Jet lag. Home again after a year and a half and no one else is awake. It just struck me that the birthday party I fell asleep three hours before last night is probably still happening somewhere but I don't feel equipped to do anything about that.
Yesterday drove through my old neighborhood, the darling Cabbagetown, to take care of some business with Luke Duke. Past my old apartment. I love Cabbagetown. That was such a great place to live and I was very happy there. Yes, visible signs of drug abuse all over the place; yes, lots of people wandering around who should have been institutionalized one way or the other. But when you live in a market economy, the only cool-ish smack downtown neighborhood a kid like I was can afford a one-bedroom in will be one crack addicts, halfway housers, and the victims of Ontario's criminal budget cuts re. low security psychiatric hospitals can also afford. And when you're as cheap as I am, that's not likely to change with age. Why pay a premium to live in a boring, isolated neighborhood? But perhaps my tune will change when I have children.
Anyways, going back there reminded me how Cabbagetown was just so great. So many restaurants and shops that I loved in one tiny area, that great park, Jet Fuel, everybody who's head's together being pretty friendly, especially by Toronto standards, and a lot of the crackheads being quite decent too. Part of the reason I want to move back to an Anglo country is that I want to live in a neighborhood like Cabbagetown again, and I've never found one in a European city. Saint Gilles has a lot to recommend it - I love living there in a different way - but some Anglo neighborhoods like Cabbagetown still promise big things for people with a good idea, without needing to be historical or hipster-ish or exclusive or expensive or uncomfortable.
Ah, maybe I'm just happy to be at the place that's closer to being home than any other place, unless you can count my man as my place which you can't, because he's a person.
sabato, ottobre 11, 2008
martedì, ottobre 07, 2008
Are you sure that's what you meant to say?
So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
lunedì, ottobre 06, 2008
Lessons from the Drunken Master
So last night I had my second driving lesson, moving on from steering, stopping and going to the Gearbox and Clutch. Oh. My. God. First, I'm not saying my instructor was drunk, but he smelled like he was drunk. Seriously. Nice man though. And second, using a stickshift is not fucking easy. Re. the automatic, it was like the difference between a tricycle and a bicycle. By the end of the two hours I was sloooooowly figgerin'er out and I think I have the gist of how not to stall when you're trying to go, but I'd still be as helpless as a babe in the woods if I had to drive a woman in labour to the hospital in a standard, and now I fully understand why civilized countries insist on a better grade of license to be allowed out of an automatic. It's totally fucking different. It feels like I've been practicing in a go-cart and now they want me to fly a B-29 over North Vietnam.
Speaking of which, carrying on with Tell Me No Lies and read the 'Through The Looking Glass' excerpt from James Cameron, his account of North Vietnam during the American bombings, etc, and followed that up, just to keep things cheerful, with Wilson Burchett's 'Atomic Plague', an account of the devastating radiation poisoning subsequent to the nuking of Japan. Both men's loyalties were questionable, especially Burchett's apparent willingness to forgive anything that called itself Communist, but they did something in those two stories that Western journalists don't seem to do anymore by going places that their national governments didn't want them to go, and indeed where it was very, very dangerous indeed to go. What do we have now in that regard? Robert Fisk blogging out loud in the Independent from Lebanon? That's something. Al Jazeera English? That's something we sure didn't have when Cameron and Burchett were alive.
I shouldn't whine. Frankly it's probably a golden age of news in terms of being able to find things out. But it seems so strange with the war in Iraq that the journalists for the big American and British outlets are not particularly involved in Iraq, particularly when locally reported news is treated as a little bit suspect - local figures, local accounts always coming second to official military accounts - and when it's so very dangerous to be a local reporter. There's an interesting article from last year about that in the British Journalism Review.
But I do whine a little, because sometimes I wonder if you need to have Cameron-y, Burchett-y maniacs to bring certain realities home to people. Because the reality of Iraq seems very distant from the general Anglo consciousness, and I wonder if that's partly because we, as Anglos, have a sort of racist mental defence that lets us value official military accounts over local Arab sources. Especially as the big scandals out of Iraq, like the Abu Ghraib perversions, were largely whistle-blown by people in the military. So does an Anglo need another Anglo to write 'this is what I saw; appreciate the horror as it's divulged by my skinny fishbelly lips' to get a grip on it? I don't know. The thing is, if it hadn't been for Burchett, whose autobiography I don't otherwise wholly admire, maybe we wouldn't have known exactly how dreadful and how special nuclear bombs are. Maybe we'd just think of them as really, really big bombs. Maybe we'd be even more blasé than we have been for the past 20 years about the prospect of people having them around in sufficient quantities to destroy our race. I really don't know.
Speaking of which, carrying on with Tell Me No Lies and read the 'Through The Looking Glass' excerpt from James Cameron, his account of North Vietnam during the American bombings, etc, and followed that up, just to keep things cheerful, with Wilson Burchett's 'Atomic Plague', an account of the devastating radiation poisoning subsequent to the nuking of Japan. Both men's loyalties were questionable, especially Burchett's apparent willingness to forgive anything that called itself Communist, but they did something in those two stories that Western journalists don't seem to do anymore by going places that their national governments didn't want them to go, and indeed where it was very, very dangerous indeed to go. What do we have now in that regard? Robert Fisk blogging out loud in the Independent from Lebanon? That's something. Al Jazeera English? That's something we sure didn't have when Cameron and Burchett were alive.
I shouldn't whine. Frankly it's probably a golden age of news in terms of being able to find things out. But it seems so strange with the war in Iraq that the journalists for the big American and British outlets are not particularly involved in Iraq, particularly when locally reported news is treated as a little bit suspect - local figures, local accounts always coming second to official military accounts - and when it's so very dangerous to be a local reporter. There's an interesting article from last year about that in the British Journalism Review.
But I do whine a little, because sometimes I wonder if you need to have Cameron-y, Burchett-y maniacs to bring certain realities home to people. Because the reality of Iraq seems very distant from the general Anglo consciousness, and I wonder if that's partly because we, as Anglos, have a sort of racist mental defence that lets us value official military accounts over local Arab sources. Especially as the big scandals out of Iraq, like the Abu Ghraib perversions, were largely whistle-blown by people in the military. So does an Anglo need another Anglo to write 'this is what I saw; appreciate the horror as it's divulged by my skinny fishbelly lips' to get a grip on it? I don't know. The thing is, if it hadn't been for Burchett, whose autobiography I don't otherwise wholly admire, maybe we wouldn't have known exactly how dreadful and how special nuclear bombs are. Maybe we'd just think of them as really, really big bombs. Maybe we'd be even more blasé than we have been for the past 20 years about the prospect of people having them around in sufficient quantities to destroy our race. I really don't know.
domenica, ottobre 05, 2008
Monday morning slap-a-wake
Nice weekend, though rather lazy as I recovered (mostly there, certainly there enough to show up at work today, which I'm a touch sad about). My last with the F-word for a few weeks as he won't be joining me in Canada-land. Looking forward to Canada like crazy but really at the moment sad about how he won't be there. That's the thing about the F-word. I don't just miss him when he's not there, I get homesick for him. But still very much looking forward to Canada.
Watched There Will Be Blood. Pretty damn good. Very actor-y; I bet they all got a nice kick out of that, particularly the Day-Lewis. 'I drink your milkshake' indeed. And great soundtrack. Still, not much more to say about that, it was just fine but, well, it wasn't Best in Show, which by the way we also watched, during a couple of hours of amused abstraction. What else? An episode of The Life of Birds. The whole first season of Monkeydust. I love it, though it does sometimes make me want to vomit. There's something so merciless about it, but so funny. Usually very focused on the misery of the UK but a running feature focused on the idiocy of American big budget cinema, of which the following is an example:
What else? After finishing Chain of Command (very nice), read a couple of excerpts from the John Pilger edition Tell Me No Lies to carry on in the investigative journalism stream. One from the pinko Mitford sister, Jessica - 'The American Way of Death'. How absolutely revolting and not much changed, I don't think. When my Grandpa died in England, his going-away rites were the right sort of thing, I think - no fucking makeup; viewing just by the family, and a nice speech from a preacher he'd liked. But then that was C of E, which hardly counts as a religion in comparative terms - I think Catholicism has a lot to do with Egyptian-style funerary ridiculousness. Anyhoo. It was all very revealing and gross, but it provided an opportunity to discuss our preferred way to have our bodies disposed of, which is an important talk for couples to have.
Watched There Will Be Blood. Pretty damn good. Very actor-y; I bet they all got a nice kick out of that, particularly the Day-Lewis. 'I drink your milkshake' indeed. And great soundtrack. Still, not much more to say about that, it was just fine but, well, it wasn't Best in Show, which by the way we also watched, during a couple of hours of amused abstraction. What else? An episode of The Life of Birds. The whole first season of Monkeydust. I love it, though it does sometimes make me want to vomit. There's something so merciless about it, but so funny. Usually very focused on the misery of the UK but a running feature focused on the idiocy of American big budget cinema, of which the following is an example:
What else? After finishing Chain of Command (very nice), read a couple of excerpts from the John Pilger edition Tell Me No Lies to carry on in the investigative journalism stream. One from the pinko Mitford sister, Jessica - 'The American Way of Death'. How absolutely revolting and not much changed, I don't think. When my Grandpa died in England, his going-away rites were the right sort of thing, I think - no fucking makeup; viewing just by the family, and a nice speech from a preacher he'd liked. But then that was C of E, which hardly counts as a religion in comparative terms - I think Catholicism has a lot to do with Egyptian-style funerary ridiculousness. Anyhoo. It was all very revealing and gross, but it provided an opportunity to discuss our preferred way to have our bodies disposed of, which is an important talk for couples to have.
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)