Ho hum

So yesterday I kept thinking I could feel spring in the air, and then looked out the window to see CRAP that eventually turned into CRAPPY SNOW. This has been the warmest Canadian winter on record and at no point during it did I shut my face about how fucking cold it was. I have no choice but to emigrate – it’s either that or have my ass kicked regularly as the planet starts to really suffer from global warming and I let my SUV idle on the curb just to speed things along a little. I don’t think I’ll be happy until I live in a climate where I can walk around all year in a – what do you call those sheets Polynesian chicks wrap themselves in? – you know, one of those. The irony of that being Polynesia will probably be swallowed by the ocean by the time I could do that anywhere I’m likely to live.

You know, if God was really looking out for us, he’d have made our capitalist-pig-excess-fuck-ups result in global cooling rather than warming. I bet you’d get some pretty goddamn fast industrial action from executive classes everywhere, even in the petrol and automotive industries, if their trophy wives or rent boys had to conceal their flauntable assets to avoid frost damage. Not to mention from we the consumers. Right now we can imagine global warming is only going to really impact society after we reach the age that we’ve promised ourselves the indulgence of a heroin addiction and will have to live rough anyways; but when it’s cold it’s TOO FUCKING COLD RIGHT AWAY.

Sadly, God only helps those who help themselves. Whoever those noble souls are. Probably the executive class.

Still reading North and South on, as mentioned, Miss C's reccomendation. Oh god, there are two important Miss C’s. Okay, opera pseudonyms – Rodelinda for Oxford Miss C, and Carmen for Paris Miss C - twee enough to annoy them both, but likely to stick in my mind since I've listened to Handel and Bizet with each of them variously. Anyways, I'm still reading North and South. I like having books reccommended not just for themselves but for what they tell you about the person who reccommends them.

The puzzle I'm examining now as I read is why Rodelinda dislikes both Charlotte and Emily Bronte - who I reckon have little enough in common besides creating flawed but eventually fully believable heroines and messy but visually evocative narrative passages - but enjoys their contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell. Who is also messy, whose writing is less visual, whose heroine is less believable, but seems to have, so far, a much deeper grounding in the historical context. (Don't get defensive, Bronte/Gaskell fans - as far as I'm concerned, messy writing is great - if all Western classics were written with the tidy precision of Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, I'd shoot myself or buy a television.) I guesss it's not rocket science, as Rodelinda is doing a doctorate in history, and not English literature. Anyways.