The Mistress in Her First Class Compartment

God, I'm getting sick of work. Luckily Canada is coming up soon. Marseille, besides the fantastic weekend with its fantastic kayaking, was a nasty hit not only of work but of anti-fun, with fucking cunty mosquitoes no less - no kidding - I was bit ten times whilst sitting through all the presentations. That shit was not quite hell, but purgatorial for sure if I've read my Dante right. And now I'm in the thick of report season. It's almost done. One more. And then - well, it's not smooth sailing, who the fuck am I kidding? I'm going to have indignant Teutonic fuckers bitching me out for the rest of my tenure at this job about how I'm not believing their lies over the lies some other Teutonic fucker is telling me. One of the sectors I cover is just fine, and most of the Teutons I interview are just fine, and I know the sectors my colleagues cover are just fine. It's just this one that's an everlasting pain in the ass . . . but at the same time I'm too interested to give it up, even if someone volunteered to take it off my hands. It's so interesting when adults lie, and this sector has a more chequered history than most, I suppose, though I'd never dream of boring you by telling you anything substantial about it.

Anyways.

On the train between Brussels and Marseille I sat in the rarefied airs of the first class compartment, reflected on my usual half-baked Marxist theories about how in the modern world bourgeois premiums don't get you shit besides an absence of proles, not even a fucking glass of wine or a nice packet of crisps or anything. Two things complimented, even improved my reflections: The General in his Labyrinth and the Arcade Fire's albums.

The General in his Labyrinth wasn't Love in the Time of Cholera or 100 Years of Solitude; it wasn't even Love and Other Demons, but it was pretty damn good, In Evil Hour good, though less supernatural. It worked very well as a cold portrait of physical disintegration, and also the disintegration of a dream, a political dream that went beyond abstracts like freedom straight to a new world, a huge new world . . . it made me care a lot more about Simon Bolivar, reading it. The sun shining out of my ass as it does, to me Bolivar was important because he inspired Garibaldi, and to me Garibaldi was important because whilst marching against the Papal States he got shot in the foot in Aspromonte, and Aspromonte is important because it bred the olive half of the Almighty Me, hence saving me from melanoma, so far at least. Thanks, Simon Bolivar! Anyways, it's made me much more interested in him, and very interested in her too, who Garibaldi went to visit in her destitution in Peru. There are all of these fascinating lives that we can only imagine. It's enough to make me want to get some mescal and head out into the desert in a pukey bid to try to recreate history. But then most things are.

And the Arcade Fire albums - not much to say about those. I like them both a lot but they annoy the hell out of me unless I listen to the whole thing in one go. Song by song it's all just trembly nonsense and my brain focuses too hard on the bad-cranked vocals, but if I have, say, a five-hour train trip between Marseille and Brussels to while away and all too much concentration to spare, they're perfect. That Bruce-Springsteen-kicked-in-the-balls-and-with-more-instruments jitteriness is like a pathetic but pleasant rallying cry for all the non-insane people in the world to stop the insanity - I don't think it will work but it's nice if I have enough time to sit down with the entire albums. I like Funeral better. And that's all.

Get ready to economize

So, whilst on vacation I read rather less than usual. Part of this was due to the old demon foe television. Especially BBC World News, I can't look away from that shit, even though it's nonsense. Everything's a fucking catastrophe there. And everything is black and white. Russia black, Georgia white. Buyouts white, government inaction black. Jesus, it annoys the hell out of me even though I can't look away. But at a peak moment of displeasure with it all, I had a sudden flash of something that's flashing on me increasingly these days - thank god I'm not American. If I think the BBC is bad, I guess it's the mercy of all fucking time my only relationship with CNN is to laugh at the home page occasionally. Not to mention the others . . . ugh.

But to mention this ridiculous $700 billion bail out - those poor people are going to foot the bill towards keeping the global financial markets liquid enough for an orderly global retreat from it. I always wondered how their economy being owned from abroad was going to ruin them and I think I'm finding the answer now - those people will be subjected to insane inflation and increased taxation without any fucking improvement of their services, because with all this public fuss aver the national debt, whoever wins the presidency in November will have a great excuse to not improve health care coverage or social security or anything, for that matter.

And all so that foreign countries and entities that have relied on the stock market to get good returns for capital funds, superannuation and pension plans - the sort of pension plans that most Americans can only dream of - and such won't be unhappy enough to fuck around with their reserves or pull out their investment dollars wholesale. America is becoming the bitch of the world. And that's alright with America, because the ruling class has figured out how to make the larger classes take the pain. Jesus. It's not Africa but it's nasty.

I don't have incredible faith in the financial stability of Europe but I'm fucking glad to live in a fiscal place where protecting residents from inflation and hits to their purchasing power is mandated above encouraging wild economic growth at the central bank, and that the bank actually practices what it preaches despite massive industry pressure and lobbying. But then I guess Europeans have always been a little more ready than Americans to challenge their governments and governmental structures, and so Europeans keep their governments scared and attentive. For better or for worse. Sometimes that means fantastic social services and sometimes that means Nazis.

Anyways, I was going to write about the only book I did actually read during my vacation, The General in His Labyrinth, but I guess that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Planning a vacation south of Gomorra

I just booked our vacation. Two weeks in Italy, one in Calabria with the family and one in Sicily. That will be very nice as I've never spent that much time in Sicily - just long laborious daytrips down from Aspromonte on those monumentally shitty roads the damnable parasitic mafia has siphoned all the money off from, and then across the legendary straits of Messina on one of the damnable parasites' damnable ferries.

Goddamn them, if God will pardon the imperative which I'm using for metaphorical purposes, in the understanding that God will damn only those who He in His wisdom judges it right to damn . How many people have died on those third world roads in Aspromonte? How many people have died in Aspromonte because emergency services couldn't get there fast enough? Lousy money-grubbing rapists, burglars, murderers, and motherfuckers. No wonder some southern Italians still miss that fascist maniac murderer Mussolini: he's the only leader that country's had with enough balls to line them up against the wall and give them the killing they deserve. And that's the most fucking pathetic thing in the fucking world. God, Italy's fucked up.

Anyways, that's where we're going at Christmas and New Years because one of my cousins is getting married, and I need to brush up on my Italian badly, and it will be nice to see the rest of my family there, and we both very much want to spend a good chunk of time exploring Sicily. We'll be staying in Syracuse, where I've never been before, but which sounds fucking legendary. And yes. We'll be going kayaking. Rock. I had to book this early because at Christmastime about a kajillion southern Italian economic migrants head home for the holidays - frankly I'm not pleased to have left it this long - the tickets cost almost 400 euros each and we were lucky to find that.

Not much else to say at the moment because work is so insanely busy and stressful. Yesterday, after finishing a fucking Homeric effort of a market report, my brain was so fried that I had to think about it for three minutes or so before I remembered my home phone number. Dear oh dear.

Taking a Cézanney view of the world

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had declined to cherchez l'homme, as they say, and if I had moved from Italy to Marseille in 2002 instead of from Italy to Paris in 2002, I would have completely different prejudices regarding French people today. Much nicer ones. In fact I loved Marseille so much that now I'm going to have to oblige us to go back for a week next summer so that I have time to at least scratch the surface, instead of lightly brush against it, and hence be able to explain to myself for the rest of my life why the hell it is I don't live there.

Brushing against its surface revealed a few faults: most of the city smells like pee, there's obviously a lot of indigents, and considering it's not a rich town everything except accommodation was Switzerland-expensive; it is a tourist destination on the Mediterranean. Otherwise I was shocked by how fucking awesome it was. Everybody who I met, outside of one cabdriver and one hotel receptionist, who don't count because they have shitty jobs, was cheerful, warm, friendly and helpfully polite - striking up conversations, sharing food, proud of their city and wanting to talk about it in a way that didn't come off as chauvinistic . . .

And the men were gallant. It was a bit strange after the dead fish-face quality of Brussels, where men only eye-fuck you during the week or two of summer weather we get, to suddenly be back on the Mediterranean where they all look so appreciative all the time. But during my peregrinations and during the day of sea-kayaking, when I was the only female in a group of seven, they combined that appreciativeness with this sort of nonthreatening helpfulness that frankly I'd got to thinking only existed in books, at least when it came to French men. I've known for some time, since spending time in Alsace and Brittany, that I'm very wrong to judge France by Paris. But now I really know it; I've been pleasantly punched in the face with the fact.

Anyways, the sea kayaking - this is where we went:


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Except by water rather than by road, of course. Around l'Estaque, which Cézanne liked to paint. It was beautiful. Cool, crystalline water that was fine enough to swim in during our lunchbreak, little black fishies swimming around, hot white beaches, breathtaking views of the savage limestone escarpments jutting out of the sea, little anenomes, caves, mussels, this whole shoreline ecosystem we could bump ourselves around. Birds. Silence.

And the lovely relaxed-swimming feeling of pushing yourself along, as fast or as slow as you wanted, in one of those fucking great boats. I love the feeling of kayaking. And then when we were coming back to the launching point in the late afternoon, the wind picked up a little bit, and there were waves that seemed big to me, who'd never kayaked on waves before, and that was fun. Kayak goes up, kayak goes down. Enough to give you motion sickness but since you're right on the surface of the water, which is moving more or less the same way you are, there doesn't seem like a point to that. I think it will be necessary to sea kayak in Australia. Sharks and saltwater crocodiles notwithstanding.

Anyhoo. Off to work again. They promoted me yesterday - I'm going to take that as permission to tell the Yankee executives to fuck themselves when they need it. In closing, I didn't take my camera to Marseille as I was going on the water but this Cézanne gives you a pretty good idea of what the land looked like from the sea:

They're all laughing at you because they're scared

Home again home again. It was hard to leave Marseille because after the conference ended, or rather after my patience ended and I did a runner, I fell deeply in love with the city.

I've never been so relieved in my life to do a runner, I think. You have to understand, and I consider it a problem beyond the credit crises and political brouhahas (but I'm being paid in euros and most of my savings aren't on the stock market), that our Kings of Industry are damnable cunts. They know some things are right and some things are wrong in moral terms, but they choose to do the wrong things. That can't be pointed out often enough. I think they're often presented as being the agents of the invisible hand of the market that really wants to help us all out . . . but the way the international financial system runs in terms of companies with publicly traded stocks is a deeply flawed one - very deeply, very fundamentally flawed.

In terms of my industry, that means a complete disregard for sustainability as anything but a half-hearted marketing tool, and even that wouldn't play any sort of part in their thoughts unless consumers weren't getting more clever about entire life-cycle, chain-of-custody issues (so you are making some sort of difference, angry people, just get angrier, and keep being angry). . . but of course the most illustrative example was the Yes Men prank re Dow Chemical and Bhopal. The text in the link is interesting for the omissions Routledge lawyers demanded, but for me the whole key to the story, the whole interest is here:

"We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of $2 billion on the Frankfurt exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day. Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow make its share price rebound by mailing out a more formal retraction on its behalf . . ."

I love the Yes Men. They do brilliant things. Seriously, Morgan Fucking Spurlock, you may be more famous but eat your heart out in terms of quality. That is, if your kitchen slavey vegan girlfriend will bend her principles enough to cook it for you they way you reckon women should.

Anyways. I did a runner from the conference and fell in love with Marseille because the final speech on Friday started sounding like a Yes Man prank, but I knew it wasn't as I'd heard the guy before at conferences. The level of contempt for consumers, for the people these companies rely on to keep the profitable, is just staggering, just repellent - I don't know if that's because the link is indirect or not but I'll tell you it even makes me miss the moral bankruptcy of television - at least television execs care what you think over time, even if they are willing to exploit the very worst parts of you.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how lovely Marseille was, and how lovely the sea kayaking was, and about how I reckon I'll have to sea kayak even in Australia despite the sharks because it's just so fucking awesome. But now I have to go to the office and do a monumental amount of work. Let's just say that part of Marseille faces west over the sea and the sunsets are tear-jerkingly magnificent from the promenade; when I arrived back in Brussels, happy to be heading home to the F-word but inestimably sulky to be away from the raawk that is Marseille and saw the sun setting over the repellent Gare de Midi, it was like some sort of covenant between me and the world that I would keep being able to see beautiful things.