The Beast Within.

Like most pet owners I anthropomorphise my dogs. In my fantasy world they are simply much younger, considerably  better-looking,  and infinitely more athletic versions of myself, sharing my interests and general attitude to life. But then, every now and again, reality breaks in: dogs are not human beings, they're semi-domesticated wolves - they are beasts.
  Yesterday morning when I took the dogs for their morning walk they chased a sickly cat and cornered it. Fortunately, as it had taken refuge in a bush on the edge of the footpath,  I was able to get the dogs on their leads and haul them off at some personal risk:  the bush was overhanging a precipice and in their continuing attempts to attack the cat they almost pulled me over the edge.
  This morning, walking down the same mediaeval pathway, I was suddenly aware of one dog's alto yelping, joined moments later by the other's contralto. I guessed it might be another attack on the cat but this time I couldn't see them. I left the footpath and started climbing through the thickets but failed to find them - although I could certainly hear them. Having called them in vain I walked back up the cliff until I reached the spot where it joins the road. I sat and read the paper on my phone for a quarter of an hour and then walked back down the cliff to the spot where they were continuing to yelp hysterically. Calling them still produced no results, so I went home and ate my breakfast. Returning once more, I realised that the barking had shifted location. They were now visible from the footpath and they had indeed cornered the same cat as yesterday. Then it broke free and ran into a bush by the side of the pathway. So once again I was able to haul them off. This time, to my horror, I noticed one dog's face and chest were covered with blood. Fortunately, a quick glance at the terrified cat revealed it was physically unscathed: the blood was the dog's own from where the cat had scratched her nose.
  So for almost an hour my dogs, my alter egos, had engaged in a bestial attack on another living creature, baiting it relentlessly. Not the sort of behaviour I would engage in, though it's common enough in the animal kingdom, including the species described below by an eighteenth-century traveller:

At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees.  Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better.  Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay, gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their form.  Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour.  They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground, for this posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind feet.  They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooked.  They would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious agility.  The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, but none on their faces, nor any thing more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda.  The dugs hung between their fore feet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.
   The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black, and yellow.  Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.

To come clean: the first images which came into my mind when I listened to my dogs' unremitting bestial howling directed against a sickly cat were those pictures which came to light in 2004 of Iraqi prisoners cowering beneath the boots of their American captors, torturers and sexual abusers. To be followed by the images conjured up by yesterday's report of the sufferings of three British holidaymakers imprisoned in Dubai. And finally, of course, like Gulliver I have to face up to the truth about the identity of the animal he described above. I can't pretend like Grillo and his deluded followers that there are two sorts of people: decent folk like ourselves and an evil 'other'. As Nick Lowe wrote: 'The beast in me / Is caged by frail and fragile bars'.
   In the end, we're not so silly when we anthropomorphise our furry friends.

Humpty-Dumpty teaches Linguistics.

As any fule know, a word's meaning is dependent on its context. When we read that a carpenter is cleaning his plane we don't immediately picture a jolly artisan buffing up a Boeing 747 with an oily rag.  Similarly, when Tony Blair assured the nation that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass-destruction and was about to use them against the West, the picture which sprang into our minds was that on the left rather than the one on the right. 

  Last Tuesday, however, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction - a pressure cooker - we discovered that the Americans have once again rewritten the dictionary; and, taking their cue from Through the Looking-Glass,  perverted the way language works. “When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” 

   Despite what Humpyty-Dumpty and his disciple, US attorney general Eric Holder, would have us believe, a pressure-cooker is not a weapon of mass-destruction. It is a household appliance. Like almost any artefact it can be used  to inflict injury. In common with many otherwise useful machines - the motor-car  springs to mind - it can be misused to kill a number of people simultaneously. But that does not make it a weapon of mass-destruction, merely an object used to inflict mass-destruction. For the term 'weapon' refers to an object designed to have the sole function of inflicting injury: a gun, a cosh, a stiletto. Other objects - baseball bats, kitchen knives - are frequently used as weapons, but to simply call  them weapons would be absurd. Jamie Oliver no more handles weapons in his kitchen than Babe Ruth handled one at the Yankee Stadium. 

   Again context is crucial. If a friend told you that she'd gone to John Lewis to buy some luggage one would expect her to return with a suitcase rather than a carrier bag. However, if the same friend turned up at to stay at one's house and, pointing to the carrier-bag she was carrying, said, 'That's all the luggage I've brought', one wouldn't be puzzled. For the context would indicate the understood qualifier: 'in place of a suitcase'. This does not however mean that deprived of its original context it would make sense for us to report to others that she'd arrived with a single piece of luggage: they would immediately picture a suitcase. Instead we'd say, 'She turned up with just a carrier-bag'. So, why didn't the Attorney-General avoid abusing the English language and charge Tsarnaev with using a pressure-cooker as a weapon of mass-destructon?
   Perhaps it's because - as New Thump pointed out the other day -  if pressure-cookers are weapons of mass-destruction Tony Blair was telling the truth about Iraq after all!

Rifts in the Net.

There are many myths about the World Wide Web or Net, prominent amongst them the belief that it is a neutral vehicle for sharing information and opinions. A fallacious belief as the Chinese government has recently demonstrated by forcing Google to restrict the sites available in the People's Republic. Furthermore, Google has recently introduced Search History Personalisation, a system designed to deliver results tailored to an individual's interests as indicated by his previous searches. Today I discovered matters go much deeper than this. To explain.

   In his reply to a eurosceptic reader's letter in the Corriere della Sera, the readers' editor, Sergio Romano, alluded to an EU document which claims that EU functionaries provide better value for money than their Westminster counterparts: 

"Agli inizi di quest'anno il Parlamento europeo ha tirato una stoccata agli inglesi con un rapporto comparativo in cui si afferma che i funzionari della Commissione lavorano di più, versano un contributo più elevato al loro fondo di previdenza e sono pagati un po' meno di quelli del Regno Unito." (At the beginning of this year the European Parliament scored a hit against the English [eurosceptics] with a report which affirmed that the European Commission's officials work longer hours, pay higher social insurance contributions, and are paid less than their Westminster counterparts.)

As a europhile I was eager to read the document and searched Google UK to find it. To my surprise I could find no trace of it, only the usual Mail and Telegraph anti-EU diatribes. However, translating the search terms into Italian and putting them into Google Italia immediately produced the relevant hit:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/it/headlines/content/20121211FCS04528/8/html/Funzionari-Meglio-europei-o-inglesi

All of which suggests that, rather than creating an international community, the Net cocoons us safely in our national comfort zones. An Englishman is protected from ever having to read anything which might disturb his xenophobic prejudices. So whilst in reality millions of English men and women don't conform to the eurosceptic stereotype, Big Brother Google has decided that their interests can be ignored in favour of the views of the majority of their compatriots. Pretty worrying, don't you think?

So let it be with Caesar.

For those of us lefties who were adults during that grete angur and unhappe of the Thatcher  years the News has been a no-go area for the past week, swamped as it has been by accounts of her time in office, reports of international reaction to her death and hagiographic tributes from former colleagues. And all this will be capped by - in all but name - a state funeral next Wednesday.
  I wondered why the demise of this elderly semi-alcoholic alzheimer sufferer should engender quite so much attention. Her death changes nothing: we may have lost the woman but her legacy is all around us in a de-industrialised Britain, an unregulated City, a rapidly disappearing NHS, under-financed public services,  the yawning chasm between the income of ordinary, honest workers and that of the tax-avoiding incompetents who help themselves to massive unwarranted bonuses and pensions paid for by the taxpayer, and the xenophobia remorselessly drip-fed into their readers by the Sun and the Mail. An article by Jonathan Freedland in Tuesday's Guardian enlightened me:

'The wider Tory tribe seems determined to use the nine-day limbo between her passing and her funeral to define Thatcher in death in a way that would have seemed impossible, if not outright absurd, in life: as above and beyond politics, as a national rather than partisan figure, as an incontestable and uncontested part of our collective inheritance.'

Freedland also reports Lord Powell's claim that Thatcher would have been disappointed if there hadn't been people figuratively dancing on her grave. And one can understand why. Channelling people's anger into self-satisfying but futile protests is a classic diversionary tactic. As Mark Antony said apropos of Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them ..." It's Thatcher's evil legacy that people need to fight not the woman herself.
  I have always had some sympathy for apokatastasis, the heresy commonly - though possibly erroneously - associated with Origen. It teaches that everyone, including Satan himself, will ultimately be saved. One could argue that no one is totally bad - Hitler was very fond of his dog Blondi. Hardly outweighs murdering six million Jews, but could be something to build on. Thatcher, despite her euroscepticism, did physically reconnect Britain with the mainland for the first time since the last ice-age. Though she may have been more concerned with its oil-fields than with its people's liberty, she was quite right to defend the Falklands. The islands may be nearer to the Argentine than to the UK, but 1521.39 kilometres is still a heck of a long way. If the Argentinian criterion for exercising sovereignty were universally applied we'd have instant European political unity. The Italians could claim that the Angles, Saxons, Germans, Goths, Vandals etc are all illegally occupying the territory of the Roman Empire and should subject themselves to the Pax Romana forthwith.
   Sadly, whilst slightly more creditable than liking a dog, Thatcher's two positive achievements hardly counterbalance the enormous harm her legacy continues to inflict. As Romano Prodi commented last Tuesday she:

 'cambiato il mondo', ma la sua rivoluzione liberista ha portato 'all'aumento delle differenze fra ricchi e poveri' ed ha 'certamente aiutato e forse provocato' la crisi economica mondiale [changed the world, but her revolutionary introduction of economic Liberalism has brought about an increase in the gap between the rich and poor and has certainly helped, and possibly provoked, the global economic crisis].

Unfortunately, not only did Prodi's remarks attract a lot of negative comment from the Twitter-sphere - the refuge of those who, incapable of formulating an argument, imagine a badly expressed opinion is an acceptable alternative  - but the Corriere della Sera, Italy's equivalent of the Guardian, has carried articles broadly supportive of her policies. That does worry me. The German dog-lover's legacy was destroyed by the Red Army and the western allies. His ideals only live on in the minds of a tiny minority of brutish morons. Would that the same could be said for those of the Iron Lady.

Pants!

The word 'pants', as any fule kno, is one of the many examples of the UK and the US being divided by their common language. In America the word signifies 'trousers'; in England what we wear underneath them. I used to be puzzled by the fact that in American English the word can also be used as a pejorative term e.g. 'your phone is pants'. I no longer am.
   A couple of years ago my elder daughter bought me some Pierre Cardin underpants for Christmas. They were admirable garments in almost every respect: boxers with lycra, my preferred style of underwear. Unfortunately they had a fatal flaw: no flies. One of the many advantages of being male is not having to get undressed every time you want a pee. No long queues in public lavatories for us chaps; no problem either when you're caught short on a country walk. And now, I raged, before throwing them into a drawer for redundant clothes, some buffoon has decided to discard centuries of collective wisdom in order to make a fashion statement. Alas, two years on I have discovered the problem is much greater than even my worst nightmares would have led me to believe. To explain.
   A couple of weeks ago, returning from the UK to Italy I managed to leave a suitcase containing, amongst other things, a week's supply of underwear on a train. This meant I had to fish out the Pierre Cardin pants from the reject drawer. It also meant I had to buy more underwear. And this is when I made my terrible discovery: in the whole of our local shopping centre not a single outlet sold cotton and lycra boxers with flies. The cheap unknown labels had joined their upmarket cousins in this sartorial lunacy. And at last I appreciated our transatlantic cousins' linguistic wisdom - for nowadays

                                                    Pants ARE pants!

Butterflies, Language and Crime.

Last week I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and ended up feeling like Ray Bradbury's Eckels, just back from his holiday, staring at the sign in Time Safari's office.
  Previously I'd been reading nothing but crime fiction. A friend had  introduced me to Jo Nesbo and Fred Vargas and I thoroughly enjoyed both of the books he lent me: Nesbo's The Redbreast and Vargas's Have Mercy on Us All. He told me that like Camelleri's Montalbano novels Vargas's should ideally be read in sequence as there is a developing thread connecting them - in the case of Commissaire Adamsberg his relationship with his occasional lover Camille. So I began with The Chalk Circle Man. which I found entertaining but far less interesting than Have Mercy on Us All.  I read the next book in the sequence - Seeking Whom He May Devour - hoping to confirm the obvious explanation that Vargas's skills improved with time. At first, to my consternation, I found this book rather tedious, possibly because Adamsberg hardly features in it until half way through. I also had problems with the translator, David Bellos, choosing to give the book a new title rather than simply translating its original: L'Homme à l'envers. The book centres on a homicidal wolf, and in the AV's translation of Peter's first epistle 'seeking whom he may devour' refers to a lion not a wolf. Although Bellos puts the phrase into the mouths of characters in the novel I doubt that the French original used an instantly recognisable allusion to the Petrine epistle. The original title, on the other hand, neatly encapsulates both the novel's central motif, lycanthropia, and the dual nature of the murderer. That aside, once Adamsberg took centre-stage things improved enormously so I'll probably buy the next in the series: Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand.
   This year's offering by Camilleri, Una lama di luce, was a distinct improvement on the last few books. Once again Montalbano was playing Mike Tucker to an intelligent version of Vicky but this time he ended the relationship because he'd come to terms with the reality of his life:

E ora sapiva finalmenti quello che doviva fari. Con la sò morti, François ligava lui a Livia e Livia a lui chiossà d'essere maritati.
…Quella stissa sira, alle novi, Marian tuppiò a longo a 'na porta che non sapiva che non le sarebbi stata mai cchiù aperta.
And now he finally knew what he had to do. François [a boy he'd once been going to adopt] had bound him to Livia [his long term partner] with his death more than if they were married.
… At nine the same evening Marian [the younger woman] knocked at the door for a long time, unaware that it would never again be opened.

   Having overdosed on gialli, I thought that it was time to take a break from crime fiction and read a 'proper' novel again. Bel Canto was one of the books we'd inherited from an American friend when she sold her house in Italy, and I was encouraged to read it by an article in the Corriere which, starting from the absurd premise that women are incapable of writing great fiction, listed Ann Patchett as a case in point. Alas the novel didn't reveal her to be another Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood, let alone an Emily Brontë. Nor had I escaped the world of crime.
   The action of the novel takes place in the official residence of the Vice-President of an unidentified South American country where a birthday party for a Japanese industrialist is being hosted. A passionate opera-lover, he has been persuaded to come to South America because the world's leading soprano has been engaged to sing at the party. The party is interrupted by the violent incursion of a band of rather inept terrorists who hold the guests hostage for several months. Gradually the individual personalities of the guests and terrorists emerge and a variety of relationships develop between them. Most importantly, the Japanese businessman, Mr Hosokawa - we never learn his first name - and the American diva, Roxanne Coss, fall in love; as do his interpreter Gen Watanabe and a female terrorist, Carmen. The setting and the characterisation are handled well, but the ending is lame. Although one could justify it structurally the author fails to make it feel authentic and a great writer must do both. I'd had problems with the novel's authenticity earlier. The guests and terrorists come from a variety of linguistic communities and are consequently heavily dependent on Gen's services. The narrator comments that some have a smattering of languages other than their own and offers the Italians' knowledge of schoolboy French as an example. The problem is that whilst it is true that Italians learn French at school, anyone who has lived in Italy will know that most Italians have little difficulty in understanding Spanish - the language of the terrorists. A fact which completely escapes Ann Patchett, and a major blunder for a novel which is centred on exploring the relationship between language and life. I thought that I'd detected another problem in the novel's understanding of language. A priest is described as 'performing' sacraments rather than celebrating them, and giving a dying man 'viaticum' rather than the viaticum. I assumed that this would be due to the author being protestant and consequently being as unfamiliar with catholic terminology as she was with Italian culture. Wrong: she had a catholic education. I then assumed that this was an American usage cognate with their calling maths 'math' and sport 'sports'. Wrong again. Consulting the current catholic catechism revealed that the viaticum has dropped the definite article throughout the English-speaking world. The reason for my confusion was that I'd stopped practising my religion in England since the early seventies, only returning to it when we moved to Italy. Although, like every language, English is in a constant state of flux, when you live in the middle of the river you're caught up by its movement and are carried along by it. 'Train station' replacing railway station and 'bored of' supplanting bored by are both deplored by us elderly pedants, but they no longer strike us as odd, only regrettable. However, by losing contact with the language of English catholicism for forty years the changes struck me forcefully. By abandoning catholicism, like Eckles I had stepped on a butterfly.
   This Wednesday my wife and I went with two friends to a concert at Villa Vinci: '"Primadonna" La tradizione del Belcanto'. In Ann Patchett's novel the soprano was a white American and her accompanist Japanese. Villa Vinci is even more sumptuous than the her fictional Vice-President's residence. In a mirror image of the novel, the soprano - Hiroko Morita - was Japanese and her accompanist, Roberto Galletto, white. Fortunately no terrorists emerged from the central heating ducts. But the butterfly put in an appearance: Miss Morita's final aria was Un bel di vedremmo!

Paranoia rules

 

 
 
In 2010, when a snowbound passenger was prosecuted for tweeting that he'd like to blow up the airport in which he was stranded, I thought that John Bull's island had plumbed the depths of stupidity.
Yesterday I was proved wrong. Some dipstick got the driver of the coach he was travelling on to summon assistance because a man of 'asian appearance' was pouring liquid into what turned out to be an electronic cigarette. As a consequence a motorway was closed for seven hours as 'a full multi-agency response was put into motion, with an army bomb disposal team, a chemical and biological weapons team, armed police, counter-terrorism officers, ambulance and fire crews'.
I know it's not a crime to be stupid, otherwise the gaols would be full to overflowing with Daily Mail readers and every non-billionaire who's ever voted Tory. But in this case I think an exception should be made for the dipstick, the coach-driver and whoever failed to check the facts before launching the 'multi-agency response' and making hundreds of people's lives a misery.

Posted with Blogsy