One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually, 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it', and what follows is a rationalization. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non literary reaction is 'This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.'
-- George Orwell, Writers and Leviathan, 1948

If you google Amarilli Caprio today, you can find a lot of new interesting and ridiculous stuff. The most surprising of all items is undoubtedly the one on the website of left-wing magazine il Diario, where is reproduced Amarilli's poem (about which I wrote the other day). What's surprising is that not only Amarilli's poem is reported as it is, and linked from the top of the home page, like it was a regular contribution to the magazine: as you can see in the picture, they also suggest to their readers to buy the anthology from which the poem is taken, and that's about all the comment they give to it.
Haven't they noticed that Amarilli's poem is, well, corny and, to put it bluntly, kind of sucks? I don't know, maybe the criteria to decide when a poem sucks are lost. And maybe it's a good thing.
Still. I've been saying myself that Amarilli Caprio, member of the Red Brigades and occasional poet, should be less obvious as a person because she writes poetry. But this doesn't make her poetry automatically interesting, right? Self standing? Only because she's a fucking terrorist?
And what about the good poets who aren't political activists, or criminals, or who don't have some other kind of equally unrelated quality about them?
I guess they're still expected to sign below the paper where on is indelibly printed "everything is politics": or some other similarly depressing indelible thought.

I usually don't do that, but I must stop and share with you this fantastic google search that brought someone to my blog.

Obviously the lyrics of poet Laura Pausini were the object of that search. I have written extensively about her --and translated her powerful verse-- in at least, well, two posts on this blog.

I admit that the confusion was probably caused by the fact that I have also written about pop singer Pierpaolo Pasolini here and there, but, please: One cannot put the two of them in the same league... Pausini has big boobs and a granny, I mean, grammy. What Pasolini has?

(Please take note of how I rank #3 on that search, for being the sole website in the whole world to put together on the same page Pasolini and Pausini. One can't be proud enough of such achievements.)

So TIME magazine came out with its moronic "you" cover. Everyone's running around saying how phenomenal and democratic it is. To me it's just incomprehensible. It's like a joke. Well, it's TIME magazine. The digest of all the propaganda, right? Ginsberg teaches.

First of all, what's with youTube? Because this cover is obviously an homage to youTube, right? The word "you" with that graphics, the player tool, even the font.
Are they taking youTube as a symbol of net democracy? A service already bought by CIA-Google and which is buried under an avalanche of lawsuits and which will probably soon die of natural death inside Google-Video's womb? And isn't it funny they decided to promote this brand as soon as Google bought it? I bet youTube could use some clamor before, when they were forced to sell because of all the lawsuits incoming.

The blurb says: "You control the information age".
"The age of information is the end of the age of knowledge." said someone else.
This supposedly free "information age" seems to me more like a playground where all the tools are bought and owned by the same two or three players, which are using them to control all the activity going on.

Meanwhile U.S. politicians such as McCain or Al Gore are actively working to dismantle Internet freedoms with the excuse of pedophiles and terrorists.
And TIME magazine, as usual, averting its eyes. Cooking propaganda.

I am a blogger and this cover is dedicated to me too, right? Well let me tell you, I'd rather have faced another pukesome Bono-Gates cover than having this chilling slap on the back.

"Information age", my ass.

I don't really care about football/soccer (or, in our language, "Calcio", which, as everyone knows, means "kick") and I could accept to talk diffusely about it only if Calcio was a forgotten sport of the past, like, say, the race of the chariots.
It's not even true I could talk diffusely about it, 'cause I have no clue really, although I immensely like the prose of old-school Calcio experts like the past Gianni Brera, when I happen to read it.
Otherwise Calcio bores me, and as a moderate fan of the "unlucky" team Inter (only because my grandfather was) I know italian Calcio to be a stupid fraud. I always felt it was very depressing to see people going nuts for it, since here in Italy it was all so obviously fixed, and when not fixed, too violent.
So, I am not surprised by, nor interested to, such news.

Anyway: (blah blah) important investigations are going on against Juventus, Milan, Lazio, Fiorentina and other minor Calcio teams. It seems that Juventus football team, that absurdly won this year's championship today, was in control of all the nominations of referees in the Italian championship, and shared its puppets with a bunch of friendly teams to fix the championship. They also gambled on it, but mostly it was probably considered "necessary" to cheat because big teams are listed companies, and lots of money are at stake.

So, years of "stunning" results and astonishing "luck" of Juventus and Milan and other teams should be revisited, I guess. But it's too late. I know that nothing significant will happen, and that next year it will be all the same fraud over again.
It's all so depressing, to see how in Italy everything, everywhere is rotten, although clearly Calcio it's the most obvious place to find rotten stuff here.
Yet even if you don't care for it, even if you somehow knew it was so ( if only because "everything else is" ), it gives a little pain to forcefully acknowledge the greedy immorality that pervades everything.

Oh, well! What should I say? Calcio... Let's not talk about it anymore.

-- in picture: Google trends. It's hard to find a search term more popular among italian Google's users than "calcio". Try with "figa" "sesso", "droga", "Berlusconi"...

Another unrelated post from the "google is scary" department.
As they say on the Goggle Blog, you can now "Sign up for gmail".
You just have to give them your mobile phone number. "So we know that you're human".
All right, but, are they human?
(mocking voice) "...some new mobile features that will make your Google account more useful and secure"
Bullshit.
What they really mean is "so we can file your goggle account along with your real phone number, and that's gonna give our records a bloody consistency, that's GOLD for us. We have to make a lot of money with your identity and habits. We already did, but, crap, who is ever satisfied anyway?"

(still mocking voice) "It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts".
Yeah, right. Now I know that you create spam just as an excuse to snatch more identity information from people, spy on them, build consistent records on them.