Everyday Pipol

A real problem with being functionally bilingual in a Francophone country is that you - that is, I - follow some of the pipol gossip religiously without understanding that I'm being suckered into distraction from issues that matter, as I can't participate policitally here (but who can at the moment? Fuckin' Belgium) and as it's all in a clever artsical fartsical language like French. Of course, Belgian gossip, outside of how everybody who's anybody is a dangerous and unprosecutable paedophile (unfortunately more than just gossip) basically amounts to French gossip, which these days amounts to the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy is being serviced by Carla Bruni.

I've gone on record, and I'll stay there, as saying that her album Quelqu'un m'a dit was not nearly as crappy as I'd been expecting, and that I like it. But there's very little doubt in my mind that the woman is Empress Bitch of the Drama Queens. Only part of that, I think, is having subjected myself to reading Justine Lévy's barely disguised autobiography Rien de grave, which didn't impress me. Maybe my French isn't strong enough to appreciate the force of her language but 200+ pages about getting fucked up, depressed and cranky with your new boyfriend after your husband leaves you for his father's supermodel girlfriend is just not my idea of a good read.*

And maybe another part of it is the way Bruni jumped from Eric Clapton to Mick Jagger. Maybe another is that I don't trust pale-eyed dark haired women.

It's a combination of seperate anecdotes, I guess. Because maybe in your life as a normal non-Queen-Bitch woman you have to choose between one rock star and another. Maybe you date an older man and fall in love with his married son, and then decide that the heart wants what it wants. But you don't do both those things and then, as Bruni did, brag about reading Dostoevosky hidden behind copies of Vogue whilst backstage at the shows during your modelling career. That is, she bragged about hiding her habit of reading bits of Russian literature which, great as they are, are pretty light. I mean, Dostoevsky is really readable, the sort of classic you read in highschool; it's not Proust. It just points to this conception of herself as some sort of beleaguered intellectual in a hostile beautiful woman's world, which is beyond pretentious - it's just insane.

Anyways, that's who the evil-trolly-but-strangely-compelling President of the French Republic is dating now instead of, oh, say, me, which is probably the only reason this is on my mind at all. It's causing a big flap in the Francophone media about the pipolisation of the presidency, about distraction from the issues that matter. Good - the French deserve it, like Paris deserves all those Starbucks, much as I hate Starbucks, due to a native inability to make real espresso. They had the chance to vote for real change in the last election and they fucked it up. Hah. Now their first lady will be a mad raving harpy who thinks she's clever and who'll distract them from how nothing is changing outside of slowly getting worse. Mwa hah ha haaaaah.

*Lord Jim, however, by Joseph Conrad, which I'm well stuck into at the moment, is. But details another time.