Your love is like false premises, false premises I don't wanna read

I'll send a nice new shiny 2 euro coin to every newspaper in Britain if they'll only stop writing about evolutionary psychology. Women don't love self-obsessed, lying psychopaths better than they love any other sort of man. Obviously, painfully obviously, self-obsessed, lying psychopaths seduce more women because they devote more time than normal men to seducing women, in an effort to re-enforce their insecure or unclear sense of self. And they'll lie about their circumstances and their intentions in aid of said seduction, over and over again with an indefinite series of patsy ladies because, as psychopaths, they feel no guilt about any hearts broken in this desperate quest to re-enforce their insecure, unclear sense of self.

Maybe Steve Connor, the writer, was trying to be jokey, which goes to show English people shouldn't try to be funny when they're sober. But what it comes off as is Steve Connor being one of those shitheads who think they're really, really nice, and don't understand why women reject them in favour of men who aren't really, really nice, when actually the problem is that Steve Connor is probably not really, really nice at all, and is in fact the sort of cunt who hates women for being more attracted to other men than to him. I've known a lot of really, really nice men, and they've had no problem getting chicks, often including me. I've written about this before and before and my feelings have not changed. God, I'm tired of unattractive men blaming their unattractiveness on women. Why can't they just blame themselves, like unattractive women do?

Speaking of unattractive women, what the fuck's the matter with French feminists? Do the indignantes protesting the outcome of a court case that was satisfactory to both parties really think that French women have it so good in terms of domestic non-violence (they don't), pay equity (they don't), political and professional glass ceilings (they don't), and the social right to leave their homes without spending a retarded amount of time and money dolling themselves up (they don't) that now the country's feminist class can relax and concentrate on informing private citizens what is and isn't an 'essential quality' in their now-undesirable marital contract? Motherfuck, those people piss me off. 'Fatwa against women's liberty' indeed. Go to my old working-class neighborhood and see if all the white women with white husbands and black eyes were the target of a fucking fatwa. Go get a fucking job, punks, and then tell me if the people paying you less and promoting you less than your male colleagues are Muslim. Holy fuck.

Excuse the pottymouth but my Mum is coming to visit for a few days, which is fantastic. But until Tuesday morning, I cannot pop a nasty word unless I accidentally hurt myself. I may explode. It may also mean no post Monday. To tide you over, here's an excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on the Muppet Show which I first saw, in reruns I suppose, when I was a young, young thing and which may have impacted my sexual persona more than I'm wholly comfortable with:



I remember how curious I was about the consequence of that towel slipping. If only I'd had Google Image search then - no, actually, I'm very pleased I didn't. Best to let the surprise build up awhile longer, until I could get my hands on one. Man, cock is awesome.

The ghost of Red Dragons past

Now that I'm free of the Cantor I have moved on to fiction again. Two new-to-me writers, which is exciting, especially since one of them has already been a revelation, that one being Charles Dickens. Found a copy of A Christmas Carol for 50 cents in the junk shop, so despite it being approximately the opposite of Christmas I snapped it up and read it. I'd been hesitant to dip my toes into the Charles because of my awareness he was one of those 'paid by the word' writers, and I'd feared getting bogged down in the wordiness of it all, but I'd meant to start reading his work for some time after I'd got bogged down by Gaskell's wordy, wordy North and South that meandered and meandered and finally wrapped up lickety-split - and still enjoyed it a lot.

I'll now find and read one of his monster novels without further procrastination because A Christmas Carol was absolutely delightful. And the wordiness, the meandering passages, were much more charming, illustrative and illuminating than anything in North and South or, for that matter, Gone With the Wind - another lovable monster. Also, A Christmas Carol made me weep like a baby - well, rather more quietly. Wikipedia says that my number one lady Virginia Woolf found his novels overly sentimental, but much as I love the Woolf I'm not going to take advice on what sort of sentiments I should be consuming from a lady who lined her pockets with rocks and chucked herself in a river, no matter how well-written her suicide note was.

Also I think it's a nasty way to do yourself in because of the state of your body when they find it. Someone who I cared very much about - one of those fulcrum people whose influence changed the entire course of my life - decided for reasons I can respect, if not understand (thank God), that his own life was no longer worth continuing. So he went out onto a large lake on a canoe, and shot himself in the head. He'd left a note but it still took awhile to find his remains. That plays on me - that it had a hole in its head, and that it took so long to find it. I can't imagine how it plays on his family. It's a horrible, merciless, confining thing, in a way, but I think we have a duty to each other, to try not to do things to ourselves that will play on the people who love us. In that sense, no one is free and no one should be free.

Anyways. Also reading Ulysses. Only got through the first 50 pages or so of roughly one million, so far too early to make any judgements, except I have, of course: it's an incredibly boy book. As mentioned I like the occasional boy book, but can I handle roughly one million pages of boy? Time will tell. So far I'm enjoying it enough to keep going.

The Red Dragon is educated by the internets

Thank you, BBC, for being good for more than keeping Dr. Who alive and trying to convince Britain and the World that the crappy ruling party isn't absolute crap. Their 'On This Day' feature yesterday informed me that on June 17 1961, Rudolf Nureyev made his break for the strong arms of capitalism, crying 'I want to be free!' Yes. Come to us, Rudolf. It also informed me that Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Perkins had a thing, and what can I say except fuckin' A, Anthony - atta give hope to normal looking people everywhere. I mean, look at this:

And then this (and if you image google Rudolf Nureyev, by the way, even nakeder portraits from the 60's come up, and he was packing just the right amount of heat, I'd say):

Learning that Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Perkins had a thing led me to learning that Victoria Principal was the one who turned Anthony Perkins on to women, and that Victoria Principal is sort of cool, and that Principal Victoria from South Park is named after her. Huh. And speaking of turn-on women: Cyd Charisse died, which is sad, though she had good long innings. She's one of the first women I can remember who made me think it might be nice to get intimate with a woman. She and Marlene Dietrich. To this day I understand, not merely as a sexual preference but as a fact, that women have incomparably better legs than men, both on average and in terms of the créme de la créme. Charisse, like Dietrich, was the créme. Look at those suckers:

You've got them as a point of comparison with Rudolf's, just above. And while Rudolf Nureyev may well have had the best legs a human male has ever had, honestly the only way you could pretend his legs were better than Cyd Charisse's legs is by pointing out that Rudolf's led to a fine package of heat at their junction, whilst Cyd's led up to something which I find about as entertaining and easy to solve as a Rubix cube, which isn't very, in case you were wondering.

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.

The Red Dragon values family

I seem to have stumbled into some sort of temporal vortex on Friday night whilst pissed and high because all of a sudden it's Monday morning. God, five day weeks make me want to shoot myself. What an arbitrary fucking number anyways - five. How about four? How about some family values cunt of a politician jumps up and down on his stupid fucking holy roller bandwagon and says 'I care so much about the sancticity of the family that I'm going to give everybody a three day weekend so they can spend more time together'? How about that, family values cunts? But noooo, I suppose it's much easier to make a stink about stopping the gays from getting some goddamn lame license and to make speeches on Father's Day. That's like the family-values-defending equivalent of making a noodlecard. GIVE US A THIRTY HOUR WEEK IF YOU WANT US TO MAKE PROPER CHILDREN. Fuck.

It was a good weekend though, fundamentally. If so. Fucking. Brief. And speaking of family values, at some point we watched Billy Elliot, which I hadn't seen before, and I thought it was very good indeed. I really liked the way the story rolled out over the disenfranchisement of the miners, and I liked the nasty harshness of Billy's family - and the realism of Billy unwittingly managing to bring his father around by catching him through dance at a very, very drunk moment. Rather than being simply a feel-good film, it was a terrific advertisement for the utility of slapping, punching and piss-ups in domestic relationships. I also liked that Billy was not simply a nice boy with a penchant for self-expression through dance. You could really see him becoming a proper primo ballet dancer - a real Nureyev type; passionate, punchy and possibly not so pleasant all the time.

Another good thing was finding out Comedy Central's website is now streaming full episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. That's nice. The F-word has a low tolerance for those shows, though. Too much shouting.