I love you baby, but face it, she's shit

Madonna is an atrocious beast. That's on my mind today because in Ghent on Sunday they were piping her 'music' into the abandoned pedestrian precinct/shopping area, I think in the same spirit as the British pipe classical music into yobbo-congregation points. You've heard about this? It's done in other countries too. The theory runs that classical music grates on the nerves of juvenile delinquents so it will drive them away from public places like train stations, parking lots, street corners, etc., where they might be 'anti-social' - which in England, at least, doesn't mean shy; it means being English and drunk.

Maybe now is the time to voice some of my disgust with the state of the England - haven't been to Scotland or Wales in ages so I'll restrict myself to shooting my mouth off about England. We had a really smashing vacation there with smashing people who I'm very fond of - English people are great, funny, hospitable, helpful, generous, all the rest of it. But I can't figure out how they can tolerate the shithole they live in and it makes me impatient. There is a really unhelpful paternalism, bordering on soft totalitarianism, in their government's relationship with them. The endless 1984-ish CCTV cameras are only one symptom of it, or we can say part of a broader and defining trend.

And that is that the government, whichever party is in, consistently relinquishes control of national assets that are obviously best run by a proper 'paternalistic' government, competition in those sectors being problematic or impossible (like the rail service, civic public transport, and its own fucking monetary policy), while struggling more and more to control the behaviour of private individuals through the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, Asbos, extended chargeless detentions. . . The Asbos are especially funny in a soft totalitarian sort of way. The most hilarious thing about them is that they were tightened up in 2005 - the same year the UK government allowed 24 hour drinking.

I can't see how that pattern - a consistent, cross party trend of letting go of the control of public concerns it should be controlling, struggling for control of things that private individuals should be controlling themselves - can come off as anything except a nasty and apparently corrupt soft totalitarianism. And I can't figure out why the British people have allowed this to roll out over the last 20 years. Belgians put up with remarkable amounts of undemocratic shit from their adminstrations but just try throwing that combination of lousy services and incarceration-happy government at them; they'd bring this place to a standstill in 15 minutes.

Anyways, Madonna. Though she's an atrocious beast and though her music being piped onto the deserted Ghent pedestrian precinct hurt my ears, I think it was a good choice. Because in every single one of her songs, from the slowest to the danciest, her singing always, ALWAYS sounds like she's scolding the shit out of you and that the best thing to do to get her to stop would be to get far away from her. Such an awful, scoldy voice. I just don't get it, you know. You'd have to be a raving, self-loathing masochist to like that crap. 'Justify my love - now - NOW, you fucking piece of shit! God that's good' And so on.

The Bedside Book of Bitching

Read a very pretty book for review this weekend - The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Full of lovely Audubon-y type pictures and texts from a great splayed range of sources, from Ovid to Bruce Goddamn Chatwin. Man, do I love Bruce Chatwin. Judging by the sheer quantity of his books filling up my shelves I suppose I must like Paul Theroux better, but Bruce Chatwin - anyways, that's a blogasm for another day.

It was put together by a Canadian author called Graeme Gibson, who I've never read. As a rule I liked CanLit but I stopped reading it when I left for Europe the first time, back in 2001. I'd got so sick of Douglas Copeland and everything Margaret Atwood wrote that wasn't short stories (her short stories are very good) that I wasn't willing to extend myself to find or order new Canadian books. Stupid of me. Like rejecting BritLit just because Martin Amis is a fucking ponce. I'll dip my toes back in soon but I don't think it will be with Graeme Gibson's books. Apparently in 1996 he decided he wouldn't be writing any more novels and that makes me suspect he wasn't getting much out of the form.

And I don't like his sentences in the introductions he wrote for each section of the birdie book. He has this one pair of sentences - the violent dislike I have for it is so far up my ass that obviously this won't be anywhere near the real review, but I dislike it violently nonetheless, especially as it concludes a section and is therefore unignorable:

"It's we who have made the cages. It's we who must open them."

First of all, I'm nearly certain you need the object pronoun there and the singular form of 'have' - that is, 'It is us who has made the cages' - because the plural 'we' isn't the subject of the second clause: the singular first clause, 'it is us', is the subject of the second clause. I think that's the underlying, emotional reason for my dislike. I taught English for three and a half years and when Anglophones use sloppy grammar to create a needlessly complex construction it gets my fucking goat. There are millions of people struggling to learn the ridiculous intricacies of our ridiculous language, often for pressing economic reasons. Why fuck it up further in confusing ways? Grammar is a series of signposts and landmarks to the people learning the language so I react a little bit violently when our intelligentsia doesn't play by its rules.

In any case, why not just write "We made the cages. We must open them."?

Anyways, none of this nonsense will be in the real review, which will be glowing. It's really a very good book. Good selections - you run across some old friends and meet a bunch of new ones that you decide you'll have to meet up with in the future. I haven't looked at Casanova before but I will now, after his funny story about the loose woman and the parrot. I recommend it.

Sexy sedition

So we did indeed go to the Marriage of Figaro yesterday and Paolo Szot, as predicted, was sex on legs to a degree that's not fit even for pseudonymous print. I enjoyed it very much, but the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines from the nosebleed section - really shitty compared to the Star Wars-y new Toronto opera house or the State Opera in Berlin, the last two places I sat in the nosebleed section. But different times, different priorities. The Ghent house seemed much older, and viciously, blowsily ornate in a way people in Toronto might recognize from the Winter Theatre, or the Elgin, or whatever the fuck corporate name they've slapped it with following its umpteenth buyout. I think it was the Kodak Theatre, or the Minolta, or some other C-grade photocopier company.

That was something that bothered me about Toronto - everything was getting slapped with a corporate name. The new opera house is the Four Seasons, I believe; the Skydome is now labelled the Rogers Centre after the evil incompetent media company that once pushed me into screaming at some poor fuck working for minimum wage at one of their call centres, and then all the big performance theatres are corporately renamed too. I know such institutions in Canada really need the money now that they can't take funding from cigarette companies anymore and our goddamn cheap government doesn't mind the idea of us satisfying our cultural needs by watching American network television. But that doesn't make me feel any fucking better. Canadians are struggling along with the same retardedly high tax burdens as most of Europe, and most of Europe doesn't have to fucking rename its cultural landmarks after the corporations that keep them afloat as an advertising tool. AND most of Europe has a public health service that functions a hell of a lot better. Anyhow. I live here now so I should get over it.

So, the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines. The F-word got frustrated and left for the second half, which is too bad because the second half is where it gets all horny and one thinks of what a naughty little perv Mozart must have been. Also too bad because, like always, the second half is much emptier, as people realize they've over-estimated how much they like opera and can't face the last 1.5 hours.

The Marriage of Figaro is a very sexy and naughty opera, and the naughtiness has a real political tone, of course; it famously raised some eyebrows by mocking an aristocrat by showing the comparative cleverness of his servants - there's something deliciously seditious about the whole thing still. But what I like the most about it is the distribution of lead voices - baritone (and it's Paolo Szot, a hot Brazilian baritone who can act at that), bass baritone, some sopranos - no fucking tenors, who usually don't do anything good for me. Even Cherubino, the young horndog, is a cross-dressing mezzo. She (in this case, Angelique Noldus) really stood out for me, as did the Countess, Maria Bengtsson - a lovely, rich, velvety voice. Ainhoa Garmendia as Susanna was vocally unobjectionable and a better actress than the other two, though I only got to appreciate that in the second half when part of the audience had fucked off. Figaro, Tuomas Pursio, was frigging awesome. I must add him to my stalk list as he's worth weekend tripping to another city for.

Prejudiced

Hilts is excited about Persuasion. I am too. I reckon it vies with Pride and Prejudice as my favourite Jane Austen novel, which is saying something, because I love Pride and Prejudice. I have a problem trusting people who dislike Jane Austen wholesale, to be honest - I just can't work out why and immediately suspect they haven't actually read Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen's writing much; I think her objection ran along the line of her characters being 'more real than true'. I love Jane Eyre more than almost any other pile of words, so it pains me to reconcile such a dinky comment with such a mammoth author. There was plenty of truth in Austen's characters, particularly in Persuasion - and not to be snarky about it, but Louisa Musgrove alone has more 'truth' in her than all of Charlotte Brontë's secondary characters put together.

The 1995 version of Persuasion is the only film version of a Jane Austen novel that I like, and it, along with the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Jennier Ehle, is the only film version of an Austen novel I've seen that hasn't made me want to spit nails. To be fair, I've stopped watching them. Two of them pissed me off irretrievably - the Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and the Pride and Prejudice with the skinny chick from the pirate movies. Those two punked out at the emotional climaxes so pukably. Eleanour is not the sort of woman who's going to burst out in tears in front of her lover. Making her do that to prove a point about sense and sensibility being best as a delicate balance is as fucking laboured as a Kevin Smith movie. And Darcy and Elizabeth traipsing around in the dewy fields in their pyjamas to wind up Pride and Prejudice! Holy fuck.

The worst thing about that Pride and Prejudice, though, is how it turned the spat after Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth into the equivalent of two teenagers whining at each other, for no reason that I can accept. Austen's dialogue for that spat is concise and some of her best, and the filmmakers wouldn't have wasted any time using it instead of using the made-up adolescent shit talk they replaced it with. What's more, it's what the rest of the novel hangs on; the idea that Elizabeth can point out to Darcy that his behaviour hasn't been gentlemanly in such a way that he's going to spend the rest of the book realizing she's right, feeling bad, and trying to be more gentlemanly. And so get her to fall in love with him; with the help of his gorgeous estate and fabulous wealth of course, ladies being only human. But take that away - as the film makers did - and all you've got left is an unexceptional shitty Hollywood romance that isn't worth suspending your disbelief for because there aren't any knobs in it.

Anyways. That wasn't what I meant to go on about. This is the problem with blogging before work - one goes off an a tangent and realizes one hasn't mentioned how great the documentaries of Adam Curtis are and how you can find some of them streamed online, and that there isn't time to go back and change anything - sigh. But I would like to mention that the F-word and I got back together when I was 27, and a spinster in that I had decided that extended romantic relationships were for the naïve, poor, or those without hobbies. It gives me a new feeling for Anne Elliott of Persuasion, which is cool, since previously the fictional chick I'd identified the most with was Rochester's crazy wife.

Model me this

When I use my words out loud, I sound like a bigger bitch than I feel myself to be in my head, because I'm not very good at using my words out loud. For example, yesterday I nearly started yelling at a co-worker because she couldn't understand why she, a bird in her 20's, was getting her television role models from aged types like the flakes on Sex and the City.

Fuck, I hate Sex and the City. The first season was funny and then it was all whine, whine, whine, tick, tock, tick goes the biological clock, oh, Mr. Big, blah blah blah. Imagine dubbing a man Mr. Big on a television show that ran for WAY too many years and never giving the audience a shot of his marriage tackle. I don't know how Chris Noth is set up but surely they could have hired a stunt cock if it was called for. Fucking fatuous. Call yourself groundbreaking, jeebus. I've seen more ground broken at ancient Indian burial grounds.

Anyhoo, I was polite enough to refrain from pointing out that having a role model your own age was more narcissism than modelling, or that it's just daftery to look at television for life guidance, and instead pointed out that people in their mid-twenties aren't attractive to advertisers. The perception is that they're struggling with some sort of debt, be it retard debt from not understanding credit cards or else student debt or both; they have less disposable income than teenagers, who don't have fixed expenditures AND who have parents buying for them; and they have less money overall than people in their thirties, who're generally not struggling by on entry-level wages anymore - and while they may have more fixed expenditures than twenty-somethings, those fixed expenditures are for things you can advertise at them - cars, baby stuff, furniture. Whatever.

So while you might have some crap ripoff where-cool-goes-to-die consultancy like my old bête noire Youthography promising to help advertisers tap into Generation X2, Generation Y, Generation Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-My-Face-I-Bought-What-You're-Selling-Already-Even-Though-I-Can't-Afford-It-Because-of-My-Student-Loan, or whatever the fuck they're calling us now, the odds of any production companies investing substantially in producing television programming aggressively geared towards people in their twenties is poor. Sensible advertisers will just not be into it.

Anyhoo, I pointed this out to my co-worker, whose response was that she felt she wasn't being served by television. Like she was the customer. After all that time working in television advertising I know that viewers are not the customer; that advertisers are the customers, viewers are commodities of varying value, and television programmes are merely ways to deliver the commodities to advertiers. Surely I should be capable of of expressing that in reasonable terms. All I felt like like expressing, however, was a bellowed 'you have a fucking Oxbridge degree! What the fuck do they teach you there?'

I didn't yell, though. Instead, I changed the subject to how shitty Sex and the City was.

Give me a simile about womanhood, with a shark

Today I would like to get excited in blog form about how awesome Steven Mithen is, about how he might not have the smoothest prose in the world, but how he can hack his way through a subject with his unwieldly sentences while somehow delicately gather a million far-fetched strands into one elegantly proved proposition, like how the essence of modern humanity is our ability to use metaphors in The Prehistory of the Mind. I have an obsession with metaphors and simile that the book really pandered to.

For example, last night I dreamt that the F-word was sick so I had to go teach his English class. It was awkward because I was stoned, in fact still sucking on the spliff when I walked through the door. But it was alright, because the subject that day was metaphor and simile. I briefly explained the concepts to the class and decided to start the practical work with similes.

'You,' I said, pointing at a boy who'd looked like he'd been ready to dive into the trashcan when I threw my roach in there. 'Give me a simile about sex, using dogs.' He blushed. Oh well, I thought, at least this is just a dream and I'm not really humiliating myself and teenagers every day in the course of my job. 'Thrashing around like dogs in a duckpond,' he said suddenly and hopefully, and the class went from tittering to oooing and ahhing. Then I woke up before I could congratulate him on the alliteration.

I've been having odd dreams lately, easy to remember and easy to interpret, which is good; now that I'm too cheap for analysis it's reassuring to know I can still keep in touch with my beastly but awesome shadow and keep up an integrated self, to a degree. The strangest simile that came to me in a dream was just before Christmas, about how womanhood is like a shark thrashing to death on the grounds of an amusement park. The best simile I heard over Christmas was how some people had faces like bulldogs licking piss of a thistle.

Rolling along

Went to the symphony last night for, I'm ashamed to say, the first time since we arrived in Brussels. Combine the F-word's thriftiness and my cranky exhaustion at the end of the working day . . . anyways, we'll be better in 2008. So we went last night, to see the Charlemagne Orchestra. Certainly the best looking orchestra I've ever seen. We were sitting right in front of the first violin section, which contained two specimens of breathtaking human beauty, and was quite fit in general.

But then the baritone, Stephen Salters, started singing and it was as though there was no one else in the concert hall. The Black Russian - hah. I liked the arrangements of Pushkin's poetry very much; it was as though it had been written for him. And perhaps it had, or at least arranged for him - I had the impression he worked very collaboratively with the arranger, Maria Alvarez. Liked the Mendelssohn 'Airs of Elijah' a lot less and felt it suited him rather less. But no probs. He got encored and sang a spiritual. Nice. Not as nice as this:



Anyhoo. The concert concluded with a Mendelssohn symphony that was fucking ace, certainly much fucking acer than the Airs. Violent and sexy. At that point the F-word and I were exhausted and jonesing for some ice cream but from the opening phrases we were suddenly wide awake and frisky again. Left the hall on a high, but the Häagen-Dazs shop was already closed, the staff gawping at us from where they were lounging behind the counters. Had a moment of hating Belgium again. What sort of fuckwit country closes its ice cream parlours just as the concert halls let out? This sort of fuckwit country. Oh well.

Cyclical cycles

Am I dumber now than I was ten years ago? At 29, I've reached the age when it becomes a serious question. The answer is still no, of course. When I was 19 I was practically vegetal, and the evidence suggests I must have been a late-bloomer, or possibly some sort of insect that went through a sticky smelly stupid stoned chrysalis period. But I suppose with each passing year, the question 'am I dumber now than I was ten years ago?' will get more and more thought-provoking.

When I was 19, one of the people who University foisted on me who I was not at all ready for was Mircea Eliade. In my defense the Romanian was hardly translated so his unwieldly sentences were a pain in my baked ass, and I still won't say Mircea Eliade was a good writer. But once I left humanities, started studying international relations and fully accepted how shittily 'academic' literature could be written, a whole new world of poorly expressed brilliancy opened up to me and suddenly Mircea Eliade was my new best friend. Besides the whole Fascist thing, but dollars to doughnuts says you would have been a Fascist too if you'd been a Romanian between the two world wars.

Anyhoo, one of Eliade's contributions to thinking about religion is the explanation of the eternal return; that by participating in religious rituals, a person participates in a sort of cyclical, mythic time, and removes themselves from the horror of historical time. I think part of the reason I didn't like Eliade when I was 19 was that the idea of historical time being horrible was baffling. Last night I understood it, though. I heard the expression 'noughties' to describe the decade through which we're living, and then started imagining what stupid names we'll give approaching decades, and was filled with an intense relief when I realized I'll almost certainly be dead before we deal with three syllables in the first part of the year-date, for example 'twen-ty-one-el-ev-en'.

Another thing that filled me with horror this weekend was realizing Alicia Keys, who apparently people take seriously, is the person who wails that whiny shit over a farty bastardization of Pachelbel's Canon. Good lord, we live in decadent times.

Anyways, there were several things this weekend that didn't fill me with horror. One of them was a Portugese band called The Gift - some friends of ours who'd just come back from there gave me a copy of Facil de entender, which is just as well as I don't suppose I would have stumbled across it on my own. The singer, Sonia Tavares, has exactly the sort of pop chick voice I like. Like if Marlene Dietrich actually had talent as a vocalist. And the instrumentation is suberb. Here's a video:

The Red Dragon is classy

Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear. Let me explain in an excerpt:

"Happy New Year to you too - hoping for more happiness for you in this one than last. Also hoping you can come visit us before long. Life in Brussels is good, though frustrating in its places; the drivers here are fucking horrible sociopaths- like Italy without the style or the Alfas. As a pedestrian I'm in daily fear for my life.

In fact, this morning while I was walking to work. I had three or four near misses - as usual. Then a car nearly hit me while it was pulling into a parking garage. The driver honked, so without even looking up I mouthed 'fuck off', flipped a bird, and kept walking. Again as usual. I thought I heard someone shouting after me but didn't want to stop in case the driver was an English expat who was pissed I'd used naughty language in front of his kids. Turned out the driver was a friend of ours who I'd been out for drinks with the night before, who'd pulled into the sidewalk to say hi! Luckily he had a sense of humour about it, but I made a New Year's resolution to always make eye contact before I drop the f-bomb from now on."

Those of you who know my parents know I'm not ill-bred, so I don't know who to blame here. Probably myself, but you know I have problems with that. In fact, last night I toppled the F-word's MacBook from the kitchen table. Potential catastrophe. Yet I actually managed to nearly lose my temper with him when he called me clumsy. Whereas if he'd dropped my laptop from the kitchen table, sweet Beulah rentboy knows what I would have called him.

Of course, an angry glare would probably suffice to make my laptop shiver apart at the seams, whereas the F-word's is a MacBook that seemingly nothing can harm besides a naughty world full of incompatible applications.

More books on trains

One of them was Dr. Slaughter, the first dip of my toes into the fiction of Paul Theroux. I was nervous. Could it compare with his travel writing, which brought my burning crush on? No. There's much more bum sex in Dr. Slaughter; it gets to feel like an excuse to examine the female, bummed perspective. As an exercise in that, it's pretty good, and he has a convincing narrative voice whilst adopting the perspective of an egomaniac bitch. And I have a weakness for international oligarchy conspiracy theories - they'd make the naughtiness of it all make so much more sense - so I had a soft spot for this book. But I'd take one of his travel books any day.

By the way, in terms of international oligarchicy conspiracy theory books, the best I've ever read was Rediscover Toast, by Alfred Wolfgang Truss. It's probably impossible to find, but it's just about the only comedic novel I still bother keeping on the shelves. Deeply creepy.

I think the only other book I read on trains, besides a collection of essays by Paul Theroux called Sunrise with Seamonsters that I'll go on about some other time that I decide to have a little blogasm over how great Paul Theroux is, was Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks. I think Oliver Sacks gets his own blogasm too, or at least Musicophilia does, some week I haven't blown my pop science credits on talking about how Richard Dawkins is a self-serving humanities illiterate. Anyways, Musicophilia was keen - I recommend it. But I think it would help to read a couple of his other books first because he mentions the case studies from those quite a lot here, with less details obviously.

It seems like a lot of books in retrospect, but it needs judging based on the amount of time we spent on trains this holiday. To put it in perspective, we're thinking of travelling to Italy by train this summer. Going from one side of Europe to the other like that will take almost as long as being endlessly fucking delayed by the fucking incompetence of the fucking UK rail 'system' whilst travelling from fucking London to fucking North Yorkshire to fucking Bath to fucking Birmingham and back to fucking London, so I should be able to get in a good big pile of reading then, too.

Dorothy and Joseph, sitting on the train

So besides The God Delusion I read some books on all the trains we took around England this holiday that weren't recommended by Ian McEwan (it should have warned me, that pompous little blurb on the cover - hardly a sentence and still a stilted narrative voice) and hence were much less annoying.

One of them was Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy Sayers, and I love the woman disproportionately, but meh. She needs a novel to get one of her stories across, she needs that much space; the Montague Egg stories were cool and then they were over, all of a sudden. Ugh. Frustrating. Skip it. Read Gaudy Night. And then read it again. Oh, Gaudy Night. One of those books that makes me want to beat myself on the head until I forget it so I can discover it all over again. Is it mystery? Is it romance? Is it an academic novel? A mysancedemic novel? Fucking rocks, whatever it is.

I read Lord Jim too. That was keen. The end wasn't satisfying in terms of the action of it and compared to Heart of Darkness Marlowe sounded like a bit too much of an old salt to me. But then I trust Joseph Conrad enough to accept that Marlowe was probably older and saltier than anyone I've ever known. Also Marlowe needed to be older and saltier here than in Heart of Darkness, because he was in the story; he drove the action to a higher degree, and we needed to understand why he would want to help Jim after Jim's episode of cowardice. Oh, the exposition of how Jim came apart to that act of cowardice - so extended, but so good, so understandable, and so confusing in how easy it is to understand! Fuck, I love Joseph Conrad. He seems to be taking his time but there's not a word on the page wasted.

There were a couple of others but it's work time now.

The Red Dragon continues to be disappointed

Further to yesterday's long, long, long post: ewwwwww! They're digging up Padre Pio! Can someone not fucking reign Ratzinger in? Was it not enough grossitude for him to spend two decades enforcing molestation cover-ups, now he's got to start up the corpse worship again? Fuck, man! But it's to be expected, isn't it? The Vatican assumed control of the shrine due to its 'over-commercialization' and now they're carrying out what could be the marketing coup of the decade in Italy - I can't really explain how big Padre Pio is there, his image is all over the place; he's bigger than a soccer player.

Will people flock to see his poor dead body? I'd like to think not, that if someone is going to believe in a saint they won't automatically believe the power of that saint will get a helping hand if the cadaver's out, traumatizing the family and frightening the children. But I don't know. Anyways, I'm getting the feeling Vatican II was just some sort of sneeze - a disappointment of Ratzinger's youth that he's fixing now. If I got to be pope someday I wonder what I'd fix. Fuckin' everything, maybe? That church has been a constant bubbling wellspring of disappointment to me for the last 16 years.

The thing is, I know so many great Catholics. And I know there are institutions in the church that are indispensable to some people, and ideas in the church that are beautiful, and it's like fuckin' Ratzinger is trying to wield all that indispensability and all that beauty like a club. He's been getting bad reviews from the Catholics of my acquaintance - could be doctrinal, could be because he's German and they're all Italian, I don't know - but the hierarchy still elected him, didn't it? Were they trying to compete with the evangelicals in developing countries by bringing back a little old-fashioned hocus pocus? Frankly this shit is making evangelicals look like the vanguard of progress. Offer free baby-sitting for the working poor, you fat fucks, that'll help you compete more than any exhumations. Oh, except no sensible people will trust you with their children anymore. There is that.

Anyways. That Britney Spears, eh? Did anyone else think those pictures of her grinning in the ambulance were the best she's been looking for years? Admit it.

The Red Dragon vs. Dawkins vs. God

So today I feel good enough to go back to work, which I guess means I feel good enough to write about The God Delusion. It's just that there's so much to write, and so much of it damning*, that one feels a little intimidated starting.

Luckily D. S. Wilson, an evolutionist who has a better eye than Dawkins for observation, wrote this lovely long article mapping out some of the fancier objections to the book. It hit home because I find the idea of memes fatuous - a transformation of a metaphor into a field of armchair-without-a-library-card study; exactly the sort of thing a biologist would come up with because he figured rightly it would give him the academic currency to let him comment on fields outside of his remit and make lots of money writing pop science books and filming series for Channel Fucking 4 that could air right before Celebrity Big Brother. And oh yes, the sort of idea that would let him ignore the possibility of group or multi-level selection, something not even his hero Darwin did.

So, you say, except you don't because one doesn't talk to a computer, and you are too classy for run-on questions, you don't like the book because he's ignoring well-argued dissenters in his field and promoting his own ideas about 'cultural trends as replicators' - to the degree of comparing religion to a useless parasite with a life of its own despite evidence to the contrary (as it's not hard to see any organized religion promotes the good/survival chances of at least one group in society - but then we're talking groups, which Dawkins just won't do) - in a pop book that's going to make thousands of unwitting readers think they've got the gospel* truth about evolution in their hands because he rightly if obviously points out what an asshole the God of the Old Testament is, writes about Bertrand Russell's teapot , and wisely if ethnocentrically restricts his criticism of religion almost completely to Judeo-Christianity and Islam?

Well, there are other reasons too.

First: his dismissal of non-oppositional magisteria is perfunctory. Totally unsatisfactory, for example, in terms of discussing the regulation of group morality, which obviously requires different mechanisms from personal morality. But then, Dawkins can't talk about groups, oh no. And he has the gall to say Gould was probably insincere about it, when Gould is now too dead to defend his sincerity. I have no idea what the men's relationship was, but that's a very small thing to write.

Maybe, in ignoring NOMA, Dawkins took the opportunity to ignore the humanities altogether in The God Delusion; not much of an excuse, but he's in need of one. His choice to overlook fundamental motivations for conflict in favour of presenting religion as an almost ubiquitous meme-y motor of human irrationality, chauvinism and greed is one that needs some defending that it doesn't get here - explaining that Hitler and some other assholes being atheists doesn't make all atheists assholes does not cut it.

I doubt Dawkins could name any significant historical conflict whose base causes were religious, or wherein religion played anything but a secondary role that provided direct material and reproductive benefit to at least one well-defined group of people. I doubt that both because he gives us reason to doubt his grasp of history in this book, and because I doubt such conflicts exist. I'm not just talking about wars; I'm also talking about the oppression of women and minority groups. But then, Dawkins doesn't talk about groups, oh no.

Now, I believe in cross-disciplinary work and I think a biologist should feel free to spout off in public about the humanities or about social issues, despite how badly that's gone in the past. Particularly a biologist like Dawkins, who also says he's a humanist. But what serious humanist could give such overwhelming importance to religion as a root of human misery when the great hecatombs of the last century - the world wars, the Chinese/Cambodian/Soviet economic plans, the murder of ancestral Jews, to name a few - weren't even putatively religious? What sort of competent observer could comment on the Middle East without at least mentioning the pattern of political religiosity rising only after it becomes apparent non-religious parties are corrupt or autocratic? And what sort of naive, historically dunderheaded denialist can confidently state, as Dawkins does, that without Catholicism and Protestantism, the British occupation of Ireland would have been settled and accepted after a few generations of intermarriage?

But moving on.

Dawkins makes some points about the gap between modern, humanistic, progressive norms of morality and Biblical and Koranic morality; I won't say good points in the context of this book, because they're less about problems with the idea of God and more about problems with the texts in question. Anyways, the idea of a 'moderate' Muslim, Christian, or Jew who doesn't treat these texts as literal truths is one he feels is hypocritical and dangerous. He calls such religious moderation the top end of a slippery slope leading to extremism, as it makes a virtue of faith or unreasoning belief.

I'm baffled as to what convinced the man 'faith' is an adequate scale along which to trace the convictions of madmen who blow up hundreds of office workers in the name of Islam and those of the millions of Muslims who, apparently, don't. I'm further baffled by how he can honestly promote this idea when he dismisses 'slippery-slope' arguments against abortion and euthanasia. People's lives and group morality are not slippery slopes. They're a series of decisions that are more or less influenced by insanity or ignorance. Neither marijuana nor God are gateway drugs.

Further, he cannot accept that changing, progressive social/moral norms give such moderates an honest, non-hypocritical basis for 'cherry-picking' from thier sacred texts. He neglects this possibility so completely that I suspect it's because the existence of such cherry-picking would mean moderate Christians, Jews and Muslims had some specific group norms that were adjusted to be beneficial in the society in which they live. And when we get talking about groups again we're dangerously close to talking about group selection, if there's even a chance of benefit to be had from it.

Anyways. Why cherry-pick, Dawkins argues; if parts of a sacred text are wrong or morally revolting, throw it out. Fair enough. For example, I'll never be a real Christian or fully trust Christian institutions because Jeebus talk has been used too often as an excuse for the oppression of women and minority groups. I can't think about how turning the other cheek is a beautiful moral idea without thinking about how priests have been telling their baby-machine female parishioners to do that to their abusive husbands for the last thousand years. Even the best of Christianity has been hopelessly morally abused by special interests trying to increase their own numbers at the expense of their rival groups - dear oh dear, there's the groups again.

However, as a creature who imagines the world outside of her understanding - like all of us have evolved to do - I will not be denied the joy of contemplating the Prime Mover, and if I throw out one way of doing so I will come up with another. I'll even give it the capitals Dawkins wouldn't, when he swiftly passed over the inescapable fact of there having been one; I'll call her the Unmoved Mover and risk waxing lyrical thinking about how a universe as staggeringly beautiful and complex as ours could be born from whatever neat-o thing she did to start it up, and I'll believe, 'if she did that, she fucking rocks'. And from the moment such a thought pops up, the human brain being what it is, she'll take on the attributes of someone who rocks: she already has a gender, and soon she'll look like my mum in the 60's, but with a rat-tail, and she'll be able to cure me when I have alcohol poisoning.

As a middle-class European I'm one of the richer and more leisured people on the planet, but even I don't have the time or the money to learn any more about science than what I get from paperbacks and Channel Fucking 4 series that air before Celebrity Big Brother. Most of us don't. We have technical or creative careers that we have to juggle with children, spouses and a web of other priceless, time-consuming social interactions. Even if science someday quantifies the Prime Mover, I doubt my ability to understand that quantification. However, it makes no sense that I should therefore ignore the Prime Mover, when my - our - brains have the capacity to get satisfaction and inspiration from pondering the beauty and sheer unlikelihood of existence, in love, gratitude, and 'what the fuck?'-itude. And it makes no sense to forbid ourselves from anthropomorphizing the Prime Mover, if that helps with the pondering.

And if far more people than one is comfortable with channel that awe for the beginning of existence itself through Christian/Jewish/Muslim/whatever institutions, and if far more people than seems right turn to religion in fear and anger instead of in wonder and love . . . Well, that's not really what Dawkins is writing about here.

If he'd restricted his book to arguing for the primacy of scientific education over religious education, I'd have agreed with it whole-heartedly. If he'd settled for arguing that atheism is the right life choice because it makes sense and because it's less liable to abuse by special interest groups, I'd have thought he made a damn good point. If he'd concentrated on the idea of the religious indoctrination of children amounting to a form of abuse, I'd have been fascinated. Maybe even convinced. Until being baffled by his hypocrisy, when he takes pains to point out elsewhere in the book that his own Anglican childhood (even an attendant 'embarassing' bout of inappropriate sexual interference from one if its clerics) did him no harm at all.

But he didn't. He argued for the primacy of his version of meme-y evolution over other people's serious views of evolution by comparing religion to a parasitic virus, and by appealing to his audience's anger with the recent violence of monotheistic societies, instead of, say, by using evidence or consistent argument. And that sucks. It's opportunistic, unprofessional, and rotten historiography. And therefore while I believe it pisses the Prime Mover off, I know it pisses me off.

Verdict: Fuck The God Delusion, it's for self-important humanities-illiterates. Try Darwin's Cathedral or Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. I love Steven Mithen. Now he's good at the cross-disciplinary shit - pity his editor doesn't understand commas. I reckon I'll write about him later. This is probably enough pop science for the week though - tomorrow I'll write about Joseph Conrad or Britney Spears or something.

* Hah hah hah!

The God Resolutions

Which is the short way of saying my brain hurts too much from being ill to write about the rights and whaaaaas? of 'The God Delusion' today, so instead I'm going to think about resolutions. Easier. This year I will:

1. Fuckin' get sick fuckin' less

2. Make more time for writing

3. Make more time for reading

4. Start music lessons again

5. Learn some graceful discipline, as I'm such a clumsy fuck

6. Be good at my job so that some day when I start making babies they let me work from home

7. Be nicer to my family and my loverman

8. Forebear from spending an entire day throwing up due to drink

9. Start eating marijuana instead of smoking it

10. Nip my nascent martyr complex in the bud

Call me crazy but I like my chances of pulling some or all of them off. We'll see.

The Feverish God Delusion

I'm back and quite comically ill. Home this aft accordingly and going to finish off 'The God Delusion'. Good reading for me currently, as illness and the end of holidays is making me cranky, and it's a cranky book. Not what I was expecting - frankly much less contentious - what a lot of fuss people make over nothing. But gripping enough to read through the grippe.

Of course, nothing can shake me of my personal belief in God, who explained the ontological argument for His existence to me about eight months ago during one of those feverish semi-hallucinatory states I'm so frequently in here, as Belgium makes me sick constantly. Fucking germ hole. At least it's not England, but more on that when I have enough energy to get my bitch on. Anyways, I'm not sure if it was His ontological argument that convinced me, or the sarcastic way He mock-sang 'duh-duh-DUUUUUUH!' when I told Him he was making a good case for His own existence.

Happy holidays etc

In England, and now in the south, where to be blunt and needlessly graphic everybody talks like they have a mouthful of plums washing out the taste of the Queen's special juices. Because of family we spent lots of summers up in Yorkshire - economically depressed, seedy, beautiful Scarborough, which I love and most of all I love the voices people speak with. Rich - the way they say 'fuck' with an 'o' - it's a lovely accent, especially if, like me, you were raised thinking all normal English people spoke like that and there wasn't some sort of stigma attached to not speaking like a twat with a mouthful of plums and royal cuntjuice. Raised thinking that the Bingo down on the south bay of Scarborough was the worst sign of social decline in the country.

I like England but there are so many ways it's a shithole. People put up with so much here that not even Belgians would dream of tolerating. The people are nice enough but I can't bear the way they TOLERATE. And lordy loo, it's expensive. Not Switzerland expensive. More like, way-more-expensive-than-it's-worth expensive. Anyways, there are many saving graces, of which one is the Indian food I am now going to go eat. Bless the Empire and the days when all the world was pink.

Like a bowl of soup

Aaaaaaaaaah. Vacation. And looking forward to the sitting-still time on the train so that I can finish reading Lord Jim, which rocks. Joseph Conrad is my hero and what's more, because he was a sailor I can believe his first person Marlow narratives are real - that you're sitting listening to this man talk for hours and hours and hours.

Isn't it odd to think of - during those long, long months all stuck in a boat together, before radios or TVs or video games, before universal literacy, before cheap paperbacks, newspapers - all those men would have to talk. Not just the sailors, though. Everybody would have had to talk. Talk and sing. We're probably incredibly shitty conversationalists and phenomanally shitty singers in comparison to people even 50 years ago. Well, it's evident. Most people seem incapable of talking about anything but themselves these days. Me included. My Chris Isaak vocal impression is really coming along though.

I do get frustrated sometimes - I'm not nostalgic for the past, I'd rather be alive now than at any other time in history I know of, but I feel like our great capacities as thinking and feeling beasts are being channeled down purposeless courses, courses encouraging buying lots of things, but not - well, not exploiting that side of humanity which is sublime; our power of empathy and our ability to look to a future that doesn't have us-as-individuals in it.

Mortality and the sublime may be on my mind more than usual because we've been listening to lots of Otis Redding. I've loved Otis Redding for ages and been sad that he died in a plane crash, and been touched that "The Dock of the Bay" was a big smash hit after he died despite that getting to be the Time of the Fucking Hippie Guitar Wankoff. But I'd never realized he was only 26 when he died. Can you believe it? With that voice! It's a strong old man's voice. Listen to him tell you to shake! Shake! SHAKE!!!!

Fuckin' Belgium

So. It's happened. And in fairness to Belgium, it's taken a long time for it to happen. When I moved to Florence I was a furious wreck within hours; Paris took a couple of months at most, and it's taken more than half a year here for the rage to set in, that is, for me to say to myself "fuckin' Belgium."

As always in these cases, it feels like there was a series of triggers setting off big annoyance shots at the same time, like going to Germany and realizing I liked the food and beer better there or realizing what a pain in the ass it's going to be for me to get a residency card despite my European citizenship or the successive ineptitude of TWO Belgian banks in terms of setting up a simple current account. But the one that got to me worst was being told about the Dutroux case, because its implications of deep and dangerous legal and political corruption made me feel like I was living in Calabria, but instead of having parasitic murdering thugs at the top of the socio-political pile there're parasitic murdering thugs who're also the sort of perverts you feel an instinct to kill for the protection of the human race. Also the weather here is exponentially shittier than in Calabria.

Then of course there's the issue that democracy has ceased to function here, following on issues of nationalism, unfair tax distribution, and deeply flawed bilingualism that makes the sometimes acrimonious relationship between Québec and the other Canadian provinces look like the relationship between God and Her nicer angels. Belgium is not bilingual in the sense that much of Canada is bilingual. The French don't learn Dutch, and vice versa though less so. You cross a regional border in a fuckin' train and suddenly the train announcements are only in Dutch or only in French. So they can be that culturally separate from each other on an official level, but when enough people vote for a party promoting greater regional autonomy on the political and fiscal level suddenly the government grinds to a fuckin' halt and the king has to step in. The fuckin' king and the old prime minister who nobody fuckin' voted for.

Oh, their political shit pisses me off. People are still dying in the Congo and Rwanda because of this fuckin' country and they can't even sort out how to institutionalize how little they want to be a country. Fuckin' Belgians.

I could go on about fiscal issues, particularly how it seems here as though the taxation system has been set up to keep poor people in their place or about how publicly funded civil projects can take years and years to complete whilst paralyzing the local economy because the contracts are all crooked or about how when you drive into the country from Luxembourg or the Netherlands you don't have to look at the signs to tell when you've crossed the border - suddenly your ass is being jounced off you by the potholes - but there's another thing that's pissing me off right now: these stupid fucks don't know how to drive. I can't count the times I've nearly been hit by some moron whilst walking across a zebra crossing or intersection where he or she is running a red light. It's just like Italy except, once more, the weather is a lot shittier. And they don't look as good while they do it.

Speaking of stupid fucks: for the last few days it's been below freezing here, which isn't so bad - I like it because it keeps the weather clear and the sun out; no precipitation, which is a fucking mercy in this goddamn puddle of a country. So you'd think, no precipitation, no icy pavements; right? Fuckin' wrong. Shopkeepers - not just a few, a lot - are in the habit of washing off the pavements in front of their shops because Belgians are incapable of cleaning up their dogs' shit. Okay, fine, I'm used to that; Europeans in general don't appreciate that it's fuckin' grosser to leave their dogs' shit all over the place than to bring some plastic bags when you take them for a walk, and pick it up. Whatever. I don't want to pick up shit in a bag either, which is why I don't have a fuckin' dog.

So anyways; shopkeepers are in the habit of washing off the pavement in front of their shops, and just because the temperature has dropped below zero doesn't mean they're going to stop, right? So despite not a drop a precipitation falling since the temperature fell, about a tenth of the pavements in the commercial districts are covered with a fine patina of slippery, unsalted ice during the mania of the Christmas shopping season. The fuckin' morons.

Everyday Pipol

A real problem with being functionally bilingual in a Francophone country is that you - that is, I - follow some of the pipol gossip religiously without understanding that I'm being suckered into distraction from issues that matter, as I can't participate policitally here (but who can at the moment? Fuckin' Belgium) and as it's all in a clever artsical fartsical language like French. Of course, Belgian gossip, outside of how everybody who's anybody is a dangerous and unprosecutable paedophile (unfortunately more than just gossip) basically amounts to French gossip, which these days amounts to the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy is being serviced by Carla Bruni.

I've gone on record, and I'll stay there, as saying that her album Quelqu'un m'a dit was not nearly as crappy as I'd been expecting, and that I like it. But there's very little doubt in my mind that the woman is Empress Bitch of the Drama Queens. Only part of that, I think, is having subjected myself to reading Justine Lévy's barely disguised autobiography Rien de grave, which didn't impress me. Maybe my French isn't strong enough to appreciate the force of her language but 200+ pages about getting fucked up, depressed and cranky with your new boyfriend after your husband leaves you for his father's supermodel girlfriend is just not my idea of a good read.*

And maybe another part of it is the way Bruni jumped from Eric Clapton to Mick Jagger. Maybe another is that I don't trust pale-eyed dark haired women.

It's a combination of seperate anecdotes, I guess. Because maybe in your life as a normal non-Queen-Bitch woman you have to choose between one rock star and another. Maybe you date an older man and fall in love with his married son, and then decide that the heart wants what it wants. But you don't do both those things and then, as Bruni did, brag about reading Dostoevosky hidden behind copies of Vogue whilst backstage at the shows during your modelling career. That is, she bragged about hiding her habit of reading bits of Russian literature which, great as they are, are pretty light. I mean, Dostoevsky is really readable, the sort of classic you read in highschool; it's not Proust. It just points to this conception of herself as some sort of beleaguered intellectual in a hostile beautiful woman's world, which is beyond pretentious - it's just insane.

Anyways, that's who the evil-trolly-but-strangely-compelling President of the French Republic is dating now instead of, oh, say, me, which is probably the only reason this is on my mind at all. It's causing a big flap in the Francophone media about the pipolisation of the presidency, about distraction from the issues that matter. Good - the French deserve it, like Paris deserves all those Starbucks, much as I hate Starbucks, due to a native inability to make real espresso. They had the chance to vote for real change in the last election and they fucked it up. Hah. Now their first lady will be a mad raving harpy who thinks she's clever and who'll distract them from how nothing is changing outside of slowly getting worse. Mwa hah ha haaaaah.

*Lord Jim, however, by Joseph Conrad, which I'm well stuck into at the moment, is. But details another time.

The house that swallowed a lemon seed

Feeling more or less healthy again after last week's disaster, outside of wanting to sleep all the time. A nasty frost has set in as well, which might have a lot to do with it; in an authentic and untouched Art Nouveau apartment unfortunately bed is the only place that's guaranteed to be warm. I hate being cold. We talk about southern France or Queensland a lot these days.

But who knows, who knows. It's daft to move where the weather is now. I just heard they'd had a snowstorm in Sicily and Calabria - these are provinces far more prone to dust storms than anything else - and I got a chilling sensation the world was going to end, or at last turn inhospitable for everything but dandelions and cockroaches, who'd probably make a better job of it than we have.

Anyways, because of my new found love of sleep I have to hurry off to work now but I thought I'd leave you with instructions to enchant your aesthetic nerves by staring at some Hundertwasser, and tickle your brain by reading about his barmy odd plainspoken - shall we say - wisdom? I think so. He kept coming up in conversation in Düsseldorf as the couple we were staying with actually knew who I was talking about when I went on about 'that Austrian guy - you know, with the colours and the trees growing out of things' and I was so happy to get a name for the images that have been lodged in my head ever since my first trip to Vienna.

Don't mention the war

Spent Friday being violently, violently ill. Missed the Christmas staff party no more than a week after reading an article somewhere about how it's career poison to miss the Christmas staff party, which didn't add to the experience. By seven in the evening I'd stopped the violence and decided I was okay enough for us to pursue our Düsseldorf plan this weekend. Glad we did despite typical shit from Eurolines that made me wish we'd had the foresight to book the Thalys, until we realized Belgian trains were on strike. Ho hum.

Anyhoo. The F-word's friends there are good people, warm, engaged, engaging. Düsseldorf itself, which I'd only ever visited once before in great trouble of mind, impressed me favourably as well. Flattened in the last war and rebuilt with some vision - and these days, with some flair, especially in the financial/admin district in the 'harbour' of the Rhine - and what a river that is. Big swollen thing. I miss having water in a city like that. They have a set of Frank Gehrys there - red, white, and shiny. They were really nice to look at.




Another thing that impressed me favourably about Düsseldorf, and which has impressed me favourably every time I've dipped my toe into German waters, is the food. Nobody eats like the Germans, and not just sausages and sauerkraut. Fresh, delicious, varied, and cheap cheap cheap. Döner to write poetry for, big decadent brunches, and oh yes, my new best friend riebekuchen . . .



And yet another thing that impressed me favourably was, when finally we had to go back to Belgium, we stopped in a train station bookstore and found loads and loads of quality English books - a classier selection than you'll find in most Anglo train stations. These are people who like reading, in different languages no less. It pissed me off disproportionately and I went through a good twenty minutes of wishing I was German. I'm going to watch the rest of that BBC series about the Great War and I want to see some damn good excuses for our side winning. Anyways, this sign on the bargain bin in the store considerably lightened my mood:

The Red Dragon believes in a Europe of regions

Ah, the joys of living with the awesome. Came home from a backbreaking deadline day to find the F-word's commentary on a photograph showing the Flemish Saint Nick hanging out the the French Pére Noël, because nothing is wrong, the country isn't breaking up, shut up shut up shut up . . .

must say I'm curious to see what would happen if the country did break up. I believe in small regional representative government co-operating within the framework of continental organizations like the European Union, so the idea doesn't pose huge difficulties for me. Except in that I live in Brussels and no one is quite sure what's going to happen to an 85% French city floating in a sea of Flem. There are lots of French towns around Brussels too, little islands of romance language.

I don't see how the Flemish can seperate peacefully without maintaining official bilinguality. Even with all the nonsense, impractical talk about Brussels becoming a city-state and Wallonia joining up with France - a bad, bad idea for all concerned, trying to incorporate a seriously economically depressed province that's been defining itself in opposition to France for more than a hundred years into one of the most ridiculously centralized national administrations in the 'free' world - though apparently the French French love the idea, despite making the Belgians the butt of their stupid jokes since the birth of Belgium - why don't they concentrate on fixing it so that the Corsicans, Bretagnes and Basques stop wanting to seperate before taking on more territory that will want to seperate - where was I?

Right: honestly, I'm concerned about violence if the Flemish don't maintain bilinguality for the sake of all the French living in Flemland, in Brussels and out of it. Do you know how many French people speak Flemish, even the ones marooned in their townships up in Flemland away from Wallonia? Almost none. Stupid, but true. And if you take away their linguistic status, basically force them to fuck off back to Wallonia, which could be France at that point and who wants to fuck off to the bits of France that aren't on the Mediterranean, I bet at least a few nut jobs would start blowing shit up. After all, this is Europe, and the tradition of making a bad situation worse by blowing shit up has an ancient pedigree here.

The Red Dragon lacks an infinite mental capacity

Rocky and the Melbine have both made their little Sagittarians now. And my grade partner at work is leaving the office to make hers this week. Don't know what a grade partner is? That's probably for the best. Unfortunately the capacity of the human mind is not infinite and knowing what a grade partner is would take up valuable mental space you could devote to remembering how to deal with a snakebite or bake clafouti, neither of which I know how to do anymore. Anyways, she's leaving to make her baby and while she's gone my new grade partner is the CEO of our corporation.

This makes me a little nervous. 'Powerful' men always make me nervous. I can't help but feel they wouldn't have bothered getting that powerful unless they liked screwing people over when the errant mood strikes them. But he seems nice and didn't once mention his car during our meeting, although he did mention his ranch. Or maybe he just told me he lives in a state with a lot of ranches in it. Unfortunately the capacity of the human mind is not infinite and remembering if my CEO lives on a ranch or just lives in a state with a lot of ranches in it would take up valuable mental space I'm devoting to calculating if we have enough reefer to last us until the beginning of our Christmas holiday (probably yes, if I hide it from the F-word during the day).

All of this is secondary to the fact that everybody is having babies and I - don't - do - maybe want to as well. Now would be the first period in my life that getting and keeping pregnant wouldn't be a massive personal disaster, particularly as I'm with the only man I've ever been with who I would consent to make babies with. Does that count as wanting to? Sometimes, maybe. Right now I'm fresh from reading Rocky's account of how his lady, who I only know as a lovely, composed figure singing Adalgisa in a production of Norma awhile back, went through a long long long delivery without drugs. Whereas I presently have mild cramps from clinging on to the back of the Red Dragon, and it's taking all of my forbearance to not get really high before I go to work to get some relief.

Am I tough enough? Not just to pop one out but to protect it once it's out, and then to raise it, and then to let it go? I don't know. Unfortunately the capacity of the human mind is not infinite . . .

How do the angels get to sleep, when the devil leaves the porchlight on

Sometimes - okay, all the fucking time, or at least when I'm not thinking about sex or food or all that other, funner shit in Maslow's hierarchy - I think about why people bother being pricks. Usually getting onto that stream of thought means remembering some episode of my own involving being a prick, and not being sure why I bothered as there's so much fun to be had that doesn't involve fucking over other people or having to invent a thousand beautifully plausible rationalizations for being a prick that might be fantastically useful if life or my conscience was a common-law criminal court, which they fucking aren't.

It all gets shady at a certain point in between trying to understand that we're social creatures who get a kick out of being more important than each other, and wondering if naughty people and nice people eventually just get into the habit of approaching life as two radically different games with radically different rewards. I don't think I'll ever understand. But it bugs the hell out of me. The rewards for being naughty seem sort of crappy.

Maybe if I had to worry about money now I wouldn't feel this way - but 'making it' in the worldly sense seems to involve so little pleasure and happiness, and so much demonstration of your power or wealth, so much display, like a peacock weighed down by a ridiculously ostentatious tail. Like the men one meets from time to time who are incapable of talking about anything except their Audis/Beamers/yachts/other possessions that depreciate by 70% as soon as they leave the dealership even when an infant could see their interlocutors eyes were glazing over, or women who are incapable of leaving their apartments without spending an hour or more of their valuable time decorating themselves when they could be occupying themselves by not being so fucking boring.

Gah. Here's some Tom Waits as all his fire and brimstone is probably what got me into the mood for all this judgementalism.

Under the mangrove tree

No office for the poor sick Mistress today, though a good deal of work. Right now, my 'work' involves finding the most comfy position for writing a market report in - a position that will incorporate semi-lying down, being close to the fireplace and being able to reach food and drinks. I think I've found the place - I had the bright if evil idea of pushing the cat off her favourite spot on the loveseat, half unfolding it, and sticking my feet up on the headrest. Poor cat. Now she's sitting next to me and purring like an outboard motor - I think she's pleased to have another source of heat in the apartment that's not usually there during the week, though she's pissed off when I sneeze.

You see the level I'm functioning at today - territorial disputes with a housecat. Sigh. This weekend had its positive and negative moments. The worst had me in the park close to our flat, staring at the colony of monk parakeets and thinking 'what are the stupid fucks doing in Brussels when they can fly south?' Suddenly the city seemed like a big mangrove island in the middle of the sea, where alien beasts like me and the monk parakeets can eke out a comfortable-enough living, but absolutely isolated, floating in the middle of an ocean of shitty northern European winter, subsidized employment, and fuckin' Belgians. Far away from the sun. Marooned, far away from the sun, because it's easier than getting ourselves to a sunny place.

Anyways, I watched a few episodes of a World War I documentary and got over it. And recalled what I do here will prepare me for doing other things elsewhere, verily in the sun. It's naughty because I haven't even been here a year yet but I still look at other jobs just to give me ideas. No intention of leaving anytime soon as the money is quite good relative to the cost of living, and I'm not bored at work. Also when I do leave I fondly imagine it'll be for a life of leisure or artistic fulfillment. But it's amazing what I'm qualified for after a youth spent getting high and doing whatever I fucking felt like.

By the way:



And:



A HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!

I only noticed this today. There's something about 'unintentional plagiarism' when someone invokes Krishna right before launching into it. I mean, what do you think if you're the Chiffons, and one day you turn on the radio and the ugly-but-talented Beatle is using your biggest hit to sing the sort of let's-go-to-India-to-find-ourselves-luckily-they-already-speak-English-because-we-colonized-them hippie shit that helped sink the commercial viability of your doo-wappy girl band stuff? You think 'lawsuit'. But I bet the girls themselves didn't see a red cent. Naughty world.

The view from Bluebeard's castle

Depression has taken a shit on our household. Since my birthday I've been okay - bursting into spontaneous song, looking forward to the future, hugging people and heckling television screens as usual. And even on the shittiest days I wasn't too badly off because, let's face it, I spent a year and a half parting with my spare cash to a Jungian for a practical reason as well as for educational and developmental reasons - I know I have some damagingly melancholic tendencies and I knew that I had to learn to live with them so they wouldn't be damaging no more.

The F-word, however, is still wandering around like a particularly pissed off lost soul. You'd think I understand, right? Sympathize? Oh, but I do. Then when he doesn't demonstrate appreciation of my understanding and my sympathy to my satisfaction, they flip into teeth-gritting annoyance so easily! And if I'm perfectly honest with myself, in the end it all boils down to the ignoble but persistent pissy little thought: 'how can you possibly be so depressed for so long when you have me?!'

And that pissy little thought can be deconstructed even further. Because I can recall the most depressive period of my life, the one where I was living in what felt like a glass box without airholes, and that was around the time that I was living with Bluebeard. Life with him was difficult - he was a difficult person. No doubt about that. But at no time then, and not now either, could I say he caused the depressive state I was in. What I can say is that our ongoing relationship was a symptom of that state. If I wasn't in that state, I would have left him immediately. There might have been some nasty chambers in that castle, but the front door wasn't locked.

Nonetheless, having had that experience makes me paranoid now that our relationship is a symptom of the F-word's depression. I can look at that paranoia and see it's a false comparison - for example, I'm not fucking insane and I have reserves of everyday patience that poor old Bluebeard was never educated to have. But I have the paranoia nonetheless. I have it and it drives me nuts with annoyance when I 'understand' and 'sympathize' with the F-word's depression and it doesn't go away. It takes every particle of my everyday patience to not scream at him to do something about his depression instead of subjecting me to it when I'm so great and understanding and sympathetic and not at all like Bluebeard (am I?), and sometimes the best I can manage is a withdrawal from the situation.

And when I step back from the situation and try to analyze it, like this morning, it drives me nuts with annoyance that we piddly little people have to look at the world and each other through the flawed prism of our narrow little selves. We can sympathize, we can relate, but finally that's the best we can do - relating - and understanding anything beyond our own experience is never a sure or even a good bet. How limited, how frustrating. No wonder people get such a kick out of believing in a God who knows all and sees all, which I would assume would include being able to see through all of our eyes. No wonder Christians dream of going to a heaven where they can share in that. No wonder Buddhists struggle to leave the self behind. Et cetera.

Anyways, I suppose I should go count my blessings as I'm not depressed, not at all, very happy in fact. Melbine, who has not been so very active blogwise, may be less so as her new baby just popped out two weeks ahead of schedule, picture perfect and without a hitch. Sweet - another little Sagittarian to get indignant about the rotten state of this naughty world, and to walk into perfectly visible coffee tables! My cup runneth over.

Whale me if you dare

For all my rampant opinionation, I'm a pacific person. My self-image, which owes a lot to the days when I was fatter, is of a clumsy humpback whale gliding through the ocean, dum dee dum dee dum, mmmmm krill krill krill, dum dee dum, oops, capsized a boat of tourists, dum dee dum, and I reckon I swallowed a dolphin with that last mouthful of krill, shit, dum dee dum. By which I mean to say I know I've hurt a lot of people by accident or due to personal insecurities that engendered some pretty damaging behaviour, but I've rarely attacked anyone in anger.

Before I continue and while I have whales on the brain, I really have to recommend Walking With Beasts (outside of Kenneth Branagh's narration - the world wouldn't have lost much if his vocal cords had been surgically removed after filming the St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V - ever since that admittedly goosepimply and inspirational bit of celluloid moment he's just sounded like a ponce to me), particularly the episode with the giant carnivorous whales. Get high and imagine if the Japanese would be so anxious to get back to whaling if those massive nasty motherfuckers were sharing the ocean with them. "I know, let's all get on a boat and go shoot at Godzilla." Yeah. It'd be great. Anyways.

My point was that when I get angry, which I do lots, I try to deal with being angry in a non-angry way, which usually works. So it pisses me off when friends make me angry because if we're close enough I can't deal with my anger in a non-angry way, as they tend to notice I'm angry. Thing is, my opinionation is getting more rampant as I age and now some friends are starting to blow my gaskets through - oh fuck, here it goes - the revelation of ongoing behaviour I think is immoral. But who am I to judge their morality, they may say, and then I'll say fuck you, I'm Mistress La Spliffe, and before you know it there's a blow up between me and very dear friends whose ferocity outstrips anything I've approached when dealing with all the cunts who I don't like that litter this naughty world.

I guess my point is that you shouldn't tell me about your naughty behaviour until you've decided to stop it. And that if you'd rather I participated in some sort of rationalization with you instead of bitching you out, well, no. There's a whole industry of mental health professionals you can hire for that. But I'll confess, sometimes I worry I'll run out of couches to crash on if this opinionation drive continues.

But the prettiest sight to see are the papers that will be served at your own front door

It's beginning to look a lot like divorce season. God, what a world. People getting so hard-bitten and cynically practical about their situations and carrying that over to the rest of the world. It makes me think, is that what we're supposed to look like when we grow up? Pursing our bitter lips and putting up with soul-destroying situations because we can count the days until we cut them off and perhaps 'benefit' from them?

Fuck, no. I refuse. I double-dutch refuse. Triple dutch. It feels like some behavioral manifesto has to come out of this year's divorce season for me - can't think exactly what though. Some sort of blend of 'to thine own self be true' and 'do onto others as you would have them do onto you' that I don't quite have the words for yet. 'Do onto others as you would do onto your own true self', I suppose.

There must be a catchier way to put it. Once I find it I plan on opening my own church, or founding my own branch of psychoanalysis.

Getting into the spirit cabinet

Really looking forward to the Christmas break. Was only sort of looking forward to it before as we're heading up to England and my dream was to head somewhere warm, sunny and non-Christian for Christmas. I believe that Jeebus was probably the Word Made Flesh, but come on, we all know he wasn't born in December, let's call a pagan New Years' ritual a pagan New Years' ritual. If the celebrations involved an elaborate ritual of the citizenry stripping naked and chasing a sacrificial greased pig across the snow, ripping it to pieces with their bare hands, roasting it on a fire, and then cunningly releasing a cute little greased piglet from below the ashes while everybody applauds and releases fireworks, then I could really get into it.

As it is - trudging along extremely crowded shopping thoroughfares in the biting Belgian rain, wracking your brain to try to remember if you've already bought your brother John Lennon's 'Rock'n'roll', and buying train or plane tickets during the peak price season, nominally to celebrate the birthday of a guy who was probably actually born in a less fucking shitty month, like August - I think Christmas would be a great season for touring the marijuana plantations of the Chefchaouen region in Morocco. Oh well. I'm just whining, really. I enjoy having family obligations very much - the alternative would be crap. So instead of going to the Rif mountains to get monumentally fucked up in the sun, we're going to fucking Scandinavia, which includes the British Isles whether they or Scandinavia like it or not. It's so fucking dark up there. Sooooo dark.

But I'm looking forward to seeing Mum, and the beauties of the Yorkshire Dales even though they'll only be illuminated by about two hours of daylight, and now also looking forward to a couple of days in London where the F-word, a fanboy, gets to see the terracotta army of the first Chinese emperor and I get to see one of my crazy old friends, and then New Year's, which we're spending with some of the F-word's crazy old friends (and I'm seeing our sweetheart in Oxford, Melbine). AND I won't be working. For nearly two weeks. This is a HUGE deal to me. The last time I didn't work for two weeks was my thesis defense trip, and I had to defend a thesis then, not to mention sleep off a breakdown, so it really didn't count. This is why I came to Europe. The periods of not working and still getting money. Oh, the joy.

That wasn't so bad now was it

Here are the views that convinced me, before I saw the F-word again, before I got a passing grade on my master's thesis, before I returned to Italy and had some ice cream, before I remembered they get five weeks of vacation here, that I would move back to Europe as soon as it was sensible:

It's from Carmen's loft, which she's opened to me when I needed it the most - the thesis, transit weekends away. It's a lovely apartment - an old industrial space that she renovated in such a way that seems to reflect her so much. But I reckon my favourite thing about it, besides her being in it, is the view:

She lives in the south of Paris, south of Montparnasse, in the neighborhood dubbed by some as the most boring in the city. But I love the way you can see from the view that people are stacked on top of each other without the cityscape losing its humanity. That's what made me want to move back so much, or one of the things: in Europe it's conceivable to live well in a city, to have a good life without thinking your carbon footprint is morbidly obese. Of course in Paris it helps to be rich. I couldn't have the life in Paris that I have here in Brussels. We'd have to live either out-of-town or in a tiny shithole.

Madame Pariyorker is soon to become Mlle Pariyorker. The marriage is spinning to a disastrous conclusion, which I spent most of Saturday hearing about. Gah. At least as I heard about it, it was a lovely day and we did some lovely things. Started it at Angelina's, a café on Rivoli that used to be classy and a lesbian hangout but is now an undiscriminating tourist trap, but a classy tourist trap with really great hot chocolate and pastries. We walked through the Tuileries after that, and then through Odéon et cetera and sat in the sun for awhile in the Luxembourg gardens. Luxembourg, I noticed during the chronicle of the Marriage That Won't, has many unattended attractive Gallic types in it that keep trying to catch your eye. Not the standard quality of Parisian drageur. These ones carry serious books, have nice shaggy hair, and don't look like they masturbate/sniff glue/piss behind trees.

Anyways. Feasted on oysters once the F-word made an appearance, and walked some more. Down to Notre Dame in the dark and enjoyed the views through the hours when you can't see the rats scuttling around. Fell asleep. We meant to go to the Musée de Luxembourg which has an Arcimboldo exhibition on, open late on Saturdays, but the reefer and chronic exhaustion had taken their toll.

Next day, Picasso museum for the benefit of the F-word, a fanboy. I got museum exhaustion the second we stepped in, as it was the first Sunday of the month and therefore free and therefore chokkers. Escaped to the Jewish neighborhood on Rue de Rosiers to get some cheesecake for the journey hope - best cheesecake ever, which is to the best as I don't really like cheesecake - and went back to collect the F-word so that we could return to Rosiers and go to L'As de Falafel, another tourist trap with awesome food. However, the falafel was slightly soggy in the middle and therefore no longer the best I'd ever had; it's been supplanted by some hippie-type restaurant in Brugges that uses more sesame seeds.

And that's all I have to say about that. Bluebeard didn't get me and I only imagined I saw him once or twice. I really have to grow the fuck up.

Bluebeard: His Part in My Vacation

Off to Paris tonight, I think - after the last abortive effort I'm not making any sweeping committal statements about my ability to get there anymore. I have some skeletons in my closet and the worst one isn't actually in my closet, it's in Paris. So sometimes I wonder if transport strikes and civil unrest aren't Carl Jung's way of saying 'don't go back'. Wondering if stepping on to the coach is like turning the key in the lock of Bluebeard's forbidden room. I don't think so, though, I think I just enjoy the drama of the simile and the aesthetic juxtaposition of a heavy, foreboding, cobwebby door at the end of a dank dark passageway in a eastern European tyrant's schloss and a fluorescently lit Eurolines coach that smells like piss and multi-ethnic impatience. I'm 90% sure that my trouble in Paris was resolved some time ago everywhere except in my own head, which is the only place I'm likely to find any Bluebeard's chambers, though if going to Paris helps me find them I suppose it's all to the best, then I can go on being rescued and moving on with my life.

On to happier subjects. Besides the sweet-ass Meindl boots that can climb a mountain but have so far only climbed to the office and back, the F-word also got me Spike Milligan's war memoirs and they're fucking fabulous. Mostly about his training and then time in Africa as a gunner. The world's funniest man writing about one of the world's most vicious conflicts? Can't lose. The titles of the three volumes tell you most of what you need to know: 'Hitler: My Part in His Downfall', '"Rommel?" "Gunner Who?"', and 'Monty: His Part in My Victory'. Last night I had a very shouty appointment at my bank - I think our relationship is coming to a close, I've been seeing ING behind its back and it's time to stop living a lie - which the cunts had the temerity to keep me waiting for after I'd gone to all the trouble of sneaking out of the office early. I was well primed for a fight and more and more pissed off as each moment passed, but kept breaking into laughter in the waiting area at some - just - fucking - brilliancy in "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?". A wonderful Christmas gift for any war-obsessed Irish Catholic Communists of your acquaintance, speaking of Hilts, which I wasn't but there you go, or for anybody really.

Save the trees

Yesterday was a conference. The conference part of it was actually interesting because it was about a sort of public certification system for environmental sustainability, so that consumers and converters can be made fully aware of how nice to the planet each producer is. My industry isn't really known for its environmental sustainability, so there was lots of moaning and groaning from the floor, lots of 'why us and not the people who make tin cans?'

And you know what else there was? Resignation. Business is figuring out that, if nothing else, being environmentally responsible and transparent is a way to make their products value-added, and it's also starting to realise there's simply no choice. Laws and consumers are intersecting, forcing things to be better. Keep fighting the dirty vicious fight, people, and remember: business is there to serve you; and not vice-versa. Make that bitch your slave.

This morning, at least, I'm very optimistic about the future of our race. Still a bit depressed in my own right, but dealing with it as best I can. Here's a picture so that I can avoid typing about it. I don't know where the F-word took it. Could be anywhere in Belgium as this country is absolutely full of trees on crutches. If I ever have a contract with a publishing house that demands I produce another book for them before I get released so that I can get a much, much better contract with another publishing house, I think I'll release a coffee table book of Belgian trees on crutches.

He seems to like me

Conference today. I'm not a proponent of getting high for work but I'd get shit-eyed for this one, except I have to go to the office in the afternoon to wrap up some deadline stuff. Mistress La Spliffe is feeling that she just can't win these days, I'm afraid. It's a little absurd - I have money, love, friendship, a great bike, best reefer of my life, a job I have to think about - everything but sunshine and free time, really. And while those are key, I get impatient with my funks when about 2 billion people would kill to trade places with me. Back when I was in analysis, my analyst used to tell me such thoughts were useless. But I'm not paying for that sort of reassurance anymore.

So how's about some Tom Waits? Googling the lyrics to 'Cold Water' is easier than finding my Yeats collection on those disastrous bookshelves and I desperately need a little lyricism today. Maybe something to remind me as well that my only relationship with freeways is being chauffeured down them.

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold

Police at the station
And they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Police at the station
And they don't look friendly
They don't look friendly well
They don't

Blind or crippled
Sharp or dull
I'm reading the Bible
By a 40 watt bulb
What price freedom
Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby
With the snakes and the bugs

Well the stores are open
But I ain't got no money
I ain't got no money
Stores are open but I
Ain't got no money
Ain't got no money
Well I ain't

Found an old dog
And he seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems to like me
Found an old dog and he
Seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems

Seen them fellows
with the card board signs
Scrapin up a little $
To buy a bottle of wine
Pregnant women and
The Vietnam vets I say
Beggin on the freeway
Bout as hard as it gets

Well I slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still
It was cool and still
Slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still and it
Was cool

Slept all night in the Cedar grove
I was born to ramble
Born to rove
Some men are searchin for the
Holy Grail
But there ain't nothin sweeter
Than ridin the rails

I look 47 but I'm 24
Well they shooed me away
From here the time before
Turned there their backs
And they locked their doors
I'm watching T.V. in
The window of a furniture store

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold

Now is the winter of their discontent, but I figure we can still go to the Gap on rue de Rivoli

I've got no shame, or fairly little, in admitting I'm homesick. Probably all the birthday messages at once is what brought it on. Maybe knowing they get that extra hour or two of sunlight back home because it's a bit further south - maybe knowing that now the snow has fallen, what light there is will be doubled by reflecting off it. It could be because I know that whether I'm there or not, Time is, and I may not be approving of what he's doing behind my back, and perhaps the people back home will be shocked to see what he's done here. My job has given me acne, for example. Not lots of it, but some. I'm 20 fucking 9 now and I have more acne on my face at the moment than I had in my whole marvellously clear-skinned adolescence put together.

Anyways, enough complaining. We're planning Paris Take Two this weekend so the F-word was a little disconcerted to hear that the riots have started again after the cops killed those teenagers on the moped. In terms of the shopping/visiting/maybe a spot of opera sort of visit the darling and I have in mind, I don't think it'll have much impact. Last time the rioters only popped into the 20th and 18th arrondisements for a little visit and the disenfranchised seemed to be happy to fuck up their own neighborhoods instead of those of the dominant. No surprise there really. I remember watching reportage about Rodney King riots - I was very young at the time, twelve I should think - and wondering why all the black people were getting upset in their own neighborhoods instead of all those famous places in L.A. where surely everybody would pay more attention. One of my brothers helpfully pointed out that if they did that, they'd get fucking killed.

I've never been to L.A. and my knowledge of their police force is based on the Rodney King trial when I was twelve and then the novels of James Ellroy, but I'd imagine the same applies except much more so in France. I don't know if people fully appreciate how not-isolated and how precedented French police killing brown teenagers and getting away with it without even having to pretend to be sorry is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 - yes, still haven't updated the browser, fuck off, you). Having spent far too much time for my tastes in Parisian suburbs I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty I'd riot too if I was a brown French teenager living in one of them and the police killed another couple brown teenagers in broad daylight, but I wouldn't dream of doing so downtown unless I had a deathwish.

Oh Tony, they're beautiful

Had a good birthday. F-word broke the bank on a pair of beeeeeyoutiful hiking/mountaineering type boots and I had a bit of a Carmella Soprano moment when we went into the outdoor equpiment store and told me to choose whatever my little heart desired. It turns out inappropriately inexpensive presents really do make me feel more affectionate. Then we went to Maastricht and smoked away the lousy weather while munching canoli and drinking champagne with a couple friends. Nice.

Paolo Szot is coming to Belgium. Long, long, long term readers of my blog, of which I think there's, oh, none left now that people keep moving to Web 2.0 (spelling mistakes in real time!) know what I think of Paolo Szot, whose schedule is linked on the sidebar so that if I ever get the time and inclination to be a groupie I can do so easily. He was Escamillo in, and the only good thing about, "Carmen" when it went down at the Hummingbird Centre a couple of years ago - besides the orchestra and the chubby blonde who sang the higher part in 'Melons, coupons'.

Anyways, he was sex on legs, or rather sex projected by a booming rich baritone, and my standard forever about what an Escamillo should be. Sexy. Now he's going to be Count Almaviva in "Le nozze di Figaro" in Ghent and my guess is he'll be sexy in that too. Stay tuned.