And if I just stopped?

Fuck this Marvellon shit now. I will not have it being part of my life, I won’t sit around getting used to it, fuck it. Fuck it hard. Condoms are better than this shit. Better than not being able to bear listening to anybody or anything for fear of kicking them. Boo!

Anyways. Marvellon moods might be great for North and South and The Remains of the Day type reading but it turns out they’re absolutely contraindicated for Italo Calvino, whose style annoyed me to the degree that 20 pages of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller made me throw it at the wall with a shrieky grunt of annoyance. The style seemed so fucking smug, slick, overly personal, even presumptuous; I’m willing to believe it was a pure chemical dislike but just thinking about it now pisses me off some more. Also it was one of the books Figaro has shipped over and I was annoyed with him last night, so that probably didn't help it.

I suppose I’ll give it another chance once the spare hormones have cleared from my system; I’m already softening up by promising myself I’ll read it in Italian instead of English. Figaro shipped it in Italian too, but it's one of those pretty editions bound in cellophane still so I'm not opening it on the offchance it was meant to be a present for, say, me.

Sometimes it feels like the biggest fucking luxury on the planet to read in another language. I’ll never forget the first books I read for fun in French and Italian. The French was L’odeur du café from Dany Laferrière. He was famous in those days for How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, which I’ve never read. The first book of his I read was the English translation of Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? Literally the title means "Is the pomegranate/grenade in the young negro’s hand a weapon or a peice of fruit?" but the double entendre doesn’t work in English. See, this is why reading another language is such a luxury. That’s a fucking awesome title. The English title is Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? which is a much crappier title, but it’s a really great book from what I remember. I know I should look at it again before I reccommend it, but I do, completely.

Laferrière hasn’t put out a novel for years, I think, but a couple of weeks ago someone sent me an awesome article of his about the Zidane headbutt. That was the day I lost interest in the headbutt because Laferrière explained it well enough to satisfy - here it is in English.