Dear Caker World:

You’ve figured out café lattés are better than drip coffee. Good for you. It long-a-fucking-‘nuff, but now many, if not most of you seem to understand that café lattés are a good thing to be drinking and not just something to mispronounce at Starbucks. Although you still do that very enthusiastically too. Felicitations.

Now, what continues to disturb and disappoint me is that soy and skim café lattés are ubiquitous yet goat milk lattés only make appearances in my kitchen.

Let’s forget that goat milk is cheaper to produce and more globally ubiquitous than cow’s milk because I understand the divide between caker logic and macroeconomic rationality. Let’s even forget that goat milk is easier on the system than cow’s milk and that soy milk is a processed abomination only people with dairy sensitivities should even consider putting in their mouths, because I understand cakers got NO logic when it comes to feeding themselves.

Just remember this: goat milk makes much, much better lattés, and it makes my heart bleed for youse guys that you don’t get to experience that in the course of a normal day. Try. You’ll believe.

Fuck, I hate Starbucks,

Mistress La Spliffe

Have you got any Greek in you? Want some?

We made pigs of ourselves last night after my psych session at a restaurant called Omonia. My analyst said Pantheon is better, but the prices seemed slightly exorbitant and Pantheon makes me think Rome. Omonia was good, anyways, more than good. Lovely.

We started with the pickled octopus – fucking yums, but not quite as good as it sounds. A touch bland – I would have enjoyed a more garlicky preserve, but the only thing I don't like more garlicky than it is is coffee, or possibly garlic, so ignore me. We also had the keftedes, a sort of baked meatball, ever so flavourful and then one squeezes a little lemon juice on them. At that point I believe I came, and then we moved on to the mains. For me, that was a spanakopita dinner – spanakopita being a sort of filo turnover full of feta and spinach. It's as good as it sounds, with surprisingly not-overcooked spinach. Figaro got the calamari dinner, which sounds hackneyed, but the squid was fresh. In that tender-rubber way only fresh squid can be. For a sweet we shared a galaktabouriko, which I’d never heard of before but Figaro got quite excited about, and I’m glad he did – it’s a sort of dense custard in an extremely thin filo crust. Not very sweet on its own, but then with honey poured over it and a little cinnamon.

Ladies and gentlemen, jizz.

So that was fun. The wine was rubbish though. Anybody know some nice Greek reds? I don’t. Should have stuck to the ouzo.

I’d like to leave you with this quote from the conclusion of Happiness: A History. It comes after McMahon has had a little discussion of aggressive antidepressant marketing and the possibility of genetic manipulation of those who are the ‘victims’ of grumpy type DNA (not to mention after McMahon has gone almost 500 pages without significant run-on sentences or excessive hyperbole, which leads me to think his heart was in these words – you know how academics are when they get earnest):

. . . when, and if, human beings decide to take this fateful step in the quest to live as gods, they should know that in doing so, they will be leaving a piece of their humanity behind. For to judge by the yearning and pursuit – the noble restlessness – that has driving Western culture for the past several thousand years, there are certain things that human beings will never know – certain riddles they will never answer – if they are to remain mere mortals. The holy grail of perfect happiness is one of those things, and like that precious mythic relic, said to have gathered blood from the side of the son of man, it, too, may exist only in our minds, a deliverance cup and a chalice to hold our pain. To take that cup – to answer that riddle, to break the spell – would be to sacrifice something of ourselves. We may well discover that the knights who dare to do so are less like the brave crusaders of lore than like Cervantes’ knight of the sad countenance, Quixote, who learns at the end of his journeys that the road is better than the arrival.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals.

I’m daytripping to Niagara Falls this weekend. Yes, the touristy bit. Can anybody suggest fun activities besides getting baked and going to the aviary, looking at the water, and taking advantage of the romantic honeymoon atmosphere by messing around in an alley somewhere?

Very little else to say at the moment. I’ve been in a minor mood for a little while due to some more shit with my French thesis advisor regarding a reference for doctorate applications. At this point, though he is a fine, fine writer and a great academic mind, I must tell you I’ll never be able to write here who he is or where you can find his books because I’m pretty sure That Fucking Bastard Asshole Crossing The Street + Me in a Car = Kablooey. He alone fills me with doubts about the viability of continuing in the academic world – do I really want to be around such cunty people for the rest of my academic life and get underpaid for it?

He hasn’t said no, by the way. If he said no, that would be straightforward, you see. And much as I adore some things about the French, their national ability to straightforwardly cut through the Gordian knots of a problem as complex and confusing as WRITING ME A FUCKING REFERENCE AFTER GIVING ME A HIGH HONOURS MARK ON MY FUCKING THESIS JURY AFTER BEING MY THESIS ADVISOR FOR OVER A YEAR has never inspired me with awe in the normal sense of the word. I should have done what my shrink said and sent him some maple syrup with the letter asking for it. I should have played the ass-kissing game. Now instead of an ass-kissing game, I get to play an even more boring and morally humiliating ass-reaming game.

I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him.

Fuck TV some more

I’m very fond of Eddie Izzard because my sense of humour was shaped by the gut-busting, life-changing-and-affirming experience of reading 1066 and All That after getting into the academic history milieu. Sadly, Sexie was rubbish even after making the gorgonzola bechemel for the tortellini with reefer butter and smoking many pipefuls. But Circle was nice. Lovely in fact. Almost as good as Dress to Kill. I think my poor Figaro is having a moment – which he keeps inside, probably in the knowledge of how militant I can get – about life sans television. He had some sort of cable at the residential school he was teaching at in England and now has suddenly nothing. Except a girlf who thinks television is a massive government conspiracy to keep us all stupid, and a DVD player.

So we watch two Eddie Izzard specials in four days just so he gets to see the moving pictures. I was dissappointed by Sexie. Oh well. I still want to see My Super Ex-Girlfriend, mostly on the strength of him being in it and its writers working on the Simpsons.

Not much else to say this morning. We went garage-saling on Sunday and I got The Tale of the Genji, which I’ve wanted to read forever, but also The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, which I’ve wanted to re-read forever, so it may be awhile yet. Boys make reading harder – I still have 30 pages left of Darrin McMahon’s Happiness, he’s up to Freud and I think he’s about to write something radical about something.

Something's begun

Here I am again, extra bendy and ready for action. Co-habitation with Figaro has thus far been a breezy screamy lark but in my ongoing and generally futile bid to avoid discussing personal details in this blog I’ll just say things are cool and leave it like that.

So glad he got here for the tail end of the summer when there is tonnes of music I like happening in Toronto. We saw three concerts in five days – some classic Jap with the Kiyoshi Nagata Ensemble, a professionalish production of Don Giovanni , and the Cecilia String Quartet playing Kelly Marie Murphy’s “Another Little Piece of My Heart” (no relation but very emotive and beautiful) and some Brahms. The three performances leave me with four things to write here:

1. Jap drumming is really horny.

2. The production of Donny G was a little rough around the edges in terms of staging and the technical perfection of most of the musicians. The set was minimal and relied heavily on light projection. And yet its energy and the clever way it was staged in such a small theatre made it fucking terrific. The chick singers were really nice and very strong even as they acted, and I enjoyed the boy singers very much too. What Leoporello and Don Ottavio lacked in flawlessness they made up for in emotional skill and Donny G himself was the perfect slimy bastard with a great booming voice. My point is it was way more pleasurable than half the performances I’ve seen from the COC that obviously had several times the budget. The COC will hopefully figure out soon, as it moves into its new digs, that the market is flooded with talent so they should work on making their productions more engaging instead of blowing the budget on the biggest names it can afford.

3. Brahms is soooooo romantic. Brahms makes me cry sexy tears.

4. As we (biked) home we could hear the leaves curling and turning brown on the trees, and the birds deciding where to go for Winter. And the whole sound, the whole sound of Summer packing its bags and preparing to leave town. I’m sorry. It’s true. Summer is taking the evenings off. We couldn’t stay for the last movement of the Brahms even though it was making me cry because we were dressed for summer. It’s a knife in my swollen heart. I think we’re going to go to Australia in February – I can’t hack this shit.