Driving last night was fun. All except the point where I was accidentally in fifth gear and the bastard nearly stalled. My exam is in less than three weeks, and last night was the first time I thought I might pass it. And strangely, or strangely to me, anyways, my incredibly bad mood made me a better driver, or at least made me feel like a better driver. Speedier after intersections. Less veery. Also there was a big electrical spring storm, lightening all over the place, rolling thunder - and somehow that helped too.
Quite a lovely spring here. Up until the big storm last night, very sunny and warm, everything getting green and flowery at once. The young men are all full of stares and lust and jissom. I wonder how it will feel in ten years or so when I'm invisible to that sort of thing. I swing between thinking it will be fucking awesome, and that it will bring on some sort of existential crisis. But you know what, there are worse things than existential crises.
Speaking of worse things, I'm being confrontational this afternoon, which I must go through before we go on vacation in Bordeaux. Maybe if I'm confrontational enough it will be an eight-month pogey vacation. Cross your fingers for me. The last week or so has demonstrated to me that I need to work on my confrontationality a little more. Fuck, you can pay through the nose for years of fucking analysis but it's just in one ear and out the other with me; we were talking about my confrontational inabilities four fucking years ago.
martedì, aprile 14, 2009
lunedì, aprile 13, 2009
No mind is more murderous than hers
We watched Pasolini's Medea last night. What a bummer. She didn't get away on a chariot drawn by a dragon in this version. He tried to make it all plausible and you know what? It isn't plausible. And in a very real way murdering your brother and then chopping him up into little pieces with an axe in a very small, confined chariot when you're a post-weight-loss Maria Callas is just as unrealistic as enchanting your bigamous husband's new wife's wedding present to set her and her father on fire. Fucking Italians, man. They have such psychologically interesting ideas about plausibility.
But it was interesting to see it, because Medea is interesting, and Maria Callas was so compelling playing her. So much Greek mythology seems to be about taming the cthonic, the Big Feminine, the woman religious figures that went about ritually sacrificing men before the macho Hellenes flattened everything. You read a spot of Robert Graves and it's all about the Eternal Feminine getting its comeuppance in verse . . . and then there's Medea, this murderous juggernaut who just keeps going and going, and benefits from a few dei ex machini in tight spots. Did she end up populating Iran with Medes? Did she just go home eventually? Too many stories in circulation. But there are no stories in circulation about her being held accountable by other people for her 'barbarism'.
And then there's Euripedes's play. I don't read it as feminist - it was classical Greece, for fuck's sake, you might as well have been a goatist - but it's very hard not to see it as some sort of emotional outlet for the monumentally oppressed women watching it - a reminder, 'if you chose to be absolutely ruthless, this is what you have the massive and frightening power to do, and the reason your life is as unfair as it is, is that you are not ruthless, you don't have to subject yourself to the horror of the loss of your family, so really, everything is okay . . .'
But it was interesting to see it, because Medea is interesting, and Maria Callas was so compelling playing her. So much Greek mythology seems to be about taming the cthonic, the Big Feminine, the woman religious figures that went about ritually sacrificing men before the macho Hellenes flattened everything. You read a spot of Robert Graves and it's all about the Eternal Feminine getting its comeuppance in verse . . . and then there's Medea, this murderous juggernaut who just keeps going and going, and benefits from a few dei ex machini in tight spots. Did she end up populating Iran with Medes? Did she just go home eventually? Too many stories in circulation. But there are no stories in circulation about her being held accountable by other people for her 'barbarism'.
And then there's Euripedes's play. I don't read it as feminist - it was classical Greece, for fuck's sake, you might as well have been a goatist - but it's very hard not to see it as some sort of emotional outlet for the monumentally oppressed women watching it - a reminder, 'if you chose to be absolutely ruthless, this is what you have the massive and frightening power to do, and the reason your life is as unfair as it is, is that you are not ruthless, you don't have to subject yourself to the horror of the loss of your family, so really, everything is okay . . .'
domenica, aprile 12, 2009
The Revolution will not be televised; it'll be on Youtube, demonstrating how to sew a flat felled seam
I'm still sick but have to go to work today to make deadline, find out what's up with my market reports, and prepare to be confrontational, because that's how awesome my life is. It's hard to resist the urge to whine. If there's one thing psychoanalysis taught me, it's that annoyance isn't relative. So while I can tell myself 'stop being fucking whiny, if you were still in Canada you'd only get 15 sick days a year, a fifth of which you would have used last week', I'm not surprised that it's completely ineffectual as a consolation. . . also in Canada, I never got this fucking sick all the time. Probably because this place is a filthy fucking hole.
There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.
God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.
I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.
There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.
God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.
I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.
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