especially bitter tone in this post, it's only because it's there.

Bring on the brickbats and the flame-throwers, but I'm going to say it: Some things really are better in America. If Italy imported a little more consumer awareness and customer service, and a little less mindless pop music, third-rate television, fast food, and Reagan-style economics from the States, the Bel Paese might actually start deserving its adjective.

[R]The Wordless Angel - for Patricia Clark Smith

2010-07-27T12:50:00.007+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Beware the Prophets of Doom: The Translation Borg

2010-07-13T14:40:00.033+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Wacosky Road: The Italian Political Situation in Less than 90 Words

2010-07-12T10:47:00.010+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

Slouching Towards Dictatorship: Gag me with a Law

2010-06-16T11:12:00.017+02:00

Italy's new "gag law," which is disguised as privacy-protection legislation but which is actually both an appalling attack on freedom of the press and a very early Christmas present for organized crime in Italy, is days away from final approval.

Even if you cannot read the article below, taken from the L'Espresso, click on the links to find newspapers in Spanish, French, English, and other languages that describe the latest invention of the ministers of Berlusconistan -- a maneuver that more than one commentator has called "worthy of a Pinochet in Chile."

The law hasn't even been officially passed yet, but freedom of information and of the press is already under attack. A one-minute-and-twenty-second video commentary on the significance of the gag law (featuring Milena Gabanelli of the Italian investigative news program, Report), is currently being censored on Facebook. In addition, a popular page, DISOBBEDIENZA CIVILE ALLA LEGGE BAVAGLIO (ARRESTATECI TUTTI) [Civil Disobedience against the Gag Law -- Arrest all of Us], has been shut down by FB moderators without explanation.

And just because that's the sort of thing that really pisses me off, I'm posting the video here as well (click the image to download or to watch in your pre-defined viewer).

In the meantime, we also have Umberto Eco's useful reflection from L'Espresso of May 27, 2010, "Noi contro la legge" [Us Against the Law; in Italian with English summary]," in which Eco attempts to describe the lack of panic-in-the-streets that this latest move toward fascism has provoked in Italy.

What Berlusconi & Co. are effecting in Italy, he argues, isn't the classic military golpe or even an internal overthrow. Instead, it's a steady, gradual erosion of democracy that makes it hard to pinpoint (or protest) any single issue, law, or decision as the key moment in which "freedom" finally gave way to "dictatorship."

Meanwhile, Berlusconi's strategists always leave plenty of time between one maneuver and the next for individual issues to lose momentum. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Berlusconi owns or controls the vast majority of Italy's media and can determine the extent to which certain issues are covered as well as the "spin" they're given. Nor is it any accident that the gag law is taking its final steps toward parliamentary approval at the precise moment during which Italy's attention (and most of its media's) is glued to the Soccer World Cup in South Africa.

In any case, what Eco makes clear is that political revolution in Italy is inching inexorably into place at a pace that's under the radar for most media cycles and even for our own attention spans; the Italian coup d'état, Eco says, is "strisciante": it's creeping in on its belly, like a snake. Italy, in other words, is slouching toward dictatorship.

* * * * * * *

"Gag Law": il caso Italia preoccupa il mondo

di Carola Frediani

Il berlusconismo è un prodotto di cui si teme l'esportazione. Ecco perché la stampa straniera sta dedicando tanto spazio alla legge bavaglio (13 June 2010)

E meno male che con il governo Berlusconi "l'immagine dell'Italia all'estero è migliorata", come continua a dire il presidente del Consiglio. Da tre giorni il nostro Paese è tornato sulle prime pagine dei quotidiani stranieri, con un nuovo prodotto "made in Italy" di cui si teme l'esportazione: la Gag Law, altrimenti detta ley mordaza, loi-bâillon o Knebel-Gesetz.

L'attacco alla libertà di stampa è visto talvolta con stupore, talaltra con sdegno, ma in qualche caso anche con paura: perché - non dimentichiamocelo - in fondo anche "fascismo" è una parola italiana esportata poi in tutto il mondo. E lo scenario di un tycoon miliardario che grazie ai suoi media conquista il potere e poi mette la mordacchia al dissenso inizia a inquietare molti paesi.

Nella culla della mafia
In tanti, come il tedesco Der Spiegel, raccontano il caos e le rivolte contemporanee all'approvazione del ddl. Euronews descrive i banchi occupati dai senatori dell'Italia dei Valori, l'uscita del Pd dall'aula al momento della votazione e riporta le parole usate da Anna Finocchiaro: "In Italia la libertà sta per essere massacrata". E se Business Week ricorda come "dalla vittoria alle elezioni del 2008 il governo Berlusconi ha chiesto il numero record di 34 voti di fiducia", la stampa anglosassone insiste sul fatto che le intercettazioni, specie in Italia, sono uno strumento cruciale nella lotta alla corruzione e alla criminalità.

"C'è un'abitudine tanto italiana quanto il caffè preso in piedi al bar", commenta The Sydney Morning Herald: "leggere le trascrizioni delle intercettazioni trapelate sui giornali che espongono loschi accordi politici e schietta corruzione. Ora il presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi ha dichiarato guerra allo strumento preferito dai magistrati che lottano contro la corruzione". Un aspetto sottolineato anche dal britannico The Guardian: "La legge approvata è fortemente contestata non solo dalla maggioranza dei media ma anche dai magistrati, i quali affermano che intralcerà di molto la loro lotta contro la corruzione e il crimine organizzato". La Bbc ha chiesto un parere al procuratore nazionale antimafia Piero Grasso; il quale alla testata britannica ha spiegato di aver provato a far modificare la legge, perché "sminuisce la capacità delle autorità di fare il loro lavoro, anche nella battaglia contro il crimine organizzato".

Come infatti spiega la bibbia della comunità finanziaria, il Wall Street Journal, "i Pm italiani attualmente hanno ampia autorità di ordinare intercettazioni telefoniche, che considerano uno strumento vitale nell'incrinare il cerchio di segretezza delle organizzazioni criminali, come la mafia siciliana".

Quei comunisti del New York Times
C'è poi chi riapre la ferita delle leggi ad uso e consumo del premier: "Anche se tutti riconoscono che le intercettazioni trapelano sulla stampa in modo indisciplinato", scrive l'autorevole New York Times, "molti vedono nella nuova proposta di legge un altro provvedimento "ad personam", finalizzato più a proteggere gli interessi personali e politici di Berlusconi che la democrazia italiana". Mentre l'indiano Sify News ricorda proprio le inchieste de "L'espresso" e la pubblicazione dei dialoghi tra il presidente del Consiglio e Patrizia D'Addario. Nonché l'ormai famigerato lettone di Putin.

Pagine bianche e fazzoletti neri
A colpire i media stranieri è stata anche la levata di scudi dei giornali e delle emittenti italiane. Non solo la primapagina di Repubblica, finita sul francese Le Monde, sul messicano La Jornada, sullo spagnolo El Mundo e perfino a Singapore sulla testata Straistimes, ma anche la fascetta nera di Sky, evidenziata dall'argentino Clarin.

E spunta il gruppo su Facebook
"Gag Law etc - Italy's democracy at risk" è il nuovo gruppo su Facebook nato con lo scopo di "diffondere consapevolezza all'estero sui pericoli per la democrazia in Italia", dove sono segnalate testate e blog che parlano della legge bavaglio. Qui sono gli stessi utenti a postare gli articoli pubblicati sui media di tutto il mondo, dal cileno El Mercurio all'irlandese Irish Times. L'immagine del profilo? Un'Italia listata a lutto.

[R]Please Stop Talking About Art!

2010-05-18T09:45:00.028+02:00

Now available on Una Vitavagabonda's new site!

[R]Draquila - and Italy is still shaking ...

2010-05-10T12:11:00.024+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

Popolo della Libertà: Annihilating Freedom of the Press, One Journalist at a Time

2010-03-16T17:33:00.047+01:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Getting A Head at Esapolis

2010-03-14T17:42:00.015+01:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

It's My Business, cont'd. - Updates on the Trust Traduzioni Scandal

2010-02-18T16:39:00.016+01:00

On 17 February 2010, the Italian Minister of Tourism, Michela Vittoria Brambilla, formally responded to the controversy generated by Trust Traduzioni’s February 8 job offer on Proz.com.

The statement, which the Ministry authorized for publication on the site of the Italian National Association of Translators and Interpreters (ANITI), reads:

The Ministry of Tourism has published no announcement of any kind regarding a search for translators nor has it authorized any other party to do so.
With regard to the announcement that appeared a few days ago on the www.proz.com internet site, and in which untrue information was imputed to the Ministry of Tourism, an official complaint has been filed with the competent authorities against person or persons unknown.
In addition, the Ministry would like to make clear that it does not apply and has no intention of applying the fees and conditions indicated in the announcement.

It’s largely a CYA response, and it remains to be seen whether anything will come of the complaint which, for the moment, names no one in particular. Meanwhile, as you may recall, the owner of Trust Traduzioni also threatened to sue “somebody” if the controversy caused problems in her contract with the Ministry. Evidently it has.

What’s interesting is what’s hidden beneath all this posturing. The Ministry says it has placed no advertisements seeking translators. Technically, that’s true—the Ministry isn’t looking directly for translators, but it did put out a call for bids to translation agencies, which is sort of a distinction without a difference.

Trust Traduzioni, meanwhile, has been caught with its pants down. In its ad, it attributed working conditions to the Ministry that the Ministry says it never authorized and does not, in fact, apply. (And, of course, the Ministry must say so because at least one of the conditions was illegal.)

Fair enough. But the fact of the matter is that this is all business as usual. The agency bids for a large job, pretending it has the personnel required to do the translation work. The Ministry pretends not to know that small-ish agencies like Trust Traduzioni don’t have a crowd of native-speaking translators just hanging around on the sidewalk like day-laborers, waiting for a job to come in. When the agency wins the contract, it has to scramble madly to find people to perform the services it has promised. The Ministry, meanwhile, pretends not to know that selecting the lowest-bidding agency necessarily means bad pay for the end-translator.

And, with fingers pointing in every direction, nobody has to take genuine responsibility for the part they’ve played in creating an untenable situation for translators.

In the meantime, translator Michael Farrell has created a new Yahoo mailing list, Azione Traduttori (to subscribe, you can also send a blank message to: azione-traduttori-subscribe@yahoogroups.com) intended to serve as a clearinghouse for action against the payment practices that Proz supports and promotes by refusing to exercise a little control over its job offerers. For now the list is in Italian only (though some English-language documents will become available.)

Shortly before Azione Traduttori was formed, a group of translators who work “into” or “out of” Italian created a new Facebook group, Liberi Professionisti Traduttori (Freelance Translators; click on the image to go there). In four days, 800 people had joined.

These efforts may seem small, but they’re still fairly revolutionary for Italy. (Consider, e.g., that the general category of “freelancer” is barely recognized in Italy; what’s more, for as much as most Italian bureaucrats or accountants or lawyers know about the subject, a freelance translator might have an easier time explaining a job as ravenmaster at the Tower of London). Meanwhile, Italian freelancers pay both higher social security/disability payments than any other kind of worker and higher taxes (and their tax filings are more complicated and more costly to prepare). That notwithstanding, when they get pregnant, need to take time off for chemotherapy, or want parenting leave, e.g., they have a nearly impossible time getting paid by the system that is theoretically there to provide for them.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the momentum keeps building.

Couturier Alexander McQueen Designs These Shoes, Kills Self

2010-02-12T15:21:00.035+01:00

Note to readers: After receiving a testy email from Lauren Starke, Director of Public Relations for New York Media, who objected to my attribution of a quote to New York magazine fashion editor Amina Akhtar, I have been advised to prepare this statement: The post that follows is intended as satire and parody. I have not actually interviewed Amina Akhtar, Bernard Arnault, or anyone else regarding McQueen's death. The quotes are made-up.

In case you weren't able to figure that out on your own.

---------------

British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead in his London flat on February 10, an apparent suicide. McQueen was forty.

Although the full details of McQueen’s death have not yet been released, friends reported that he had been deeply despondent over the last several months following the realization that he had dedicated his life’s work to the world’s most pointless profession.

A close family member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that McQueen’s depression began to deepen last October when his Spring 2010 collection was unveiled in Paris. After the show, at which his line of 10-inch-high women’s footwear was introduced, McQueen admitted to a few intimates that he no longer felt personally rewarded by designing shoes that made models look as though they had gotten their feet stuck in flower vases.

That conviction seemed to take root in a series of emails McQueen sent to friends during the subsequent holiday season. “I thought it would cheer me up to have Raquel Zimmermann wrestle topless in the sand with snakes for the Paris show," he wrote in one such exchange. "I thought I could re-create the thrill I felt when put a double-amputee on stilts and paraded her down the catwalk like I did at Givenchy. Or when I hung those tampons on a skirt. I mean, fuck Duchamp, right? But it all turned out to be such a downer. Plus those shoes look like what Guy Pearce was wearing in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert when they show up at that hotel bar in Broken Hill, Australia.”

New York magazine fashion editor Amina Akhtar reported being “devastated” by the news of McQueen’s suicide, adding that McQueen’s death was a loss that would be felt the world over, “especially by anorexic, twenty-something career women; bulimic models; pale, sickly-looking teenage girls; and high school sophomores whose friends insist they're just 'artistic.'”

Bernard Arnault, who hired McQueen at Givenchy, downplayed reports of past conflict between the two, emphasizing that a man of McQueen’s talent “is forgiven everything.” Added Arnault, “How many designers are there in the world who can dress a Björk or a Lady Gaga? Making women of that cultural importance look like Disinterred-Cadaver Barbie is a gift permitted to only the few, and Alexander was one of them. The hideous, over-priced dresses at this year’s Oscar ceremony are going to be a lot less hideous and over-priced without him.”

For McQueen, however, the thrill had evidently gone quite some time ago. In one of the last emails he wrote, he told his ex, George Forsyth, “Remember me on that yacht in Ibiza? I was so full of ideas, all ready to go to work on my ‘Explosion in a Play-Doh Factory’ collection. I couldn't wait to say the Devil wears McQueen. Well, I ran into the Devil yesterday and she’s put on weight, the cow. And all she wanted to talk about was florals. The minute I could get away from her, I tweeted ‘I do not think in florals!’ And I meant it, too.”

Indeed, there are those who consider McQueen’s final tweets a kind of public suicide note. “If it she had not me nor would you,” he wrote in the kind of eloquent expression of deep human emotion that Twitter has made possible for millions. And then, a few hours later, “milkduds!”

With that as epitaph, Alexander McQueen abandoned the catwalk for the last time, leaving the world of fashion to wonder how it could possibly go on promoting grotesque, useless, unwearable clothing without him.

The Revolution of the Translators – It’s My Business, and I'm Minding It

2010-02-11T16:19:00.035+01:00

For an 18 February 2010 update on this story, please click here.

-----------------

On February 8, 2010, the Novara-based translation agency, Trust Traduzioni, published the following job announcement on Proz.com. (Proz, arguably the internet’s largest translation-services clearinghouse, is widely used in Italy.)

Dear Translators,

We are looking for new team members to include in a translation project for the Italian Ministry of Tourism.
The Ministry has begun sending us—and will continue to do so throughout 2010—materials from the site www.italia.it that need to be translated into English, French, German, and Spanish.
The "cartella" imposed by the Ministry is 2600 characters and the price is 9 euros gross with payment after 90 days (this condition is also a requirement of the Ministry).
The price is extremely low, but translators should consider the large amount of work on offer and the ongoing nature of the project.
If you are interested, contact me via email, telephone, or Skype.
We already have files ready for translation that need to be assigned with some urgency.
Your participation is appreciated.

The outraged reaction from translators was almost instant—and it hasn’t abated in the three days since: literally hundreds of messages to translators’ lists, to Proz, and on Facebook. A petition to the Minister of Tourism, Michela Vittoria Brambilla, which garnered more than 1000 signatures in its first 36 hours (as of this writing, there are slightly more than 1200). A pissed-off response from the owner of the agency in question (about which more later), and (so far) even a brief mention in today’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.

In other words: what we're seeing is practically a revolution.

Translators, especially Italian translators, never protest en masse (we tend to complain a lot, but almost never agitate as a group). One of the profession’s greatest weaknesses, in fact, is the lack of collective action (and, more seriously, the absence of any sense of belonging to a collective, which must obviously come first).

There are a lot of reasons for that lack of protest, but one of the most debilitating is the fear of getting a “bad rep.” The fact is, a translator’s livelihood depends on word-of-mouth. Particularly in Italy, where troublemakers, muckrakers, and whistle-blowers of any kind are routinely and effectively shunned, marginalized, silenced, ridiculed, and “disappeared” (figuratively speaking), there’s a huge amount of fear of standing out too much in the crowd. Which means a lot of people get away with a lot of things they ought to be ashamed of, from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on down.

Translation clients (especially agencies) know this. And they take full advantage of the fact.

There’s also this Kafkaesque reality to deal with: Under Italian law, anyone who disseminates information that could be construed as “defamatory” about a business entity is guilty of a crime. What that means is that I could be charged with breaking the law if I sent a message to a translator’s list that said, “X Agency has owed me €1000 for six months. I’ve sent them five emails asking them to pay me. They’ve never responded.”

Truth is not a defense. Let that sink in. It does not matter if what you say is true. The agency in question could still report me to the police. Does it happen very often in the case of translators? No, but it could. Talk about a “chilling effect.”

But this time was different. This time, Trust Traduzioni’s announcement touched a raw nerve. In a troubled translation market and in the midst of an economic crisis that the Italian government refuses to acknowledge, that obscenely low offer on behalf of a government agency and those insulting conditions were a blow upon a bruise.

This wasn’t just another case of a private client expecting a translation for peanuts—a situation that was not unusual in 2007, became epidemic in 2009, and is now simply the norm. It was a case in which the employer offering sweatshop wages was the Italian government itself—a government bound to uphold a constitution whose very first line is “Italy is a democratic Republic founded upon work” and which goes on to affirm, in its Article 36, that “Workers have the right to wages in proportion to the quantity and quality of their work and in all cases sufficient to ensure them and their families a free and dignified existence.”

There wasn’t a lot of dignity in the Ministry’s offer.

Not a lot of dignity, starting with the detail of that cartella of 2600 characters—supposedly imposed by the Ministry of Tourism. (Here’s a quick primer for those not “in the trade.” In Italy, translators are typically paid by the cartella or page. In the case of publishers, the cartella is generally 2000 characters; for all other jobs, the standard cartella is 1500 characters. Inventing a 2600-character cartella is like your employer telling you he’ll pay you $20 an hour--but when he says "hour," he means 104 minutes instead of 60.)

Not a lot of dignity in those nine euros, either. For a standard cartella of 1500 characters, €9 would already be considered "starvation wages," especially in a country where freelancers pay 40% of their gross in taxes and social security contributions. In this case, it means putting about €5.40 per “super-cartella” in your pocket after taxes—or €3.12 (about $4.30) at the standard-cartella rate.

A translator working full bore with material that isn’t especially complicated (i.e., which doesn’t require hours of research) can finish off somewhere between eight and ten standard cartelle per day. That’s equivalent to 4.6-5.75 “super-cartelle,” for a net of €24.84-31.05 ($34.28-42.85) per eight- to nine-hour workday.

Well below the federal minimum wage in the U.S., that is (currently $7.25/hour). In Italy, where there is no minimum wage (or, rather, where the minimum wage can quite easily be zero in the case of the thousands of “internships” that are virtually the only employment available to young workers entering the labor force for the first time), it is palpably insufficient to “ensure (workers) and their families a free and dignified existence.”

And there wasn’t a lot of dignity in that 90-day payment period, a “condition imposed by the Ministry.” If true—that is, if the 90-day wait wasn’t a pretext invented by the agency—the Italian Ministry of Tourism is violating European Union law. Because paying one’s creditors as slowly as possible is something of a national sport in Italy, a law was passed in 2003 (Legislative Decree 231) whose purpose was to bring Italy in line with 2000 European Union legislation intended to “Combat Delays in Payment in Commercial Contracts” throughout the Union. If it was a pretext, then Trust Traduzioni is in violation of the law. Either way, it’s an illegal condition.

After the controversy had raged for only a day, the owner of Trust Traduzioni sent an anonymous response to the Proz.com forum. In brief, her message was this:

1. I participated fair and square in bidding for the contract to translate the Ministry’s tourism site and my agency won.
2. Nobody’s forcing anybody to work for low rates; if you don’t like them, don’t accept them.
3. If translators and interpreters don’t have a union to help them establish decent wages and working conditions, it’s not my fault.
4. If you don’t stop complaining about this, I’ll sue Proz for failing to protect its job posters and for not verifying the truthfulness of the announcements it publishes.
5. Why don’t you all go back to minding your own business?

In other words: the usual bluster and bluff, and a not-especially-adroit dodge of the issues.

I might agree with Trust Traduzioni on one issue, though. Someone ought to sue Proz. True, I’m not sure what Point 4 means (sounds like language suggested by a lawyer): no one has attacked the “truthfulness” of her announcement, and it isn’t clear how she would propose to be “protected” against the outraged responses of translators who find a job offer offensive.

But Proz deserves to be sued for its refusal to protect translators (who are the ones who pay hefty annual fees for its services) against agencies like Trust Traduzioni and other clients who apply steady, implacable downward pressure on fees. In that calculus, translators have almost no power, and job offerers, with Proz’s help, have all the power.

Below-market offers have been common on Proz for years, but the situation has become dramatic in the last 12 months. Removing them from Proz wouldn’t eliminate the practice, but it would disable one of the main mechanisms by which low-ball clients come into contact with desperate, inexperienced, barely professional translators. It’s a link that deserves to be broken. And if Proz’s owners refuse to intervene at the level of fees, it shouldn’t be too much to expect them to stop approving announcements that contain illegal working conditions. I mean, at the very least.

Speaking of barely professional translators, meanwhile, I can’t help but close with this observation. Virtually every single “official” Italian government site that I’ve seen (whether national or local) is marred by preposterous, often comical English (I can’t speak for other languages), and the Ministry's www.italia.it site is no exception. The author of "Inglisc: Mèd Een Eetaly" hosts a growing collection of similar specimens on his site.

Clearly, other Italian ministries, governmental agencies and departments, and official city and regional sites (not to mention private businesses and organizations) have been choosing translators the way the Ministry of Tourism chooses translators. Rest assured that they're getting just what they pay for.

Swan Divorce at Slimbridge Wetland Centre Prompts Wider Concerns about Marriage

2010-01-25T17:26:00.018+01:00

A pair of Bewick’s swans at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre wildfowl sanctuary in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire (England), have divorced, the BBC reported yesterday. Slimbridge researchers, who have followed more than 4,000 swan marriages, took note of the development this month when both members of the former couple returned separately from Arctic Russia to their winter lodgings in Slimbridge, new partners in tow.

According to a spokesperson for the Wetland Centre, the event marks only the second time in forty years that a pair of normally monogamous swans has voluntarily dissolved a cygnine partnership, widely known for duration and faithfulness.

The couple, identified in court documents only by their first names, Sarindi and Saruni, married two years ago. Friends who spoke on condition of anonymity suggested that Saruni’s inability to produce a cygnet had led to growing tension within the couple, though a young swan who indicated only that she was “like, best friends with Saruni,” objected to what she termed a “sexist interpretation” of the facts. “Every since Sarindi went on Facebook,” she told this reporter, “he’s spent less and less time with Saruni and more and more time playing Farmville and friending pens with revealing profile pics. Online, he’s got, like, 3700 friends. How’s Saruni supposed to compete with that? You ask me, he never even really wanted any cygnets.”

Reached through his lawyer, Sarindi denied the allegation. “Saruni showed up back here in Slimbridge with some cob-toy on her wing about ten minutes after the divorce was final, so you tell me: which one of us wasn’t serious? I was home every night, working on the nest mound, but I was the only one who was bringing any eelgrass to the table. And I was always ready to co-incubate the clutch. If there wasn’t any clutch, well, all I’m saying is, I did my part, okay? But now I just want to get on with my life. Me and Saruni, we’re different, that's all. She was from the Taymyr Peninsula and I was a guy from the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Two different worlds. It just didn’t work out. No drama, no hard feelings. I don’t understand why everybody’s whooping over this.”

But C. Anne Brauloh, a sociologist at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, who specializes in swan relationships, sees broader trends at work in the couple’s separation. “Young swans today feel they don’t have a lot of time. They’re anxious to move on in their careers, get their cygnets in a row. There’s tremendous pressure to choose a mate, especially since in traditional terms they only have one chance to get it right. Slimbridge is just the tip of the iceberg. More and more swans are going to start speaking out about hasty or unhappy marriages and we’ll see more couples making choices like Sarindi and Saruni’s. Second and even third matings are on the way, as is the blended palmiped family. Swan culture may take a while to absorb these new realities, but it will eventually adjust. Monogamy may be common among swans, but our research suggests that it is more a heavily enforced social custom than a true biological imperative.”

Reaction from religious leaders, however, has been both sharper and more accusatory. A spokeperson for the Most Reverend Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Clifton, for example, condemned the divorce. Speaking at a news conference held outside Clifton Cathedral, the Bishop called on the faithful to recall that: “Marriage is a sacrament, which no man must put asunder. And by ‘man,’ of course I mean ‘swan,’” the Bishop added. “Also seagulls.”

Even the Vatican weighed in on the surprising news from this far corner of West England, and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement, printed in today’s Osservatore Romano, which read in part, “Svans mate for life. This is to all the vorld known. When this natural order is contradikted, of interference by a tweachewous, ungodly force we can be certain. You know what I’m talking about, so don’t make me say it.”

Across the Atlantic, proponents of the “pro-marriage movement” in the United States were quick to seize upon the Pope’s words. “How much more evidence do you need of the harm the gay agenda is doing to the institution of heterosexual marriage?” asked Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage. “Homosexual pseudomarriages are now recognized in more than a dozen European countries, including the United Kingdom. They just got a so-called ‘civil unions’ bill through the senate in Hawai’i. The anti-Prop 8 lawyers are kicking our asses in District Court in San Francisco. Is it any coincidence that the Portuguese parliament approved gay marriage just a week before divorced swans started showing up in England? I don’t think so. The state of normal heterosexual wedlock is on the chopping block all over the world. If we don’t reverse this trend, we can start singing a swan song for marriage.”

Cristiano Ronaldo Comes Out!

2010-01-04T18:55:00.005+01:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

Faithfully, Into the Dark

2009-12-25T12:34:00.020+01:00

Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.
(from “December” by Gary Johnson)

For the past 48 hours, I have been awash in friends’ holiday greetings—no, more specifically, in their Christmas greetings—accompanied in most cases by ritual best wishes for the coming year.

The truth is, I love receiving such greetings. I’m just as susceptible to “cute,” “sweet,” and “sentimental” as the next guy. I like being thought of.

At the same time, I have to admit that they leave me all but mute. I don’t know how to respond to greeting cards (virtual or in paper form) or to publicly posted holiday pictures and updates, the electronic equivalent, I suppose, of the old-fashioned “Christmas letter” or “holiday card with family portrait” sent indifferently to one’s Christmas card list. (I vaguely remember having a Christmas card list. Slightly less vaguely, I recall buying greeting cards meant to appease the voracious demands and insidious guilt aroused by said list. I am also sure, at some point in my life, that I did Scotch-tape the Christmas cards I received to the wall or propped them up on the mantel, but I can’t specifically remember when. To tell the truth, I can’t specifically remember ever having a mantel.)

Still, I’ve never known quite what to say to these onslaughts of well wishing, these imperatives of happiness. And yet I have resonated (and I still do resonate) to the implicit messages of “hope” in such greetings: have a lovely holiday; best wishes for the new year; peace and joy to you and yours.

Who doesn’t want others to speculate positively on his behalf regard futures in peace and joy? Who wouldn't enjoy a lovely holiday? Who doesn’t appreciate knowing that others are wishing him well?

But I also recognize the finger-crossing, a-pinch-of-salt-over-your-shoulder, propitiatory nature of the greetings that we rain down on each other at this time of year. I see the gesto scaramantico (the apotropaic gesture – a great word in English that we don’t use nearly enough). I realize the grim determination to think good thoughts, to banish the negative, to refuse to spend a neuron’s worth of energy on “the bad stuff.” Especially not now. Not now when, at last, the days have finally started lengthening again, when there’s a fraction’s worth more light every day and we’re headed back toward the sun.

Something in all that troubles me. Why would we make the apotropaic gesture, why would we say or write the words that ward off trouble, if not because we are all too conscious of trouble's existence? Don’t the greetings themselves, in their insistent cheerfulness, conjure up precisely what we’re not supposed to be talking about at this time of year?

I suppose what I’d like is for there to be a different kind of greeting we could send one another during this season. A greeting that expressed all the warmth and affection and fellow-feeling that I genuinely believe we harbor toward our friends and loved ones and yet which, at the same time, conveyed what strikes me as a fuller, more humane context: “I wish all that for you, knowing that we suffer and will go on suffering.”

For me, there was precious little peace in 2009, to be honest. And I was hardly alone. Like few other years, or so it seemed to me, 2009 brought serious illness, loss, fear, unemployment, depression, isolation, divorce, anxiety about the future, even desperation into the lives of many—perhaps most—of the people I know. Not in every way and not at every moment, but still. It was there. Perhaps 2009 wasn’t even a record year; I haven’t been keeping statistics. I do know that I was much more deeply aware of it.

So what I’d like is a holiday greeting that inspired solidarity and friendship and tender feeling but not forgetfulness. I want a Christmas card that brings me a sincere wish for peace and joy but that doesn’t suggest, even subtly, that I am a failure (a Grinch, a Scrooge) if my heart remains heavy.

It could say, perhaps, “Congratulations for having participated in another year of being fully human” or “My thoughts are with you as you face this terrifying, intimidating, wonderful adventure” or “We have come through trouble and survived: let us be merciful with ourselves, and vigilant toward the pain of others, even as we are grateful.”

Or, since “hope” is so much the word of the season, it might say this, as Lu Xun once wrote: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is like roads upon the earth. For in the beginning, there were no roads; but when many people pass one way, a road is made.”

When I read words like that, I experience what I think others intend for me to experience when they send their notes and cards and photos and poems during the holidays: Comfort. Joy. Great tidings of.

And a good reason to keep on walking on the earth, even after Christmas.

[R]Povia's back & there's gonna be trouble ...

2009-12-17T16:04:00.013+01:00

Povia, the Italian singer-songwriter who won a prestigious Mogol Prize in 2009 for his composition "Luca era gay" (Luca Was Gay), a song about the curative powers of ~~denial~~ ~~a beard~~ ~~lying to your wife and children~~ heterosexual marriage, will return to the Sanremo Festival of Italian Music in 2010. Povia's newest entry, we have learned, is inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman maintained in a vegetative state for seventeen years despite her family's exhausting legal and social battle to respect Eluana's wishes and remove her from life support and artificial feeding.

The Catholic Church held prayer vigils and fasts in opposition to what it called "euthanasia," and issued pre-printed postcards to churchgoers that allowed them to nominate members of the Englaro family, their supporters, and assorted journalists for fast-track ex-communication by Pope Benedict XVI. A few days before Eluana's death on 9 February 2009, the Pope blessed thousands of such cards, mailed to the Vatican by ~~crazed zealots~~ ~~religiously obsessed fundamentalists~~ ~~Jesus jumpers~~ concerned Catholics, promising eternal damnation to all those in the medical profession who subverted the will of God by employing such "fetishes of Satan" as anesthesia, dialysis, penicillin, and medications used to keep 82-year-old men from succumbing to their age-related heart conditions.

"As we meditate on the sanctity of life and our thoughts turn to Eluana's struggle not to be murdered by the white-coated acolytes of the King of Hell," the Pope said, reading from a prepared statement, "don't let me forget to mention that homosexuality is a sin."

Artistically original and socially committed -- and known for his devotion to the Catholic church and to the protection of heterosexual families, which are seriously endangered all across the world -- Povia has chosen to entitle his 2010 Sanremo entry "Luca Was in a Coma."

Forgive Me, Big Daddy, For I Have Sinned (the Caso Marazzo)

2009-11-27T17:44:00.008+01:00

I’ve certainly got no objection to kicking a guy when he’s down, especially when he’s yet another slimy Italian politician doing his level best to keep up with the crop of crooks, tin-pot dictators, hypocrites, and stooges that are currently in charge of Italy’s government, but Piero Marazzo, the ex-governor of the Lazio Region, makes things too easy.

Let me bring you quickly up to speed: While he was still the head of the Lazio Regional government, we are now given to understand, Mr. Marazzo spent a certain amount of his free time frequenting transsexual prostitutes and snorting kilos of coke. Four police officers discovered what he was up to but—this being Italy, instead of, I don’t know, Los Angeles in the Daryl Gates years—they did not, naturally, arrest him. No. They got someone to film him, and then tried to blackmail him.

In a series of events worthy of a bad Grisham novel, all of this eventually came to be reported in the press, whereupon Marazzo very quickly resigned from his job.

Many, many details remain unexplained, however. In the days and weeks since the "scandal" broke, Marazzo issued a series of statements in which he revealed, as La Repubblica put it with admirable bite, “truth on the installment plan.”

The Reader’s Digest version:

1) I was being blackmailed.
2) I was being blackmailed, but I’m not guilty of any of the things people are saying!
3) The video of me having sex with a prostitute doesn’t even exist, and I’m being manipulated.
4) No, wait, OK. Yeah, actually, it does exist.
5) I’ve made mistakes in my private life.
6) I’ve made mistakes in my private life, but I never used drugs!
7) All right already, a few lines of coke now and then, OK, I admit it.
8) Leave me alone! My life is a nightmare! The media has destroyed my entire world!
9) I’m going on a spiritual retreat. No one should try to contact me.
10) I realize I need to ask for forgiveness, so I’ve decided to apologize ... to the Pope.

And that about brings us up to the present, when Marazzo’s letter to Pope Ratzinger arrived on the desk of Vatican Secretary of State and Papal Chamberlain, Tarcisio Bertone. Somehow (I can’t imagine how, but perhaps you’ll have an idea) the existence of the letter was leaked to the press (though the specific contents are not yet known and, the Vatican says, never will be—for which, Heavenly Father, please make us truly thankful).

The letter was presumably written during Marazzo’s several-week spiritual retreat at the Benedictine Abbey in Cassino (Province of Frosinone) where he has been dedicating himself to “light farm work, prayer, and meditation, constantly attended by the discreet presence of the Abbot, Piero Vittorelli.” (Vittorelli, by the way, told La Repubblica on November 21 that Marazzo had “been engaged in the extremely delicate process by which a person emerges reborn.”)

Be that as it may ... back home in Rome, things are a great deal less bucolic.

In fact, two central figures in the case have been murdered: the man who supplied Marazzo with coke and apparently shot the incriminating video, and a transsexual prostitute (a Brazilian native known only as Brenda) with whom Marazzo was filmed “in a compromising attitude.” The investigation into the murders is “ongoing,” which is police-talk for “no leads in sight.”

Naturally, the relentless media spotlight on the neighborhoods where Brenda lived and worked (and where a group of other transpeople and prostitutes continues to live and work) meant that everybody quickly figured out where to find them—including the hooligans and petty terrorists of the Lazio’s extensive black-shirt “community.” For the last month, beatings and attacks on trannies have occurred there on the average of one per day.

Marazzo, for his part, continues to refer to himself as a good Catholic and a dedicated husband and father and to insist that his only concern, now that his political life is over (let’s not take bets on that yet), is keeping his family together. So far, however, Marazzo has yet to release one public word of regret regarding the death of Brenda; the fate of several other trannies, caught up in the investigation, who were sent off to be deported for illegal immigration as soon as police were done interrogating them; or the climate of terror that has spread among transpeople in Rome.

Just talking for a moment about those whose entire worlds have been destroyed....

Following the murder of Brenda on Novembre 20, meanwhile, a second witness to the Marazzo episode, another prostitute identified only as Natalì, has been placed under police protection. Last night’s poll to the public (Call right now! Our lines are open! It only costs one euro to vote!) on a popular current-events show: “Do you think it’s fair to expect taxpayers to provide police protection for a transsexual prostitute?”

I won’t bother to tell you the result.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

2009-11-21T16:18:00.004+01:00

The town of Coccaglio (Province of Brescia) is planning on celebrating a “White Christmas” this year. That’s the name given to a new initiative—promoted by the Northern League and launched in time for Christmas—against illegal immigration. Between now and December 25, police will go knocking on the doors of some 400 homes where immigrants live in order to make sure everyone has their documents in order. The local representative of the Northern League, Claudio Abiendi, said, “Christmas is a celebration of Christian tradition and identity, not of hospitality.” For the former mayor of Coccaglio, Luigi Lotto, the operation only exploits citizens’ fears. (From the magazine Internazionale, 20 November 2009.)

A Short Course in Organized Religion

2009-11-07T17:14:00.002+01:00

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"

"Why shouldn't I?" he said.

I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"

He said, "Like what?"

I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?"

He said, "Religious."

I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"

He said, "Christian."

I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

He said, "Protestant."

I said, Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?

He said, "Baptist!"

I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"

He said, "Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"

He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!"

I said, "Burn in hell, heretic scum!" and I pushed him off.

An Act to Promote Marriage Equality and Affirm Religious Freedom

2009-11-04T16:22:00.015+01:00

Well, this news about the repeal of the so-called “gay marriage” law in Maine has really got me down.

You probably already know that the Maine state legislature passed the bill last April, and that it was signed into law by Gov. John Baldacci in May. It was supposed to go into effect on September 1, 2009.

But then groups with names like Stand for Marriage Maine and the Maine Coalition of Concerned Families decided the legislature had it all wrong, and they collected enough signatures to put the law on the ballot this last November 3 as “Question 1.”

That way, the people could decide.

Not the people who wanted a same-sex marriage, of course. They were obviously prejudiced. The other people, who weren't. Prejudiced, I mean.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the National Organization for Marriage, the Daughters of Isabella, the Knights of Columbus, the Eagle Forum, and the Family Watch International, along with PACS such as Maine4Marriage, Maine Marriage Initiative, Maine Marriage, and Marriage Matters in Maine (you can tell they pretty quickly ran out of ideas for names) all got together to hold “No on Homo” rallies, trick-or-treat for marriage (white sheets were a popular costume), and escort voters to the polls in oxcarts and other vehicles reminiscent of the century in which more than half of the state’s residents evidently live.

When all the precincts had reported in on election day, gay marriage was out out out! By 52.7% to 47.25% (or, if you like raw numbers, by 27,729 votes).

Well, my god. Is anyone surprised? I mean, I read Stephen King novels. I know what those people are like! Annie Wilkes, Joe St. George, Warden Samuel Norton. Do I need to draw you a picture?

But, as I say, the whole thing has me lower than a snake in a wagon rut. I was counting on the gay-marriage law in Maine, along with the ones in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire, to help pave the way for my own marriage plans. You know, we were feeling pretty optimistic about the whole bandwagon, critical-mass theory.

For years now, me and my sister, Ethyleen, have been hoping to obtain formal recognition for our long-term, committed civil partnership with our Lapponian Reindeer Dog, Frank. What I mean is, we want to get married, just the three of us, and I was convinced we’d be able to kind of slide in there, along with the gays.

And we are not the only ones! Just in our town, we know of all kinds of relationships that would benefit: two nephew-uncle couples, two aunt-nieces, three brother-brothers or sister-sisters (and at least one brother-sister-mother-parakeet), a mixed Muslim dromedary/Asian Catholic marriage, and who knows how many canine-human unions (including a number of monogamous multiple-mastiff households).

Here's a recent photo of Frank, by the way, in a reflective mood.

Anyway, those people in Maine somehow caught wind of us, and they started raising holy hell about incest and bestiality and one thing and another, and that was all she wrote. Frankly, I still don’t know how they figured out what the American Civil Liberties Union and the people at Protect Maine Equality really had up their sleeves (though I suspect Glo, Frank’s groomer, had something to do with it; she says she's in love with her Oaxacan spiny-tailed iguana, but I've seen how she looks at Dirk, the shampoo boy).

In any case, what happened in Maine promises to put the kibosh on the whole plan. In fact, if things keep going like this, what with all those other initiatives and propositions and amendments and what have you, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Frank has turned out to be awfully susceptible to ringworm, and Ethyleen is the only one with health insurance on account of her job as day manager at the Snack’n’Spew. We need to get Frank covered because those miconazole treatments aren't paying for themselves!

I hate to say I told you so, but the fact is that I did try to warn people that this was going to happen. I stood right up at our meetings and I said, “Folks are going to figure out that we’re only supporting same-sex marriage because we want to tie the knot with our gerbils and our next of kin. You’re not going to fool anyone.”

But no one ever listens to me. And the next thing you know, you’ve got sweet little old ladies in Maine waving Bibles and talking about necrophilia.

Anyway, what I say is, it’s time for a schism. Let the gays go off and fight their own battles from now on. They’re obviously not doing us one damn bit of good.

Il Fungo Ipogeo

2009-10-31T15:35:00.003+01:00

Andiamo innocentemente all'Ipercoop, dove una ragazza sorridente ci porge un bigliettino pubblicitario. Lo prendo io, così, d’impulso, geneticamente incapace di essere brusco con qualcuno che, per lavoro, deve stare davanti ad un negozio, sorridente, a distribuire pubblicità. Il bigliettino, che si rivela in verità un mini-opuscolo, annuncia la "Sagra del Tartufo di Bosco della Panfilia.” Dentro, trovo scritto: “La presenza di essenze arboree, unitamente all’origine alluvionale dei terreni, ha favorito nel tempo le condizioni per la crescita del fungo ipogeo e il Bosco Panfilia, sintettizzandone morfologia e caratteristiche, è uno dei luoghi più adatti per il suo sviluppo.” E a quel punto decido che una bella incazzatura ci vuole.

I pilastri dell’incazzatura sono tre: Uno, chi c***o crede che un testo così pomposo (dietro il quale vedo benissimo il muso compiaciuto dello scrittore pompato) faccia venire voglia di assistere alla sagra? Due, perché c***o qualcuno è stato pagato per produrre una merda del genere, e sicuramente più della ragazza che la deve distribuire? E tre, dove c***o c’è il numero di telefono, perché, dài, veramente ... il “fungo ipogeo.”

Ci sono 923,000,000 persone nel mondo che soffrono della fame—quotidianamente, non come un fatto transitorio. Ogni anno, il 60% (SESSANTA PERCENTO!) della mortalità infantile in tutto il mondo è dovuto alla fame. E mi invitano ad una sagra per spacciare un prodotto per cui la gente è disposta a pagare tra €100 e €300 all’etto (all’ETTO!). Tra mille e tremila euro al kilo ($636-$1900 alla libbra americana). Cioè, se non bastassero quei prezzi, per rincarare lo snobismo devo pure leggere “essenze arboree,” “sintettizzandone morfologia e caratteristiche,” e “fungo ipogeo.”

È proprio qui dove l’essere buongustai, gourmand, foodie (come preferite chiamarlo) diventa un’oscenità. Ho un bisogno pazzesco di telefonare a quelli di Bosco della Panfilia giusto per dire, ma vaffanculo, va’.

The Scarlattina Letter

2009-10-27T12:10:00.000+01:00

It would take a stronger man than I to resist this joke....

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, today's Il Messaggero reports, is confined to his home in Arcore (Province of Monza e Brianza) with a case of scarlet fever and has cleared his official schedule for the rest of the week. Among other things, this means he won't have the chance to pop over to the Abruzzo yet again to take credit for (something about earthquake victims).

Only someone very, very distingué and genteel, however (i.e., not me) could refrain from noting that scarlet fever is one of those illnesses that adults tend to catch only when they spend a lot of time with children.

Signs of the Times

2009-10-15T14:25:00.015+02:00

A couple of responses to recent events in Italy.

The attempt to pass a version of a hate crimes law in Italy went down in flames a few days ago when "caring" center-right legislators voted to table the bill permanently, joined by their counterparts on (what passes for) the center-left. The latter group included, famously, Paola Binetti, a member not only of the so-called "Left Democrats" (Democratici di Sinistra) but of Opus Dei. She didn't vote for the bill, in case you've never heard this one before, because it would have "made my own beliefs about homosexuality a crime." To which a number of Italian bloggers quickly replied, "Good work. Now your beliefs about homosexuality aren't a crime; they're just bullshit."

The cartoon is headed "Representatives & the People They Represent" and juxtaposes the failure of the hate-crimes legislation with the October 11th gay-bashing of a university professor and his partner in the center of Rome. The case has received a great deal of publicity (for once), in (large) part because it joins a growing number of such attacks lately and in (larger) part because the professor in question was brave enough to come forward and talk publicly about what happened.

A parliamentarian holding the standard of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian Parliament) says, "Yeah, let's bury it/him! (a play on words: the bill was "affossata," that is, permanently shelved or "buried" in a figurative sense; but "affossare" recalls "fossa" or grave and, thus, bury in its literal sense as well). The skinhead says, "The only aggravating factor is you!" a reference to the bill's intention to add an "aggravante sessuale" or "sexual orientation enhancement" to existing penalties for battery in cases of homophobic aggression. (Grazie, Mauro Biani!)

Poster for one of the several ad hoc demonstrations that are being held around Italy in the wake of recent goings-on. This one is a kiss-in organized in Milan by the Giovani Democratici or Young Democrats. The legend says "Who's Afraid of a Kiss?" and invites the public to "join us for a kiss" in support of a "law against homophobic violence."

At Least He Makes the Sun Shine on Time

2009-10-14T10:02:00.007+02:00

That rocket scientist and aficionado of the "Roman salute," Italy's Minister of Tourism, Michela Vittoria Brambilla, has a brand new idea. Form a Task Force of young Italian patriots (rigorously under 30) to counter all the bad foreign press
Italy's been getting lately. These job of these young ~~teppisti~~ journalists is to seek out "negative" foreign press and counter it with "positive" articles about all that's right with Italy.

The job, that is, is to do like Silvio at the European Parliament in 2003. After German European MP, Martin Schulz, launched a blistering analysis of Italy's role in the European Union, including its retrograde laws and dismal human rights record, Berlusca responded by inviting Schulz to come to Italy and see all the things the Berlusconi government could take credit for. To wit:

the sun, the beauty, the one hundred thousand monuments and churches in Italy, our 3,500 museums, our 2,500 archaeological sites, the 40,000 historical houses in Italy that [the Berlusconi government] hasn't managed to destroy.

In other words: You say we're backwards on immigration; I say we get a lot of sun. You argue we're soft on crime; I say look at all those museums.

This, one imagines, is exactly the kind of thing Brambilla's squad is going to get up to, because the "international denigration of Italy" (her words) has to stop.

If so, she and her group of "It's Defamation Even If It's True" Irregulars have their work cut out for them. In the space of less than 48 hours this week, both Newsweek and the Washington Post published long articles critical of Berlusconi: "La Dolce Berlusconi" in the Post and "Silvio, It's Time To Go" in Newsweek.

Their coverage came only a few days after The Economist's "Out of Court," which commented,

In several cases, the only reason [Berlusconi] has escaped [legal] conviction has been either an amnesty or a modification of the statute of limitations sponsored by his own government.... To the prime minister’s supporters, though, the ruling is yet more evidence that he is the victim of a plot by his enemies and left-wing members of the judiciary.... The weakness (but also the strength) of the right-wing conspiracy theory is that it is self-confirming: the more the prime minister is prosecuted, the more he seems persecuted.... Many, perhaps even most, Italians now doubt the good faith of an institution, the judiciary, whose impartiality is essential to any functioning democracy....

If you don't read Italian, now's a good time to catch up on the serious political and social malaise that has Italy in its grip.

Quick, before Brambilla and her "truth squads" start telling you about the archaeological sites.

Che la tosa la tasa: Turning the corner on sexism in Italy?

2009-10-10T12:41:00.011+02:00

Silvio Berlusconi (linked via telephone on live television): Ah, is that the voice of Signora Rosy Bindi I hear?

Bruno Vespa: Yes, and she's saying that your comments present a really serious problem....

Berlusconi: As usual, she's prettier than she is intelligent.

Bindy: Mr. President, evidently I'm not one of those women who's at your disposal.

October 7, 2009 exchange between Premier Berlusconi and Rosy Bindi, MP and Vice-President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, on the Italian political talk-show, Porta a Porta.

---------------

You'd need a little background to fully appreciate the rage in Chiara Saraceno's article from today's La Repubblica, "Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the 'Philosophy of the Exploiter.'” But then again, maybe not all that much.

But you have to take a minute to get the full impact here. This is the leader of the entire country, the Italian Premiere, insulting the Vice President of the lower house of Parliament for (a) not being pretty and (b) not being smart. On national television. In front of literally millions of people. Roberto Castelli, Vice Minister for Infrastructure and Transportation, also present on the program, followed Berlusconi's shrewish and dismissive comment with a jibe of his own--Bindi was a nagging old maid, he opined.

Berlusconi's zingers and idiotic one-liners would fill a book (and I don't know why they haven't)--such as his comments about how he and Obama were so much alike because they were both "handsome and had a tan" or, in 2003, before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, when he "joked" to the socialist parliamentarian Martin Schulz, who had just finished (as they say) tearing Berlusconi a new one for Italy's racist immigration policies and failure to pursue cross-border extraditions: "Mr. Schulz, I know a production company in Italy that's in the process of filming a movie about the concentration camps. I'd like to recommend you for the role of kapo."

You get the picture.

So here's Saraceno's OpEd in translation. I hope her article--which is reproducing on the internet faster than mold on cheese--marks the start of something.

--------------------

Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the “Philosophy of the Exploiter.”

Silvio Berlusconi has always claimed to “adore women.” But he loses all sense of decency the minute one of them dares to contradict him.

by Chiara Saraceno
English translation by Wendell Ricketts

The Premier who “adores women,” as he so graciously told a Spanish journalist who asked him about his social life, loses not only his mind but all evidence of civility and decency the moment a woman, one of his colleagues in Parliament and the Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies, dares to criticize him. In the eternal locker room in which he seems to feel so at ease when it comes to talking about women or to women, it’s not enough to insult them in a general way—as baby-eating Communists, for example, the way he generally does with opponents of the same sex.

Instead [when he and Bindi locked horns on Porta a Porta], he couldn’t stop himself from basing his expression of scorn in an aesthetic judgment. In so doing, Berlusconi—who, by the way, is himself unattractive, dyed, and heavily lifted, in addition to being rather on the elderly side—confirmed that, as far as he’s concerned, women fall into two categories: the ones he finds pleasant to look at, who are potentially exploitable (if they haven’t already been exploited), and in whom intelligence is an optional accessory. (Or, if it' isn't optional, at least it doesn't stand in the way of their duty to hold him in fawning high regard).

And then there are all the rest. Women who are older or not conventionally beautiful are acceptable only if they are adoring. If they are not, the axe of judgment falls and they’re cast into the land of nonexistence.

Senator Roberto Castelli, floor leader of the Lega Nord [the Northern League], contributed his variant on this same locker room mentality, choosing to characterize Bindi via the classic topos of the old maid. As if a woman without a man were automatically unloved and unwanted rather than simply being an individual who had chosen not to have a partner (wisely so, one might be tempted to say, if men like Castelli are examples of what is available on the market).

For members of the Lega Nord, evidently, women must be prohibited from covering their faces or their heads for religious reasons, but the old saw from the depths of the Veneto Region remains true: “Che la tosa la tasa, che la piasa, che la staga a casa” [roughly, “woman: keep your mouth shut, your man happy, and your self at home”].

That attitude isn’t very distant from the one held by the traditionalist Muslim men from whom the proud members of the Northern League consider themselves so different.

Rosy Bindi was quick-witted enough to respond to the insult by observing that she was obviously not one of the women who belonged to Berlusconi’s “available and exploitable” category. But she is the only one who has reacted to Berlusconi’s and Castelli’s boorishness. Though there were a few embarrassed faces, not one of the men who were present, including the host of the show, Bruno Vespa, felt it was his duty to distance himself from the sort of gravely sexist language and behavior that makes it difficult for the few women who are, rarely, given the opportunity to participate in public discourse (Bindi was the only woman present on Porta a Porta that evening, on a stage full of men).

Not one of the many more-or-less elderly, flabby, unattractive, nipped-and-tucked men who populate Italian politics need ever fear being insulted or robbed of his dignity on the basis of those physical factors by anyone he deals with, no matter how heated the interaction becomes.

The silence (the embarrassed, cowardly silence of collaborators) of the men who are Berlusconi’s allies (just as of those who are his political opponents), of men in political life (just as of those in the media) is a crucial political issue that must be faced because it indicates how deeply the roots of sexism have been planted in our country’s culture. We can hardly forget that, in Spain, President Zapatero was attacked in the press simply because he stood silently by during one of Berlusconi’s road shows (on that occasion, Berlusconi explained just how he would extend the concept of hospitality if he found himself in the company of a beautiful and potentially available woman).

But there is another disturbing silence: the silence of the women in Berlusconi’s own governing party, starting with his cabinet ministers. Their voices are raised solely when their boss calls them to order so they can defend him against one or another of the scandals in the ongoing parade: his promises to put showgirls in political office, eighteen-year-old Noemi’s birthday party, all those carefree goings-on at his Villa Certosa mansion in Sardinia. But not one of them has distanced herself from the image of women—and of themselves as politicians and as ministers—that emerges from their passionate defense of their boss.

The Minister of Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, is the most notably silent, although it would presumably be her institutional duty to put in a word. Whatever the reasons that led her to be offered a position as Minister, she ought to make an effort to remember that equal opportunity is not a beauty pageant. And that we can’t permit a bunch of old letches, no matter how rich and powerful they may be, to pronounce judgment on what women are and what they’re capable of, age and beauty standards aside.

Allowing a colleague to be insulted, even if she’s a member of the opposition, for reasons that having nothing whatever to do with politics and everything to do with sexism is a serious mistake, and women are all paying the price for it.

What we talk about when we talk about "mafia" ...

2009-10-09T09:20:00.013+02:00

Fairly or not, the foreign press has been having a field day with Berlusconi (I'd say fairly, since the Italian press savagely lampooned both Clinton and Bush, and were right to do it), but this cartoon from the New York Times of 8 October 2009 hits on something that most people fail to understand about the impact of fifteen years of Berlusconi on Italy: that he has installed a mafia (if not, perhaps, "the" mafia) at the highest levels of government.

How many people are aware, for example, that he appointed his own lawyers to serve in Parliament? Indeed, only Berlusconi is directly elected (and this is the great mandate that he speaks of ad infinitum); after that, he and his party, the Popolo della Libertà (variously translated as the People of Freedom Party and the People's Freedom Party) decide who receives Parliament seats and Parliament salaries. The assignments are largely made, of course, on the basis of favors done or favors promised.

But that is precisely what the mafia is, at its basic organizational level: the ability to position "your" people in such a way that they (a) get rich and/or powerful; (b) remain beholden to you for that fact; and (c) protect your interests, support your initiatives, and keep their mouths shut.

Berlusconi with Godfather-esque hit men behind him is a crass image, but it gets the point across: Berlusconi's enforcers are, by now, everywhere. They take the form of television programs censored; of books rejected by the publishing houses Berlusconi owns; of a Left that lives in abject terror of being called Leftist; of squads of lawyers like fire ants ready to overwhelm and sting to death anyone (even rival newspaper companies) who criticizes Berlusconi; of media and journalistic careers ruined; of network news programs that somehow always manage to find time to bring you sound bytes from the Popolo della Libertà spokesclones, but almost never from the opposition (such that you'd quickly start believing there was no opposition).

For many Italians--perhaps most, if you believe the polls produced by his own media outlets--Berlusconi is an offer they couldn't refuse.

Slings and Arrows: They Always Come from the Left

2009-10-08T11:42:00.014+02:00

If you haven't been following Italian politics lately (and who could blame you?), including NoemiGate and the Paid Escort Scandals, the following OpEd from La Stampa might not make all that much sense to you.

In short, though, there was a sort of coup in Italy yesterday, when the Constitutional Court declared a 2008 law, the so-called "Lodo Alfano," unconstitutional. The legislation, one of Silvio Berlusconi's most Machiavellian triumphs, exempted him and three other of Italy's "più alte cariche" (highest-level government officials) from being prosecuted for ... well, for anything illegal they had ever done.

The immediate result of the passage of the Lodo Alfano was to suspend two mega-trials (involving, among other things, the bribing of judges and other serious chicanery) in which Silvio B. is a defendant. With yesterday's opinion, those trials should pick up where they left off, but I wouldn't hold my breath: Silvio certainly has a few tricks left up his sleeve and I doubt we've heard the last of the "Lodo."

In the meantime, Berlusconi gave one of his classic performances on TV last night, fulminating against the "Left" for having poisoned the Courts and twisted the media against him.

In the good-old, bad-old days, Berlusconi used to insist that filthy, baby-eating Communists were behind any objection to his ~~papal decrees~~ ~~ukases~~ ~~supreme commandments~~ proposals, and that was back when you were more likely to happen upon an honest cab driver in Rome than a real Communist in Italy. Now he limits himself to calling out "the Left," which is the source of all evil.

And that, as Massimo Gramellini points out in his delightful satire, explains just about everything.

* * * * * *

Slings and Arrows: They Always Come from the Left
La Stampa.it
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplRubriche/editoriali/hrubrica.asp?ID_blog=41
by Massimo Gramellini
Translated by Wendell Ricketts

After yesterday’s proclamation by the Boss, we’ve finally got a clear picture of where things stand. Italian judges are Leftists, which is nothing new. Public television, with the exception of Topo Gigio, is Leftist. Seventy-two percent of newspapers are Leftist (not 71 and not 73: 72%; He said it himself). The Constitutional Court is Leftist; the Quirinale, where the President of the Italian Republic lives, is Leftist; referees and umpires are almost always Leftists. Cops who hand out traffic tickets are Leftists. The teachers who give my son “Ds” are Leftists; the neighbor who stinks up our entire building with whatever he’s frying is a Leftist; the woman who stole my parking place is a Leftist, just like the Queen in Snow White, Veronica Lario (Berlusconi’s second wife), and the Constitution: Leftists, every single one.

The alarm clock that wakes you up at 7am is Leftist; having to shave is Leftist; coffee without sugar is Leftist; traffic jams and holes in my socks are Leftist; my hateful boss is a Leftist; my wife nagging me about the errands she wants me to run is an extreme Leftist. The lottery is Leftist, otherwise I’d win. Foreigners, professional comedians, and black cats are Leftists. Paid escorts are Leftists, but only the ones who can’t keep their mouths shut afterward. Cavour (Italy’s first prime minister in 1861) was a Leftist, but so were Indro Montanelli and Frederick I, if that’s the issue. Gianfranco Fini is a Leftist and the weather forecast is, too, at least if it predicts rain. Even I become a Leftist when I have trouble digesting my stewed bell-peppers. In Italy, there’s only one disaster that isn’t Leftist, and that’s the Left.

P.S. Long live Italy, long live Berlusconi! (yes, He said that, too!)

Italy: The Magical Land Where Racism Doesn't Exist ...

2009-09-20T12:48:00.005+02:00

... just ask Italy's politicians.

"Ciao a tutti tranne i negri. Hihi."

"Hi, everybody. Except for the niggers. Ha ha."

Graffito at the bus stop across from the mall where we do our weekly grocery shopping.

Twelve Million Flies Can't Be Wrong

2009-08-24T11:31:00.016+02:00

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

Tragedy on the High Seas

2009-08-22T13:45:00.009+02:00

Late in July, 78 Eritrean immigrants board a rubber raft in Tripoli, Libya, and set sail toward Italy. After six days, the motor quits and they quickly run out of provisions.

Some 23 days later, on August 20, they are intercepted by the Italian Guardia di Finanza about 7.5 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa. The immigrants report having run into at least ten fishing boats during their ordeal, only one of which stopped to give them food and water.

Of the 78 aboard at the beginning of the trip, only 5 are still alive when they are found by the Guardia di Finanza. The others had died and their bodies had been thrown into the sea.

Press Release by Italian Minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni, architect of the new "Security Package" that makes immigration a crime: "Seventy-Three Illegal Immigrants Evade Arrest."

Perfectly Formless: Mapplethorpe & Michelangelo in Florence (Mal Comune, Zero Gaudio)

2009-08-16T10:44:00.042+02:00

Having just returned home from seeing the Perfection in Form exhibit at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, I have just one question for curators Franca Falletti and Jonathan Nelson:

Were you out of your fucking minds?

I’ll admit it: The concept behind the Perfection in Form exhibit is so tantalizing that almost no one could resist. In fact, it was the idea alone that brought me all the way to Florence the weekend of Ferragosto, a time when most sentient beings would prefer to be anywhere else.

And yet. Michelangelo and Mapplethorpe together. Two artists who dedicated themselves to representations of the male body (not exclusively, but not incidentally either); two artists in significant portions of whose work the homoerotic charge is as palpable as it is inescapable (with allowances for differences between the Italian High Renaissance and the New York Sexual Renaissance, along with the small matter of the nearly five centuries that separate Mapplethorpe's birth from Michelangelo’s).

That said, I should have been warned when I read, on the Galleria’s website, Ms. Falletti’s and Mr. Nelson’s précis of the exhibit, a statement of purpose that itself deserves to be displayed in a museum somewhere (if there were a museum dedicated to masterpieces of incomprehensible, bombastic artspeak gobbledygook of the sort that fills exhibition catalogs the world over but which is grimly determined to subject the English language to peine forte et dure until all meaning has been crushed out of it).

Here, for example, are Falletti and Nelson attempting to describe the “theorem that lies at the basis” of the Perfection in Form exhibit: “[T]he assumption that provides the key of interpretation [is that] a true rupture between classical art and contemporary art does not exist. Historical phases do exist (and the XX century is one of them) in which the changes in conceiving and perceiving the artistic creation are faster and more radical. And yet, there remains a continuity in relation to which the great artists of the past and those of today (the past of yesterday) can always find a shared language, though with different sensitivities.”

(Translation: Great artists are connected by a common language that transcends individual styles or historical periods. The twentieth century is a time period. "The past of yesterday" is, unfortunately, the kind of poetry that defies translation.)

But Falletti and Nelson are just getting warmed up: “Consequently, the choice of the works to exhibit fell on photographs in which the artist [they mean Mapplethorpe] best expresses his classical sensitivity in the construction of an abstract and synthetic form, in itself an expression of perfection. The exhibition therefore offers the opportunity to reflect once again on a fundamental theme for the artists of all times and, in particular, for Michelangelo, for whom Mapplethorpe always showed a great interest: the theme of form and its relation to the Idea it contains."

(Translation: We chose photographs by Mapplethorpe that demonstrate his interest in form. Michelangelo was interested in form, too.)

Please note: The choice of photographs “fell”—out of an upper-story window and to its death, one imagines. And “Idea” is written with a capital letter because you might otherwise not Understand that we are talking about Art, where Ideas are Important.

This is English that is so crippled, so empty, so alienating, so insulting, so colossally stupid that the only dignified response to it is derision.

Once inside the exhibition, in fact, the fatuous, pretentious prose only gets worse. But if Ms. Falletti’s and Mr. Nelson’s unfitness to describe Perfection in Form was as blatant as all that, what convinced the administrators of the Galleria dell’Accademia or the trustees of the Mapplethorpe Foundation that they'd be capable of mounting a coherent exhibit? It's an (il)literary mystery.

Still, the question of the vacuous signage is a triviality: One comes to an exhibit like Perfection in Form to see the art, not to read. Let me attempt, then, to express the real reasons why the Perfection in Form exhibit is a failure in every single possible way that it is possible for an exhibition to be a failure, save the possibility of arson.

First of all, the Galleria dell’Accademia is a terrible museum in a country where terrible museums are as common as overpriced spaghetti. Ironic, isn’t it, that Italy, which spends so much time bragging about its unrivaled artistic heritage, should have such a careless, screw-you attitude about exhibiting that art?

Ironic, but true. Leaving aside the fact that 75% of Italy’s “artistic heritage” is stored in mildewy vaults, basements, and private archives or is otherwise maintained in perfect inaccessibility to the public, the lion’s share of the remainder is exhibited in freezing (or sweltering) churches so dark you could develop film there; placed eight feet above the visitor’s head in converted villas that were never intended to serve as museums; crammed into tiny spaces so busy with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architectural bagatelles that even the most amazing art work is trivialized; obscured behind pieces of dusty plate glass that serve better as mirrors than as windows; kept ten feet away from the public in cages, niches, hutches, or other enclosures; crammed in among a mind-boggling profusion of lesser holdings of breathtaking dullness and mediocrity (I’m thinking specifically of museums in which twenty display cases in a single room are dedicated to thousands of pottery fragments no larger than a cigarette lighter, each one of which has been carefully numbered); or is “in restauro” and thus covered by eleven feet of scaffolding.

The vast artistic legacy that is physically present within Italy’s borders is almost more than the mind can contemplate. The problem is that, at any given moment, seeing some of it is more a matter of accident and luck than it is of planning and intention on the part of Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage or Italian museum directors.

Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia is no exception. The lighting is harsh and fixtures are placed without regard for the art works on display; many of the paintings are so high on the wall that you’d need a ladder to see them (you can make out, on those mid-air canvasses, the outlines of figures starkly distorted by glare and shadow); and there’s a huge gallery dedicated to a numbing series of marble busts of long-forgotten Romans (or fragments of busts, or fragments of pedestals on which busts once stood), the quality of which is so mediocre that virtually the entire tiresome collection deserves to be carted off to the parking lot of the nearest nursery-and-garden store and sold. (Perhaps a way for the Galleria to raise money for better lighting? Just a thought.)

Let’s be honest: The Galleria dell’Accademia has one thing going for it, and one thing only: The David. Otherwise, it’s a smallish, provincial museum with ten great works of art, hundreds of eminently forgettable ones, and an appalling $14.00 ticket price.

And, of course, one must always contend with the basic hostility of the Italian museum curator toward the visitor. The idea that a museum should be educational or user-friendly is not Italian. Not by a long shot. The museum-goer in Italy is a rube and an interloper who is not worthy of admittance. Far from deserving accommodation, he deserves to be challenged to a duel: The art’s that way, bucko; give it your best shot.

If you have to contend with capricious gallery hours; museum websites written in wretched English and overflowing with inaccuracies (one page of the Galleria’s site says that the Mapplethorpe/Michelangelo exhibit runs through 27 September, a second page informs you that you have until September 30th, and still another assures you that the show has been extended through January 2010); outrageous overcrowding; usurious ticket prices; nonexistent or incomprehensible signage; execrable lighting; aggressive tour guides who shout you out of the way so their group can see the painting; and a veritable gauntlet of bottlenecks (such as at the Perfection in Form show, where a video of Patti Smith is placed smack at the entrance to an internal gallery: you can barely get through the door because of the clot of visitors watching the video, and you can barely watch the video because of the people elbowing you out of the way in their struggle to get past)—well, that’s just what you deserve for being so stupid as to come to a museum in the first place.

Italian museums (and the Galleria dell’Accademia, let’s be clear, is an Italian museum) employ bored and churlish guards whose sole job is to snarl at you if you try to take a photo, or if your cell phone rings, or if you get too close to a statue or a painting, or if you exit through the wrong door. They glower at you as if they were traffic cops and you’d just run a red light. They frown and wag their fingers at you as if they were playground attendants and you were a wayward four-year-old. They know nothing about what’s in the museum or, if they do, they aren’t interested in answering your idiotic questions about it. In short, they’re pissed off that you bothered to show up, and their counterparts in the front office are fully in agreement with the policy.

In addition to its other uncharms, the Galleria dell’Accademia is a singularly bad place to display a collection of relatively small photographs. It is a singularly bad place to display relatively small photographs behind glass, where the glare renders many of them invisible (or, in the second gallery, where one forgets that the photographs are indistinguishable in the gloom [the Galleria’s web page calls the lighting scheme “theatrical”] because of the new worry of becoming the victim of a pickpocket or frotteur in all that darkness).

And it is a singularly bad place to display relatively small photographs of naked twentieth-century men, a certain number of which have their business hanging out, because the juxtaposition with fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Madonnas, and crucifixions, and depositions is—sorry, but it’s the truth—not only macabre and aesthetically harrowing, it’s in the kind of ghastly bad taste one might expect from an exhibit curated by Homer Simpson.

And when it isn’t bad taste, it’s simply bad. Tacking a Mapplethorpe photograph of a body builder to a wooden frame alongside an enormous, unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo (one of his Prisoners, intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II), makes the photograph look like graffiti and renders the sculpture kitsch.

Kitsch is also a word that could be used—though it is not the only one that comes to my mind—for the decision to place blowups of Mapplethorpe photos around the David statue, which stands on a large pedestal in a rotunda at the blind intersection of three halls. Normally, the visitor approaches David face-on, and Ms. Falletti and Mr. Nelson chose to situate a large, black-and-white Mapplethorpe blowup on either side of the seventeen-foot-high statue. Now, it happens that one can walk completely around the David for the 360-degree view. At the Perfection in Form exhibit, however, when you arrived at David’s butt, two other Mapplethorpe enlargements waited—of a pair of models’ butts.

I’m sure this enormously amusing visual pun was supposed to appeal to the plebeians, but all it really did was expose (so to speak) the profoundly trivial nature of the entire exhibit.

Which brings us to the real reason the Perfection in Form exhibit is a monstrous, embarrassing failure: the fact that Ms. Falletti and Mr. Nelson don’t understand the first fucking thing about Robert Mapplethorpe.

The decision to mark the twentieth-anniversary of Mapplethorpe’s death with an exhibit in which every single trace of political, sexual, or cultural context has been peeled away like St. Bartholomew’s skin is not only obscene, it’s an act of nearly unprecedented cowardice. In fact, I can’t help but think that the only thing “perfect” about this exhibit was its perfect reflection of the retrograde, homophobic, and Catholic-strangled political and social climate in Italy today.

Nor do I think the Galleria’s decisions—political decisions, in the end—are an isolated case. Last summer, at the Scavi Scaligeri Centro Internazionale di Fotografia in Verona, Mauro Fiorese and Enrica Viganò’s fifty-year retrospective of the work of Duane Michals similarly sought, in similarly desperate terms, to emphasize the “universal nature” of Michals’ photographs. The visitor came away knowing a great deal about Michals—except for the fact that he is gay or the extent to which themes of homoeroticism and of love and loss between males have been an essential component of his work for decades.

In the case of the Galleria, many of those photos that purport to demonstrate Mapplethorpe’s search for "perfection in form" also happen to be the portraits of men he was physically attracted to, not a few of whom he had sex with and almost all of whom are black. I have yet to read a truly satisfying effort to parse the fascinating and complex racial and sexual politics of all that, but Falletti and Nelson’s attempt to be superior to such considerations is galling. Pretending to focus on Mapplethorpe’s attention to “form” doesn’t get anyone off the hook.

Writer Edmund White attempted to touch on the complexity of Mapplethorpe’s “sculptural” photographs of black men when he said in an interview: “Mapplethorpe sometimes looks at blacks as though there were figurines from the Art Deco period, sometimes he looks at them as though they were savage gods, sometimes he looks at them as purely abstract pieces of machinery. Sometimes he looks at them as athletes, sometimes he looks at them as exclusively sexual beings. You could say that all of these views are reprehensible or somehow objectifying, and I think he’d be the first to agree. But I don’t think that in any way minimizes the power of his art to awaken in us some of our deepest fears, dreams, nightmares.”

Though his language remains troubled by questions of “we” and “them,” of whose “fears and nightmares” he’s talking about, White at least attempted to say something thoughtful about race in Mapplethorpe’s work; he at least refused to sidestep the vexing and fascinating issue of Mapplethorpe’s “gaze.” Falletti and Nelson, in contrast, have found a new, twenty-first-century way to dehumanize Mapplethorpe’s models, sanitize his impulses, and depoliticize his art.

Do we really need to be reminded what Mapplethorpe meant for Reagan/Bush-era censorship mania in America? That the Washington, DC-based Corcoran Gallery abruptly canceled Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment show in 1988 and, a year later, that the Cincinnati, Ohio, district attorney prosecuted the director of that city’s Contemporary Arts Center for obscenity after the Center mounted the same exhibition? That the resulting controversy led to the famous “defunding” of four American performance artists in 1990 and, in the fullness of Jess Helms, to the complete evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts?

No. Let’s talk about “form” instead. Let’s talk about (here are Falletti and Nelson again) “the profound instance that leads to the creative act ... the need to dominate nature through an imposed rule, free of the artist’s emotional or optical point of view.”

(Translation: Blind artists without an “optical point of view” make better art? Artists impose rules on nature, but do so without emotion? I have no freaking idea, and I’m tired. Feel free to write and tell me what you think this mess really means.)

It’s interesting to note, by the way, that the title of Falletti and Nelson’s exhibit comes from a bowdlerized quote of Mapplethorpe’s, which is repeated copiously, if not obsessively, throughout the galleries: “I’m looking for perfection in form ... I am trying to capture what could be sculpture.”

Dot, dot, dot. What Mapplethorpe actually said was: “I’m looking for perfection of form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers. It’s no different from one subject to the next. I am trying to capture what could be sculpture....”

He did it with cocks. Mapplethorpe was interested in flowers and shape and form and composition ... and he was interested in cocks. And so was Michelangelo. Not exclusively, but not incidentally either. That’s another thing they had in common beyond form, and the fact needs to be said—loudly and insistently—chiefly because people like Falletti and Nelson refuse to.

Lesbian Cops? Not in Italy!

2009-07-04T09:00:00.013+02:00

For those who don't read Italian (and it's a shame, because the article below, from L'Espresso, is the first serious media investigation of this incident): the woman in the picture is Luana Zanaga, a 39-year-old cop who is facing suspension from her job in the Padova Questura, as well as other, as yet unspecified, disciplinary actions.

Her "crime"? Zanaga reported her colleagues for the "climate of homophobia" in her department and for ongoing discrimination against her because she is an out-of-the-closet lesbian. Zanaga reports incidents dating back to 2005, including a note from two fellow officers who suggested an unpleasant death for her in a concentration camp and a sexual advance from a male officer that ended only when she punched him. She's been charged with making false statements and "discrediting the police force."

"I expect them to make an example of me," Zanaga says, "to serve as a warning for all the others like me who stand up for themselves."

She's probably not wrong, unfortunately. It's 30 years ago in Italy and, as David Goodstein used to say, "You can always tell the pioneers. They're the ones with the arrows in their backs."

Zanaga, meanwhile, appears to be the first and, so far, the only out lesbian cop in the entire country.

News of the incident has appeared on queer blogs in Italy, but has received almost no coverage in the mainstream Italian media. Mara Carfagna, the Minister for Equal Opportunity (who maintains that discrimination against homosexuals does not exist), has made no statement.

Zanaga is nearly unprecedented in Italy, where the closet is about a hundred thousand square miles wide and virtually nobody fights for her or his rights when discriminated against--especially not in the military or the police. Zanaga marched in the LGBTQ pride march in Genova in June, and she's just not shutting up.

Meanwhile, her superiors have forced Zanaga to undergo medical and psychiatric exams in an apparent attempt to demonstrate that she's mentally ill and, in a perhaps small but wounding gesture, she was fired, shortly after coming out publicly, from her position as a coach of a girls' soccer team. The soccer club made that decision, it said, "to protect the good name of our organization" and also because they wanted to assure parents that there were no "homosexuals or drug addicts" in their midst.

If anyone knows how to reach Luana, please give her a hug for me. She's brave in a way I'd like to be brave, and courage like hers is in short supply here.

Let's just hope that all those arrows aren't enough to kill her.

**********

Agente gay a rapporto
di Paolo Tessadri
http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio//2103528

La denuncia di una poliziotta di Padova: mi vogliono punire perché sono lesbica. E, dopo gli insulti di alcuni colleghi, attacca: nelle forze dell'ordine regna ancora un clima di omofobia.

Luana Zanaga

La sua colpa? "Sono una poliziotta lesbica: per questo mi vogliono
punire". Luana Zanaga, 39 anni di Rovigo, in servizio alla Questura
di Padova, è sotto inchiesta disciplinare. Non la licenzieranno, ma
potrebbero sospenderla dal servizio fino a sei mesi. "Mi aspetto
una punizione esemplare, un monito per tutti quelli come me che
alzano la testa". Il provvedimento dovrà portare la firma del capo
della polizia, Antonio Manganelli. Capelli corti, poco più di un
metro e 60 di altezza, all'apparenza minuta ma incredibilmente
tenace nel rivendicare i suoi diritti: "Parlo come cittadina",
precisa. Perché l'accusano proprio di questo: di aver fatto
dichiarazioni senza autorizzazione e di aver portato discredito
alle forze dell'ordine. Lei sostiene di essersi difesa, dopo gli
insulti dei colleghi: ha denunciato di vivere in un "ambiente
omofobico" e per queste dichiarazioni a ottobre è finita sotto
inchiesta.

Già nel 2005 a Padova era stata trasferita dalle volanti alla sala
radio, subito dopo avere scritto su un sito omosessuale: una
vicenda per la quale parla esplicitamente di mobbing. A punirla fu
proprio una donna, un vicequestore: ogni 15 giorni doveva andare
dal medico della polizia perché ne attestasse l'idoneità. "Mi
chiedeva se stavo bene con la mia omosessualità e io rispondevo che
stavo benissimo", ricorda. È tornata alle sue amate volanti pochi
mesi fa, con l'arrivo del nuovo questore. Ma la situazione con
sembra cambiare: "Nel nostro ambiente siamo discriminati come
omosessuali". Le torna sempre alla mente un suo ex collega
siciliano delle volanti di Milano. Lo deridevano, lo insultavano:
una mattina di sei anni fa si è sparato. Ed è stata proprio lei a
portargli soccorso.

Fra tanti messaggi di questi giorni ha ricevuto anche le mail di
due poliziotti, un uomo e una donna, che l'hanno consigliata di
"bruciare in un lager". "Io amo la polizia, a quattro anni giocavo
con un modellino di moto della squadra mobile, a 13 ho rotto le
scatole a uno spacciatore davanti a casa e nel '98 sono entrata in
servizio. Fin da piccola sognavo questo lavoro", ammette Luana
Zanaga. Laureata in Scienze politiche, non è mai riuscita a vincere
il concorso per funzionaria perché, sospetta, v'è stato ostracismo.
E ricorda un episodio al corso della scuola di polizia di Pescara.
"Girava voce che io e un'altra poliziotta stessimo insieme e alle
due di notte un responsabile voleva entrare nelle nostre camere".
Il suo, dichiara, non è un caso isolato: parla di omosessualità
diffusa all'interno delle forze dell'ordine.

Motivi per punirla per il lavoro non ce ne sono, il suo stato di
servizio è impeccabile: voto 'distinto' nel rapporto di
valutazione. Al suo attivo 32 arresti, un sequestro sventato, "ma
mai un encomio, mai un riconoscimento da qualche superiore".

Poi, a ottobre dello scorso anno, un giornale patavino pubblica un
rapporto riservato interno in cui si rivela la sua convivenza con
un'altra donna. La spia - ritiene Luana - è uno dei colleghi che in
questi anni l'hanno discriminata, che ha voluto screditarla
pubblicamente. Chiamata a rapporto dai superiori, Luana non tace la
propria omosessualità e si difende. Ma le ripercussioni sono
immediate: a Rovigo, dove doveva essere trasferita, dichiarano la
sua "incompatibilità territoriale". E proprio da Rovigo parte un
violento attacco da un funzionario, che la dipinge come una "una
matta lesbica". La polizia pochi giorni fa l'ha 'processata' per
ore davanti a una commissione disciplinare e fra tre mesi le sarà
inflitta la pena. La scorsa settimana ha ottenuto anche la
solidarietà di Gianfranco Fini, che ha incontrato insieme ad altri
rappresentanti di associazioni gay. E non rinnega nulla: "Se
rinascessi, vorrei rinascere lesbica e fare la poliziotta".

(02 giugno 2009)

From The Land That Knows No Shame ...

2009-07-02T09:41:00.005+02:00

Today I'm simply stealing wholesale from Charles Lambert (I even stole the headline of this post). I'm on a deadline and, anyway, I couldn't have said it any better.

Why does he bother? Because "freedom of the press" in Italy has come to mean "you're free to invent anything you want to." And also because someone has to (bother)!

-----------------------

Thursday, 2 July 2009

All the news that's fit to print
by Charles Lambert

The blonde in the green tee-shirt is Noemi Letizia. She's the eighteen-year-old who calls Silvio Berlusconi Papi and can't decide whether to cavort on a table in her underwear or represent Italy at the European parliament (and, let's face it girls, could you?). The man standing next to her, one hand adoringly encircling her neck, is her boyfriend. His name is Domenico Cozzolino. The older couple behind them, lips pressed together as the pressure within Vesuvius slowly builds to their rear, are the happily-married parents of Noemi, Signor and Signora Letizia, enjoying a moment's intimacy. The photograph comes from a popular Italian magazine called Chi (Who).

In the preceding paragraph the first and last sentences are true. The rest of it is nonsense. Domenico Cozzolino is not, and never was, Noemi's boyfriend. He's pimped himself on afternoon TV and is now a PR. He was asked by Noemi, who'd apparently been prompted by someone else, to pretend to be having an affair with her, indeed, to be engaged to be married. Naturally, no PR worth his salt would turn down the chance to be photographed with a household name for a mass circulation magazine, even if it does mean lying through his teeth. And talking of lying, the couple of canoodlers in the background may be Noemi's parents, but they aren't usually this affectionate with each other. They're separated and have been for some time. The photograph, like the article accompanying it, is a complete fabrication. It's a lie designed to legitimate the Letizia family and their squalid dealings with the Italian prime minister. Who also happens to be the owner of Mondadori. Which happens to publish Chi.

I don't know why I bother.

Racism is a boomerang....

2009-06-24T13:20:00.009+02:00

The more than fifty-year-old Italian ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana) is launching a new campaign against racism and homophobia in Italy. Their poster appears below:

The Rome-based ARCI was founded in Florence in 1957 with the purpose of encouraging the diffusion of democratic values and fighting “nazifascismo,” which is a single concept in country that was governed by both Nazis and Fascists during WWII.

The caption on the poster reads:

“You call us dirty nigger and stinking lesbian, but you're offended if someone calls you an Italian gangster. Racism is a boomerang. Sooner or later it’ll come back to hit you.”

The semiotic approach of the campaign is pretty intriguing. What’s useful to know by way of background is that “razzismo” is used in Italy to mean “discrimination” or “bigotry” of all kinds and not just race-based prejudice. Thus someone who degrades or disparages women or gay people (or Sicilians, for that matter) can be considered “racist.”

There’s both a certain efficiency and an immense danger of oversimplification in smooshing issues together in that way, and I have to admit I still wince when I hear an Italian use “racist” when a good old “homophobe” or “sexist” would do nicely (and both words exist in Italian).

The other thing the campaign takes for granted, which a non-Italian might or might not immediately grasp, is the degree to which Italians are offended by the assumption that Italian culture (as the popular saying would have it) can be summed up as “pizza, mandolins, and the mafia.”

The Italic Studies Institute of American (“Guardian of the Italian Heritage”), for example, issued a study in 2002 in which they analyzed 1,233 American films made since 1928 and concluded that 69% “portrayed Italians in a negative light.” Of the films analyzed, 40% depicted Italians as “mob characters,” with the remaining 60% of the negative portrayals divided among “boors, buffoons, bigots or bimbos.”

When The Sopranos arrived in Italy in 2001 (with record TV audience shares—about 10 million viewers—for the series’ premiere), Italians seemed to take it a bit less seriously than did Italo-Americans, but I suspect that’s largely because the series dealt with Americans first and foremost. Italians are well aware that Italian-Americans have almost nothing to do with Italians, and they're not entirely unwilling to believe that America is a four-million-square-mile-wide crime zone (so much so, in fact, that the media are likely to refer to any incident involving a troubled neighborhood or a violent protest in Italy as the “Far West,” “the Bronx,” or “Fort Apache”).

In any case, there’s no question that the association rankles, and ARCI’s obvious attempt is to suggest that negative stereotyping comes from a similar place, regardless of the target.

Frankly, I’m enthusiastic about the attempt to educate the public that racial/ethnic prejudice and homophobia are related in their consequences (if not necessarily in their source). For decades, the LGBTQ movement in the U.S. (even back when it was just “the gay movement”) has tried hard to associate itself with the traditional civil-rights movement, and it has always been a hard sell.

Similarly, attempts to equate homophobia with racism have met with mixed success in the states, not least because of a few insulting, ham-handed attempts to draw parallels between Harvey Milk and Martin Luther King or to compare queer protesters under arrest with Rosa Parks. We’re seeing some of the results of that failure in the current same-sex marriage debate.

Meanwhile, the history of dealing with cultural prejudice and the “-isms” is so different in Italy (which has never had what one might reasonably call a “civil rights movement”), that I wonder if ARCI might not just be on to something.

I’m a little less convinced by ARCI’s claim that the new posters will “appear all over Italy,” since I’ve heard that song before (see my piece on the Tuscan Region’s “Sexual Orientation is Not A Choice” campaign back in 2007—those posters were also supposed to go up “all over Tuscany,” but I never saw a single one in a public place.)

ARCI’s own distribution efforts aside, it’s hard to know how much attention the campaign is going to get in Italian schools or the media. Not much, would be my prediction, but I’d be happy to be wrong. On the other hand, over the last year the Italian government has whipped up so much racism (in the Italian sense of the word) that a national response by a respected organization would be more than welcome.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what Mara Carfagna, the ex-cover girl turned Minister for Equal Opportunity, will make of ARCI’s campaign. If she’s smart, she’ll ignore it, but the Italian right-wing is feeling more than usually testy lately, and she’s just likely, as Italians put it, to miss a perfect opportunity to keep her mouth shut.

How Paranoid is Paranoid Enough?

2009-06-17T14:23:00.002+02:00

On June 5, 2009, during an annual celebration dedicated to the Arma dei Carabinieri (the Italian military police force that generally keeps civil order but is also called into combat overseas), TV crews (and several others) caught Minister of Tourism, Michela Vittoria Brambilla, in a one-armed Fascist salute following the playing of the Italian National Anthem.

Brambilla, who is frequently mentioned as the likely political successor to Silvio Berlusconi, serves as an Undersecretary in Berlusconi's cabinet. The event was an official state function, and she was present as a government representative.

A photo of the event was published in the Repubblica on June 6.

Meanwhile, the YouTube video (below) has been making the usual rounds.

Brambilla has also been accused of attending a separate event on May 29, 2009, said to have been an official "Black Shirt" assembly, and at which, it is alleged, she was also seen giving the Fascist salute.

Brambilla responds as follows: "The Italian Left really makes me laugh. They don't have any political issues to talk about so our adversaries are reduced to commenting on the angle of my elbow or the height of my arm when I salute the citizens of Italy."

In other words, not exactly a denial. Rather, Brambilla's snotty riposte is a typical example of the Italian Right's media strategy (which, it has to be said, they sort of borrowed from Reagan, after Sarah Palin got done using it: Neither the Great Communicator nor American's Favorite Soccer Mom particularly liked answering questions they didn't write themselves, and neither do the emissaries of Berlusconistan).

Someone is going to alert me before they start building the work camps, right?

Mr. Berlusconi Goes to Washington

2009-06-16T10:45:00.005+02:00

And the original version in Italian from the good folks at www.bastardidentro.it:

One Ronde Doesn't Mean It's Spring....

2009-06-15T11:57:00.011+02:00

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Italian government is about to give the official nod to the recently formed Italian National Guard (Guardia Nazionale Italiana), whose website you can see here and whose uniforms and emblems might just remind you of something. If the law is approved, the GNI will activate its posses (they call them “citizen patrols”) in public places in Italy as a means to “help” the beleaguered police, whom the GNI is convinced are failing to maintain public order.

The GNI is a loose association of ex-cops, ex-military, and ex-Fascist party adherents (though perhaps, in the latter case, you could even leave off the “ex”) heartily supported by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, who was quoted in yesterday’s La Repubblica as saying, “We want citizens to be able to support the police forces in our cities. People say, ‘They want street patrols.’ Yes, street patrols are exactly what we want.... Anything else is just idle chat. We’re not going to back down, despite the accusations that we’re trying to bring back the Black Shirts and all the rest. We’re going to see this through because it will bring greater security to our cities.”

The step you might have missed—a linkage that Maroni and his cronies have by now forged in Teflon—is that “more security” is a euphemism for “fewer immigrants.” For the GNI, the site says, “the Italian citizen is the first and most important pillar of the State,” a phrase not without a certain level of euphemism all its own. An alarming number of Italians, meanwhile, have swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—the equation “foreigner=danger,” and that particular genie isn't going back in the bottle any time soon.

For the record, the GNI denies that the “Black Sun” they’ve adopted as a symbol has anything to do with the similar logo used by the SS during World War II or which has more recently been employed by NeoNazi groups. On the GNI site, instead, they trace the Sole Nero back 13,000 years and associate it with the Kaliyuga. Just like when you spy a swastika tattooed on the shoulder of the skinhead who is burning a cross on your lawn, it doesn’t have anything to do with Nazism. He only put it there because of his deep spiritual connection to an ancient and holy Sanskrit symbol.

The GNI, meanwhile, officially insists that it is an apolitical “patriotic group” organized to provide an outlet for citizens who feel the call to serve their country in a concrete fashion and established as a direct response to reductions in staffing and funding for police forces. As of this writing, the GNI claims to have enrolled 2,500 Guardisti, who are simply waiting the approval of the proposed legislation that will authorize them to begin their patrols in Milan, Sicily, Puglia, and Calabria.

The street patrols will be carried out by unarmed militiamen (and –women?), who will nonetheless be equipped with donated vehicles, boats, and even an airplane. Charles Lambert has more to say about it on his blog, “Dressing Up.”

It’s times like these that make you long for an Italian Civil Liberties Union, Of course, that would only work in a country that had any.

Life in Berlusconistan -- Episode 12,651: Parade Route Denied to Roma Pride 2009 Organizers

2009-06-04T14:18:00.030+02:00

Every year, just like clockwork, this sort of stuff happens in Russia, with plenty of water cannons, riot police, and arrests for people who attempt to demonstrate peacefully anyway.

But not in Italy, right? Because Italy is a democracy. Or, at least, that's what it says on their web page.

Why, in 2009, isn't Rome's mayor ashamed of himself? Why isn't the police department hanging its head in embarrassment? I dunno the answers, but I do know one thing: If this is how Italy intends to treat its gay people, it doesn't deserve to have any (pace, beloved Oscar).

Here's a letter from the organizers of Roma Pride 2009 about the city of Rome's refusal to grant permission for the annual march to take place this year.

------------------

June 2, 2009

Dear Friends,

Each passing day brings this year’s annual Roma Pride celebration nearer. With only ten days to go before the scheduled June 13th date, however, the issue of the parade route remains unresolved.

As many of you already know, on June 2nd, police officials in Rome’s Questura denied permission to the organizers of Roma Pride 2009—for the third time—to use the parade route. they had proposed. The motivations for the latest refusal, which have become increasingly pretextual and absurd with each denial, have forced the Rome Pride 2009 committee to consider legal recourse to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court and to the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano.

In addition to the customary issues of LGBT rights and discrimination in Italy, we now face this serious infringement of our basic liberties as citizens. Rome Pride 2009—a significant demonstration for civil rights and for the visibility of an entire community—is under threat thanks to the arbitrary and unilateral decision-making processes of the city of Rome and its officials.

This year, just as last year, city authorities have not simply caved in to the dictates of the Vatican in denying Rome Pride 2009 access to Piazza San Giovanni, outside the Basilica of St. John Lateran, as a post-parade gathering point. They have gone so far as to successfully oppose the parade itself, denying the celebration’s organizers permission to follow the parade route used in 2008 (which leads from Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Navona).

These actions set a dangerous precedent for all citizens and for all future demonstrations, marches, and rallies. It is an alarming attack on the principle of separation of church and state and on our freedom of association. As such, it represents a threat not solely to Italians who are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans but to all the country’s citizens.

For all of these reasons, we ask that you do everything you can to show your solidarity with Roma Pride 2009.

You can indicate your personal support or that of your group or association by sending an email to romapride@gmail.com (please copy me personally at a.maccarrone@mariomieli.org).

Additionally, please spread the word by forwarding this message to your friends and families, colleagues, LGBT groups, activists, rights organizations, politicians, and parade organizers in other parts of the world.

If you are a journalist, or if you blog or publish a newsletter or periodical either in print or online, please pass this news on to all of your readers and contacts. The diffusion of information about the obstacles placed in the path of Roma Pride 2009 is our main weapon against the shroud of media silence that has fallen over this situation.

With gratitude for your support and help,

Andrea Maccarrone
a.maccarrone@mariomieli.org
romapride@gmail.com
http://www.romapride.it

Una Rosa ...

2009-05-19T15:03:00.001+02:00

... per il mio amore, che mi mancherà così tanto. Non sei mai solo, Mouse. Ti amo con tutto il mio cuore.

Immagine ...

2009-05-10T12:03:00.003+02:00

I wish I could draw an invisible wall around this house and carve out our own country. Citizens, only two, but visitors welcome: no passports, no visas, no border police. A safe place that no one could ever threaten or take away...

Follow the link for more Spring Garden photos.

I Carried Out My Orders....

2009-05-09T13:32:00.012+02:00

Quoted in the Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper on May 9, 2009, Premier Berlusconi commented on the "respingimento" (rejection) of 200 Africans who attempted to enter Italy illegally, only to be rounded up and forcibly returned to Libya (the subject of the article below).

"The center-left wants a multi-ethnic Italy," Berlusconi commented. "We don't see it that way."

---------------

La Repubblica
9 maggio 2009

Parlano i militari delle motovedette italiane che hanno riportato in Libia i migranti.|
Solo un giovane del Mali è riuscito a nascondersi ed è sbarcato a Lampedusa: "Miracolato"

"Ho eseguito gli ordini ma mi vergogno. Quei disperati ci chiedevano aiuto" ["I carried out my orders, but I'm ashamed of myself. Those people were desperate and they were asking us for help."]

dal nostro inviato FRANCESCO VIVIANO

LAMPEDUSA - "È l'ordine più infame che abbia mai eseguito. Non ci ho dormito, al solo pensiero di quei disgraziati", dice uno degli esecutori del "respingimento". "Dopo aver capito di essere stati riportati in Libia - aggiunge - ci urlavano: "Fratelli aiutateci". Ma non potevamo fare nulla, gli ordini erano quelli di accompagnarli in Libia e l'abbiamo fatto. Non racconterò ai miei figli quello che ho fatto, me ne vergogno".

Parlano i militari delle motovedette italiane - quella della Guardia di Finanza, la "Gf 106" e quella della Capitaneria di porto, la "Cpp 282" - appena rientrati dalla missione rimpatrio. Sono stati loro a riportare in Libia oltre 200 extracomunitari, tra i quali 40 donne (3 incinte) e 3 bambini, dopo averli soccorsi mercoledì scorso nel Canale di Sicilia. Un "successo", lo ha definito il ministro Maroni, che finanzieri e marinai delle due motovedette non condividono anche se hanno eseguito quegli ordini. Niente nomi naturalmente, i marinai delle due motovedette rischierebbero quanto meno una punizione se non peggio. Ma molti non nascondono il loro sdegno per quello che hanno vissuto e dovuto fare. "Eravamo impegnati in altre operazioni - dicono fiamme gialle e marinai della capitaneria - poi improvvisamente è arrivato l'ordine di andare a soccorrere quelle tre imbarcazioni, di trasbordarli sulle nostre motovedette e di riportarli in Libia".

Non è stato facile, a bordo di quelle carrette del mare c'erano donne incinte, tre bambini e tutti gli altri che avevano tentato di raggiungere Lampedusa. "Molti stavano male, alcuni avevano delle gravi ustioni, le donne incinte erano quelle che ci preoccupavano di più, ma non potevamo fare nulla, gli ordini erano quelli e li abbiamo eseguiti. Quando li abbiamo presi a bordo dai tre barconi ci hanno ringraziato per averli salvati. In quel momento, sapendo che dovevamo respingerli, il cuore mi è diventato piccolo piccolo. Non potevo dirgli che li stavamo portando di nuovo nell'inferno dal quale erano scappatati a rischio della vita".

A bordo hanno anche pregato Dio ed Allah che li aveva risparmiati dal deserto, dalle torture e dalla difficile navigazione verso Lampedusa. Ma si sbagliavano, Roma aveva deciso che dovevano essere rispediti in Libia. "Nessuno di loro lo aveva capito, ci chiedevano come mai impiegavamo tanto tempo per arrivare a Lampedusa, rispondevamo dicendo bugie, rassicurandoli".

La bugia non è durata molto, poco prima dell'alba qualcuno ha notato che le luci che vedevano da lontano non erano quelle di Lampedusa ma quelle di Tripoli. Alla fine i marinai italiani sono stati costretti a spiegare: "Non è stato facile dire a tutta quella gente che li avevamo riportati da dove erano partiti. Erano stanchi, avevano navigato con i barconi per cinque giorni, senza cibo e senza acqua. Non hanno avuto la forza di ribellarsi, piangevano, le donne si stringevano i loro figli al petto e dai loro occhi uscivano lacrime di disperazione".

Lo sbarco a Tripoli è avvenuto poco dopo le sette del mattino: "Vederli scendere ci ha ferito tantissimo. Ci gridavano: "Fratelli italiani aiutateci, non ci abbandonate"". Li hanno dovuti abbandonare, invece, li hanno lasciati al porto di Tripoli dove c'erano i militari libici che li aspettavano. Sulla banchina c'erano anche i volontari delle organizzazioni umanitarie del Cir e dell'Onu, ma non hanno potuto far nulla, si sono limitati a contare quei disperati che a fatica, scendevano dalla passerelle delle motovedette per tornare nell'inferno dal quale erano scappati. Le donne sono state separate dagli uomini e portati in "centri d'accoglienza" vicino Tripoli. Non si sa che fine faranno.

Solo uno è riuscito a sfuggire al rimpatrio. Un ventenne del Mali che aveva intuito cosa stava succedendo a bordo e si era nascosto sotto un telone. Ha messo la testa fuori solo quando la motovedetta della Finanza è attraccata a Lampedusa, ha aspettato che a bordo non ci fosse più nessuno e poi è sceso anche lui. È stato rintracciato mentre passeggiava nelle strade dell'isola ed ha subito confessato. Adesso si trova nel centro della base Loran di Lampedusa. Un miracolato.

Hold That Thought

2009-04-29T12:28:00.005+02:00

This is no time for cavils about how you’re not religious and you don’t “do” prayer—let’s not even mention white light or healing circles. Everybody believes in hope, right? Everybody wishes their friends well, right? So do that, please. And do it a lot.

1. Here’s where we live. Imagine us safe and together within that circle. Imagine the circle strong and unbroken. Imagine the home we’ve made together—with all our silly, cheap souvenirs from trips here and there, our postcards attached to the fridge with magnets, our books, our dirty socks, the couch where we watch too much TV, the table where we dunk biscotti in our coffee every morning—imagine that environment uninterrupted and whole. (If a few people we don’t actually know get blessed inside the circle, hey: it’s for a good cause.)

2. Here are a couple of shots from our garden from last year. Your job is to imagine us sitting at the rickety little table in our tiny courtyard and looking at things like that again this year. Picture us on all the warm mornings and evenings to come, eating out there and working out there and just sitting there watching things grow and feeling lucky and grateful to be together.

3. And here are a last two from our garden right now. Here, your job is to imagine us being able to be together and watch all of those things grow up, get planted, and produce their flowers, fruits, vegetables or what have you, as the months go by. Picture us eating lots of salads, and putting our own basil on pizza, and making risotto with fresh peas, and canning the leftover tomatoes when Fall comes along. Picture us peaceful.

With much love,

Wendell

Lessons in Grownup Etiquette

2009-04-22T14:21:00.006+02:00

Unexpectedly, Friend A calls to say that Friend B is suddenly in the hospital, the kind of serious being in the hospital that must be described with words like “chemotherapy” and “intensive care.”

Friend A is careful to warn me, however—including in a follow-up email—that I must, under no circumstances, contact Friend B because I am not supposed to know that Friend B is seriously ill, or in the hospital, or both. I cannot send a card or a text message, nor can I phone. Visits, of course, are out of the question.

Now, what I would like more than anything else, is for Friend B not to be in the hospital. That is, what I wish is that the (let’s call them) facilitating conditions did not exist in the first place. Beyond that, my next preference would be not to have been enrolled in a Grownup Secret that I don’t know what to do with.

To be honest, I’m not sure how I would behave if I were gravely ill. I do know I wouldn’t want to have to describe the details of my treatment or my prognosis over and over and over again. I wouldn’t want to have to face either false cheerfulness or enforced grimness on the part of my friends. I wouldn’t want medical advice or information about miracle cures downloaded from the internet.

I wouldn’t want to have to confront what Anatole Broyard described, in his book Intoxicated by My Illness, as others’ need for the ill person to be ill properly, to assume the “role” we are taught (by TV movies or Kubler-Ross books or Oprah) is the appropriate one: full of emotional gravitas and spiritual maturity or, alternately, brimming with heart-breaking vulnerability and bracing honesty.

So perhaps, if I were gravely ill, I would also erect cordons around myself to keep my condition secret; perhaps I would elect others to serve as gatekeepers and bodyguards.

At the same time, in the decade that ran roughly from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as I watched one friend after another fall ill and die from HIV/AIDS-related complications, I realized that the committees of bedside bouncers and concierges of convalescence that gathered around the sick and the dying were often self-appointed, that their duties were not necessarily guided by the wishes of the person who was ill.

At least twice, to my shame, I served as one of those “caregivers” who decided who could know and how much, who could telephone and who could only send a card, who could be granted an audience and who could be entrusted with a set of house keys. Sometimes, the ill person even enjoyed these ministrations, the chance to settle grudges or to enforce those hierarchies of intimacy and friendship that exist always but are virtually never explicated, except during illness or tragedy.

More often, however, it was the sentinels themselves who relished the mandarin power to wield information, to permit or to refuse, to allow or to demur. Even though in those years, and at least in San Francisco, sickness and death were widely considered to be a community spectacle (the way—forgive the macabre parallel—pregnant women are often treated as though they were a public matter), not everyone was entitled to a backstage pass.

I think, nonetheless, if I were ill, that I would want more than anything else to know what was taking place in my friends’ lives; I would be more avid for their news than they could ever be for mine.

I have never been seriously ill, or at least not since I was a small child. But I have been around enough illness—more than enough—to know that it is a tedious, monotonous affair and that its worst feature is its trick of isolating the ill person from life beyond the sick room, the clinic, the rounds of doctors’ offices. It is like exile to a country where you know no one and where the natives speak to you in a strange language that you must learn instantly and resign yourself to using imperfectly.

In that situation, I would want distraction. I would want gossip and movie reviews. I would want to know how the garden was growing and whether the increase in bus fares looked as though it would get through the city council. I would want anything that pulled me upright and reconnected me to the world. Especially if I feared leaving it. Especially if I really was leaving it.

I am not, obviously, in a position to know the “truth” of Friend B’s wishes. Perhaps other people would be of no comfort at all; doubtless there are factors that I cannot apprehend from my location on that other continent, the land of the well.

And yet I can only be perplexed by the decision to keep others at bay—assuming, indeed, that it was a decision. Because to ward off the ham-handed sympathy of others, their awkward curiosity and their palpable discomfort, is also to deny their warmth and humor, their sustenance, their ability to carry with them everywhere, like birds, the seeds of heedlessness and of a voluptuous, temporary amnesia.

So this is for Friend B, who will never read it: what I might have said, if I’d been able. If I were not part of a Grownup Secret I am not grownup enough to understand.

Not One Euro for the Earthquake in Abruzzo - Giacomo Di Girolamo

2009-04-17T14:57:00.006+02:00

Giacomo Di Girolamo is a journalist in Marsala, Sicily. His open letter, my translation of which appears below, was first published on Facebook several days after the 6 April 2009 earthquake in the Abruzzo region (centered about ten kilometers west of the town of L’Aquila). Di Girolamo’s letter quickly set a record for readers and comments and, on 15 April 2009, La Repubblica’s Adriano Sofri responded to Di Girolamo in a front-page Op-Ed. His half-hearted rebuke suggested that Di Girolamo’s purpose was rhetorical rather than actual—in other words, Sofri opined, the thousands who wrote to say they agreed with Di Girolamo, and probably even Di Girolamo himself, had actually parted with their Euros after all, even if they did so with misgivings.

Leaving aside the question of whether it is or isn’t appropriate to donate money to Abruzzo earthquake relief, the rest of what Di Girolamo says is incontrovertible. The media circus around the earthquake has been shameless. The photo opportunities for politicians mouthing pieties have been endless. And, slowly, alarming facts are beginning to come out: that supposedly seismic-proofed buildings such as the University Student Residence and the San Salvatore Hospital in L’Aquila, both of which were substantially destroyed, may have been constructed with cement mixed with beach sand (taken illegally from the nearby seashore) rather than lime, a substantial savings for contractors but a guarantee that structures built in such a way will be less resistant; that city officials repeatedly told residents, despite literal months of hundreds of smaller earthquakes, not to worry, to go back home, not to be alarmist—and, in the meantime, promulgated no evacuation plan for the city.

As for what will likely come of all the promises of funding and rebuilding and so forth, it's enough to read Roberto Saviano's comments in The Independent. If you haven't lived in Italy, it's difficult to believe that things could go so wrong or be so corrupt (if you live in New Orleans, it's probably less difficult to believe), but they do and they are. And that's part of what gives Di Girolamo's letter so much impact: When he says that what he wants is "an efficient national government," he's asking for a lot.

In writing that the Abruzzo earthquake would provide politicians with a "front" that could be used to "justify anything and everything," Di Girolamo was also more than a little prescient. During an April 16 news conference, Prime Minister Berlusconi explained why it was impossible to combine the upcoming referendum with the scheduled elections for the European Parliament -- one of Di Girolamo's suggestions and a move that would save the government literally hundreds of millions of Euros.

It couldn't be done, Berlusconi said, because the Lega Nord, the powerful right-wing political party whose stated goal is to detach several northern regions from the rest of Italy and create a new country, Padania (see Lega Nord in Wiki for more information), threatened to call for a no-confidence vote in Parliament and cause the government to fall. It's complicated, but basically the issue is that the referendum would be valid only if a certain percentage of voters show up to vote: the Lega Nord doesn't want the referendum to pass and is worried that combining the elections would increase voter turnout and, thus, validate the referendum. Hence their threat.

To allow the government to fall at a time of economic crisis and when Italy was dealing with the aftereffects of a devastating earthquake, Berlusconi said, was out of the question. When a reporter directly asked Berlusconi whether it wasn't an enormous waste of money to hold two elections, he responded, "Look, this doesn't have anything to do with me and this is not the time for a question like that." End of discussion.

Meanwhile, also on April 16, Radio Capital broadcast an investigative report on the collapse of the San Salvatore Hospital. The report revealed, among other things, that the firm responsible for building the hospital with faulty materials went bankrupt many years ago. Other construction firms and suppliers who worked on the hospital are still in business, however, but thanks to the Italian system of using subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and sub-sub-subcontractors, ultimate responsibility for the shoddy construction may never be determined. The investigation and legal proceedings, in any case, would take at least ten years to conclude, at which point many of the claims would have to be dismissed because the statue of limitations would have run out.

One of the paradoxes of life in Italy is precisely this: that it is, at the very same moment, a modern, post-industrial, Western nation -- and a third-world country.

* * * * * *

Not One Euro for the Earthquake in Abruzzo
by Giacomo Di Girolamo
Trans. by Wendell Ricketts

You'll have to forgive me, but I won’t be donating so much as a single cent toward the fund -raising efforts now underway for the victims of the earthquake in the Abruzzo. What I'm saying sounds like an obscenity, I know, and I also know that people normally flaunt the opposite position, with none of the modesty that charity requires.

But I’ve made up my mind. I won’t be making any telephone calls to toll-free numbers that extract a Euro from my account; I won’t be sending any "donate-a-Euro" text messages. From my end, there won’t be any bank transfers to special accounts set up for earthquake-relief. I don’t have a spare bedroom to offer, no summer house on the coast to open up to a needy family, no old clothes to donate, not even ones that have gone out of style.

I resisted the celebrity appeals, the minutes of silence at the soccer games, the statements by politicians, our Prime Minister being moved to tears on live TV. The television schedules turned topsy-turvy, the non-stop live broadcasts, the appeals superimposed on the screen during prime time—none of it made an impression on me. I’m not going to donate one single Euro. And I believe that’s the greatest gesture of civility that I, as an Italian, can make at a time like this.

I’m not going to donate so much as a Euro because the thing that is destroying this country is charity: the stereotype of the generous Italian, of that bungling populace guilty of every kind of foul-up and impropriety but which, in the midst of tragedy, is capable of spasms of generosity and is consequently forgiven everything. That’s the point: I’m sick and tired of that Italy. I want nothing more to be forgiven. Generosity, unfortunately, and with it charity, is a pretense. We’re still standing there, on the edge of that well in Vermicino in 1981, waiting to see whether little Alfred will make it out alive,[1] holding on to one another with all our might. The compassion we suffer from (and which we offer one another) is genuine. But we haven’t moved one single centimeter.

In fact, I believe that tragedies, all of them, can be anticipated. The wells covered over. The guilty parties identified. The damage repaired in a timely manner. I refuse to donate a dime, because I already pay my taxes. And what I pay is a lot. Those taxes already include money for rebuilding, for aid, for police, fire fighters, and other public safety measures. All of which winds up being spent for other things. And that, in turn, means that the police, fire fighters, and public-safety authorities turn to Italians for donations when they need money. I’m saying no. Go get the money out of all the illustrious tax cheats that permeate this country’s economy.

My taxes also pay for the courts whose job is supposed to be to figure out who is speculating on building safety, and which are supposed to be doing that job before catastrophes take place. With my taxes I also support an entire political establishment—all of them, at every level of government, incapable of accomplishing anything, not one single thing, unless you count putting themselves front-and-center whenever there’s a camera in sight.

Even the President of the Sicily Region, Raffaele Lombardo, went to visit the areas hit by the earthquake—a trip paid for, like all the others, by us, the taxpayers. But what was the point? Was there really any need for him to go?

I might have been able to come up with a Euro, or maybe even two. Then Berlusconi started talking about building a “New Town” in L'Aquila, and I thought about “Milano 2,”[2] about the lake with its swans, and about the neologism “new town.” Where did he get that from? Where did he read it? How long had he been mulling that one over?

A time of anguish like this can’t be allowed to be marked by silence. Everything has to be toyed with, reproduced for the spectator to consume. That’s where “New Town” comes from. It’s a brand name. Like Brooklyn Chewing Gum.[3]

I could have shelled out a few cents. Then I saw that even Renato Schifani had decided to pay a visit to the earthquake zone. The President of the Senate declared that “what we need at a time like this is a united political effort.” Amen to that. But don't ask me to be on your side, because I’m not like you. I work. I don’t make my living from politics, on the backs of the community. While you, all of you, are responsible for what happened, because in one form or another you’ve governed the Italians and the ground they stand on for generation after generation, I am guilty of nothing. In fact, I'm in favor of justice. What you’re in favor of is the kind of solidarity that helps us forget about the fact that there isn’t any justice.

I’m not going to part with it, my Euro. Because I remembered my mother, who worked for the Italian government for forty years: In an entire year, her pension is worth what Schifani earns in a single month. So explain why I should fork over my Euro. To pay for what? Oh and by the way: When the Belice earthquake hit Western Sicily in 1968, my parents were deeply touched by what had happened, and donated some of their savings to the victims.

Then there was the earthquake in Irpinia in 1980, and once again my parents made a noble and symbolic donation through their post-office account. For the rebuilding. And we all know how that turned out.[4]

After Irpinia, there was the quake in Umbria in 1997. Then, in 2002, in San Giuliano di Puglia in Molise, where no one could have failed to be moved by the story of the classroom that collapsed on twenty-seven children, killing them and their teacher.

But now I’ve had enough. What’s the point of sending aid if everything goes on just the way it always has?

They’ve discovered, just the way decent journalists should do (now there’s a good way to spend a Euro—buy a newspaper written by decent journalists) that one of the schools that collapsed in L’Aquila was once actually a hotel. With the stroke of a pen, however, some obliging city bureaucrat decided to transform it into a school, regardless of the fact that it satisfied not even the minimum safety requirements for such a building.

In fact, in my own city, Marsala, there’s a school just like it, the largest one in the area: the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale. For thirty years it has been housed in a building that’s really a hotel transformed into a school. Not one safety requirement has ever been respected in this papier-mâché building with 600 students. To date, the Province of Trapani has spent nearly €7 million in rent on that school, where—just to give one example—the asbestos subceiling in the gym collapsed last October during a sirocco. (A sirocco!! Not an earthquake! A sirocco! Is there a Richter Scale for south-easters? Should we invent one?)

So that’s where my Euro went—drowned along with all those other millions of Euros—my one Euro of shame for the members of a political establishment who are incapable of making decisions, unless it’s the decision to line their own pockets without the slightest restraint and to pay their pals back by making sure they get rich, too.

I was just about to send off my one-Euro solidarity SMS, and then I heard them bragging on the Tg1 newscast about the exceptional audience shares they’d been receiving during their live broadcasts from the earthquake zone. Since I also pay for the public television service with my annual license fee, my feeling is that I’m already doing them a favor if I don’t ask for my money back after hearing an atrocity like that.

I won’t donate a dime for the towns ravaged by the earthquake. And I don’t want anyone else’s money if something should happen to me. What I want is an efficient national government, one in which it isn’t only the craftiest and the slipperiest who run things. And since I already know that nothing like that is going to come to pass, I also believe that the earthquake will turn into a great big lottery landslide for politicians. Now they all have the perfect excuse not to talk about anything else. Now no one can criticize the government or the majority political party (which is all of them, even the ones in the opposition), because there’s the earthquake to think about. Just as with 9/11, the earthquake and the situation in the Abruzzo are going to be the front that is used to justify anything and everything.

Thousands of resources are wasted in this country every day. If only it truly wanted to, the national government knows where it could get the money to help the earthquake refugees: by freezing politicians’ salaries for a year, or the salaries of the “super managers”; by combining the next European parliamentary elections with the upcoming referendum, rather than funding two national elections. Those are the first ideas that come to mind. Every time I think of something else, I’m that much more enraged.

I’m not going to donate a dime. Instead, I’m giving the best help I can: my outrage, my indignation. In these difficult days, I want to assert my right as an Italian to live in a house that is safe. And the rage welling up inside me turns to tears when I hear people say “something like this would never have happened in Japan,” as if the Japanese had discovered something new, as if know-how was the exclusive province of the Land of the Rising Sun. Every engineering student with a freshly printed university degree understands how a building ought to be constructed. What happens is that they’re made to forget as they exercise their profession.

I cry in my rage because it is always the poorest people who die, and in the televised pandemonium there’s not even one single poet with the greatness of a Pasolini to tell us how things really are, to gather together the pain and anguish of the least among us. This country has killed all of them, all the poets, or else it's allowed them to die of boredom.

But today, here, I feel Italian, a poor man among poor men and women, and I demand the right to have my say.

In the end, just the way that nature does when it causes the earth to move.

[1] Life in Italy came to a halt on June 10, 1981, when, for some 60 hours, live television broadcasts from Vermicino (near Rome), tracked superman efforts to free a six-year-old boy, Alfredo Rampi, who had fallen 180 feet into an uncovered artesian well. The events were followed by some 21 million Italians and, when the rescue efforts proved futile, the entire nation was plunged into mourning.

[2] Milano 2 is a planned “new town” or “supercondo” community in Segrate, in the suburbs of Milan , built and financed in the 1970s by firms owned by Silvio Berlusconi. The built-in TV network installed throughout Milano 2 helped Berlusconi launch his television empire as well, and he used his own television channels to market Milano 2 to upper-middle-class families. One of Milano 2’s features is an artificial lake, frequently used as a location for shooting TV programs and commercials.

[3] Brooklyn “the chewing gum with the bridge on the package,” was introduced in Italy in 1969. The massive advertising campaign that followed earned its producer, the Perfetti Van Melle group, a market share of 90%.

[4] The allusion here is to the fact that, following the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia, reconstruction and repair efforts quickly became a lucrative business opportunity for organized crime, which controlled contractors and contracts, supplies and suppliers, etc. An article in the 15 April 2009 The Independent contains more background on what took place.

All is Well

2009-04-07T14:29:00.009+02:00

Don't worry: The earthquake zone in and around L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo, is almost 450 km south of us. We're just fine. Dolce Metà’s family is closer to the earthquake area, but only slightly, so they're out of danger as well.

The situation down there is about as tragic as things can get. The only good news is that emergency and rescue crews appear to have shown up almost literally within minutes of the quake and are continuing to do a fine job -- rescues of this type are one of the situations in which Italy truly shines.

The bad news is that the number of deaths keeps rising and there are so many injured that hospitals are completely overwhelmed. As of this morning, April 7th, the number of homeless had been "downgraded" to 17,000 (from more than 100,000) and temporary shelter (in hotels, mostly, but there are tent cities in each of the affected towns) had been arranged. All of these figures change constantly, however.

If you don't read Italian, there is decent coverage in the New York Times. Ironically, we've been getting most of our news from them and from Italian TV, because Italian newspaper internet sites are so overwhelmed with hits that the connection isn't reliable.

There are some images here, if you can get through:

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/cronaca/terremoto-alto/1.html

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/cronaca/terremoto-arte/1.html

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/cronaca/terremoto-risveglio/1.html

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/cronaca/onna-disastro/1.html.

If you're of a mind to donate, your local Catholic diocese should know something, since non-governmental aid apparently is being organized through the Church.

It's impossible not to sense the anxiety and sadness that's in the air but, I repeat -- we're not affected and we're fine. Spare a thought or a prayer for the people in the Abruzzo, because they are truly suffering. And get your home disaster kit up to date.

Charlotte's Webs

2009-04-03T11:51:00.005+02:00

We woke this morning to find dozens of small spider webs woven among the branches of the jasmine bush. The fog had come in just before dawn and left the webs dripping with dew. A few hours later, the dew was gone and so were most of the spiders. Did they attack one other and tear down the nests? After days and days of rain, in any case, it was a sight to lift our spirits.

Nor was that all. Here's our first gardenia of the season. Against all odds, it bloomed indoors (the weather is still too unpredictable to trust the gardenia outdoors) with the help of a "gro-lite" (in our case, that's just a plain, old energy-saving bulb).

Strano Bedfellow

2009-03-17T11:27:00.005+01:00

Just over a year back, as you may recall, I described the carefree antics of some of Italy’s parliamentarians in the run up to and just after the no-confidence vote that brought down the barely-two-year-old government of Romano Prodi. (See “Chaos Theory.”)

One of the most delighted campers during the extremely dignified and spontaneous outpouring of political ~~bile~~ enthusiasm on the floor of the Senate was Antonino “Nino” Strano, then a Senator with the National Alliance (one of the many illegitimate descendants of the Fascist party, which began ramifying the minute WWII was officially over).

Nino lost his job during last year’s elections, but Silvio “Boss Hogg” Berlusconi wasted no time in nominating Strano as a candidate for the European Parliament (elections will take place later this year). It may be worth noting that the Italian delegation to the European Parliament is something of a laughing stock: its members have distinguished themselves by having the lowest rate of attendance of any country, by earning the highest salaries (approximately $21,000 per month, plus a per diem and a staff allotment, whether or not they have a staff), and by staying in office for the least amount of time (Italian politicians use the European Parliament as a kind of a holding pen where they can earn a lot of money while they wait for one of their cronies to find them a better sistemazione).

Strano, in light of his new-found respectability as a MEP candidate, has recently begun menacing bloggers and facebookers for circulating the video that you can see below, which is just one of the pleasures of making it available to you. (Charles Lambert gets the credit for finding this little gem and for starting a virtuous catena di Sant'Antonio—and if there’s no reward in heaven for helping others learn what a scum Strano is, there truly is no God).

I consider it mildly interesting that Strano, whom you can hear screaming, among other things, “checca squallida” (sleazy queer) and “frocio” (faggot), is, according to some sources, gay himself. (What? Did the casual, Fag Flag drape of his cherry-red sweater give him away?) Mildly interesting because finding closeted, self-hating, right-wing fags in electoral politics is about as rare as coming upon rednecks at a demolition derby.

In any case, here’s the video. You can view it on Youtube (assuming Strano hasn’t succeeded in making them pull it), which should be the top video, If it should be unavailable, I have a downloaded copy, which I'd be glad to send to you.

The video is, inexplicably, in Italian, German, and English, so there's a little something for almost anyone. For those who don't have any Italian, though, here are a couple of highlights: At a certain point, Strano explains why the director, Franco Zeffirelli, thanked him in the end credits of Zeffirelli's 1993 film, Storia di una Capinera (released in English as Sparrow).

In January of this year, Zeffirelli, who is an Italian senator (since 1996 with Berlusconi's right-wing Forza Italia party), finally confirmed what "everyone knew" and came out in an interview with the Italian magazine, Libero. One might have been surprised only because Zeffirelli has repeatedly announced his support for the draconian and homophobic statements of the Catholic Church (see above, under "right-wing politics, self-hating homos in").

So let's tie all the strings together. The protagonist in Storia di una Capinera is also named "Nino," but Strano wanted to make it clear that his relationship with Zeffirelli was a matter of nothing more than an affectionate and "serene" friendship (a euphemism for "we weren't doing it"); and, by the way, that he was on the verge of nominating Zeffirelli to a position as a "Senator for Life." (The nomination didn't take, but it wouldn't be Italy if one hand didn't ... you know.)

Later in the vid, Strano insists that he has always demonstrated the greatest openness toward the "homosexual world," which, "as a confirmed heterosexual," he respects. (That's despite throwing around words like "sleazy queen" on the floor of the Senate.) And I trust that clears things up.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Pane

2009-03-09T14:09:00.007+01:00

Persistence pays. Or so one is told.

It took many weeks, about four kilos of flour, and five tries (two of which were certifiable disasters), but we've apparently turned the corner on bread.

Apart from the "stegosaurus" shape (we still have to work a little on forming the dough at the final stage), this was the first loaf that both tasted good and was genuinely recognizable as bread. (As an aside, I'll add that I find the shape quite charming and casereccio, though I realize it wouldn't precisely fall within the canons of current ISO standards for "cereals, pulses, and derived products.")

Yeast, frankly, remains an unfathomable mystery to me; I'd like to be making "natural yeast," but other than creating a slurry that smells a lot like a bar, our efforts have yet to result in anything that actually causes bread dough to rise. So, at least for the time being, we're still dependendent upon the yeast you buy in little gray blocks at the store.

Meanwhile, the cabalistic and recondite language employed on most bread-making web sites remains largely impenetrable (plus, bread recipes seem to be guarded like the Enigma code -- strange, indeed, for a foodstuff that has, in the main, no more than four ingredients).

For the home economists among you (and don't try to pretend I was the only boy who plotted a way to get into home economics and out of phys ed; the compromise was typing, and I suppose one could say, in a way, that I owe my livelihood to the exacting ministrations of Mrs. Pietroscewski): It is just barely possible to make a kilo of bread for less than what it costs to buy one in the store (decent bread, I mean: the IperCoop offers something at a Euro a kilo that I wouldn't even use for bread crumbs); but it isn't really possible to make pasta for less.

Clearly, it depends what kind of pasta: home-made tortellini can go for somewhere between €22-26 per kilo, so it's obviously cheaper to make than to buy. On the other hand, the day I start spending my days making tortellini will be the day I win the lottery and can officially abandon the ~~excruciating pain~~ utter joy of a career as a translator.

Conversely, a kilo of decent fresh (not dried) tagliatelli o maltagliati can be had for about what it would cost to make them at home (factoring in electricity but factoring out labor). If we're talking dried pasta, there's no comparison: industrial producers like Barilla and DeCecco churn them out at prices so low that you couldn't afford not to buy them, if your budget was really squeaky tight.

We may get to that point (I have nightmares about subsisting on spaghetti and salt), but for the moment we're enjoying playing at "artisan cooking." It's as much fun as you can have indoors with your clothes on.

Sanremata 2009 - Uscite Discografiche

2009-02-23T11:25:00.010+01:00

Sanremata 2009 – from the blog “Liberidea”.
Republished by kind permission of the author, Giuseppe Iacobaci.

(Stay tuned for a translation in English!)

Uscite discografiche

Come ben ci insegna l'esperienza di questi giorni, giudicare una canzone dal titolo è una cosa sciocca e superficiale...

Abbiamo avuto in anteprima esclusiva la pregnante tracklist del nuovo album di un noto artista sanremese, ma prima di pubblicarla abbiamo richiesto, onde evitare sciocche polemiche superficiali, che ogni traccia fosse accompagnata da un breve commento da parte del noto musicista. Eccola qui:

1. Ambrogio era gay. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva il famoso Froids, non abbiamo niente contro i froci e comunque si può benissimo guarire. E comunque siete tutti scemi, la canzone è una cosa poetica che non parla di tutti i froci ma di un frocio specifico che è guarito, non è che guariscono tutti, questo lo so pure io; pure io sono stato fr... gay per un sei sette mesi ma poi sono guarito, quindi non è possibile che sono intollerante, io auguro a tutti di guarire e tornare normali come è successo a me e adesso mi piace la patonza e sono felice! No, davvero, lo auguro a tutti, di guarire, con grande simpatia e tolleranza: seriamente, anche esteticamente, c'è paragone fra la patonza e la minchia? Su, lo so, è colpa della mamma, vi è stata troppo col fiato sul collo, ma fate tutti uno sforzo e guarite, dai. Volevo dire solo questo. Ma voi giudicate dalla copertina e non avete capito niente, ma sapete che vi dico? In fondo io sono superiore e vi schifo tutti. Sì, sì, continuate, continuate, ha ha ha ha. Non vi sento, non vi sento, non vi sento!!

2. Quel ladro d'un ebreo. Questa canzone lo so già che porterà tante polemiche che io non volevo. Come diceva il famoso Scecspìr, io non ci ho niente contro gli ebrei, ma giuro che mi è capitato di conoscerne uno che era un ladro, ma ladro! Perciò la canzone sarà fraintesa di sicuro ma è poesia, non parla di tutti gli ebrei ma di un ebreo specifico che è un gran ladro e pure figlio di mignotta ebrea per giunta. Non strumentalizziamo ora, io sono solo un cantante, non è che sto dicendo che tutte le mignotte sono ebree né che tutte le ebree sono mignotte, ma tu pensa la sventura di essere le due cose contemporaneamente! E questa qui era così, mignotta e ebrea e con un figlio ladro ed ebreo per giunta. Specificamente, dico.

3. Puttana Eva. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva il famoso Danbràun, non abbiamo niente contro le puttane che anzi fanno un servizio alla comunità e spesso anche a me, anche se i prezzi sono troppo alti, e così siccome sono un musicista vario mi sono detto, devo fare un brano gèzz su questa cosa. C'era questa specifica puttana che si chiamava Eva, e anche non era ebrea (che poi sono uno tollerante) mi ha ispirato poeticamente questa canzone incompresa sui prezzi alti. Ma non è che adesso tutte quelle che si chiamano Eva se la prendono con me, non strumentalizziamo: ci sono Eve puttane e Eve no, questo va detto, visto che non lo capite da soli ve l'ho detto chiaro e tondo e chiudiamola lì.

4. Appendiamoli. È una canzone coraggiosa sugli stupratori e gli assassini. Io dico: appendiamoli. Una bella corda e li appendiamo, così non lo fanno più. Basta con i fraintendimenti, su questo siamo tutti d'accordo. E comunque la canzone non parla di tutti gli stupratori e assassini ma pure di qualche ladro, specie se ebreo, ed eventualmente pure di qualche frocio, ma di froci specifici che non vogliono guarire, non è che poi guariscono tutti, e allora, poeticamente parlando, appendiamoli! Non vorrei però che questa cosa poi venisse strumentalizzata, io sono solo un cantante e racconto delle storie, non è che ho delle idee, anzi sono pure contro la pena di morte, però intanto uno
li appende, poi quello che succede succede.

5. Questa cazzo di minestra. In questa coraggiosa canzone prendo finalmente le difese degli uomini che tornano a casa da lavorare e non trovano la minestra pronta. Anzi, di un uomo specifico, e una specifica minestra. Il ritornello, cantato con la voce bella grattata e sofferta fatta da me nel compiuter del mio amico Cecco, dice: "Questa hazzo di minestra l'è miha pronta, la stiamo miha aspettando che fiorisca la zucchina? Lo vo' hapi' he dopo una giornata di lavoro uno smonta/ e trova te holle manimmano e piagnùholi pure, hretina?" Però basta con i fraintendimenti, io sono solo un cantante e sto solo raccontando una storia. Come diceva il famoso Pinkfloi non abbiamo niente contro le minestre, però le mogli un po' rompono il cazzo; ma voi tanto giudicate solo dalla copertina e strumentalizzate le polemiche come sempre! Tanto non vi sento, non vi sento.

6. Questi cazzo di cinesi. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva Stivenking, non abbiamo niente contro i cinesi, basta che però non si mettono lì ad aprire tutti sti negozi con queste scritte che non si capisce un cazzo, magari c'è scritto vaffanculo italiani e tu non lo sai e ci vai a comprare la magliettina e quelli ridono tra loro e parlano cinese senza che li capisci. E come dico nel ritornello, "E puoi contarli anche per mesi, ma poi cazzo, si potrà sapere cazzo, quanti cazzo, sono questi cazzo di cinesi?" Oooooh, ma siete svegli o cosaaaa? La piantiamo con le polemiche? Io sono soltanto un cantante, sto raccontando una storia e basta, e il titolo è chiarissimo, parlo di questi cazzo di cinesi, non tutti quanti, tipo chessò, quelli che stanno in Cina a me non mi hanno fatto niente. Ho detto questi cazzo di cinesi, questi qui, non tutti quanti i cinesi, capito? La vogliamo finire con questi fraintendimenti e strumentalizzazioni?

7. Maremma bucaiola. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva il filosofo Henghel, a volte una maremma può anche essere bucaiola, e non bisogna nascondersi dietro a una fettina di prosciutto fingendo di non vedere queste cose che tanto sono sotto gli occhi di tutti; ora i toscani so che stanno facendo un corteo contro di me organizzato dal mio manager, ma io queste polemiche strumentalizzate non le sopporto, c'è bisogno che lo dica o siete tutti scemi? E allora ve lo dico, non mi riferisco alla Maremma Toscana, ma a una specifica maremma che preferisco non nominare per turbare gli animi, ma vi assicuro che l'ho vista personalmente ed è bucaiola. So che questa cosa produrrà delle polemiche strumentalizzate, perché sono un portatore sano di polemiche, ma io sono solo un cantante, è solo poesia e tanto potete parlare quanto volete tanto non vi sento. Però comprate il mio disco, guardate che bella copertina, l'ho fatta io, è fantastico, vero?

8. Moreno lo stupratore romeno. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva lo scrittore, quello lì, Grignam, Grisciam, quello lì, vah, non abbiamo niente contro gli stupratori, basta che però non siano romeni. Voglio dire, capita a tutti di essere stupratori nella vita, io per sei o sette mesi sono stato stupratore ma poi ho incontrato questa persona speciale e sono guarito e adesso stupro solo lei, ma solo un pochino. Invece se uno è romeno è più grave, perché non puoi essere romeno solo per sei sette mesi e poi guarire. Aspettate, comunque io sto parlando di uno specifico romeno, non di tutti i romeni. Magari quel romeno lì non può guarire, gli altri magari invece sì, io sono solo un cantante e non lo so, racconto solo storie, ma questa cosa la volevo dire per dare liberamente voce a tutti quelli che liberamente la pensano come me. Però scusa tu mettiti nei panni di un padre, ecco. Un padre specifico, dico. So che questa cosa produrrà delle polemiche strumentalizzate ma tanto io non ci sento. Ma l'avete vista la copertina che bella? Compràtelo, il mio disco, dai, dai, dai!

9. Io ti punirò. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Questa canzone d'amore parla in maniera poetica dell'amore di uno specifico uomo verso una specifica donna e ha aspettato con pazienza che si laureasse e ora se la vuole pure sposare, ma la specifica donna però vuole iniziare una carriera da avvocato e sarebbe pure disposta a fargli pure le pulizie e cucinare e cambiare i pannolini ai bimbi come tutte le mogli, però vuole fare pure l'avvocato, ma lui è poco persuaso, le avvocatesse stanno negli uffici con gli avvocati, e poi ci sono i giudici, tutti questi maschi intorno che gli ronzano e passano e urtano, e urta oggi e scusa domani e parla, e guarda, e un caffè, e un aperitivo che ci fa, e un happy hour in fondo che cos'è, e uno poi si rompe pure un po' il cazzo, e giustamente. Allora poeticamente io mi sono immaginato nei panni di questo specifico uomo che vede questa specifica donna, non tutte ma lei proprio specifica, e la vede con quel tailleur grigio serio serio il primo giorno di lavoro e le grida in preda alla rabbia tutto il suo amore: "Io ti spoglierò / di quel tuo paltò / donna di successo che ti credi superiore / sei grigia come un cesso ma sarò il tuo punitore / oh, sì, io ti punirò / per amore, ti punirò". Certamente la cosa sarà fraintesa e strumentalizzata, ha ha ha ha, come se io ce l'avessi con tutte le donne in carriera! Ma non è vero, è solo con quella lì specifica che me la prendo.

10. Mario era normale. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva il famoso coso, Schumacher, non abbiamo niente contro gli etero. Questa canzone poetica fraintesa e strumentalizzata che ho scritto su richiesta dell'arci-etero per fare par condicio con l'altra, è proprio tutta all'opposto e dimostra come sono aperto a tutti i messaggi e moderno. Parla specificamente di uno specifico etero che a differenza dell'altro dell'altra canzone invece lui è rimasto etero perché gli stava bene così e non aveva bisogno di guarire (e voglio dire, mi pare ovvio, cioè, voi ditemi se è normale uno che gli piace Bondi o uno che gli piace la Ferilli). Questo brano a differenza dell'altro dimostra che per me, uno, se è felice, può pure restare com'è. Il testo dice: "Mario era normale / e pure un po' maiale / girava ogni canale / in cerca di maiale/ Mario era felice / un po' meno Beatrice / lasciava a casa la moje / e annava a cerca' troje". Insomma, una canzone d'amore.

11. Bonus track: Marcella era un po' mignottella. Basta con i fraintendimenti. Come diceva il grande Patchans, questa è soltanto la storia di una singola persona, una ragazza che la sera usciva con i jeans attillati e le minigonne e poi veniva stuprata, ma poi capiva di aver sbagliato e si chiudeva in casa a pregare per tutto il resto della vita, e spiego bene questa cosa profonda e poetica nel monologo del brano ("ero molto bella / e a causa dell'infanzia disagiata / a far la puttanella ormai c'ero portata/ capitemi però mi son pentita / e non giro più svestita / la donna discinta / facilmente resta incinta / ha fatto bene quell'omone / a insegnarmi la lezione / come diceva froid da qualche parte / il corpo nudo è un'arte / ma l'arte va nascosta o ti fai la bua / sennò so' cazzi tua, l'hai fatto apposta"). Insomma, un messaggio di speranza per tutte le ragazze svergognate che mostrano l'insert coin da questi jeans a vita bassa: si può guarire! Ora io non voglio lanciare polemiche, io sono solo un cantante e non lo so cosa vuol dire tutto questo, io non capisco un cazzo, io viaggio solamente in treno e quello che sento lo racconto, le mie canzoni nascono tutte da chiacchierate nei treni (tanto per fare qualche titolo dal mio prossimo album: "So' le otto e ancora stamo a Chiavari", "È occupato questo", "Chiamate il capotreno c'è un marocchino senza biglietto", "Cazzo la latrina è intasata", "Che dite, abbassamo 'e cucciette?") ma questa cosa la volevo dire per dare liberamente voce a tutti quelli che liberamente sono a favore dello stupro e questa è libertà del pensiero, stiamo in democrazzìa. Voi criticatemi, ma tanto io non ci sento. Ma l'avete vista la copertina che bella? L'ho fatto io, è il mio disco, si chiama "Pallonaro di mestiere." Compràtelo, dai, dai, dai.

Something about this topic makes it impossible to discuss...

2009-02-20T19:07:00.028+01:00

If you’re sick to death of Povia, “Luca Era Gay,” and reconstituted homosexuals, believe me: I’m with you. The good news is that this is my last post on Povia. The less good news is that it’s going to be a long one.

And that’s because most of what’s being said about Povia, about his song, and about the responses and the re-re-re-sponses thereto is utter bloody nonsense. The kind of utter bloody nonsense that leaves you with the desire to execute your television and unlearn how to read. The kind of utter bloody nonsense that makes you think you must be from another planet, because the people around you are clearly not of your species.

The kind of utter bloody nonsense that, if there were alarms that went off when the level of bullshit reached dangerous levels, the way they do for smog in Beijing, the sirens would have been wailing for days.

Unfortunately, there’s still no face mask to protect you from stupidity. Or from homophobia.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s get right to it. If you’re not up to speed (lucky you), you might want to review your CliffsNotes: Behind This Darkness, Nothing (Part 1): Out & In with Roberto Bolle; Luca Era Gay - Luca Once Was Gay - Povia; and Asking People at the Stadium Whether They Think Soccer is Boring - Povia on Homosex.

“(‘Luca era gay’) isn’t making any kind of general comment—it’s just one person’s story.” (Massimiliano Varrese, the actor who will play “Luca” in the video version of Povia’s song.)

Now, let’s be clear: Massimiliano Varrese is serious eye candy. A comment like that, however, merely demonstrates why “B” actors should keep their mouths shut when it comes to social issues they don’t understand.

Each year, a wide variety of songs are presented at the now fifty-nine-year-old Sanremo Festival of Italian Song. Some are meant to be funny, some are meant to make you dance, and some (most of them) rely on good, old-fashioned cheap sentiment (such as the one that more-or-less launched Povia’s career in 2005, “Quando i bambini fanno ‘Ooh!’” [“When Children Say “Ooh!”], an inoffensive puff piece about how adorable kids are).

Every year, however, performers also bring “social issue” songs to Sanremo—such as this year’s “can’t we all just get along” plea for racial harmony, “L’Opportunità,” performed by singer/songwriters Pupo, Paolo Belli, and Youssou N’dour (“Welcome my unknown friend ... let’s experience our differences as an opportunity”); or Fabrizio Moro’s 2007 “youth division” winner at Sanremo, “Pensa,” a song that encouraged resistance to the mafia.

Such songs aren’t presented simply because they intend to “tell an individual story” that “can’t be generalized”; they’re there to make a point regarding specific social phenomena (in fact, “L’Opportunità” comes at a time when Italy is enacting some of the most draconian anti-immigrant measures since Fascism).

“Luca Era Gay” is exactly that kind of song. To insist otherwise is so intellectually impoverished and so willfully ignorant that one can only be astonished by the gallons of gall it takes to do so.

If Povia had had the courage to tell interviewers that he intended to use his time at Sanremo to issue a warning about the danger that homosexuality poses for society and the family, you could have an ounce of respect for him. It’s a benighted position, but at least it’s honest.

Instead, he chose to hide behind the cowardly and moronic cover story of wanting to relate what a stranger "happened" to tell him one day on a train. I don’t know why Povia isn’t writhing in embarrassment, but one gets the sense that shame is not an emotion he’s familiar with.

Speaking of cover stories: Massimiliano Varrese wants to make clear that he’s not at all worried that people will think he’s gay, just because he’s playing Luca in the video. “The paparazzi have photographed me so many times with girls that I don’t think my sexual identity is in any doubt,” he told the internet publication, “Sorrisi e Canzoni TV.”

I don’t even need to say it, right?

Which brings us to the corollary: “It’s just a song. I don’t understand why it’s so controversial.”

If you don’t understand why the song is so controversial, or why so many people consider it damaging and insulting, then sit down and shut up. You don’t have anything intelligent to say on the subject.

It’s fine with me if people like the song or don't consider its impact as perfidious as I do. But someone who says “I don’t understand,” is either brain-injured or means something else. Something else like: “I don’t actually care.” “I consider the issue trivial.” “I can’t be bothered to empathize.”

I repeat. Love the song if you like. But please don’t say you “don’t understand" why it’s controversial. If you don’t, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, not proud of your indomitable and independent spirit.

The point here (and those of you who already have a keen grasp of the obvious can skip ahead) is context. And context, as we know, is everything.

Italy is a country where national politicians regularly bandy about words like “butt fucker” and “faggot.” Where the Minister of Equal Opportunities insists that “the question of equality in the matter of same-sex unions is a false problem.” Where parents stab or beat their gay or lesbian children and then defend themselves saying it was a matter of “family honor.” Where the mayor of Milan, Italy’s most international city, refuses to allow the city to sponsor the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and where the mayor of Rome refuses to allow the city to sponsor any of the events associated with the annual Gay Pride celebration, one of the largest in Europe. Where there are virtually no gay characters on television; where you can count the number of openly gay public figures on the fingers of about one-and-a-half hands. Where the Pope refuses to support a UN declaration in support of the decriminalization of homosexuality (because he doesn’t want to discriminate against those countries where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment or death) and, generally speaking, can’t stop raving about homosexuality.

In other words, a country in which public discourse around homosexuality has a certain, let’s call it, slant. And where the counter-response to all of the above is, almost always, silence.

(Sure, people of good conscience are horrified and ashamed. But I’m referring to a proportionate response, literally “equi-valent,” in analogous if not identical venues and with the same number of kilowatts.)

And then someone appears on a nationally televised program watched by one Italian in four, and sings a song in which homosexual relationships are depicted as sordid and criminal, the result of trauma and family misery, and in which heterosexuality provides the escape from that misery and the resolution of that trauma.

And then he sings it again every night for three more nights, and in the meantime he gives interviews to journalists in which he continues to expand on his view that “telling a story about a person who managed to get out of homosexuality” offers a “message of hope.” (Ah, a message of hope? But didn’t he say the song had no message—that it was just “one person’s story”?)

As a response to which, various hugely disorganized gay-rights organizations in Italy snark among themselves, give confusing and conflicting interviews to the media, and seem, with few exceptions, petulant, irrational, and cowed.

Let me make it personal: This weekend, my partner is home visiting his family. On Friday night, like a significant chunk of Italian families, they gathered around the TV to watch Sanremo. And he wound up sitting there, listening to “Luca Era Gay,” next to his mother, who believes that what the song says is true—not true about “Luca,” but true in general. She believes that my partner’s relationship with me results from emotional confusion and represents a psychological difficulty of some sort. She believes he could be heterosexual if he’d only “give a girl a chance.” (And, by the way, doesn’t he want to call his ex-girlfriend this weekend while he’s home?) She believed it anyway, but now she’s seen a nice young man sing about it at the Sanremo Festival and she thinks, “It’s not just my opinion—it’s the validated truth.”

That’s the context in which “Luca Era Gay” appears. In which a mother who receives almost literally no positive information about homosexuality from television and newspapers is suddenly exposed, via the most mainstream and impeccable of sources, to Povia’s “message of hope.”

Now. Does anyone still not understand why the song is controversial?

Or what would happen if we shifted the context slightly? In recent weeks, Rome (and, to an extent, all of Italy) has been reeling after a series of particularly hideous rapes in and around the city. So let’s suppose Povia had decided to take a song to Sanremo that dealt with rape. A song told from the point of view of Lucia (let’s call her), who realizes, after she’s raped, that it really was all her fault: She used to go out by herself to after-hours nightclubs, she hung around with disreputable guys, she wore skimpy skirts and revealing T-shirts, she drank and took drugs. After the rape, though, she turned over a new leaf. She gave up all that rebellion in favor of nice, traditional family values. Now she’s married and happy. And it was all thanks to the rapist.

Women’s groups (and, I would hope, not solely women’s groups) would be in the streets demanding an apology and a retraction from the singer, the presenters of the Sanremo Festival, and the network. (And don’t fool yourself that a lot of Italians don’t believe that the women attacked in Rome had it coming.)

But wouldn't that also just be one woman’s story? A personal story? Not something you could generalize?

Is there still anyone idiot enough to argue that Povia’s song isn't delivering a message? Is there anyone still pinheaded enough to try to insist that “Luca Era Gay” appears in some sort of cultural vacuum?

Other than Povia himself, I mean?

Free speech.

The related attempt, meanwhile, to defend “Luca Era Gay” on the basis of "free speech" is one of the most cynical and manipulative tools of the pro-Povia propaganda machine.

In fact, essentially no one has ever actually suggested that Povia should have been censored or that he didn’t have the “right” to sing his song. Criticism of his (feeble) reasoning, of his homophobia, of the errors of fact in the song, of the timing of the performance, of the song’s message—those do not constitute censorship.

What people like Povia (who almost always seem to be right-wingers—sorry, but it’s true) always forget is that having the “right” to say what you like does not automatically confer upon you a privilege—that is, the privilege of 100% approbation.

The right to sing “Luca Era Gay” (if it is a right) doesn’t give Povia the right to be free from criticism. It doesn’t give him the right to go around whinging that the negative responses to his song are, in fact, an attack on the right itself and not on the content of the expression.

And it’s totally slimy to imply otherwise.

It’s worth remembering the analogy rendered famous by the U.S. Supreme Court in discussing this precise issue. Suppose you go into a crowded theatre and scream “Fire!” There isn’t one, but you do it anyway. As a result, people panic; injuries result. You were just expressing your sense of humor, you say; anyway, your speech is a protected right.

No, it isn't, says the Court, which understands something about context. Because free speech, like all democratic rights, is a two-edge sword: it’s a right and an obligation at the same time. In other words, it’s never entirely free, if free means “without consequences.” The more unpopular the speech is, in fact, the more it costs. If your ass can’t cover the checks you write with your big, free mouth, then you’d better shut up.

And I’m just going to finish up by discussing two of the most loathsome lies perpetuated (and perpetrated) by “Luca Era Gay” and by the way the resulting controversy is being handled by the media in Italy.

“There were people who told me, ‘It’s natural,’ but I studied Freud and he didn’t see it that way.” (Povia, “Luca Era Gay”)

Well yes, actually, he did.

Freud (he’s the guy who floated the concept that all human beings were innately bisexual, remember?) believed homosexuality to be entirely natural. But let’s take a minute to examine the concept, because what becomes blatantly obvious is that what Christers like Povia mean by natural and what Freud meant by natural and what I mean by natural are not the same thing.

The problem nowadays is that all conversation regarding “nature” almost instantly runs aground on the “If God had meant for two men to be together, he’d have created Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve” argument.

That’s because there is simply no way to argue that homosexuality is not biologically, ecologically, elementally natural, not solely in humans but among many other animals. If you don’t like homosexuality, that’s a datum you’d rather ignore, so you skip over to theological or “moral” arguments regarding what is “natural,” which is what Povia does in his song: he’s not interested (he says out of one side of his mouth) in science or biology (except when it’s helpful to his argument to twist a more-or-less scientific interpretation, as he does with Freud); he’s talking about “God’s laws.”

And we can argue for approximately ever about what God considers natural and “correct” and no one can ever be fully right because God is inscrutable and that, Babies, explains in a nutshell a couple of thousand years of history in which human beings have tortured and slaughtered one another by the literal billions because God told them to.

If you’re Charles Manson and God tells you to, you’re a psychopathic murderer. If you’re the Pope and God tells you to, it’s the Holy Inquisition.

While I’m on the subject, here’s a question I’d like answered: If homosex is such a big, hairy deal and if even thinking about it means that you’re going Straight to Hell to be Tormented for All Eternity by Demons with Red-Hot Meat Rakes, how come the Ten Commandments doesn’t mention it? OK, maybe it was on that other tablet, the one Moses dropped. A whole tablet, written with God’s very own finger, in which he very clearly tells us not to touch each other there. Maybe.

Or what about Jesus? He had half the friggin’ Bible to work with, and He didn’t manage to say one single word about the most heinous and unnatural sin known to humankind? I know he was distracted, what with the Sadducees, and the walking on water, and the wandering, but that’s more than just forgetfulness, I’d say. I hope God gave him a good talking to later when the two of them had a chance to sit down with the H.S for the big “assuming-human-form-and-establishing-a-new-religion” wrap-up session.

Of course, one might also point in passing out that God must have created Adam and Steve—because where else did they come from? I mean, was homosexuality imported from some other planet? Except God created the planets, too, right? Anyway, I digress.

The fact that Adam and Steve didn’t make it into the Bible is hardly their fault. Blame it on heterosexist scribes. In any case, since Adam and Steve have been around just slightly less time than Adam and Eve, they’re about as natural as they could possibly be.

In the end, what people like Povia mean by “natural” is that homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality. And there I’m 100% in agreement.

For those interested, by the way, I came across a remarkable manuscript image of the letter Freud wrote in 1935 to an American mother worried that her son was gay. (Click on the image to see a large version of the entire letter.)

In it, Freud summed up what a career in psychoanalysis had taught him:

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.... By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it.... What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed....

Povia considers himself an expert on Freud, but apparently he missed this letter.

Too bad for Luca that he met Povia on the train and not Freud.

“Born Gay”

~~ Povia: “No one is born gay. You become gay because of who you spend time with, what you’re taught as a child.” ~~ Iva Zanicchi (2009 Sanremo contestant and member of the European Parliament): “If you’re born homosexual—it’s not an illness, it’s your condition—and you’re gay your whole life.”

God bless Iva Zanicchi for trying to help, but here’s one thing Povia and I agree on: I don’t believe anyone is born gay.

I also don’t believe anyone is born heterosexual.

What I believe is that we’re born with the capacity to have and to deploy a sexuality, that we are imbued with libidinal energy that can (in Freud’s poetic image) “fill up” or “occupy” objects—lots of them, and even different ones over time. Not unlike the way we’re born with the capacity for language, though whether we speak Mandarin or Xhosa or Russian is, so to say, an accident of upbringing. To that extent, I'm much more of a Freudian than Povia is.

But the fact of the matter is that no one knows—not me, not Povia, not the Pope, not Freud, not flotillas of endocrinologists and geneticists and pediatricians. And it doesn’t look we’re going to know any time soon.

So the really interesting question becomes: What does it matter? How are the various positions being used in the service of other agendas (political, cultural, artistic, religious)?

To date, it strikes me that entirely too much of the commentary regarding “Luca Era Gay” has been derailed in the polemic over the unanswerable and reductionist question, “born or not born?” Even the exceedingly strange Italian gay writer, Walter Siti, got into the fray when he issued a statement “defending Povia” on the grounds that it wasn’t correct to say that people couldn’t change their sexual orientation—indeed, Siti asserted, it happened all the time. “We always have the capacity to cross the borders (of heterosexuality and homosexuality), either from one direction or the other, according to our personal psychology. It depends on thousands of factors, including mere chance,” Siti wrote. (One might best understand Siti’s views on homosexuality by comparing him to the late, great Quentin Crisp, if you can imagine Crisp stripped of all discernible traces of irony.)

Luxuria, meanwhile, the former MP who continues to be the go-to gal for journalists who want a queer-positive quote, put it this way:

(“Luca Era Gay”) is a nice song about science-fiction, because it isn’t as though you’re gay one morning, and then you wake up the next day and you aren’t anymore.... I continue to be of the belief that a popular, nationally televised program (like Sanremo) can do a great deal of good or a great deal of harm. There’s no question that the text of a song that conveys the idea that homosexuality is a sort of burden that you need to liberate yourself from isn’t so great because a teenager seeing Sanremo could get the idea that homosexuality was something that needed to be cured. If, in the interests of providing equal air time, they had Al Bano sing a song about being cured of heterosexuality, I’d be in favor. But the real problem is that we need to be cured of repression, we need to be cured of prejudice. The Italian mentality is opening up slightly, but rather than making giant leaps forward, we’re taking tiny little Geisha steps.

In the end, one is left asking why Povia is banging this particular drum—or, to stay with Luxuria’s metaphor, why he has insisted on donning this particular kimono. But perhaps there's a clue here: Almost four years ago, Povia gave an interview to the monthly magazine, Panorama, in which he said:

I had a gay phase, too. It was when I was 18 years old. It lasted seven months, and then I got over it. I even converted two of my friends who thought they were gay and now they’re married and they even have children.

In a later interview, he went even further: “My parents separated when I was little. I was left alone in an environment totally dominated by female figures. I played with dolls. Anybody who thinks you’re born gay is mistaken.”

So: Povia era gay or wasn’t he? Just as his song was about to debut at Sanremo in 2009, he issued a retraction: “I’ve never been gay,” he told the Italian weekly Oggi. “I told a reporter that story once, but really, I was talking a lot of nonsense in that interview.”

In fact, throughout the interview in question, Povia talks as though he’s high or drunk, offering up a series of hallucinogenic non sequiturs that clearly left the interviewer perplexed. But he says one little word at the beginning of the interview that I suspect explains this entire ruckus.

“Everybody thinks I’m a nice guy,” he said, “but really I’m trasgressivo.”

Now, “trasgressivo” is one of those overused Italian words that means everything from “I don’t always signal before I turn left” to “My sex life involves military uniforms and Cricetidae,” but it’s essentially similar to an equally overused English word: “nonconformist.”

Poor little Giuseppe. Artsy, bourgeois kid grows up in Milan, talented but maybe a bit of a sissy. Parents separated. Sister’s bulimic. Teaches himself to play the guitar and then lives the life of the singer-waiter, moving around Italy in search of restaurant jobs. Gets his first real break in 2005 when he’s already 33 but, between one thing and another, he’s not exactly zooming to the top of the charts with a bullet. When he isn’t invited to Sanremo in 2008, he launches a contentious campaign against that year’s musical director, accusing him of engaging in the “payola and political payback” that exclude small-record-label musicians from radio air time and from venues like Sanremo.

And through all of this, he really wants to be seen as trasgressivo.

Me, I’d have preferred it if he’d decided to use somebody else’s community as a marketing gimmick, but there you have it.

As of this writing, “Luca Era Gay” has less than 2% of the public vote on one internet poll site dedicated to predicting Sanremo winners, 10% on another and, on the perhaps-more-reliable Repubblica site, is tied for third place (with Patty Pravo) with 11% of the vote.

Half of me hopes Povia loses miserably, and half of me hopes he wins—just so we won't have to endure weeks of hearing about how he was robbed and censored and silenced by the communists. But whatever happens, I couldn't be happier that, come tomorrow morning, Sanremo will be over.

Povia era.

Asking People at the Stadium Whether They Think Soccer is Boring - Povia on Homosex

2009-02-19T17:26:00.003+01:00

Two evenings ago, along with about fifteen million other people, I finally heard Povia’s “ex-gay” anthem, “Luca Era Gay” (Luca Once Was Gay) at the Sanremo Festival, the full text of which had been guarded like the whereabouts of Bin Laden up until about twelve hours before the festival began. (You can find my translation of the song here.)

I expected to find the song offensive and retrograde; I expected it to give aid and comfort to the Italian (but certainly not only) conviction that gay life is tragic and to shore up the popular fantasy (an especial favorite of the Catholic church) that a soi-disant gay man is merely a confused heterosexual who hasn’t yet come across the right woman. And I wasn’t disappointed.

To be sure, “Luca Era Gay” is a grubby and sick-minded rehearsal of popular clichés and of the discredited psychological theories of nearly a century ago: the “close-binding intimate” mother who is “morbidly jealous” of Luca’s female friends and begs her son never to get married; the absent, alcoholic father who has nothing to say to his son and who is probably cheating on his wife; the disturbed and guilt-ridden adolescent who is seduced by an older man and “goes with men” because he doesn’t want to “betray his mother.” It all ends happily, though: At a party, Luca meets a girl who “understands” him, allowing him finally to forgive his father (but not his mother, whom he indicates he never really loved), get married, and bring some more children into the world. Poor girl. Poor children.

It’s either a pulp novel from the 1950s (one of those with titles like Twilight Men or Love Among the Shadows) or else it’s a song presented in 2009 at a national music festival in Italy.

There’s a word for this in Italian, by the way (there’s a word for this in every language, I suspect, but let’s stay local): baggianata. Even if you don’t speak Italian, it’s almost onomatopoeic, but the word comes to us along the same road that gave us “babble” and “prattle,” so you get the picture.

As if the song weren’t twaddle on its own, there’s the fact that Povia has, for at least a monthbeen doing his level best to demonstrate that he is both (a) bigoted beyond repair and (b) desperate for attention. At first, he allowed as how the song was autobiographical, but on the night before Sanremo opened, he retracted that previous interview (had he had a heart-to-heart with Robert Bolle?), insisting that the idea for the song had actually come from a conversation with a guy he “met on the train.”

Yeah, let’s call it the train.

“I’ve never been gay,” Povia told the Italian weekly Oggi. “I told a reporter that story once, but really, I was talking a lot of nonsense in that interview.”

The day after the song debuted at Sanremo, Povia released a statement saying that he “had no intention of offending anyone.” He was just

“telling a story about a person who managed to get out of homosexuality and is finally happy, and I thought it was appropriate to spread this message of hope.... (A person might) think he loves (another man), but then he realizes he has to look within himself in order to recognize what love truly is, perhaps because he meets a woman who makes him feel like a real man and ... allows him to overcome a series of traumas that had sent him in a different, confused direction. So I’m asking people, once and for all, to knock it off: I don’t have anything against gays.... But I want to be free to sing about the healthy values that were taught to me in my family.”

Whew! Imagine what he might have said if he’d actually wanted to offend us.

At a rhetorical level, there’s great stuff here. Povia, like the Catholic Church, has learned the new rhetoric of homophobia: Now it’s the gays who are the bigots; now the gays are the ones who are intolerant. They’re trying to keep artists from singing about what they feel called to sing about. They want to censor the Sanremo Festival. They are (as Povia said in his post-Sanremo statement) “people who think they’re liberals or are in the thrall of communist chic.”

He’s just exercising artistic freedom. People who think the song is a (say it with me) baggianata don’t believe in democracy.

At this writing, we’re awaiting the opening of the third night of festival programming. “Luca Era Gay” has made it this far (frankly, the competition isn’t particularly stiff this year), and an increasingly smug Povia is continuing to give interviews in which he manages to convey all the smirking satisfaction of someone who thinks his side has already won the match.

Thus far, my new favorite is the one that appeared on the Repubblica site yesterday. An interviewer actually attempted to challenge Povia’s ~~intellectually dishonest~~ creative interpretation of scientific evidence regarding sexual orientation “change.”

“Have you had any cause to reflect on your position, given the numerous psychologists, sociologists, and other experts over the past several days who’ve said that this idea of changing one’s sexual orientation and becoming heterosexual isn’t consistent with....”

“Are they gay, these experts?” Povia wanted to know. "Because if they are, it's like me going to the stadium to ask people whether they think soccer is boring.”

Luca Era Gay - Luca Once Was Gay - Povia

2009-02-19T17:10:00.015+01:00

There are already several bad English translations floating the web around of Povia's "ex-gay" anthem, which stands a decent chance of winning this year's Sanremo Festival. Before any more time goes by, I wanted to offer what strikes me (humbly enough) as a slightly more decent rendition.

What's pretty difficult to convey in English, especially in a fast translation like this, are the terribly catchy rhymes that make the original so musically compelling. In fact, the verses are more or less spoken in a sort of "rap light" version, while the chorus is sung -- accompanied by a very talented female vocalist who reminds one a bit of that wailing voice in the background of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.

************

"Luca Once Was Gay"
Povia

Intro:
Luca once was gay but he’s with her today. When Luca speaks, he holds his heart in his hands. Luca says: Today I am a different man.

1st Verse:
Luca says: Before I talk about the change in my sexuality, let me make one thing clear: If I believe in God, I can’t depend on human beings for my answers. Human thought is divided on this issue, so I didn’t look to psychologists, psychiatrists, clergymen, or scientists. My search took me into my own past, and when I dug down deep, I found the answers to my questions about myself.

My mother loved me—too much. Her love became obsession. Under the weight of her beliefs, her attention, I felt myself suffocating.

My father was a man who didn’t make decisions. I could never talk to him because he was always at work, though I suspected the truth was a little different. In fact, when I was twelve, my mom told him she wanted a separation. I didn’t understand what was happening, but my father said, “Yeah, that’s the right decision,” and after that he started drinking.

My Mom never had a good word to say about my Dad. She used to tell me, “Whatever you do, don’t get married.”

She was jealous of my girlfriends; it felt so unhealthy. And my identity was more confused than ever.

Chorus:
Luca once was gay but he’s with her today. When Luca speaks, he holds his heart in his hands. Luca says: Today I am a different man. (Repeat.)

2nd Verse:
Today I’m a different man, but back then I needed answers. I was so ashamed, I did my looking in secret. There were people who told me, “It’s natural,” but I studied Freud and he didn’t see it that way. I got through high school, still not knowing what happiness was. An older man made my heart race and that’s when I realized I was homosexual.

With him, I didn’t hold back. He showered me with attention, and I thought it was love. Sure, I could be myself, but then the sex became a competition.

I felt like I was the guilty one. I figured they’d catch him sooner or later, but I could make the truth disappear so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

I was looking for my father in all those men. I went with them because I didn't want to betray my mother.

Chorus:
Luca once was gay but he’s with her today. When Luca speaks, he holds his heart in his hands. Luca says: Today I am a different man. (Repeat.)

Finale:
Luca says: I was with a man for four years. Sometimes there was love and sometimes only deception. We cheated on each other constantly.

I was still searching for my truth, for the kind of love that would last forever. Then one night I met her at a party. She was just there with a lot of other people. She had nothing to do with what I was going through, but she listened, she laid me bare, she understood. All I remember is: the next day, I missed her.

So that’s my story—my personal story. No sickness, no recovery.

Dad, I’ve forgiven you, even though you went away and never came back.

Mom, I think about you all the time, and I’ve never stopped caring. Sometimes I still see your face, but I’m a father now, and my heart belongs to the only woman I’ve ever truly loved.

Chorus:
Luca once was gay but he’s with her today. When Luca speaks, he holds his heart in his hands. Luca says: Today I am a different man. (Repeat.)

Life in Italy Today: 2 (Berlusconi)

2009-02-19T09:47:00.008+01:00

A poem by Roberto Benigni:

"If on that night, the divine Hand as her guide,
Donna Rosa* had offered her Milan cavalier a ride
with a posterior view, at Silvio’s conception,
rather than her bearded clam: wondrous intervention—
she alone, the woman Rose, would have received the shaft
and not Italy entire, from north to south, from fore to aft."

*Donna Rosa, it is perhaps obvious, was Berlusconi's mother.

Life in Italy Today: 1 (Immigrants)

2009-02-19T09:45:00.001+01:00

Graffito: "Immigrants, please don't leave us alone with the Italians."

From the Department of "Non Ci Sono Parole": Name Your Kid After Il Duce, Get a Check

2009-02-08T18:16:00.013+01:00

Tricolor Flame Social Movement: €1,500 Bonus for Every Little Benito or Rachele

Emanuele Buzzi
Corriere della Sera
February 8, 2009

Translated by Wendell Ricketts

MILAN — In the name of Benito and Rachele, money is pouring in like rain. The plan to provide a 2009 stimulus payment of €1,500 to couples who promise to name their children after Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, or his wife, Rachele Guidi, has met with an unexpectedly positive response from all over the world. Donations are outstripping applications for the baby-name bonus, and the program, launched last November by the Basilicata-section secretary of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore (the Tricolor Flame Social Movement), Vincenzo Mancusi, is collecting sums far beyond anything he had anticipated. (“Tricolore” is a reference to the red, green, and white Italian flag.)

“We have €516,000 available for this project,” Mancusi explained to the Corriere, “and offers of help are coming in from everywhere in the world. A woman in Madrid sent us €16,000 and said she was ready to sell off some of her property to support this initiative.”

It’s a success well beyond anything the party had imagined, Mancusi said: “We expected to be able to provide funding for ten or twenty babies.” Meanwhile, donations have come in from as far away as Carinthia (Austria) and France, and sometimes in surprising numbers. In fact, the windfall has even aroused the curiosity of the BBC and the Russian state television network.

The first applications for the bonus payments have also been received from the five communities “at risk for depopulation” to whom the program was originally addressed. “Six couples have contacted us, and two have consented to the terms of the agreement that would give them the right to receive the payments.”

Is there, among them, some die-hard Fascist party militant? Not at all, says Mancusi: “These are complete strangers to the movement. We’ve never issued membership cards to them.”

Most are couples between 25 and 35 years of age, “with a low to average standard of living.” The future beneficiaries of the fund do not include residents of other Italian regions or immigrants; instead, they are “all Lucani,” Mancusi confirms, using the antique name for the Region known today as Basilicata.

In the meantime, requests have begun to appear from a dozen or so towns located throughout the rest of the Region: “Some of the other residents of Basilicata feel they’re being discriminated against. We’ll probably extend the project to the entire Region within a few months.”

In addition to the area covered by the incentive plan, the slate of names may be broadened as well. “Certainly,” says Mancusi. “Democracy means the opportunity to choose. I’d propose Giorgio as an alternative to Benito and Assunta for Rachele.”

But Pino Rauti, former head of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (a right-wing party founded in 1946 by survivors of Mussolini’s Fascist government) and of the Tricolor Flame and currently party secretary of the far-right Movimento Idea Sociale, dismisses the bonus for Basilicata’s newborns: “I find the idea of speculating in futures for children’s names or this sort of sentimental nostalgia unbelievable. This initiative is like some kind of time warp.”

Behind This Darkness, Nothing (Part 1): Out & In with Roberto Bolle

2009-02-04T10:33:00.010+01:00

A few days ago, writer Matteo B. Bianchi posted the piece below on his "Matteo B Blog," and I couldn't resist translating it.

In Part 2 of "Behind This Darkness, Nothing" I'll have more to say about the oh-so-'70s tenor of gay life in Italy, but in his commentary on ballet dancer Roberto Bolle and the pop-singer, Povia, Matteo hits the big themes.

The clever title of Matteo’s original post, by the way, was "Bolle di Sapone"—“Soap Bubbles.” It's a play on Bolle’s surname that also suggests, as the Italian expression would have it, "lots of air, not much substance."

***************

Wan Lake
by Matteo B. Bianchi
Translated by Wendell Ricketts

Last week, the La Scala ballet's principal dancer, Roberto Bolle, came out in the French magazine, Numéro Homme, only to issue a retraction the following day in the Italian newspapers. The whole affair has been widely reported in the press, on the internet, and by all the usual suspects.

My view is that the real news here is the retraction. I mean, I can hardly believe anyone was amazed by the confession; rather, what comes as a surprise is knowing that Bolle felt the need to deny it. Moreover (just to be completely accurate), Bolle didn’t deny the content of the confession. Rather, he clarified that he didn’t intend to speak in public about his private and romantic life (which strikes me as an implicit admission by someone who doesn’t have the courage to make an explicit one).

The real question I find myself asking is this: Why, in 2009, is a world-renowned star still afraid that admitting his homosexuality will, in some way or other, hurt his image? How can it possibly damage his career? Go find the most staid and prudish person you know and tell him that La Scala’s lead danseur is gay. The resulting shock wouldn't produce enough energy to lift a single eyebrow.

In other words, how is it possible in this country that even someone who has reached stratospheric levels of fame and recognition, all of which would guarantee him every possible form of personal protection, lacks the courage to take a stand? What lies behind this absence of any sense of civic responsibility toward the gay community?

And while we’re on the subject, there’s the matter of the singer, Povia, and the revisionist song he plans to bring to this year’s Sanremo Music Festival, “Luca Era Gay” (Luca Used To Be Gay).

When I first heard what Povia was planning to sing about, I shrugged my shoulders. “Who gives a crap?” I said. Objectively speaking, Povia is an authentic loser, whose non-influence on Italian music seems obvious. Raise your hand if you remember even the title of his song about the pigeons. Exactly. Nobody. And yet it won him first place at the Festival in 2006.

My feeling is that the announcement of Povia’s intention to participate in this year’s Sanremo with an anti-gay song deserved to be ignored. The week afterward, the public would have immediately forgotten about him and his song, which is what always happens.

But gay movement activists felt something needed to be said, and rightly so, and they decided to protest the content of Povia’s song, uncivil and deviant as it is. All right then. Since the blister has, so to speak, already burst, what I’d like to say is this: If Povia used to be gay and then gave it up, that’s nothing but good news for the gay community—a community made up of people who’ve chosen to live their dreams, their emotions, and their desires (joyously, proudly, and completely) and who are prepared to fight for the right to do so.

The fact that Povia won’t be at my side in that struggle gives me nothing but pleasure. I deserve better traveling companions—at least that damn much.

Charles Lambert's Scent of Cinnamon: Tough Literary Queries Posed Here

2009-01-27T10:13:00.020+01:00

For several months now, novelist and short-story writer Charles Lambert has been zooming around the internet, popping in suddenly here or there—just like Endora on Bewitched—to chat about one of the only things that are still worth talking about: writing.

Charles’ visit to VitaVagabonda marks the last stopover on his “Something Rich and Strange” tour (you can find links to Charles’ previous nine guest appearances at the bottom of this page), and was the occasion for us to discuss the reason we are all gathered here today: his remarkable short-story collection, The Scent of Cinnamon (Salt Publishing, 2008).

Much praise has already been heaped on The Scent of Cinnamon, whose title story was selected for inclusion in the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology; and other people have thought of almost all the nice things I might have said about it (one of the drawbacks of going last). I would just add (or, perhaps, repeat) the following: As a writer who writes short stories (and, especially, as a writer who reads a lot of them), I repeatedly see the short-story form being beaten about the head and shoulders, verbally abused, held against its will, hamstrung, evulsed, shackled, gagged, scuttled, keelhauled, made to dance like a trained monkey, trifled with, besmirched, deplumed, despised, defamed, dishonored, and debauched.

One of the best things I can say about The Scent of Cinnamon, then, is that it is the work of a writer who treats the short story with respect and awe, with grace and skill. As if, in other words, the short story were an art form.

Which is about as rare these days as going into a store and getting actual customer service from the person in the customer-service booth.

Charles was kind enough to chat with me about some of the aspects of The Scent of Cinnamon that I found most intriguing, and our conversation follows. (You can get your very own copy of his collection at fine bookstores everywhere or online in the UK or the US of A.)

WR: As a sort of experiment, and because I thought he needed a jolt, I assigned “The Scent of Cinnamon” to one of my advanced English students to read over the holiday break. I was interested in using it that way both because the story is full of words that he ought to learn and because there’s a fair amount of reading between the lines to do which, if a student can manage it, is a sign that he or she has moved beyond a literal understanding of English and into a metaphorical or lyrical one. I don’t even mean anything especially complicated by that, but just things like: what clues are there as to the time period in which the story takes place or where does Joseph Broderick live (for historical reasons, I decided it was New Zealand or Australia, but I’m not sure). If you were going to teach one of your stories, which one or ones would it be and what would you use the story (or stories) to illustrate?

CL: I’ve thought a lot about this recently, Wendell, because I’ve been asked to write a piece for a sort of manual designed to help people write short stories. It was suggested to me that I might want to do something on “twist in the tail” stories, as I seem to write them so often. I don’t want to spoil the anticipated pleasure of reading my piece by giving away all its secrets here (as befits its subject, I suppose), but I’m certainly intrigued by the way a story can open up to reveal a second story concealed within it. A really satisfactory twist should never feel like an afterthought; at the same time, if it weren’t there, the rest of the story should still feel complete without it, although it certainly wouldn’t be as good. All the information needed for the second reading to exist must somehow be embedded in the narrative, waiting to reveal itself as the real story, for which the other one acts as a sort of deceitful, protective mask. I think I’d choose this to talk about with students, ideally with the more detailed support of my finished piece for the manual (gulp! deadline, end of February).

The two stories in the collection that probably represent the method best—and the ones I’d choose if I wanted to teach it with my own work rather than that of someone who’s better at it, say, Saki—are the first and the last: “The Scent of Cinnamon” and “The Growing,” and it’s relevant, I think, that they both lean on genre forms to some extent. I’d hope that one of these stories would show how this sort of narrative works in a resonant, rather than banal, way. I should say, though, that it’s never my conscious intention to write this kind of story—when they come, they come. If I had an advanced writing class and felt like doing my own work with them, I’d also like them to help me work out to what extent, and by what means, “Soap” might be this kind of story.

By the way, Laura Furman, the editor of the O. Henry Prize, once told me that a historian colleague of hers had worked out where Joseph Broderick lived by seeing how long it took post to arrive from the UK at the turn of the last century. He established, as you guessed and I—fervently—hoped, that it was almost certainly somewhere in the Antipodes. I researched a lot for details of Dunkirk while I was writing “Something Rich and Strange,” but I must admit that I winged it for “The Scent of Cinnamon.”

WR: One of the things I realized, in reading The Scent of Cinnamon, is what a complicated relationship I have with British English (and, it naturally follows, with American English). Like a lot of American readers, perhaps, I’m fond of British writers because I tend to find among them a richer vocabulary and an elegant, more attentive use of language (I’m obviously excluding younger writers and most bloggers who, on both sides of the water, seem to express themselves with about the same 338 words). It’s not for nothing that I go back to Pepys or Woolf every now and then, just to “rinse my pen” (pace Manzoni) in an English that is not yet poisoned by such dubious innovations as MTV, hip hop, verbed nouns, mass advertising, and Judith Butler. (To be fair to my com-pats, there are any number of American writers who could fill the bill just as well as Woolf and Pepys, I just can’t think of one right now—maybe Walt Whitman’s prose, oddly enough or, of course, Henry James, though he always seems more European than American in sensibility.)

That said, it’s also true that I sometimes find myself out of patience with British writers for what strikes me as excessive phlegm and a sort of linguistic punctilio that borders on the sadistic. In other words, if American writers, especially many contemporary ones, seem to lack gravitas, British writers sometimes seem to be writing with an anvil strapped to their wrists. One of the things I admired about The Scent of Cinnamon, in fact, was that you combined a lovely and enviable use of language with a writer’s touch that always struck me as just right for the characters, the plot, the story. It’s British English but it’s got what I’d be so bold and shamelessly chauvinistic as to call an American inflection; it’s haimish. Now, in case you were wondering whether I actually had a question, here it is (and, in utter disrespect of the rules, it’s a two-parter): First, do you experience anything similarly visceral (knowing, as I do, that you read very widely) in your relationship with American writing/writers vs. British writing/writers? And second, what, if anything, would persuade you to write (or dissuade you from writing) characters who lived in and spoke American English; that is, how would AE affect characterization or the kind of stories you tell. (And obviously I’m thinking of what it would take for me to write a BE-speaking character convincingly....)

CL: Well, this is almost too flattering to require an answer and I think I’ll just bask in your generosity for a moment. OK, basking over, back to the job. The writers I admire are divided pretty equally between the two sides of the Atlantic, I think, but something they may have in common is that many of the Americans I love tend to write with a grammatical complexity and richness of language that often feels “European” (Brodkey, White), while the UK authors who most appeal to me have an edginess that doesn’t feel British English, and certainly comes from what Carver represents in the US tradition. Which is another way of saying that, like you, I’m probably most interested in writers who don’t work within national stylistic rigidities, if these exist—and, to be honest, I’m not convinced our shared intuition would bear too much examination. (Someone commented on an earlier leg of the tour—I think Kevin from Canada, which wouldn’t be surprising!—that quite a few of my favourite writers are, in fact, Canadian. This may be significant. Maybe writers like Munro, Arwood and Gowdy just naturally combine the two....) I should also say that I’m deeply bored by the increasingly dull pseudo-classical cadences of some British writers (OK, McEwan primarily, but there are others: I don’t, for example, think Hollinghurst is nearly as good a stylist as most people seem to, much as I enjoy his work, and think it valuable).

As far as my own work is concerned, I’m very wary about creating AE characters, and the only one in this collection is Janice in “Little Potato, Little Pea,” who just seemed to come to me whole and ready-made. I have, as apologists always say, many American friends, and I know how wonderfully inimitable they are, but I think I know enough of their speech patterns and mannerisms to produce something fairly convincing within a very narrow range, and I hope I’ve managed to do this in the story. The fact that she may be the most despicable person in the whole book (and I know there’s some serious competition) is, believe me, pure coincidence.

WR: This isn’t the question that I had intended to ask you on this topic, but I was inspired by a note I received recently from a friend, a performance artist, who wrote that she was about to attend a conference entitled “Performing Other: Constructing Race and Gender Onstage and Off.” When I lived in SF, I did theater criticism for about ten years and there was a lot of interest in those years in the idea of “performativity”—that is, in the way “performance” (sensu strictu) combined or contrasted with “performance” in the deconstructivist sense. It seems to me as though these interesting concepts haven’t been applied in quite the same way to writing or, at least, not as thoroughly. So let’s do.

The really entangled and entangling question I want to ask you has to do with the way you, as a writer, “perform” homosexuality for readers—your homosexuality or homosex as an abstract construct or homosex as a character feature or homosex as a plot point. That is: If you write a character who is queer, and if you want the audience to know that s/he is queer, you’re forced in some way to “perform” that fact. The easiest and least interesting way is just to use the words, but you’re still left with the issue of how the gay character you “perform” will be “read”—both by other LGBT readers and by readers who aren’t. Arguably, a gay or lesbian or tranny character is an “other” in any case, whether with respect to an audience that’s not exclusively homo or to a gay public that isn’t familiar with the time or milieu or social class of the character.

In your interview with Jockohomo, you mention the “otherness” of Selby, which nonetheless somehow resonated within you. For me, the “gay” of Selby (or John Rechy), Andrew Holleran, or leaping several decades, Augusten Burroughs is simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable, “other” and not. I thought a lot about this as I worked on Everything I Have Is Blue, where one of the criteria I used in selecting stories was the way in which the writer had his or her working-class character “perform” being working-class.

Anyway, before you answer, let me blather on a little more about this topic by saying that one of the most fascinating stories for me in your collection was “Moving the Needle Toward the Thread,” in which I was convinced that the main character was (or ought to have been) gay. Obviously, there are clear indications that the narrator is a woman in love with a man, but for me, the “performance” of certain elements that I identified as “homosexual” seemed clear. Plus, I couldn’t help but think of the death of Joe Orton. Of course, I don’t know if any of this was intended or whether I’ve made it all up. If, in your answer, you could also comment on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which has struck many people (me included) as the performance of a homosexual relationship using heterosexual characters, I’d be much obliged. For 10 bonus points, throw in Foucault.

CL: Where to start? I wrote an essay some years back on the strategies a (male) gay poet might use to address the loved one without the gayness of the relationship being annulled by readers’ assumptions of heterosexuality, and this covers some of the ground you mention here (it’s still available in the excellent collection, Language and Desire, which, incidentally, also contains the full transcript of the notorious “tampax” conversation between Charles Windsor and Camilla Parker-Bowles). Fiction’s different from poetry, obviously, but readers still make assumptions, as they have every right to do, and these are based not only on the text, and on markers within it, but on extra-textual stuff, the cover illustration, the publisher, what we know of the writer, etc. No one, in other words, expects the narrator in a Dennis Cooper novel to be a girl. It hasn’t been a strategy of mine to make that unworkable with my writing, but the simple result of letting myself go where the whim takes me, and finding myself involved in narrative situations that don’t necessarily key with my own sexual identity, or my thoughts and beliefs as a gay man.

This doesn’t mean people don’t jump to conclusions, of course, and you aren’t the first (male, gay) reader—you’re actually the third—to feel that the narrator of “Thread” ought to be, or even ‘is’, a man. One of the reasons she hitches up her skirt in the first paragraph is to indicate that this isn’t likely to be the case. In a sense this indicates the story’s failure and, I hope, its success, because what I really wanted to do was to signal otherness by showing how foolish Claire is to believe that it doesn’t matter one jot whether, talking about love, we move the needle towards the thread or the thread towards the needle, because it does; after which I wanted to show, as her certainties dissolve that she might, after all, and despite ourselves, be right. That at a more basic level there is less otherness, and more oneness, than we think, and that our refusal to recognise what there is can act as a barrier to our overcoming it. Clearly, this is a lot for one story for to do.…

I’d like to talk more about the elements you identify as “homosexual” in the piece, because I wonder if they might not reflect ways in which gay men have internalised what they perceive to be feminine behaviour and whether that might not be a trap I’ve fallen into. But I really think we should discuss this over a bottle of wine... Who knows, I might even get my ten point bonus. And yes, I absolutely agree with you about Albee. That must be worth five, surely?

WR: You’ve lived in Italy a lot longer than I have, but I was struck that at least four of the stories in The Scent of Cinnamon are set in Italy: “Nipples,” “Entertaining Friends,” “Damage,” and “Little Potato, Little Pea.” (I don’t think I’ve missed one, have I?) I’ve written only one story set in Italy, and that one years ago, when I was still only visiting semi-annually. Since then, I’ve made many attempts but haven’t gotten far; instead, now that I don’t live there anymore, my stories tend to find themselves in Hawai’i or San Francisco. Perhaps I just see the past more clearly than the present and, thus, it’s more available to me. Italy may still be too “actual.” That said, Cornwall, London, and other locations in England show up in several of your stories, as does Greece, Normandy, and so on. In what ways has Italy changed for you or become available as the “location” not only of your (real) life but for your stories? What are the geographical places that you tend to be called toward as you write?

CL: It’s certainly true for me that I need distance in time to get a decent hold on something. The events that triggered the autobiographical stories in the collection, which include the four set in Italy (with the obvious proviso that I’m only in “Little Potato, Little Pea” as one of Janice’s unfortunate, and barely mentioned, lettore colleagues; and, yes, you did miss an Italian one, Wendell, though you can be forgiven, because the unidentified island I had in mind while writing “Moving the Needle towards the Thread” was actually Ponza, just off the Lazio coast), had all had time to mulch down before I began to work on them, and the same is obviously true of those stories set in England in which the central character is either a child or fresh out of university. I should say here that “Girlie” is not autobiographical, except, in a small way, psychologically. So the past is definitely another country, and more amenable to being written about. As far as the present goes, I think I’d find it very difficult to set a long piece of work, like a novel, entirely in contemporary Britain, particularly if it was dealing with adults.

Little Monsters (out in paperback on 6 February, by the way!) is divided, as I am, between a past in the UK and a present in Italy, and my imagination, to put it mildly, isn’t sparked by life “at home” in the way it is by that in Italy. This doesn’t mean I subscribe to the view that Italy is all bruschette and arancini (though I often wish it were if the alternative is Berlusconi and lavoro precariato), as you well know. If I did, I wouldn’t know what to say about the place that hasn’t been said, excruciatingly, by a dozen other people. I suppose I write about Italy because I find myself getting worked up about what goes on around me, as people do, and want to deal with it. Both my last novel and the one I’m writing at the moment are set entirely in Rome, although they each involve a mixture of Italian and non-Italian characters, and deal, at a narrative level, with lamentably typical Italian subjects: terrorism, political double-dealing, corruption—although what they’re really about, like Little Monsters, is guilt and loss and responsibility, my favourite themes. An earlier novel, as yet unpublished, has only Italian characters, and I didn’t feel that I was moving outside my territory in a way that I would have done if I’d tried to write a novel about rent-boys in London. (Go figure. Now that is AE!) I still haven’t written a single word of fiction about Fondi, where I’ve been living for almost seven years now (God!), but I’m looking forward to it.

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Charles Lambert’s “Something Rich and Strange” Tour, November 2008-January 2009

11 November 2008: Elizabeth Baines
18 November 2008: Writing Neuroses
25 November 2008: Me and My Big Mouth
2 December 2008: Jockohomo
9 December 2008: Vanessa Gebbie’s News
16 December 2008: Asylum
6 January 2009: dovegreyreader scribbles
13 January 2009: Harkaway’s Occasionalities
20 January 2009: Topsyturvydom

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About the author: Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, the United Kingdom, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, his occupations have included kitchen hand, shop assistant, medical journal editor, guidebook writer, receptionist, teacher of political science, and journalist with ANSA, the Italian news agency. He now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples, a stone's throw from what was once the Appian Way.

Charles Lambert is also the author of the highly acclaimed novel, Little Monsters (Picador, 2008). He blogs at Charles Lambert's Place for Everything That Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else.

FaceBook is a Virus: Twenty-Five Random Things about Me

2009-01-26T11:08:00.003+01:00

After I got "tagged" for the third time on Facebook, I started to have chain-letter anxiety. So I figured I'd better create my own list, because I can use all the luck I can get.

I know. A lot of people have had it up to here with these lists, and I don't blame them.

On the other hand, you have no idea of the number of messages I received about the Pittsburgh Steelers or how much it vexed me to have to search Wiki to find out what the hell a "Terrible Towel" is, so we all have our crosses to bear.

I'll say one thing in defense of "Twenty-Five Things" lists: It's not a bad exercise for creative-writing classes or for groups of almost any kind. It works especially well as an “ice-breaker” exercise. Have people write their notes on separate slips of paper and put them in a bowl. Participants then draw slips at random and guess who wrote what. Or make up your own rules.

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Twenty-Five Random Things about Me

1. I’ve developed an aversion to the telephone that borders on psychosis and am considering going back to writing letters by longhand.

2. I miss my mother more than my father and think about her often, though for many years the opposite was true.

3. I would dearly love to fall in love with Italy again.

4. I consider bad/careless writing a personal affront, and I’m not kidding when I say I’d levy stiff fines for the rubbish that is increasingly passed off as English; repeat offenders would have to serve time in language-abuse jail.

5. I wish I had become a marine biologist.

6. I’m thrilled when an experience moves me enough to make me cry and I would like it to happen much more often than it does.

7. I’ve made a lot of really stupid decisions in my life, but the decision not to have kids was one of the good ones!

8. Never being able to dedicate regular time to writing is both terribly sad and terribly demoralizing.

9. I miss Buffy.

10. I also miss American food, especially “ethnic” food, and am beyond exasperated by Italian chauvinism regarding their national cuisine.

11. I spend entirely too much time in existential tizzies and quandaries, though I wouldn’t necessarily give them up in favor of a more superficial approach to life (even if it were simultaneously more peaceful).

12. I still think I’m going to finish a Ph.D. before I die.

13. I experience being oppressed by technology and am worryingly addicted to the internet.

14. I always intended to get a lot more tattoos, but at this point I probably won’t.

15. I’ve only had one cavity in my entire life.

16. There are few experiences that make me feel more forlorn and derelict than being cold; conversely, for me there’s almost no such thing as “too hot.”

17. About two months out of three, the full moon drives me almost literally crazy for a few nights.

18. I’m a sucker for Judy, Barbra, Edith, Billie, Cher, Aretha, Patsy and various and sundry divas of their ilk and grandeur, and I don’t mind being a stereotype as long as I get to sing along.

19. I was truly convinced that things were going to turn out a whole lot different.

20. I can’t wait to get back to working in a prison or JD center.

21. Chronic back pain is a wretched, wretched fate.

22. Even after seeing hundreds and hundreds of them, I still get a huge, childish kick out of going to the movies—even more so if I smuggle in homemade popcorn.

23. I’m trying to make peace with the realization that there will be no solution in this lifetime for the fact that the people who are most important to me always live far away—from me and from one another.

24. If I could get them, I’d eat a Hawaiian papaya a day and never be bored!

25. I worry that my Italian isn’t going to get any better than it already is.

Tempora et Mores: RAM Dump 2009

2009-01-12T13:31:00.013+01:00

“No one needs more than 256k of RAM,” Bill Gates once famously quipped.

Turns out it’s not true—not for gig-devouring Windows-based computers and not for human beings on the downslope of 50.

I’ve decided, therefore, that I’ve really got no choice: If I want to keep my processing level reasonably high, I’ve got to convert some storage space. Which means losing some memories from 2008 and beyond.

On the chance that any of the following memories might turn out to have the slightest redeeming historical value, I’m hoping someone else will step forward to take them over. As for me, as of midnight tonight, I am purging my memory of the following (and the secretary will disavow all knowledge of my actions):

1. Michael Phelps. Let’s be honest: The 2008 Olympics were a bore, China had no business being allowed to host them, and Michael Phelps is the biggest athlebrity dork since ... well, ever. In keeping with the values and mores of the Dubya era (see below), he can barely string two coherent sentences together and, even were he to read Trollope out loud, he’d still sound like a tall, idiot child with a mouth full of mashed banana. Who knows how a kid born in Baltimore wound up with a voice like a Valley Boy, though I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t take the other linguistic choice of white boys of his generation: talking like a wigger. Plus, he’s got a wicked overbite and he shaves his forearms. I’m over it.

2. Hillary Clinton was robbed. I’d be tempted to forget Hillary Clinton altogether, just because she pisses me off, but I feel the need to keep her in the memory banks as long as she’s Secretary of State. For me, it was real simple: Barack Obama’s message was “I’d really like to be president, and I have some innovative ideas that I’d put into practice if you gave me the chance.” La Clinton’s message was: “You owe me, I deserve it, and damn it, it’s my turn!” Other than not being able to control her megalomaniac husband, that’s essentially why she lost. End of story. While I’m at it, I’m purging everything leading up to last year’s Democratic convention.

3. Povia. Italian pop singer. Sort of Michael Bolton with hair, but less talented. One year he had a hit song about how cute babies are. The year after that he had a hit song about how cute pigeons are. This year he’s threatening to go to the annual Italian music festival, Sanremo, with a song about how cute ex-gays are. Povia himself was gay for seven months, he says, “on account of keeping bad company.” Now he’s cured and, what the hell, he wants to sing about it. We are not amused.

4. Soup. No special reason. I just ate way too much of it in 2008, and I don’t want to think about it for at least a year. Starting in January 2010, feel free to remind me what I’m missing and to send along your recipes. (Runners-up in this category were eggplant and rosemary.)

5. The Shrub. (RIP, Molly Ivins.) Our long national nightmare is over. Gerald Ford said it about the Nixon years; I can’t say it enough about the Dubya years. Even if Obama’s presidency turns out to be as lackluster as, say, Millard Fillmore’s, things are still bound to be better. I’m only worried that I’m probably not going to live long enough for historians to recall The Shrub as the most disastrous president of all time and/or to spit on his grave. Them, I mean. Doing the spitting. Because I'll have forgotten all about it.

6. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bernard Madoff, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and their fellow travelers. This is more in the nature of a memory adjustment than a memory dump, but my plan is to clear away a lot of details (including competing editorials in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, each “explaining” the financial crisis in terribly convincing and mutually incompatible terms) and just “remember” that the lot of them are rotting in prison. Preferably in Texas. Preferably near Amarillo.

7. Benedictus PP. XVI. Forgetting the entirety of organized religion would, admittedly, free up a ton of space, but would then necessitate a defrag that could last most of the year. Between Catholics, Jihadists, compassionate conservatives, the Taliban, the Mormons (aka, the American Taliban), Rick Warren and his minions, Fatwas and Sharia, and all the rest, it’s difficult to know where to start. My plan, however, is to begin by forgetting not just Pope Ratz, but all that has happened in his papacy—all the way back to April 19, 2005, when 115 cardinals in Rome got it really, really wrong.

8. Celebrity chefs. I don’t want to argue that Italian television has the most irritating celebrity chefs in the world (not when people like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver are in contention), but there’s this one guy, Mattia Poggi (whom one site likens to an Australian surfer) whose plucked eyebrows, masonry-strength hair gel, and maddening habit of saying “E voilà!” every three seconds are enough to make me fantasize about feeding him into the duck press. He's the epitome of everything that went wrong with Italian boys in the 1990s: The sexiest guys in the world got metrosexualed to within an inch of their lives; they're depilated, effete, anorexic, and vain, and they have more cosmetics in their bathroom cabinets than their sisters. Plus, Mattia is a stupid name for a boy. Anyway ... my point is: Ever since Two Fat Ladies went off the air a decade ago, has any one of these egomaniacs taught you one useful thing? I seriously doubt it. I’m even going to unsubscribe from the American Public Media’s newsletter, “The Splendid Kitchen,” because Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s shameless name-dropping and “more Italian than thou” attitude have become seriously unbearable.

9. Canadian movies, especially if Denys Arcand is involved. My “Movies I Saw in 2008 That Really Sucked” list is topped by Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares) and Days of Darkness (L’Âge des Ténèbres). But I’ve also been forced to see such dogs as Where the Truth Lies (useful to recall, however, if you ever find yourself playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”), The Saddest Music in the World (not even La Rossellini could help), and any number of Canadian horror films or comedies, which are indistinguishable from one another. It’s no accident that the most over-hyped movie of the last quarter-century, Crash, was written and directed by a Canadian. Guys, you whip our asses at just about everything having to do with government, social policy, and quality of life. Couldn't you just leave the movies to us?

10. Sarah Palin. I don't really need to explain why, do I? Don't worry, though: I'm definitely keeping Tina Fey.

St. James of South Philly, the Patron Saint of People Who Want Peace & Quiet at the Movies

2008-12-28T12:29:00.016+01:00

Okay, so he isn't the most pleasant-looking guy in the world. In fact, he's the kind of Italian-American goombah that Italians would call a brutto ceffo.

You can't see it in the photo, but I'll bet he generally goes around wearing a gold chain with one of those little chili-pepper shaped pendants hanging from it. It's called a "corno" in Italian (a horn) and its history as a talisman dates back to the Stone Age. Guys like James Joseph, though, tend to tell you they're shaped like sperm. In Italy, they're red; in South Philly, they're often made of gold, thereby combining bling with whatever people think they remember about Italy.

If you watched The Sopranos with any regularity, you certainly saw them.

Enn ee way ... one thing 100% American about James Joseph is that he was packing heat when he went to see a movie on Christmas night. That's just the kinda guy he is.

And when the people sitting in front of him during a showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button wouldn't shut their freaking mouths and stop chatting like they were at home in their freaking living room instead of in a freaking public movie theater filled with other people, he shot one of them. (See "Police: Pa. man shot for making noise during movie.")

It's a shocking event. Like Rick Warren and other holy people, however, I, too, love the sinner even if I hate the sin.

In this case, I'm not even sure I hate the sin all that much.

Actually, I keep thinking of Bernard Goetz who, back in 1984, helped make the world safe for subway riders in New York. At the time, the city had a crime rate that was 70% higher than the rest of the nation, and I don't think it's entirely an accident that crime slowly began to drop in NYC after Goetz. Not because Goetz was a hero (he wasn't; he was a racist and a whack job), but because his case served to focus people's anger regarding an issue the city was stubbornly failing to address: the fact that citizens didn't feel safe walking the streets and riding the subway.

Since I don't generally carry a gun, I don't feel safe telling others to shut their damn mouths at the movie theater. Similarly, I'm really fed up with the fact that movie theaters no longer employ people to perform the function of keeping order in a public place and of enforcing what are, ostensibly, the rules.

A few months ago, during a film, we watched as a man continued to have a conversation on his cell phone, in an increasingly loud voice, even after another movie-goer had gone to try to get help from the management and even after the two gals from the popcorn stand had come in and bravely asked him to take his conversation outside.

If James Joseph Cialella had been there, he'd have shot the guy.

As for me, I'm certain it would all have happened much too fast for me to be able to identify the shooter.

You Just Screwed Up, Buddy: Giving Comfort to Those Who Prey on Hate

2008-12-20T09:48:00.013+01:00

I have never believed that Barack Obama was going to stand up one day on national television and say “I support gay marriage for anyone who wants it.”

I have never fooled myself that the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was ever going to climb to the top of his list of priorities.

I knew, from the start of his campaign almost two years ago, that he was a classic “liberal” when it came to queer rights: Some of his best friends are. He’s against anti-gay violence and job discrimination against LGBT people (most of it—just not in the military). He’ll appoint qualified lesbians and gay men to positions in his government.

But he doesn’t really, truly believe we’re the same as “everybody else.” He doesn’t really, truly believe we should be entitled, in every single conceivable way, to the same legal and social status as people who happen to be heterosexual. And he doesn’t really, truly believe that homophobia falls into precisely the same category as racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism.

For homophobia, he’s willing to make some exceptions. For the fundamentalist Christian right, he’s willing to concede that a religious motivation justifies the preaching of anti-gay bigotry and, evidently, that churches have a legitimate role to play in formulating public and civil-rights policy in a secular society.

That’s exactly what happened in California last November: Religious groups (the Mormon church chief among them) succeeded in repealing the right of marriage for same-sex partners, which the California Supreme Court had previously declared constitutional, for motivations that were entirely religious (or, as they like to put it, “moral”).

Rick Warren was right there with them.

Obama has made it clear that, in his approach to governing the United States, he wants to move beyond “small politics”; he wants to “reach across the aisle” and “expand the debate.” How could we not agree?

But every single political position, personal belief, or religious conviction does not deserve a place at the table. Not every opinion is legitimate or correct simply because someone holds it, and democracy doesn't mean reducing all moral positions to the least common denominator.

I don’t expect fundamentalist preachers to stop inveighing against homosexuality anymore than I expect McDonald’s to stop selling high-fat hamburgers: It’s what they do.

What I do expect is that the (future) President of the United States, who campaigned on a platform of principles and core values, will demonstrate that he has some.

I don’t think Rick Warren deserves to be shot on sight or put in a concentration camp or be clapped into jail—which is quite a bit more Christian than what a lot of the people in Warren's Rolodex would be willing to concede to me. Over the years, big-name members of the fundamentalist religious right have publicly and repeatedly called for LGBT people to be arrested, imprisoned, murdered, branded, stoned, fired from their jobs, physically segregated ... you get the picture. These are Rick Warren’s friends and colleagues.

And Obama thinks inviting a man like that to pray at his inauguration is an example of building bridges.

He’s wrong. If Jeremiah Wright doesn’t merit a place on the podium on January 20th—if his ideas were “divisive and destructive” and “[gave] comfort to those who prey on hate”; if Wright "contradict[ed] everything that [Obama was] about”—then why isn’t the same true of Rick Warren? Those quotes, by the way, all come from Obama’s statements about Wright last April 29th.

And that is what makes the choice of Rick Warren so appalling. Obama didn’t need to go out on a limb or expend political capital or take a position for gay marriage or gay rights that would have stirred up national controversy.

All he had to do was refuse to sacrifice gay people in the name of pandering to the religious right. All he had to do was refuse to give comfort to those who prey on hate. All he had to do, if he wanted to build bridges, was not bury us under them.

All he had to do was invite someone other than Rick Warren. Avoiding this offense, in other words, would have cost Obama nothing. But we weren’t important enough not to insult.

Writers like Lee Stranahan (in the Huffington Post) and numerous bloggers, meanwhile, defend Warren by saying that he actually represents the “mainstream.” “Embrace what you have in common with Rick Warren,” Stranahan exhorts; “a majority of Americans agree with Warren about same sex marriage and many more states have made marriage equality unconstitutional than have ratified it.”

We’re kidding here, right? Lee Stranahan really does know the difference between democracy and the tyranny of the many, doesn’t he? He, and those who hold similar views, are not really arguing that full citizenship and legal parity for queer people should be decided by majority vote. Or is he?

One hundred and fifty years ago, the “mainstream” view was that slavery was a fine old institution and that the national government should stay out of it. Eighty years ago, the “mainstream” was convinced that women had no business voting. Sixty-six years ago, the “mainstream” held that Japanese-Americans were traitors and that imprisoning them in concentration camps was legitimate and justified. Forty years ago the “mainstream” considered mixed-race marriages immoral and supported laws prohibiting them. Six years ago, the “mainstream” was convinced that Iraq was hiding caches of weapons of mass destruction and was an immediate threat to the safety of the United States.

The mainstream is often wrong. Obama ought to know that better than anybody else: Up until a few months ago, the “mainstream” believed he could never be elected president.

And here’s a final irony. Earlier this month, Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee announced that the national Lesbian and Gay Band Association, a group that represents LGBT bands in eighteen states, would perform at the inauguration. An historic choice, or so we're told.

But let’s think about the symbolism of all this. At Obama’s inauguration, LGBT people are invited to dance, play music, and entertain, but the question of our dignity as human beings and our full enfranchisement as citizens ... well, over that question looms the shadow of Rick Warren, his jaws still bloody from the evisceration of gay marriage in California.

I’m quite sure a man as smart and decent as Barack Obama doesn’t need me to explain the meaning of the term “minstrel show.”

So you think the school system has problems in America...

2008-12-17T14:48:00.007+01:00

By now, everybody knows that I love me some Stefano Benni. Yesterday, a Facebook friend posted a piece from Benni’s site in which he skewers Italy’s Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini. (The Italian text is easy to find online, though it no longer appears to be available on www.stefanobenni.it.)

Here’s my translation: I just couldn’t resist. Benni’s “Il Mostro Unico” is a quick lesson in the current Italian political and educational situation (sad, sad), even if all the references may not be immediately clear.

---------------------------

THE MONSTER REDUCTION AND SIMPLIFICATION ACT
by Stefano Benni
Trans. by Wendell Ricketts

Dear Hooligan Students:

It’s me, your beloved Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini. After my proposal to give a failing grade in deportment to all those Italian students who protested school conditions and my plan to reduce the number of teachers in the classroom, I have a new idea that will revitalize the Italian school system. Where does education begin? In nursery school, as we all know. And that’s where we need to focus our efforts so that young children will learn to be obedient and respectful of authority. Fairy tales, however, with all that surplus fantasy and reckless waste of characters, alienate students from healthy realism and a proper degree of conformity and fuel the danger of getting off track, not to mention that they lead to debauchery, drugs, and hooliganism.

As a result, by Executive Order, I hereby institute the Monster Reduction and Simplification Act. Henceforth, the reading of fairy tales that contain more than one monster or bad guy, which would represent a clear burden on the taxpayer, is prohibited by law. Most important of all, every children's story must emphasize the degree to which the remaining monster is a perverse, old-style-Communist-sympathizing hooligan.

The MRSA (Monster Reduction and Simplification Act) prohibits, for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, because the Wicked Stepmother and the witch are a costly and pointless duplication of characters that is detrimental to young students’ imaginations, leaving entirely aside the question of the ambiguous living situation in which Snow White and her seven little worker-friends find themselves. One of them, in fact—Grumpy—is obviously a union member who belongs to the Italian General Confederation of Labor.

Little Red Riding Hood is allowed, but we need to make clear that the hunter is associated with the Lega Nord and that the wolf, being of Transylvanian origins, is a Romanian. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is out: one thief is enough. Peter Pan is out—there are too many pirates living off the national coffers. Pinocchio is out: Even if the Cat and the Fox were to be combined into a single animal, there would still be the matter of the defamation of the police force and the fact that the Land of Toys is an obvious reference to Mediaset. Tom Thumb is allowed, but he’ll have to start calling himself Big Toe Tom and he’ll need to be at least 5’5” tall to eliminate the obvious dig at our beloved Prime Minister.

Hansel and Gretel are out because we don’t need two monsters, the mother and the witch, plus they all spend too much time talking about economic crises. The Ugly Duckling is out. If someone is ugly, it’s for genetic reasons and he’ll just have to stay that way. Besides, Andersen was gay.

Puss in Boots is likewise out because of the obvious sadomasochistic connotations. Cinderella is out—and I mean really, really out. There are three bad characters and they all look like me—your superficial, ill prepared, and long-winded Minister of Education. Reduced and simplified maybe, but still the only one you’ve got.

If the Shoe Fits...

2008-12-15T10:31:00.008+01:00

During a press conference held last Sunday as part of President Bush's farewell tour to Iraq, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at Mr. Bush on live television and insulted him, calling him a dog. Mr. Bush narrowly avoided being struck by the twin projectiles.

For the full story, see "Iraqi Journalist Hurls Shoes at Bush" from the December 14, 2008, New York Times.

As an American, I want to use this public forum to express my horror and outrage at this event.

After six years, more than 579 trillion dollars, and the deployment of some 300,000 American soldiers, do you really mean to tell me that Iraqis haven't learned to aim any better than that?

No Discrimination Against the Discriminators: The Compassionate Christianity of Papa Ratz

2008-12-02T12:17:00.011+01:00

This is not exactly the freshest news in the world: For at least two years, France has been considering a proposal to the United Nations requiring the decriminalization of homosexuality in member countries. As early as November 2006, French activist Louis-George Tin announced his intention to present the UN with a draft resolution to that effect.

In September 2008, just slightly less than two years later, the French Junior Human Rights Minister, Rama Yade, told a conference of NGOs at UNESCO that she would submit such a resolution to the UN General Assembly in December, with the aim of effecting universal decriminalization of homosexuality. In the meantime, every single country in the European Union has signed on to France’s draft declaration, which will be presented officially on December 10, the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights.

Let’s be clear: We’re not talking anti-discrimination legislation, gay marriage, adoptions, or anything else. All we’re talking about is: In those countries—more than 80 of them, including Iran (currently the world leader in the execution by stoning or hanging of gay people); most of Africa; India; and the U.S., on its military bases throughout the world; see "Homosexuality Laws of the World" for a complete list)—where you can be fined, arrested, jailed, tortured, and/or executed simply for being gay or for having a relationship with someone of your same sex, homosexuality per se would be decriminalized.

Who could have a problem with that? It seems sort of obvious, really, like taking those laws off the books in towns where it’s illegal to water your cattle on the public streets or wear spurs in the courthouse.

Now, I know this will shock you, but it turns out that one of those people who has a big problem with that is God’s man in the Vatican, that bastion of Christ-like love and human kindness, Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger.

The Vatican opposes the resolution because ... okay, let me try to work this out for you, though I warn you that the logic is Kafkaesque. The Catholic Church is against discrimination, including discrimination against homosexuals. But since the Catholic Church is against discrimination, it’s also against discriminating against countries that discriminate.

According to the Vatican, the UN resolution would “pillory” countries where homosexuality is illegal and punishable by law, forcing them to create “new categories protected from discrimination,” even while failing to take into account the fact that such laws “would create new and implacable acts of discrimination.... States where same-sex unions are not recognized as ‘marriages,’ for example, would be subject to international pressure.”

I am not making this up. Mons. Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s permanent pit bull (um, observer) at the U.N. said it yesterday in an interview with the French media.

This, by the way, is the same Vatican that brought you nearly a decade of pretending that the Holocaust wasn’t happening. Evidently, the Pope didn’t want to discriminate against Nazis, either.

I leave you with a short comment written by an Italian friend and translated by me. She sums things up pretty well:

Lord, Give Me Courage
by Isabella Zani
(Or, read it in Italian: Voglio il coraggio)

--------------------------

There are countries in this world – lots of them, too many in fact (when even just one would be more than enough) – where gay men and women, as the result of a personal predisposition that they didn’t chose any more than a person chooses to have blue eyes, black skin, or a Roman nose, are persecuted by law, by the authorities, and by the official actions and pronouncements of those in power, as well as by the ignorance, fear, and derision of their fellow citizens. Harassed by State violence, that is, in addition to the violence perpetrated by “normal” people.

This is not right. This is wrong. And there’s really nothing else to say about it. If we’re talking about shit, you know it when you see it.

Okay, so apparently the Pope, or whoever it is who speaks for him, doesn’t see things the way I do. Or, to put it another way: he doesn’t say, loudly and clearly, that the situation I’ve described is wrong. But if he won’t say it’s wrong, then he should have the guts to say it’s right. It’s simple, really: something is either right or it’s wrong. He should have the nerve to say: I refuse to condemn the countries where they treat homosexuals that way. I, and what I represent, we support those countries. We don’t believe what they’re doing is wrong. Ergo, we believe it’s right.

If you can’t find any compassion in your heart, Holy Father, see if you can find a little courage.

What’s a Little Transphobia Among French?

2008-11-30T10:33:00.005+01:00

You may or may not have heard that former Italian MP, Vladimir Luxuria, recently triumphed as the winner of the 2008 edition of the reality TV show, L’Isola dei Famosi (or "Celebrity Island," sort of a cross between Survivor and The Surreal Life, except that it goes on FOREVER and is hosted by Simona Ventura, easily one of the most irritating presenters on Italian television [and that’s saying quite a lot]).

It was big news—at least to me—because I love me some Luxuria. She’s cool, she’s smart, she’s a big lefty, she talks about queer rights constantly in a country where the silence is deafening, and she calls out Fascists like Alessandra Mussolini wherever she finds ‘em.

So how come the Agence France-Presse (AFP), via the Google News newsfeed, published such a hateful article about Luxuria's win? (See the full piece here: Italian Transvestite Ex-MP Triumphs as Reality TV Star.)

It’s fairly amazing, in fact, that in less than 200 words, the AFP article manages to deploy every trick in the transphobe’s book: referring to Luxuria throughout the article as “he” (though Luxuria has lived for a very long time as a woman); calling her a “transvestite” instead of transgendered or transsexual; and insisting that Luxuria’s “real” name is a male one.

Really. It’s impressive. Very 1960s.

It’s hard to know if the fault is the writer’s (the article isn’t signed) or the translator’s (assuming the article wasn’t originally written in English; if the translator did it, though, that was quite an act of revision!).

In any case, it’s obnoxious. Language counts – and if you remember the days (not so very long ago) when the New York Times refused to print the word “gay” – you know how much.

Shame on Google News (which, like virtually everything else connected to Google, is impossible to contact directly); shame on Agence France-Presse (whose website displays a generic contact form; we’ll see if they write back).

We’re in the third millennium, babies. It’s time to get with the program. If you’re not writing about our new “colored” president and our about-to-be “lady” secretary of state, figure it out: A tranny by any other name is no longer just as sweet.

Call Me Cynical ...

2008-11-30T09:59:00.009+01:00

... and age-ist and just plain bitchy, but the New York Times reports this morning that Liza Minnelli is back on Broadway for a "comeback" ("retirement" being one of those words in the Minnelli vocabulary, like "marriage," that is spoken in the eternal subjunctive).

"Liza’s at the Palace" opens this week. Writes the normally less fawning Charles Isherwood in the Times:

Ms. Minnelli is looking — hallelujah! — healthy and happy at 62, and sounding strong and grounded. “I just feel like I’ve come through a whole bunch of stuff,” she explained in the living room of her Upper East Side apartment, a sleek marble-and-mirrors aerie in which it is easy to imagine the ghost of Halston languidly stalking the halls, trailing a phantom stream of cigarette smoke. “But I have never felt better in my life. I feel free. I feel happy. I feel completely solid. Calmer and more focused. I understand how intelligent I am.”

Well. (You can read the full story here: Comeback With a ‘Z’.)

As I say ... cynical, age-ist, bitchy, but ... I can't help but wonder: Is the new show to help tide Liza over because she, like millions of other retirement-age Americans, lost big bucks in the stock market crash? Did the cost of marrying (and quickly divorcing) one gay man after another finally get to be too much? (I dare you: go search for Google images of David Gest and tell me he isn't the most terrifying white man you've seen since Michael Jackson; they have the same plastic surgeon, by the way, though I hardly need to tell you that).

Of course, we love Liza--America's answer to Loredanna Berte'-- 'cuz she's Judy's daughter, so: Liza, break a leg! (Just not one of the ones you recently had replaced, kain ein horeh.)

Made in Italy® : Un Colpo di Telefono

2008-11-26T08:17:00.004+01:00

From the beautiful and Camorra-rich town of Torre Annunziata, just down the coast from Naples (and in the same province), came the news yesterday that an impressive arsenal of drugs and weapons had been confiscated by police.

As Il Mattino (and many other newspapers and TV news programs) reported:

"Police officers took three young men by surprise in the Parco Penniniello neighborhood, where the youths were observed loading large suitcases into an Opel Astra. When they saw the police, the three abandoned the car and escaped on foot....

One of them, Luigi Gaito, 28, was later captured and charged with receipt of stolen goods, possession of illegal weapons and ammunition, and possession of narcotics with intent to engage in drug-trafficking.... When police searched his home, they found €8,580 in cash and a closed-circuit video-surveillance system....

The confiscated suitcases contained 5 kilos of hashish, divided into 50 smaller blocks; 700 grams of cocaine, some of it already packaged in dose-size envelopes; 118 grams of crack in dose form; a semiautomatic 9mm CZ pistol with two clips; a Beretta semiautomatic 9mm with two clips; a .22 caliber pistol; 13 portable VHF radios; 8 bulletproof vests; 4 pairs of safety glasses and earmuffs; 15 disposable coveralls; 6 raincoats; and more than 2000 cartridges of varying caliber."

I can't even imagine what they were doing with all those raincoats and disposable coveralls. Evidently their work involves a great deal of splatter.

Meanwhile, I haven’t mentioned the most important find of all: a telephone-pistol! That’s right: a tricked-out cell phone complete with fake antenna (the gun barrel) and a button capable of firing up to four .22 caliber rounds. “Surely a deadly weapon in the hands of a mafia killer,” as Il Mattino somewhat breathlessly put it.

Now, my point here isn’t to discuss the stunning lack of political will to resolve the problem of the Camorra in and around Naples. And it’s not even to speculate about how the police in this case “happened” to be lucky enough to come along just as three scugnizz’ were stuffing their car with drugs and weapons. Normally, the police wouldn’t be able to find the Camorra in Naples with GPS and a Frommer’s, but that’s a whole other story.

My point is: Here’s something really useful, and we should take full advantage of it. If these organized-crime boys can invent a cell phone that shoots bullets, I’ll bet they can invent one that shoots the person at the other end of the line. Or that self-destructs and cleaves your head open like a cherry bomb if you talk into it too loudly while you’re riding next to me on the train.

All I’m saying is: Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Luigi Gaito is going to be in jail for all of about eleven minutes and I’m sure you’re not actually entertaining the fantasy that he’ll ever be convicted of anything. Let's get him working on the Venge-a-Phone project instead and start making crime pay!

Guava Jam

2008-11-22T11:50:00.033+01:00

This morning we opened the jar of Hawaiian Sun guava jam that I bought in a spasm of last-minute desperation shopping in Kona, the day before we left. There’s something so sad about eating it here, when the temperature outside is hovering just below 50ºF and the sun (though, at least, today there is sun) is reduced to a strip about a yard wide and perhaps three yards long.

Eating our guava jam, I couldn’t help but think of those drives back and forth to Hilo, where yellow patches of fallen guavas littered the shoulders of the highway, or even our last two days in a B&B on the mid-slope of Hualalai above Kona, where the climate changed entirely and guavas and other fruit and plants grew that you wouldn’t find a thousand feet closer to the ocean.

“I wonder how guava jam would go with cheese,” asks Dolce Metà, thinking, no doubt, of the lemon-pear preserves and the green tomato and horseradish sauce I made last summer, both of which, in fact, are pretty phenomenal with cheese. (Not American cheese, intendiamoci.) Way Far West Meets A Lot Further East West, sort of.

I’d never even though of eating marmalade with cheese until I met him; now I love it. The guava jam idea isn’t so outrageous, once you wrap your mind around it. Something to think about for when we open our Big Island ItaloHawai‘ian fusion restaurant, E Come Mai. (It’s a bilingual pun.)

Our last night in Kona we went to watch the sunset at a tourist trap overlooking the bay. You have your “tropical” drinks (woefully--and, in fact, illegally--weak and underpoured: Hello, Mr. Liquor Inspector??!!) at tables located in a sand pit. Once you get seated, you are, for all intents and purposes, planted, and your chair slowly and inexorably sinks. You can neither shift position nor rise without the help of a crane. I felt sorry for the waiters, who had to spend their shifts trudging through sand. On the other hand, it’s a hideous place that deserves to be bombed. (For the record, it’s called Huggo’s on the Rocks. Never go there.)

At some point, the live “Hawai‘ian” music started. For an hour, though, not one Hawai‘ian lyric, unless you count (and I don’t) “E komo mai no kaua ika hale welakahao,” which is a line from the 1933 hapa-haole classic, “My Little Grass Shack.”

You’ve probably heard it:

I wanna go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawai‘i,
I wanna be with all the kanes and wahines
That I used to know, so long ago….
I can hear the old guitars playing
On the beach at Ho‘onaunau
I can hear the old Hawai‘ians saying,
“E komo mai no kaua ika hale welakahao.”

Trouble is, I’m fairly sure no old Hawai‘ian ever said anything of the kind. The phrase is sort of pidgin’ Hawai‘ian, and it doesn’t mean much. Or, more accurately, they’re real Hawai ‘ian words; it’s just not much of a real Hawai‘ian sentence. Anyway, what they’re getting at is something like “You’re welcome to come over to my house and we’ll heat the place up together.”

Big fun, in 1933, to slip something like that into a tame, silly song for mainlanders longing to be anywhere that wasn't America.

At Huggo’s, the “Hawai‘ian” singers sort of mumble over the one line in Hawai‘ian when they get to it. They don’t seem to know the words. Or maybe they do, and they’re just embarrassed to sing them to a bunch of haole tourists with lobster-red skin and Hobie sunglasses. I know I would be.

Meanwhile, the sun sets directly behind an enormous cruise ship docked in the middle of the bay. For more than an hour we watch little drone ferries zip back and forth from the port, returning passengers to the ship. I continue to nurture hope that the ship might take off before the sun is good and gone, but no luck. It’s dark before the ship finally leaves—headed either for Hilo or for Maui. A lovely sunset cruise for them; a $60 bar tab and hapa-haole agità for me.

And that’s as good a place as any to start the Trip to Hawai‘i stories. All the major themes are present.

Auwe auwe, make na kanaka mäoli i Hawai’i, ko aloha lä ‘ea, ko aloha lä ‘ea.

A (Brief) Italian Lesson: Amici Più Falsi di Così....

2008-11-20T17:10:00.014+01:00

I am translating/reposting (without her permission, so I hope she doesn’t feel the need to send any of her “friends” to pay me a visit; she lives in Florence, after all) Laura Prandino’s amusing post “ma inaugura tua nonna!” from her LaPra blog. In it, she objects to Italian journalists’ calque translation of “inauguration” with the word “inaugurazione,” which has another meaning entirely.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unveil This!

Two random dictionaries, one on CD and one online. The definition of “inauguration”:

* Ragazzini/Zingarelli 2008 (CD-Rom)
1 insediamento: (USA) the President's inauguration, l'insediamento del Presidente
2 inaugurazione: (USA) Inauguration Day, il giorno dell'insediamento del nuovo Presidente (January 20).

* Picchi/Hoepli online

1 inaugurazione, apertura
2 insediamento
• inauguration ceremony cerimonia d’insediamento; Inauguration Day (US) giorno dell’insediamento del Presidente; the presidential inauguration l’insediamento del presidente; his inauguration as President will take place next week il suo insediamento come presidente avrà luogo la settimana prossima.

[To which I would add, just for the sake of clarity for Anglophones, the English definition of inaugurazione:

"nf opening; unveiling, ribbon-cutting (ceremony): l’inaugurazione di una casa a house-warming; l’inaugurazione del nuovo teatro the opening of the new theatre; l’inaugurazione di una statua the unveiling of a statue; l’inaugurazione di un albergo to open a hotel; to cut the ribbon on a new hotel; l’inaugurazione di una chiesa the consecration of a church.”

Now, back to Laura:]

It’s not difficult.

In Italian, a president si insedia. Inauguration for Americans. Insediamento for Italians. Simply and painless.

So why is it that all the TV news programs I’ve been listening to insist upon treating Barack Obama as though he were a sports complex, with lots of ribbons to be cut; mayors decked out in red, white, and green sashes; and bishops dispensing blessings? (The question of why the opening of a sports complex should require the presence of bishops who dispense blessings deserves a much longer conversation; for the moment, let’s just let it slide.)

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I love stuff like this -- and probably for all the wrong reasons. First, because it relieves me to learn that the Italian language is going to hell in a handbasket just like English and, second, because I appreciate knowing that there are members of the "Lynne Truss Santa Subito" Fan Club in Italy, too. And also because I firmly believe in the lex talionis, which some people think means “The law of retaliation” (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth), but which actually means, “If you don’t stop treating words so badly, I’m going to poke you in the eye with a talon.”

Hawai'i's Own

2008-11-17T08:45:00.005+01:00

Now that I am finally able to reclaim my U.S. citizenship, in my first official act I am adding "Barack" and "Obama" to my spell checker.

I can't believe no one has put a picture of it on the web (at least not one that I can locate), but the best bumper sticker we saw in Hawai'i looked something like this:

and then the Honolulu Advertiser spun it this way:

On the night of the 4th, we were in a sports bar on the main drag in Hilo, knocking back margs and eating "Lava Wings" as we watched the election results. Suddenly, he made it look so easy. Me ka pilikia ‘ole, no ho'i?

This is only the second time in my entire life that I've voted for a presidential candidate who actually won, and the first time I've ever voted for a presidential candidate because I wanted him and not because I didn't want the other guy.

When Obama appeared for his victory speech, a woman at the next table started weeping into her balled-up napkin. I certainly wasn't going to cry in a sports bar in Hilo, but I winked at her when she turned around, and I thought: "Wheee! Here we go!"

A Kiss Before Flying

2008-10-23T04:52:00.007+02:00

This Sunday, at some point well before dawn, more than a year of planning (of which, the first 2/3 was mostly fretting and dithering, two very essential phases that most management courses don’t tell you about) will reach its culmination: We're off to Hawai‘i (which is to say: back home) to celebrate my 50th birthday.

I was hoping to have something meaningful and profound to say about this moment, which seems both banal and profound as I hold it up to the light and turn it round and round.

But I don’t. I mean, I know what I ought to be feeling. The truth, though, is that I’m fully engaged in the Checklist Stage, which means that I’m concentrated on making lists and crossing things off them, a kind of occupational therapy for those without access to a nice, calming Xanax prescription.

Or I worry about things like whether our pilots will remember to adjust the wing flaps so the plane can actually develop enough lift to get off the ground, unlike what happened last August in Madrid when a Spanair flight bit the dust on takeoff from a height of about forty feet, killing 154 people.

In fact, according to recent reports, human rather than mechanical error is today responsible for more than 90% of all plane crashes, which is the sort of thing that can keep a person up nights. Especially if you spend a few minutes looking at the statistics.

For the period from January 1, 2002 to October 8, 2008,

-- deaths due to mechanical/human failure: 7,606

-- deaths due to terrorism: 0

But that doesn’t mean I won’t have to take off jacket, shoes, belt, and who knows what else as we go through the “security” check. Nor does it mean I’ll be able to bring a homemade sandwich to eat on the plane rather than spend $10 for the one the airline would like me to buy onboard.

Now, I suppose you could look at those numbers and say “See how well all that security is working!” Though that reminds me of the terrible groaner about the Texan who starts putting up red flags all around his garden “to scare the elephants away.” His neighbor remarks, “But there aren’t any elephants around here!” And the Texan retorts ... yeah, well, you get the point.

Still, maybe if they were screening, training, paying, and scheduling pilots better, instead of worrying about what you’re carrying in that baby bottle, a significant chunk of those 7,606 people might still be alive.

But what do I know?

It’s certainly easier thinking about things like this than it is thinking about a concept like “home” (see, “going back to”); or which is the place where one lives and which is the place one is visiting; or whether one is moving toward or escaping from any given physical (or metaphorical) destination; or about the journey everybody’s making, every day, and all of us in the same direction, which are the thoughts that tend to creep around the edges of your mind like the neighbor’s cat as you reach the eve of your fiftieth birthday and as you contemplate spending your fifty-first year in a country that’s only partly yours (for reasons of birth) rather than in a different country that’s only partly yours (for reasons of politics and philosophy and morality).

In the meantime:

Print out e-tickets
Pack earplugs
Buy batteries
Decide what books to read on the plane
Make sure neighbor has house keys so she can water the plants
Clean out fridge
Unplug everything

Leap.

My God’s Bigger Than Your God

2008-10-14T09:27:00.013+02:00

As you may have noticed, I’ve been keeping my distance from the Election ’08 shenanigans in the YouEssUvA.

One, because the whole thing is prodigiously depressing. Even at this great (and mercifully insulating) distance, I some weeks ago quit being able to bear the sight of John McCain’s cheeks or the way they sort of spring apart like elevator doors coming unstuck whenever he makes that terrifying smirk of his (which CNN tells us is his smile). As for HER ... it’s no fun even making fun. How many times can you sit around with friends, counting along while she drops her “g’s,” before it’s just ... demoralizing.

Now, I might normally be getting some giggles out of the 2008 version of The Surreal Life—Wasilla (starring: the American people), but since there’s a decent chance she’s going to get to play Arsenic and Old Lace with a 72-year-old man with skin cancer, the laughter has a tendency to kind of, um, die.

Two: I can’t friggin’ believe it. (Though this might be the same as #1.) I mean, I realize I’m not alone in this. I’m quite sure, when Obama gets home at night after a tough day on the campaign trail, that he hangs his head in his hands and asks Michelle, “Does it actually seem possible to you that the stiff and the pinhead are neck-and-neck with me and Joe?”

And three: A lot of my commentary on the campaign thus far is along the lines of “How can you people be so f***ing stupid?” which isn’t exactly elevated discourse. Plus, people who are stupid really don’t like being told they’re stupid. Moreover, even if they had some interest in agreeing with you, they’re too stupid to take any actual action to repair the situation. So you begin to see the limitations.

At the same time, however, my email box has, for weeks, been filling up with messages whose theme is “Many supporters of McCain/Palin are thoughtful and sensitive human beings who have well considered reasons for their choice, and they deserve our respect.”

Well, if “deserve our respect” means we shouldn’t have them forcibly sterilized, bulldozed into shallow-pit graves, or chased across the border by rabid Dobermans, I most certainly agree. Tearing up their voter registration cards would more than satisfy me.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for science to identify the McCain/Palin supporter who doesn’t start out every argument with “I heard on Rush/my minister told us/FOX news says,” who doesn’t show up at McCain/Palin rallies carrying a stuffed monkey (a monkey!) with an Obama sticker on its chest, or whose idea of full and rigorous debate isn’t “Barack Hussein Obama – the name says it all.”

This is the American Idiotocracy. And it votes. Which, see Paragraph 2.

On an entirely related note: We saw The Mist last weekend (the latest Stephen King movie), and there’s that scene where all the townspeople are trapped in the supermarket by the deadly fog, and then Marcia Gay Harden sets in to preaching about The End Times and waving her Bible and haranguing everyone about the need for Ex-Pi-A-Tion, and one by one the others start getting strange looks on their faces ... blank, but sort of prognathous and glowering at the same time ... I mean, was I the only one who thought it looked like a McCain/Palin campaign rally?

For instance, the one in Davenport, Iowa, on October 11, where Rev. Arnold Conrad, formerly of the Grace Evangelical Free Church, preceded McCain’s appearance with this thoughtful oration:

“I would pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day.”

Now, I know people who were appalled – APPALLED, do you hear me? – by Obama’s association with that terrible racist and black supremacist, the Rev. Jeremiah White. And I’m just as sure as I can be that those very same people will be up in arms about McCain’s association with a minister who believes (a) that non-Xians are the equivalent of “heathens” and (b) that the One True God belongs both to the Xian Right and the Republican Party. Or by Palin’s with a church that holds “Pray the Gay Away” services to help troubled members overcome the sin of homosex (though, once you’d killed off all the wildlife, I wouldn’t have thought there was all that much else to do in Alaska besides homosex).

Because, of course, supporters of Obama/Biden are thoughtful and sensitive human beings who have well considered reasons for their choice, and they deserve our respect.

Professional Standards for Written Translations in English

2008-10-08T14:01:00.001+02:00

The Professional Standards for Written Translations in English petition is now online. Please consider signing it.

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TO: THE COMMUNITY OF PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATORS

One of the most disturbing trends in the field of professional translation is the growing willingness of agencies, publishers, and private and business clients to employ translators who are non-native speakers to produce translations in their second (or other) non-native language. Similarly, we are witnessing a dramatic expansion in the number of individuals who identify themselves as “professional” translators but who nonetheless provide written translations in a non-native language.

When the target language of a written translation is English, these phenomena are particularly widespread.

While millions of people the world over are bilingual (or more than bilingual), this does not make them translators. Because translation is a written art, the ability to live, work, or express oneself orally in a non-native or second language is not sufficient to qualify one as a translator.

Millions more study foreign languages and may become highly proficient in a second or other language. But this fact—standing in isolation—does not qualify them to work as professional translators, either. Professional translation is not solely a linguistic, technical, or “scientific” operation; thus, language skills—even excellent language skills—are not sufficient to qualify a professional translator.

Professional translation requires a vast personal experience of the cultural, historical, technological, political, linguistic, and material realities in which a target language has developed and is used and modified by native speakers.

Professional written translation, thus, is not an “adequate” or “approximate” reflection of the target language or, by extension, of the target culture. Instead, professional written translation requires mastery of linguistic expression and of cultural knowledge that experienced, qualified, native-speaking translators alone are in a position to provide.

Nothing in this petition is intended to impugn speakers of English as a second or other language, students of English, or the many citizens of the world who live their daily lives in more than one language.

Rather, the purpose of this petition is to endorse a Professional Standard for Written Translations in English that distinguishes between, on the one hand, qualified, professional native-English-speaking translators who translate into English and, on the other, individuals who translate into second or other-languages.

We therefore support the following professional standards:

1. The professional translator provides written translation services exclusively into her/his native language;

2. Professional translators, translation educators, and translation-training programs discourage students, administrators, instructors, and clients from providing, accepting, or promoting written translation services into a second or other language;

3. In representing their credentials and experience, professional translators do not claim to be “native speakers” of a second or other language, regardless of their level of competence in that language;

4. Professional brokers and jobbers for translation services (including agencies, publishers, and all other entities that use, provide, or sell written translations) exclusively employ professional, qualified translators who are native speakers of the requested target language;

5. Where possible, professional translators communicate with colleagues the highly unprofessional nature of failing to utilize qualified, native-speaking translators; of promoting oneself as a professional translator into a non-native language; and of accepting employment for written translations provided in a non-native language.

Sincerely,

[The Undersigned]