Mmmmmmmm bacon redux

Oliver Twist is even better than television. I wonder, as I wondered with North and South, what it would have been like to read it as a serial. It really does move me to tears . . . Feeling rather melancholy at the moment generally and not sure why. All is fine, good even, and somehow seeing Rodelinda gave me some perspective on where my life is going - those sorts of long, catch-up afternoons can do naught else. And while I'm going through a frowny period at work, I'm expecting that frown to be turned upside down when the budget is worked out for next year - by hook, by crook, or by bluster. Any which way, that's fine. So I'm fine. Beyond the garden level dissatisfaction with my industry that should be there, driving me a bit.

Could be because I'm on the rag. Not on the Red Dragon, though. It's been a painless process this month too, which makes me think. We're not really vegetarians - we eat fish and cheese like nobody's business. Otherwise, however, we don't eat meat, for most of the normal reasons (concerned about resource overconsumption, we're too cheap, it makes us fat, watched too many David Attenborough documentaries resulting in a resolution to avoid eating anything who's mother loved it, etc.).

But ending up at a lousy conference in London where the only recognizable foodstuff on offer was chunks of cow marinated in something, and then ending up in a hotel in London, where they were serving a full breakfast buffet with wonderful, wonderful bacon, good lord, how I love bacon, that salty ambrosia, I ended up eating lots of meat two days in a row at an apparently critical juncture, and then not suffering the crippling pain that's become par for the course over the last couple of months. Maybe I'm just wildly casting around for an excuse to eat more bacon but I think I shall set aside a couple of days every 28 to get really bloodthirsty. Wasn't there a Danny Boyle movie about that?

Mmmmmmm Bacon

Super quick trip to London these past two days and it was just lovely. Well, the Tuesday conference, for which I went, wasn't. I won't go into it. You know the drill. Putatively about sustainability, really about how to present the appearance of sustainability, and deeply depressing. But yesterday at least was a wonderful day.

We started it with a trip to the Francis Bacon exhibition, as planned, and that was marvellous. They'd got nine rooms of his paintings from museums and collections all over the world and I found it revelatory to see them all, together and themselves close up; there were so many things I'd never noticed from reproductions and visits to individual works at different galleries. And the F-word was like a pig in shit, of course, loving Francis Bacon as he does in that special cannibalistic way artistic types love each other. And in just the sort of thing my archivist brain likes, a tenth room had pictures and notes and sketches from his studio, showing crumpled figures stuck and painted back together, prefiguring the ghastly shapes on the paintings in the other rooms. Photos of his circle there, and I was interested to see that George Dyer was a piece of ass. Exactly the sort of aubergine-nose thuggy looking type I go for and then feel guilty about, just like Francis Bacon. Ah, lapsed Catholics and our rough trade . . . thank God, in all seriousness, I've found an aubergine-nosed thuggy looking type who's also the kindest man in the world. Anyways, it was a really well put-together exhibition. Not to be missed, if missing it can be avoided.

And then, after the F-word departed, a lovely afternoon and evening with Rodelinda, who I hadn't seen for an embarassing number of months - 1.5 years, really. We went on a trip to a lovely big bookstore next to the university, and I bought three - a Stephen Jay Gould book about the millenium, Robinson Crusoe, and Oliver Twist. Now this post is long enough and I have to run to the office and deal with being a professional so I can get home in time to let the vet tend to my cat, so I won't go into books on trains, much. Just let me tell you this one absolute fucking horror story. On the way to London and during the non-pertinent bits of the conference I read Nathaniel's Nutmeg, which I'd picked up in the Oxfam shop here on a whim, since I didn't know much about how all that shit in Indonesia and how everything had worked out with the spices and the Dutch and the British. It wasn't the most academic book ever but it was an excellent and compelling read, and left me in a Boy's Own Adventure sort of mood.

So Rodelinda recommended Robinson Crusoe while we were book shopping, and after bidding goodbye to her and to her neuroscientist darling at the train station - more on him and his fascinating projects later - I dove into it. Rollicking good read, so eventful - so many things happen apart from getting stranded on a deserted island, at the beginning. And finally, just when I got to the moneyshot 40 pages in, when the brutal waves have pushed-pulled him to the shore of his island, the edition skipped to page 198, and was all fucky order-wise after that, and completely missing pages 41-89. I was so angry I could have shat myself. Instead I started reading Oliver Twist, which was compelling enough to distract me from my fury. But the sting in the tail is that Robinson Crusoe had been the only book I'd paid full price for at the shop, Oliver Twist and the Stephen Jay Gould book having been marked down to less than 50% of their normal price. Ugh. I'm still pissed off.

'Gomorra', fuck, it's even a great title

This week will be busier than I'd like, starting with today, but it's for a good cause because, as mentioned, we're running off to London tomorrow. Yaaaaaay! Nonetheless, today I have to tell you about not one but TWO new favourite things:

New Favourite Mobster Movie: Gomorra, by a fucking landslide. Shows those people as the lousy parasitic cunts who'd fuck their own mothers they are. I've been feeling quite strongly about this lately - probably started a couple of years back, post-season four, when I realized the Sopranos had turned into well-shot lifestyle commercials and didn't have anything to do anymore with the psychology of men who are worthless enough to decide that sort of life is for them. Or maybe it even started 12 years ago when I went to Calabria for the first time as an adult and realized what these sorts of organizations do to their own country. And it's been getting stronger with the last year because of some things with my family and some things with work, because those people are all wrapped up in the economic organization of Italy, which we cover for the magazine - without shame, with impunity.

Suffice to say the tidy, surgical precision of the way bad guys only killed bad guys except when there was some sort of dreadful mistake in The Godfather and similar such was starting to feel like the biggest whitewash since the medieval gentry managed to convince themselves they were chivalrous because they serenaded aristocratic women in between raping the peasants. Gomorra isn't like that. At all. It's excellent - textually, and also aesthetically - very good to look at in a gritty way and very nice music from Massive Attack.

New favourite Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Holy shit. It makes the Metamorphosis look like an ode to social cohesion. Wow. It was so good that I can't find ways to describe how good it was, but that's never stopped me from trying before, so, well, it was a ripping good read, and an utterly convincing literary universe despite being so short. And it should be mandatory reading in all civics classes.It had the unusual merit of being so convincing, as mentioned, but at the same time contriving to feel very much like an allegory of something - but of what? And the action of wondering, 'what is this an allegory of?', sort of forces you to realize it's an allegory of everything - of how we shy away from some of our more confusing duties. Ah, I really can't describe how good it was. Just fucking read it. 128 pages, you've got nothing to lose.