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

Housewives no longer desperate

 

My wife and I watched the final two episodes of Desperate Housewives on Wednesday, a show which has been part of our mental hinterland since 2005. Like most long-running series it had gradually run out of steam, shedding viewers on the way. On a superficial level the ending was ludicrous: I know little about the American legal system but find it hard to believe that any system would have credited Mrs McCluskey's confession or ignored the mass of evidence of Bree's involvement.
However, like the equally improbable myths of the world's great religions, the ending did contain two profound truths: the redemptive power of love and the fact that, as Christ put it, 'Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it'. Mrs McCluskey's redemptive gesture was a direct result of the housewives offering her terminal nursing care - not that it was much in evidence! Their act of love brought them salvation. And it was only when the housewives leave the comfort zone of their life in Wisteria Lane that they are able to achieve their full potential: Lynette as CEO of the American branch of a multinational company, Gabrielle with her own company and television show. In a nicely judged satirical touch, the alcoholic and promiscuous Bree - who against all the evidence believes herself to be the embodiment of traditional American values - is elected to the Kentucky State Legislature as a conservative Republican Representative.
As no one reads this blog, there is no danger of my appearing in Private Eye's 'Pseuds' Corner' leaving me free to share this final flight of fancy:
Just as Christ had his Last Supper with his disciples the day before he left this earthly life so the housewives met for a final game of poker. Re-enacted as the Mass, the Last Supper symbolises the bond between christians; similarly, their card game had a quasi-sacramental role for the housewives.
As with Lost, the programme's producer gave it a closure which, whilst not entirely convincing or stemming naturally from the hodgepodge of material which had proceeded it, did articulate:

'Our almost instinct almost true
What will survive of us is love.'

Philip Larkin and the translators of the Authorised Version may have put the idea more elegantly but, to adapt the Heineken beer slogan, I guess Desperate Housewives refreshes the hearts the others cannot reach.

 

Earthquake in the north.

April's revelation of the corruption at the heart of the holier-than-thou Northern League was followed by the collapse of its vote in last month's local elections. Tragically the benign psephological earthquake which had metaphorically struck 'Padania' was followed this month by its literal cousin.
   The picture below graphically reveals that northern Italy's problems don't stem from an influx of African immigrants, as the xenophobic and racist Northern League would have its deluded followers believe. The real danger comes from the African continent itself pushing further into Europe as the Apennine phallus attempts to penetrate  the mons veneris of the Alps. Geologically speaking, Italy is part of Africa not Europe; the real immigrants are the Bossi clan not the poor souls fleeing across the mediterranean to escape war and famine.

To hell in a handcart.

Three interesting articles in yesterday's papers throw light on the current economic crisis. The article by Antonio Puri Purini in the Corriere della Sera, Dalla Finanza all' Antipolitica i Nemici della Moneta unica, identifies the two enemies of the single currency: international finance and the far right. The former object to the EU 'perché unica a mantenere un sistema non interamente dominato, grazie all’ economia sociale di mercato, dalla logica del profitto' [because it is the only one to maintain a system not entirely dominated by the logic of profit, thanks to its social market economy]. The leaders of the latter are the agents of international finance and their followers its dupes, driven by ignorance and fear.

An article by Philip Inman in the Guardian dissects the failures of Monetarism. Although its proponents' recipe for growth is cutting workers' terms and conditions it 'is alarming how easily monetarist ideas have prevailed …monetarists have convinced working people they are the reformers and that social democrat parties are a conservative barrier to recovery. Social democrats only seek to preserve the privileges and outmoded practices that got us into trouble, they argue.' And so the turkeys vote for Christmas, repeating Cameron's cry that it woz Gordon Brown wot got us in this mess, when in reality his mistake like that of 'Hank Paulson in the US and finance ministers across Europe of all political colours was to believe in the low regulation story and watch, with regulators at their side, as banks went on a lending spree.'

The third article, by Dominic Rushe JP Morgan investment boss Ina Drew quits over bank's $2bn losses, reminds us that the spree isn't over. The only block would be strong EU institutions opposed to 'una parte della finanza internazionale dominata da hedge funds aggressivi e insofferenti verso regole e freni, è inesorabilmente attratta verso la prospettiva del guadagno immediate' [the section of international finance dominated by aggressive hedge funds, intolerant of rules and restraints and inexorably attracted by the prospect of short-term gains]. No wonder they want to destroy first the single currency and the EU itself and reduce its workers to the miserable condition of Chinese coolies or Indian untouchables.

No country for old men.

Yeats may have been right in thinking that Byzantium, or the New Rome, was no country for old men, but the same does not apply to what was once the heartland of the Western Empire. Italy's former priapic premier is far from being the country's only elderly politician.   

   Today's Corriere carried a news-item  about the 95 year old retired doctor, Mario Spallone, currently standing for election as mayor of Avezzano in the Province of L'Acquila. Although he was the late leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti's, personal physician he is not, as one might have expected, standing as a candidate of the left. "Io sono communista … Io non ho niente a che fare con quella robaccia del PD!" [I'm a communist … I've nothing in common with that rubbish in the Democratic Party]. I guess he feels the same way about the PD as I do about New Labour. 

   His interviewer expressed astonishment at the unrepentant Stalinist's claim that he would be helped in his electoral campaign by the late Padre Pio. "E certo! Padre Pio morì tra le mia braccia, e io sono suo figlio spirituale. E lui mi aiuterà a vincere queste elezioni. Lui può …" [It's a sure thing! Padre Pio died in my arms and I'm his spiritual son. And he'll help me to win these elections. He really can …]

    And so, dear reader, you can see why I like living in Italy so much: it's full of crazy old men just like me.