Wednesdayβachingly soft shimmering autumnal dayβRadio la Bobine hightails it to the mountains. Three independent radio stations are holding a week-long seminar for high school kids, funded by regional government, teaching them how to set up portable stations, interview, edit, broadcast. Twenty-two kids. Democracy is a word you hear a lot from Joseph, a counsellor from Nyons.
What are they looking forward to? Dancing, say the girls. Candy, says a Polish boy called Leo with thick blond hair in a sugar bowl cut. Everybody giggles, looks away. Last night suddenly they became one. Why do I love radio so much? In the spring of , when the whole world went into quarantine, I was holed up in the French countryside. There were seven of us--me and Alastair and our two twenty-something-year-old children and three of their friends--plus an untamed dog from the pound, and ours was a pretty bucolic lockdown.
Reading Pasolini, watching Pasolini, breathing, sweating, dreaming Pasolini. Pasolini is someone whose work I love and live by, and it seemed as if Pier Paolo was the right guide to this plague time. I was craving his poetry from the early 60s, a poetry imbued in a classical humanist tradition that was simultaneously raw confessional and civic-minded. I was craving his newspaper journalism of the s, polemical pieces delineating how consumer capitalism was destroying nature, language, culture, the human body, even.
You may have read some sections of it. Other heroes of this book include the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinop, my mother, Michel Foucault, a third-century Carthaginian woman-martyr, Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot, a 19th century French hermaphrodite, and of course, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
All interspersed with chunks of autobiography. But readersβand the hope that some of my inadmissible obsessions will resonate with themβgive me courage. I ask how many of them would like to visit the U.
