Psychoresolution

I've decided 2010 is going to be insofar as possible a mental health spa of a year. Go to the weekly meetings, start analysis again, try to sleep more, save getting really high for occasions a bit more special than having had a hard day at work - they're all going to be hard days at work until work stops - basically try to get myself a little better-regulated. 2009 was a bit of a tough year in mental health terms with work diving into an even greater cross to bear than I had been expecting, and I'd been expecting things to get quite cross.

Of course it was my boss disappearing, making things about twice as difficult in practical terms, and horribly different in emotional terms - coming in every day and sitting in my desk next to his empty desk, his Chupa Chups and slippers and fucking Ribena waiting for him - just waiting. HR Goddess was going to clean it out until being told his mum is coming to the city soon to deal with his apartment; she thinks his mum may want to see it - even clean it out herself - none of us know how these things need to be dealt with emotionally. How could we? Luckily this is a horrid, freak occurrence that really doesn't happen often enough to make it into any manuals.

You know, I'm quite sure he's dead but once in a while that's still tempered by not believing that this is happening.

They're going to replace him soon and I suppose I'll believe it then - although soon, in these terms, is not likely to be soon, since they need someone with quite a lot and a specific sort of experience, and the woman who's doing the choosing was an extremely good friend of my boss who worked closely with him for years and years, and will need to work closely with this next one for years and years, so she won't be too easy to please. I just hope to god that they rearrange the office when it happens. My whole 'not believing this is happening' shtick is aggravated by occasionally having a question about what I'm doing and looking up to ask him and realizing no - he's still not there. I think I'm going to lose it a bit if I look up to ask him a question and there's someone else there instead.

Anyways, so things continue dreadful but the thing is, that's life - and a lot of horrible things will happen, and a lot of lovely things will happen, and I want my brain to be capable of dealing with both categories with more or less grace.

In which I discover the limit of my personal tolerance for post modern relativism and the narratives of the loser

I've been totally drawn into Far From the Madding Crowd, which is even beating out the AK 47 book. Mind you the AK 47 book is far too narrative-y for me. I just want dirt on how people get them, who sells them, and how and when knock-offs start getting produced, all that good, if dry stuff - and so far the book, which is decently well-written however much I complain, is just stories about people who had or loved or shot or invented AK 47s.

That having been said there was a good narrative about a north Vietnamese guy who was supposed to have shot down a B-52 with a Kalashnikov. That sort of thing in more depth would be nice to read about the Vietnam War - something from the perspective of the north Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, which whatever you think about the wherefores really did something amazing in historical terms; rather more amazing than what the US managed in the same conflict. Gender terms, too. All those women fighting. I'm not the only one that fascinated, of course. A while ago I saw this 1967 article from Time. "Sullen, sloe-eyed Victoria-Charlenes" - wow. The whole article reads like a justification for little old ladies or pretty young ones getting napalmed once in awhile. Fascinating.

But now I'm at the point of being sick of hearing about the conflict from an American perspective, be it yet another book or fucking pacificist-martial movie or hippie movie or Rambo movie or rant about the loss of America's innocence, like Cuba and the Philipines and all of that pre-World War II manifest destiny crap was just some sort of forgettable childish temper tantrum or whatever the fuck else. When I was a history student I was sometimes unhappy about how the perspective of the victor was so necessarily dominant in the records of past conflicts - I felt like I was missing big parts of the story - but in this case I'm starting to realize that the perspective of the loser really has its limits too, in terms of failing to be interesting rather than obsessively navel-gazing. On a human level, Americans were a tiny minority of the people who were fighting and getting horribly traumatized and slaughtered there, and on a political level the outcome turned out to not matter much for them - they lost and somehow their international empire kept ticking over. So really, how many Apocalypse Nows can I take seriously before getting to hear something from the perspective of the victor?

Well, I'll do some serious looking later - after the AK-47 book and after Far From the Madding Crowd, which is a monstrous big beast of a book, and will take a long time despite being compulsively readable and full of male passion. I think that's one of the things that makes me love Thomas Hardy - I think he had a remarkable talent for passionate male characters - George Eliot had a similar talent. I have the same sort of crush on Gabriel Oak that I've got on Adam Bede, and Farmer Boldwood is really unsettling as well.Both Hardy and Eliot also had a remarkable talent for imperfect women who manage to fuck everything up due to masculine traits in their personality, which hits home with me a bit. I haven't fucked everything up lately but I mustn't get too complacent.

Christmas books

¡Guerra! was good. Recommend it. Very well written and hardly twee at all. Ghosts of Spain was more a collection of anecdotes and self-conscious but inevitable condescension. Don't not reccommend it, but don't reccomend it either. Very Guardian. The author's phrasing suggested that what he didn't understand wasn't quite worth understanding, in opposition to ¡Guerra!.

Now reading Far From the Madding Crowd. I fucking love Thomas Hardy, I can't help it. There's something about those overworked, laborious sentences of his that is absolute butter on my toast. And his feeling for scenery, even if he does use sentences no self-respecting modern writer would ever allow to run on so, is flawless. Look at this paragraph he uses just before he describes a painful boy-girl meeting:

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

Now, I don't know if either the boy or the girl is going to chuck themselves in the river before the end of the story literally, but one or the other is sure to figuratively . . . maybe both, maybe one of each. I don't know, because Thomas Hardy is one author who I must insist lead me gently to the conclusion, so I don't know what's going to happen. I've decided that's why Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles just haven't worked out for me, since far too many film versions had let me know what would happen - it's not like they're fundamentally more depressing than some of the others I've loved.

However, the Hardy was interrupted by a late Christmas present from the F-word, Michael Hodges' AK-47: The History of a Gun. That man knows me fucking well. Only on page 20 so far so will hold off on judgement. So far a bit pop, but oh well. I'm back at the fucking office as of yesterday so my brain is toast enough to enjoy pop.

Spain, as far as I can tell, shits all over Italy. The past few years have represented embarassment after embarassment as I head to southern European countries that have had histories as full of oppression and invasion and regionalism andall the other stuff Italians blame for their country being such a fuckery, and see that those countries are less of a fuckery. Probably most dramatically Croatia. But Spain felt like a more apt comparison size-wise. And we were in Madrid, which felt quite equivalent to Milan, where I've also spent a good deal of time - too much. And I can tell you this with absolute certainty - Madrid shits all over Milan. It's more friendly, cleaner, better public transport, nicer restaurants, and there are things to do besides shop and be a big stupid wanker. I really don't know why Italy sucks so much. I don't. I have theories. But right now I'm writing about Spain.