John Foot, a professor at University College in London and sometimes-Milanese, has a good piece up in today’s New York Times exploring the links between Qaddafi, Italian football (notably Juventus) and investments. Worth your time.
There’s way too much news this week, from the Libya to the milleproroghe, from Macedonia’s electoral crisis to the role of social media in the events that have shaken the Arab world. Fini’s proclamation that the PM was not ‘anointed by the lord’ may hint at the beginning of the end on this side of the Mediterranean as well.
Look for a more thorough weekend update as your chronicler has other deadlines to meet this mild Friday morning.
For those who’ve spent time east of Apennines, ponder this bit from the Economist’s review of David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples.
Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines).
…or just another country?
I’m not sure what’s more depressing — the amount of ‘worst’ categories that my adopted country is in, or the amount of ‘worst of the worst’ categories that my native country is in. But something about the data seems off to me — was this chart assembled by the paper of record or actually by the IMF? I don’t doubt that other industrialized nations routinely outperform us; some of these categories are quite well-documented (healthcare availability, life expectancy, income disparities) but all the same, this reeks of a certain school of woe-is-me-American declinism that’s of limited use, if not simply tiresome. But: statistics are interesting, as long as one understand their uses and abuses.
Intuitively, I’m not sure what to make of Italian food security being at the same level of Israel (who, incidentally, did not get the dark red ‘worst of worst’ mark that the belpaese did). Unscientifically, it’s hard to believe that anyone starves in Italy — but much easier to believe that many families find it hard to ‘make it to the end of the month,’ to translate the Italian phrase. Rising food prices play a role in that, but according to a recently-unveiled Euripes report (quoted here on MSN), public debt and the cost of energy and housing are the main culprits.
Mortgages and rents are not affordable for two out of five Italian families, and 40% of households have difficulties in paying rates and fees. A worrying picture emerges when you compare the data of 2011 with the previous year: 40% of Italian families has trouble paying their mortgage, compared to 23.2% in 2010, and 38.1% have trouble paying rent, versus 18.1% in 2010.
If you find recent write-ups on the doings at Arcore too much to bear lately, then get your day started right with this hilarious Grease parody. Warning: not only do you have to follow the news and Italian, you have to know have Italians interpret/hear English. There’s enough code-switching in this for a linguist’s wet dream. You don’t have to know much about Grease. Hat-tip: Zoomata.
If you want to see the original, it’s here.
Now, while we’re at it, how about a Super Breakout-style bunga-bunga game?
Now: can we get some of that Egyptian and Tunisian action on this side of the Mediterranean, please?
Happy Epiphany everyone. I’m just in from an utterly exhausting holiday trip to Rovigo, Louisville and Washington DC, and after yesterday’s 24-hour trip home, I’m too spent to do much other than post this ridiculous 1951 Warner Brothers cartoon featuring Charlie the Dog.
Ah, crude stereotypes of Italians and Ed Butz-like linguistic appropriations! Still, I knew that WB’s typing had to extend beyond Pepé Le Pew and Speedy Gonzalez. Someone obviously had a deeper understanding of italianità, because there’s an obvious homage to the pre-WW1 greats of the Scala in the cartoon — the sign up in the restaurant (“Melba Tetrazzini Gadski Martinelli”).
Otherwise: see the Social Network, if you’re one of the few people that hasn’t already. I fully believe it took large liberties with the Truth in all senses (is Harvard still so good-old-boyish; do programmers really spend so little time coding and so much time partying — these have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere), but it’s good storytelling, and I think must hit on some basic kernel of truth in that Zuckerberg is a brilliant, slightly amoral geek with powerful driving ambitions — much like the world’s last true uber-geek, Bill Gates. (This ascendancy is broadly hinted at in the film — and those who incredibly don’t know who Gates is are those who miss out, although I sincerely doubt that there was one person at Harvard in 2003 who didn’t actually know of Bill Gates.)
Totally unrelated: why does Hemingway, who dealt with the problem of bilingual conversations rather elegantly in A Farewell to Arms, stumble so hard in For Whom the Bell Tolls by using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for tu? It seems so basic. I’m not the only one who noticed, of course.
More after I’ve caught up on sleep.
I’m not entirely sure what to say about this at the Banco di Sardegna near Corso Sempione, but I walk by it every night and it seems like the most peculiar deterrence to me: positioned inside the entryway to the bank, behind the barred gate that’s pulled down every night. Just inside is a video monitor. On it, more or less continuously (also during the day), an image of one or two security guards watching a video screen plays.
What they’re watching is you as you approach the bank, and this is shown to you. If you stick your hand through the bars (as I did to take a picture), an automated voice warns you (as if you didn’t already know) that the bank is under surveillance. I half expected the guards to come chasing me out of the bank and onto the street, as might happen in Belgrade or Washington, but no. I fully expected to see myself on the screen, much like when Laura Palmer opens her bedroom door in Fire Walk with Me and sees herself entering a painting on her wall.
Images for your bemusement/befuddlement.
Why is Genoa always a place for spectacular violence? There is much to be said about the violence of Serbian football fans in Genoa yesterday, but alas, I have to be away from the computer all day today. Mainly what I want to say is that Vuk Jeremic can apologize in the media all he wants, but his irrational policies about Kosovo stoke this kind of gangsterism, and I’ve no doubt — none whatsoever — that this violence and the violence at the gay pride parade were nurtured by politicians. You will hear lots of blame given to gangster overlords like Darko Saric, but the informed reader would do well to keep Jeremic’s clean-cut image, excellent English, and “Western” credentials in mind when trying to understand these extremely non-spontaneous events. It has a stench of the Milosevic years.
Let me point something out for aspiring writers on Italy who wish to dress up their language. Italian is a fairly colorful language, so there are several good metonyms for the country. Il bel paese (“the beautiful country”) has the finest pedigree, having been used by both Petrarch and Dante. If you want to point out the defining geographical feature, you can use lo stivale (“the boot”); this is rife with opportunities for word play such as Napoleon’s famous maxim that you must enter a boot from the top. If you want to be official you can say Italian Republic, an exact translation of the name of the county that has existed since the referendum held on June 2, 1946.
Now: in Italian you may come across la Penisola, the peninsula, from time to time. And that’s ok. Italians know only one peninsula and so there’s a context. But it doesn’t work as hip shorthand in American English. “What a great cup of coffee I had on the Peninsula!” is simply confusing; “I went up to Turin on a recent trip to the Peninsula” is just pretentious. There are several peninsulas in Europe; notably the nearby Iberian and Balkan ones, and Italy shares substantial history with both. If you really want to be a pedant, you could consider all of Europe a peninsula of the Eurasian subcontinent. To add to the confusion is the fact that “peninsular” in English often refers to Spain, not Italy; i.e., Peninsular Spanish or Peninsular War. There are other, better terms. Most importantly:
“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”
And if you don’t know who said that I’ll leave it to you to google, but if you’re interested in good, clear prose style and you don’t know, then you’re in trouble.
Meanwhile, the first week of school last week meant tons of education reform excitement in Italy (as well as less posted from your chronicler). Yes — a subject that usually makes most Americans huddle and cry while as vaguely-defined horrors like state-mandated testing and No Child Left Behind is actually exciting in Italy. This year, Minister Gelmini has halved the number of teaching positions. Official state-certification bodies at all major universities continued to pump out teachers in droves till just a few years ago. The intelligent reader sees where this leads — lots of teachers sitting at home, waiting for a substitution assignment. I should point out for the unaware that Europe’s university system, far more specialized than America’s liberal arts-organized model, is less tolerant of job-switching. (Doubtlessly there’s something cultural to this as well.) The upshot is that in the last couple of years, the level of opprobrium directed at Minister Gelmini — who is, incidentally, a lawyer and not a teacher by training — has moved from the graffiti-laden walls near student quarters to the headlines. In her somewhat feeble defense, I usually say that this is to avoid the sort of public sector glut that crippled Greece. But there’s no question that it could’ve been handled better — like by closing the certification schools a few years earlier, or at least limiting enrollment.
Last week’s other interested drama was a private school in Adro, in nearby Brescia that festooned its entryway with the “Alpine Sun.” There’s a particularly prominent one at the entryway to the school.
Apparently it’s just a ‘cultural symbol.’ Of course this doesn’t take into account that the school is named after a prominent member of — guess what party? One that just coincidentally happens to use the Alpine Sun as the main symbol of their made-up country. Let’s compare.
Adro’s mayor, Oscar Lancini, has been at the center of this debate. Not entirely surprisingly, he is also a leghista. Gelmini has come out and told him to order to have the symbols removed from the school. He’s saying today it will cost 30 thousand euros. The whole idea of branding teenagers with your political party’s symbol would just seem pathetic if, as I try to highlight on this blog, immigration in Europe were not such a pressing issue. I’ll keep you posted on how it plays out. Gelmini, linked to Berlusconi, is playing a risky game by coming down hard on Bossi, of course, lest he go the way of Fini, but I’d like to think it’s inconceivable that she not endorse this move.
As a side note, the left, in their predictably opportunistic fashion, is trying to make educational spending an issue, without really saying much other than ‘time to roll up out sleeves.’
One expects political upheaval in Italy. After all, the country has had as many governments as Boliva since World War Two, and my primer on Italian politics had a photo of parliamentarians fist-fighting on the cover.
But — Sweden? As Stephen Castle wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, Swedish politics are usually “worthy, high-minded and often utterly predictable, Swedish politics has rarely offered much by way of excitement” — pretty much the exact opposite of Italy’s opportunistic and treacherous circus, in other words. It’s certainly new to me — I’d have expected to hear more about the Netherlands, France or, if you want to look at the Scandinavians, Denmark — but inasmuch as it traces all the main themes common to the Italian debate — the future of the welfare state, the decline of industrial society, and rising immigration — I’ll be following it closely.