The Red Dragon does not feel the new Carla Bruni is the most anticipated French album in decades

You know one of the things that's hilarious about the French? Any jerk on the street there can spend a good 15 minutes telling you everything that's wrong with American media in terms of 24 hour 'news' channels and Rupert Murdoch and Paris Hilton all the rest of it, but then one of their best selling broadsheets publishes this. The Figaro, never much of a paper to rock the boat as far as Sarkozy's Elysée goes, kisses its winsome way so far up Carla Bruni's ass it must look like she has four lips on her face. And that more than a month before her album comes out, and on the front page, just at the time preparations start up for yet another general strike, which I'll tell you had fucking better be over by our vacation time. So pathetic, it's emetic.

Finally finished that Cantor book and not recommending it. It got sloppier towards the end until his opinionation and sweeping statements didn't sync up with each other anymore, let alone with his source material. Even with marijuana, the final chapter about the Rinascimento was painful. It's all very well for traditionalists to whine about post-modernism, but they need to react, not just reject. Whatever else it is, a post-modernist approach to history is a valid criticism of the traditionalist approach. A traditionalist is subjective, horribly so, in that he approaches historical subjects with an obvious personal theory or agenda. Name me one traditionalist who hasn't. And it's usually a fairly sentimentalist theory or agenda at that, explaining or excusing things happening in the present day via the vagaries of a bunch of Roman assholes or something. And then all sources are interpreted, sometimes clumsily and labouredly, through the lens of that theory or agenda, and yet with the language of absolute certainty.

Not that such subjectivity, sentimentalism and pulpit-bashing isn't the case with post-modernist approaches but there is an effort to strip that tendency bare, or at least acknowledge it. And if that means less certainty - well, who needs to be sure of everything all the time? I'd rather get closer to a faraway truth than get well convinced by the hot illusion living next door.