The Morious Glotherland is linning, I have to spie down for awhile

Martin Amis's new novel, which I don't like, has the general and eternal shittiness of Russia as a central theme. Since I have so little experience of things Russian, Shostakovich's opera Lady MacBeth of Mtensk also seems to me to be about the eternal shittiness of Russia, which might be why Stalin banned it though it seemed to be critical more of a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois uselessness than anything to do with anything Stalin seemed likely to have liked.

I like Shostakovich awfully because of the way he can make something upsetting and unsettling tuneful and engaging, and this opera follows. I think most commentators say it's about boredom. And I think those commentators are all men who can't bring themselves to admit it's about intense female sexual frustration. I mean, she's been married for years and she was a virgin, for god's sake. Yeah - "boredom." Wankers. Anyways - I caught myself suspending disbelief several times, thanks to the music and excellent ensemble singing bringing the squalid, squalid plot into painful believability. Fucking squalid, man.

But wonderful staging, wonderful cast, wonderful music. A little nudity, too. Just girly nudity - there were sex scenes and the tenor didn't get his pants off. I couldn't suspend my disbelief then, which just made it funny since they were sort of going at it to the music, which I find with Shostakovich always has a faint breath of polka rhythm to it. And if there's anything funnier than dry humping to polka, I haven't thought of it. I also thought it was highly condescending that the orchestral interlude was dubbed "The Psychological Heart of the Opera" in the surtitles when the curtain came down; that deserved the wave of laughter it generated from the audience. The music spoke for itself, and while Toronto audiences may be a bit troggy they're not going to get up and start having loud conversations about adenoids over their ringing cellphones while the orchestra continues to play. Jeebus, give us some credit.

Anyways, may I ask what the fuck is up with Russia? Some of the world's most beautiful music, film, literature and architecture; apparently the best ice cream in the world - but at what fucking price, man? That place is fucked up. Hecatomb after hecatomb. A series of iron fists to the face of its neighbours and its own population - always this rampaging territorial insecurity, at the governmental level at least - and drunk, drunk, drunk. I don't think they lost the Cold War; I think they just had to call a time out for a few decades while the governing class slept it off.

Toronto

Putting it into terms I could understand, my analyst has told me my Reader's Digest stress count was dangerously high. This means anything personal I have to say today would be a massive whine, so here are some photographs instead.

This is Toronto. 70 year old buildings next to 20 year old buildings and everything covered in snow. It's nice; I like the blend of the old and the new - it would be prettier if it was a little older and a little newer, but it doesn't matter. Everything is prettier when the snow gets dumped on it.

Until, that is . . .

It turns to motherfuckin' slush. Look at the sorry state of this footpath. The City of Toronto's a fucking beast in terms of which footpaths get cleared and which don't. The footpaths around my office, for example, on the quietest (and most expensive) side streets, are shovelled religiously, despite the car traffic the pedestrians have to brave being nothing more than a few Beamers and Benzes purring gently around. The Don Bridge, over which harried commuters speed (and drivers in Toronto, while not as insane as in other cities, are remarkably shit), has a footpath whose maintenance you see here.

Fuck you, City of Toronto. Moving on.

This is also a picture of the Don Bridge. Again you can see the cables barring the footpath from the void; this used to be Suicide Central. It still has suicide hotline numbers posted at each end next to phone boxes, although it would now take a great deal of doing to throw yourself off. Now, I've never been really tempted to throw myself off a bridge (although on frigid days I sometimes wonder if, in the event of me peeing off the side, it would freeze before it hit the ground - you've thought about it too, admit it) but I imagine that the graffiti scrawled on to the concrete in the background would put me off from doing it here. It lacks a certain gravitas.

Pissing in the snow

There’s a lovely big snowstorm in Toronto. I say lovely because the snow makes it warmer, and not out of any love for snow – just out of extreme hate of the cold. I’ll put up pictures later, though, because it does make the city look much prettier and more interesting. Prettier and more interesting is good because I’m at a dangerously low ebb. In a staring-at-the-ceiling sort of place, as I think about what life will be like if no one ever hires me for anything. And I had a horrible dream last night about what ‘Allo ‘Allo would have been like if Sergio Leone had filmed it spaghetti Western style. Suffice to say all those “ . . . or you will be shot” turned into, well, shooting.

Although circumstances are stressful at the moment I’m tempted to think my pisser is hormonal, seasonal or chemical. Whenever I remind myself that things are actually under my control and if what I do next turns out a bit shit I can just stop doing it and do something else instead, I feel better – then I carry on with whatever task is at hand, and my mood crowds back down on me (particularly if the task at hand is looking for a better job) until I remind myself again. It’s a little frustrating.

You make me feel so nasty

What a foul mood I was in yesterday. The funny thing about my foul moods is they're not particularly in my head, but in my mouth; that is, I feel okay but then release mighty streams of catty bitch when I speak, or else feel it a mighty effort of compression to not release a mighty stream of bitch. Maybe it's from having to be polite all day and then really engaging myself with my student in the most patient way possible. He's already being Herculean speaking as much as he does, considering how Korean schools in his time didn't let children speak in language classes. It isn't purgatorial - he's really sweet and pretty interesting, from a part of Korea I haven't had students from before. But it is an effort and I'm not used to making any efforts at 5:30 in the evening.

Anyways, last night he was asking how my plans to split are going, so I told him, and he gave that iconic Korean nod and said he thought living in Europe was better than Toronto. That piqued my interest, of course; I know how hard he finds the nasty fuckin' cold and the comparative filth, so I was curious to know why he came here rather than Australia or New Zealand (which would have been cheaper) or the U.K. or Ireland (which would have been warmer). Apparently, it was all about Major League Baseball and Toronto being the only non-United States city that had a team. He went on to point we also have the NBA team and are getting a lovely big soccer franchise and that David Beckham will make his league premiere here.

I guess this is a nice sports city in a way lots of European cities are not. What's left after you've poured your partisan soul into the local soccer team? In Italy and France, not much; there's the rugby and basketball there, but comparatively speaking nobody cares. And if you're from a country that wasn't a British possession, how much of a fuck can you possibly give about cricket and the other things those people get excited about? And if you are from an old American satellite, I guess you would care about a sport like baseball a good bit. I guess Toronto just ended up with the right mix of ethnic groups and demographics to have lots and lots of sport.

What a funny thing international sport is. I understand passion for soccer - I don't know why, but I do understand how you can identify a team's performance with your civic pride - but otherwise I can't understand how people watch sports without getting stupidly drunk enough to be fooled into finding it interesting.

And the Windmill Says "Wheeeeeeeee!"

Figaro and I are in the interview process for a residential school in some insanely environmentally cutting edge slice of Belgium - his visa is running out, my job is going to start sucking unbearably in eight days, and I've decided it's quixotic (I wonder if I'm using that adjective appropriately here - missed Don Quixote from third year when I was off in Italy absorbing the Renaissance and sort of figured I'd read that only when I'd learnt Spanish, which obviously I haven't done yet; two years in television media and I can hardly even speak English anymore) to apply for classy-type jobs when I'm not available for an interview in which my interlocutor can see my titties.

So I have a general feeling that soon things are going to get flustered, busy and painful any day now (especially considering I have to go to the West Coast for as long as possible before moving to Europe) which made it very easy to enjoy the relaxed pace of this weekend. Relaxed - hah, actually - I had a lot to do and I got an awful lot done, and drank an awful lot too. But it felt relaxing. I think I'm getting my ability to relax in the face of overwhelmingly stressful events back, and just in the nick of fucking time, I'll tell you that. No other fit-to-print news, besides that Figaro figured out eggplant slices dipped in ground oats instead of bread crumbs before being fried are PHENOMENAL. I recommend it.

Upwards and onwards.