My parents are here, oh them of the auspicous genes, having a nap at the mo while I don't, I repeat, don't go to the office, which is pretty great and makes up for any little niggling annoyance at being asked for the umpteenth time if I'm managing my food allergies properly or some such - God, no wonder I was such an asmathic little drip as a teenager. But in a larger sense I'm learning how to manage such little niggling annoyances - feel them and enjoy them. They're luxurious annoyances that not everybody benefits from and that I, assuming I manage a normal lifespan, will not always benefit from - not just because of mortality in his ugliest guise - but because of the aging process gradually reversing our dynamic of futile, unwelcome concern. So may as well benefit from the annoyances now. It all comes from love.
We've been having a nice time and eating superbly and now they understand why I hate my job, so will hopefully only worry the inevitable amount when I get fired/quit and hippy out. Drinking far more than I usually do; I think half the reason I became such a pothead is not liking drink as much as most of my family does. But it's fun. We went to my neighborhood's wine-tasting festival, which in a European context means something besides hipsters with nothing else to do that night sauntering around a congress centre being ignorant and putting on an act of slightly less ignorance. It means a big marquee full of overweight Belgians getting fucking sloshed on fine wine, peeing in the corners and then getting led out in handcuffs after paying a 10 euro cover. Frankly, it made me appreciate hipsters. I never thought I'd say that, but you try sampling wines in a tent full of moronic elephants sweating stale tobacco-scented grappa, and you'd appreciate hipsters too. It was fun, though, and then we went to my favourite tajine place. Generally we've been having a nice time. They're leaving in the morning. It seems dreadfully short, it's bizarre how these visits always seem so short when you're in the home stretch. Oh well.
lunedì, marzo 16, 2009
venerdì, marzo 13, 2009
I'm a Mac, and you can still use me even if you're a complete fucking idiot, and I'm an Esprit, and I won't give you crotchrot.
This computer I'm currently typing on, the MacBook 13.whatever inch aluminum thingummy, is fucking awesome. I just plugged it in and everything works. Holy shit. I would have bought one of these fuckers years ago if someone had told me how moron-friendly they are.
While I'm plugging brands, I'll also plug the clothing store Esprit. Not only have I recently noticed almost every new item of clothing I've acquired in the past two years is from there - and that counts used clothing I've picked up from consignment shops - it's also the only place on two continents I've been able to find flattering women's jeans that don't have spandex or other artificial fibres in them. What a revolting, physically disgusting fashion tsunami stretchy women's jeans is. It makes perfectly serviceable asses look like German sausages and it's unhygienic.
Finding proper, 100% cotton jeans was a priority for me because I have a horror of yeast infections. Mind you, I haven't had a yeast infection in a decade or more, but I'm sure that's to do with my no lack of trying to avoid one, to the point where I refuse, point-blank, to put any artificial fibers in the vicinity of my Holy Delta, Batman! So I was willing to pay almost any money for proper cotton jeans. I checked everywhere, I checked wildly overpriced designer brands I would never even consider, ordinarily. I was willing to go up to 2 C's in euros, I was fucking ready for some 100% cotton jeans. But no dice for two fucking years.
Finally all my old jeans fell apart and I was swanning around like Lawrence of Arabia in cotton billowy things for half a year before I went into an Esprit and found a pair of fucking gorgeous 100% cotton jeans for 25, count them, 25 eency-weency vaginitis-free euros. I love you, Esprit.
While I'm plugging brands, I'll also plug the clothing store Esprit. Not only have I recently noticed almost every new item of clothing I've acquired in the past two years is from there - and that counts used clothing I've picked up from consignment shops - it's also the only place on two continents I've been able to find flattering women's jeans that don't have spandex or other artificial fibres in them. What a revolting, physically disgusting fashion tsunami stretchy women's jeans is. It makes perfectly serviceable asses look like German sausages and it's unhygienic.
Finding proper, 100% cotton jeans was a priority for me because I have a horror of yeast infections. Mind you, I haven't had a yeast infection in a decade or more, but I'm sure that's to do with my no lack of trying to avoid one, to the point where I refuse, point-blank, to put any artificial fibers in the vicinity of my Holy Delta, Batman! So I was willing to pay almost any money for proper cotton jeans. I checked everywhere, I checked wildly overpriced designer brands I would never even consider, ordinarily. I was willing to go up to 2 C's in euros, I was fucking ready for some 100% cotton jeans. But no dice for two fucking years.
Finally all my old jeans fell apart and I was swanning around like Lawrence of Arabia in cotton billowy things for half a year before I went into an Esprit and found a pair of fucking gorgeous 100% cotton jeans for 25, count them, 25 eency-weency vaginitis-free euros. I love you, Esprit.
mercoledì, marzo 11, 2009
Gonzo professionalism
It's hard to express, even to myself, how little enthusiasm I have for my job this week. If it helps I have a recurrent image of Gonzo from the Muppets destroying a grand piano with a sledgehammer while I work. I'm hanging in there and going at it hard, up to and including eleven, count them, eleven hour days, but my motivation has dwindled to 'don't cost your managers their bonuses by punking out, they're nice guys.' I've had to start asking myself if I would have quit by now if the economy wasn't in such a state, and that's not a pleasant question to be asking. I'm pretty sure the answer is no, though. The plan has always been to hang in there and work hard for a good long time. I am in control of my life. Basically.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
Flushing a deep commie red
Yes, erm, marketing doesn’t work on me? I watch Benicio del Toro run around the jungle in Che for a few hours, and then suddenly read some of Guavera’s books within a fortnight, and now am stuck in to The Open Veins of Latin America.
I guess all this anti-imperialist literature is much more appealing to me when, instead of some whiny little Yankee Chomksyish 'Democracy Now!' east coast yaaaaaaaawn through the nose voice reading it in my head, there’s the sort of Spanish accent that doesn’t lisp (as they do tend to, here) and that does say things like ‘amorrrrrrrrr’ and 'it makes sex look like church.' I'm starting Spanish lessons after getting my driver's license and I cannot wait to talk like that. I will be so fucking sexy to myself.
The difficulty here, of course, is that I'll almost certainly have a Spanish Spanish teacher, and he or she may be a lispy fucker, and judgemental about my desire to speak like someone from the 'colonies,' as they do tend to think of the new world here, I'm told. No big deal that they think that way. The French and British haven't psychologically relinquished their past 'glories' either - can't expect too much of these European cultures that've peaked and crested - the only thing more shit-headedly ignorant than an invasive power past its prime is an invasive power in its prime. I'll just have to be true to my self and my sense of the sexiness of not lisping and trilling my 'r's, no matter what anachronistic colonialist claptrap is taught to me. 'Amorrrrrrr.' Hot.
martedì, marzo 10, 2009
Anything about anything
Remind me to not say anything about anything again, ever, when it comes to purchasing decisions. The F-word's illustrious Mac gave up the ghost this morning. It's as dead as my dead, dead Dell. Although my guess is that he'll be able to fix it again, or else the Mac people in Ghent will.* The Mac people in Brussels are morons, from all accounts. There are a lot of moronic things about this city. I'm fucking sick of it.
No, really. I'm sick of it. This weekend was a tipping point. Or rather tipping points, as springtime has came to the penises of the men again, so when I need to calm down and get some fresh air and solitude, which this poor little northern Ontario girl needs to do a couple of times a week, I can't go to the Dudenpark and have a nice sit on my favourite tree trunk and a nice think about things while the birds sing, or at least not without some poor horny bastards coming over and trying to fuck me. I get rather angry - I mean, I'm sitting in the middle of a forest by myself dressed like a lumberjack, obviously I want to be left alone, why can't you losers just fucking leave me alone - but at the same time, I don't blame them. Not because I'm aware of my remarkable irresistibility, of course, but because I understand that male sexuality is based on Eternal Hope, and they can't help it. It's a symptom of where we live - Brussels, Belgium, Europe in general. It's too crowded here. You can't be alone; there are always men when the weather isn't positively foul, and men will always try to fuck you, except, apparently, after you hit menopause when you become invisible, or at least that's what they tell me, and you know what, right at the moment being invisible to strangers doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I'll feel differently about it at the time.
In a general sense, the crowdedness of the continent is something we discuss when we have a think about where we'll settle down. We both come from empty countries with cultural atmospheres that are not, by most measures, as rich as those of Europe, or at least as full, or at least as old. (Argument contra: what I miss about Canada are the multicultures; even Brussels, one of the most cosmopolitan cities on mainland Europe, can't hold a candle to the multicultures of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.) Heard the one about the difference between yoghurt and Australia? Yogurt has its own culture! Hah . . . hah? So we live in a crowded continent, and the benefit of that is a rich cultural life; if there's nothing attractive in Brussels culturally one weekend, we can breeze off to Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bonn, or anywhere we like, really, which wouldn't be a possibility if we were based in an Australian or Canadian city. That's the good thing about living in a crowded continent. The bad thing is . . . everything else. I have to say I'm coming to the end of my patience with the crowding.
*He fixed it himself, of course, in about three minutes. Remind me to say anything about anything I want, forever.
No, really. I'm sick of it. This weekend was a tipping point. Or rather tipping points, as springtime has came to the penises of the men again, so when I need to calm down and get some fresh air and solitude, which this poor little northern Ontario girl needs to do a couple of times a week, I can't go to the Dudenpark and have a nice sit on my favourite tree trunk and a nice think about things while the birds sing, or at least not without some poor horny bastards coming over and trying to fuck me. I get rather angry - I mean, I'm sitting in the middle of a forest by myself dressed like a lumberjack, obviously I want to be left alone, why can't you losers just fucking leave me alone - but at the same time, I don't blame them. Not because I'm aware of my remarkable irresistibility, of course, but because I understand that male sexuality is based on Eternal Hope, and they can't help it. It's a symptom of where we live - Brussels, Belgium, Europe in general. It's too crowded here. You can't be alone; there are always men when the weather isn't positively foul, and men will always try to fuck you, except, apparently, after you hit menopause when you become invisible, or at least that's what they tell me, and you know what, right at the moment being invisible to strangers doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I'll feel differently about it at the time.
In a general sense, the crowdedness of the continent is something we discuss when we have a think about where we'll settle down. We both come from empty countries with cultural atmospheres that are not, by most measures, as rich as those of Europe, or at least as full, or at least as old. (Argument contra: what I miss about Canada are the multicultures; even Brussels, one of the most cosmopolitan cities on mainland Europe, can't hold a candle to the multicultures of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.) Heard the one about the difference between yoghurt and Australia? Yogurt has its own culture! Hah . . . hah? So we live in a crowded continent, and the benefit of that is a rich cultural life; if there's nothing attractive in Brussels culturally one weekend, we can breeze off to Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bonn, or anywhere we like, really, which wouldn't be a possibility if we were based in an Australian or Canadian city. That's the good thing about living in a crowded continent. The bad thing is . . . everything else. I have to say I'm coming to the end of my patience with the crowding.
*He fixed it himself, of course, in about three minutes. Remind me to say anything about anything I want, forever.
domenica, marzo 08, 2009
The Red Dragon is iNsecure about marketing
Having worked in television for a couple of years, and now working in a job which amounts to corporate communication (although generally of things the corporations don’t want communicated), I’ve half-convinced myself that I’m a woman upon whom marketing and advertising budgets are wasted; that I’m above the fray, that I know the score, that . . . you know, wanky wanky wank. But now I’ve bought my first Macintosh, and it’s not even here yet, and I’m already looking at websites about how great it is and how I can take care of it, like it’s a fucking puppy. So I’m not so sure. Rational(izing) Spliffe tells me I bought it because:
- The F-word and I both bought laptops in early 2003. His, a Macintosh, is still working perfectly, outside of a sticky disc drive. Mine, a Dell, is dead. DEAD. Really, really dead. His had the same problem that’s made mine dead, around the same time. And he fixed it himself. He’s an artist who can barely add. And professionals shrug their shoulders at my dead, dead Dell. Fine.
- I looked into a lot of other PC brands, and once I get the programmes I want with the features I want (even though I don’t think I want that much) it costs about the same as the MacBook I’ve bought, though that’s because I bought a refurbished one, and in Canadian dollars. My mum’s bringing it later this week.
Both good reasons, right? But Critical Spliffe says no, no, you bought it because it’s fucking pretty. With the aluminum and the glass and the brand notoriety and everything. You bought it because the aggressive, insipid, lifestyle/status marketing worked. You’re weak! Weak! You're like all those assholes who you deal with at work who talk about their boats and Audis! And maybe Critical Spliffe is right. I will try to use this experience as a lesson to be less judgemental about all the other stupid fucks who pay too much for lifestyle-branded goods. Or possibly to be more judgemental about myself. A bit of both, perhaps.
In any case, Critical Spliffe is excited about the new Mac too. It gets her goat that the F-word is still pottering along happily with his computer and ours is dead in the corner; she’d never give me any peace if I bought another PC and it crapped out prematurely too. And yes, 6 years is fucking premature. I paid something like Euro 1500 for that piece of shit in 2003 – I was stupid enough to buy it from the French retailer. That means it cost me, just for possession, 250 a year, which I could have spent on marijuana or trips to the west coast. Or, if I’m right about what my portfolio was making over those years, it would have got me about CAD800 in ill-gotten stock market returns. Not to mention how it did my fucking back in every time I budged the fat fucker off the desktop. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it, just that – okay – maybe it wasn’t worth it. We'll see if the new one is.
giovedì, marzo 05, 2009
A nice thing about work being so stupid crazy right now is that this week has just blown right by. Yesterday I did come quite close to losing my shit, though. It's never a quantity of work that gets to me - I'm already there, right? Much as I'd rather browse the Daily Mail and learn how to make my own vodka, I might as well work if I'm already there, and when Mistress La Spliffe gets working . . . well, I may flatter myself, but I work. Mighty projects fall like Goliath and inextricable tangles of bureaucratic razorwire are hacked through like the Gordian knot. There's a reason people keep paying me even though I can't complete a sentence without saying 'fuck' and can't sign off for a delivery without evaluating aloud exactly how much of a peice of ass the courier is. I'm quite good at doing things, and doing lots of things at that, well and fast. So the workload, though remarkably heavy this week, has been fine.
No. What nearly made me lose my shit is other people. To sketch things out, my company has a few media offerings. Some make their revenue from advertising, and some make their revenue from subscriptions. Our offering makes its revenue from subscriptions. Hypothetically, this is quite nice, because it means our main compositional goal is to truffle out the truth - to write the news, in short - to make our words and numbers mirror reality as closely as possible.
In reality, however, the economic crisis is quite understandably turning the people in sales into chickens with their heads cut off and we all have to deal with that. Yesterday one customer complaint got passed along as a Chinese whisper from one non-English speaker to another until it landed on our laps in an absolutely indicepherable form - wherein it was literally impossible to understand. The man who brought it to our attention had no more idea than we did what the fuck it was about (to the best of our knowledge, it looked like the complainers were mixing us up with one of our competitors, which shows you how fucking awesomely competent our marketing team is, but that's a whine for another day). And even in this form, it sparked off hours of soul-searching and a request that we, the editors, set up a meeting with the company with the complaint that we didn't understand at all but which seemed to be about one of our competitors because our marketing team fucking sucks cheese cock.
The request was kiboshed later, or at least put off, by our Yankee head of department, but when I first saw it - as I wrapped up one report, started another, worked out some numbers, checked some other numbers, did the other million little things I have to do every Thursday to make our formatting deadline, and had the pleasure of dealing with one opportunistic, useless French information provider - I seriously considered losing my shit. It seemed like a reasonable option, all of a sudden. First idea was to smash things, but then my salary could get docked, possibly . . . Screaming abuse? The last woman in my department who lost her shit via screaming abuse got a half-year payout to leave that day. Hmmm . . . screaming abuse. But then I realized if I was thinking about it so calmly, I couldn't, in good conscience, lose my shit. My shit was already under control. Losing my shit would be an insult to the thousands of people who really do lose their shit each day.
I have to stop looking on nervous breakdowns and getting fired as an escape from 'all this' . . . I have to take more responsibility for my situation. Nothing is going to rescue me, or if it is I mustn't wait for it. I have a plan and I'm following it, and right now that plan means working through an economic crisis that has people acting like headless chickens. And if that's hard and infuriating, well, at least it's Friday. And my parents are bringing me a new computer from Canada next week.
No. What nearly made me lose my shit is other people. To sketch things out, my company has a few media offerings. Some make their revenue from advertising, and some make their revenue from subscriptions. Our offering makes its revenue from subscriptions. Hypothetically, this is quite nice, because it means our main compositional goal is to truffle out the truth - to write the news, in short - to make our words and numbers mirror reality as closely as possible.
In reality, however, the economic crisis is quite understandably turning the people in sales into chickens with their heads cut off and we all have to deal with that. Yesterday one customer complaint got passed along as a Chinese whisper from one non-English speaker to another until it landed on our laps in an absolutely indicepherable form - wherein it was literally impossible to understand. The man who brought it to our attention had no more idea than we did what the fuck it was about (to the best of our knowledge, it looked like the complainers were mixing us up with one of our competitors, which shows you how fucking awesomely competent our marketing team is, but that's a whine for another day). And even in this form, it sparked off hours of soul-searching and a request that we, the editors, set up a meeting with the company with the complaint that we didn't understand at all but which seemed to be about one of our competitors because our marketing team fucking sucks cheese cock.
The request was kiboshed later, or at least put off, by our Yankee head of department, but when I first saw it - as I wrapped up one report, started another, worked out some numbers, checked some other numbers, did the other million little things I have to do every Thursday to make our formatting deadline, and had the pleasure of dealing with one opportunistic, useless French information provider - I seriously considered losing my shit. It seemed like a reasonable option, all of a sudden. First idea was to smash things, but then my salary could get docked, possibly . . . Screaming abuse? The last woman in my department who lost her shit via screaming abuse got a half-year payout to leave that day. Hmmm . . . screaming abuse. But then I realized if I was thinking about it so calmly, I couldn't, in good conscience, lose my shit. My shit was already under control. Losing my shit would be an insult to the thousands of people who really do lose their shit each day.
I have to stop looking on nervous breakdowns and getting fired as an escape from 'all this' . . . I have to take more responsibility for my situation. Nothing is going to rescue me, or if it is I mustn't wait for it. I have a plan and I'm following it, and right now that plan means working through an economic crisis that has people acting like headless chickens. And if that's hard and infuriating, well, at least it's Friday. And my parents are bringing me a new computer from Canada next week.
mercoledì, marzo 04, 2009
The Red Dragon is a learner driver
You fat Belgian cunts,
I'm driving around in a fucking car covered with fucking 'L's and other big signs about how I'm a fucking learner driver in a rental car. As a learner driver in a rental car, I'm not going to go fast. If you don't like that, you can
A) fuck off and die
B) pass me
But what you can not do - not, in any case, without revealing yourself as one of nature's own pukebags - is ride my back bumper with your highbeams on. You stupid fucking shitwipes.
It won't make me go any faster. It will just make me mad. I'm 30 years old now and I don't care what you think. But the fact that you're doing it to me means you're also doing it to dumbfuck little wired 16 year old learner drivers who have been drinking too many caffeinated sodas, who may eventually panic, speed up, lose control of the car, and flame out at great cost to human life and property. Is that what you want, you brainless clapped-out fucks?
Holy fuck, the idiocy of this made-up nationality really makes me want to vomit.
Yours, unfortunately, for another year or two,
Mistress La Spliffe
P.S. Holy shit.
I'm driving around in a fucking car covered with fucking 'L's and other big signs about how I'm a fucking learner driver in a rental car. As a learner driver in a rental car, I'm not going to go fast. If you don't like that, you can
A) fuck off and die
B) pass me
But what you can not do - not, in any case, without revealing yourself as one of nature's own pukebags - is ride my back bumper with your highbeams on. You stupid fucking shitwipes.
It won't make me go any faster. It will just make me mad. I'm 30 years old now and I don't care what you think. But the fact that you're doing it to me means you're also doing it to dumbfuck little wired 16 year old learner drivers who have been drinking too many caffeinated sodas, who may eventually panic, speed up, lose control of the car, and flame out at great cost to human life and property. Is that what you want, you brainless clapped-out fucks?
Holy fuck, the idiocy of this made-up nationality really makes me want to vomit.
Yours, unfortunately, for another year or two,
Mistress La Spliffe
P.S. Holy shit.
martedì, marzo 03, 2009
So how's your portfolio doing?
This is a rant that becomes a bigger rant that ends in a plea.
Yesterday Yankee management did something so inexplicable, so wrong-headed, so cost/revenue/HR unconscious to my department that I've ceased to understand them. Or at least I'm telling myself that I've ceased to understand them, because if I do understand them, they're either blithering idiots or bleeding idiots. And as such, they're perfectly capable of doing one thing or another that will ensure the next Christmas axe falls blessedly on my own welcoming cranium.
The first boneheaded thing I now believe they're capable of doing is going for sheer, number-driven employment practices, which would see me replaced with someone new and a few hundred euros cheaper. That person would take six months to be functional, and considering the history of our department, they'd be statistically likely to turn out either incompetent or emotionally fragile, and depart post-haste, beginning the whole process again. And this would be in a department where one of my three direct colleagues has just quit and is being similarly replaced, and another is on maternity leave, and the third is also a new hire. It would be really fucking stupid, in short, and yesterday I was in some despair because it seemed so stupid as to be absolutely fucking impossible. Now . . . hope springs anew.
The second thing I'm now sure they're willing to do is to replace the managers here, in our office, who I'm accountable to. And who, honestly, I'm crazy about. I've worked some ethically-challenging, infuriating jobs, and the present one is no exception. But here as well, I've been blessed in having some of nature's great managers, who understand how to engage with me, make me work my lazy little fingers to the bone, make me care about the product I'm working on, make me most earnestly desire to be a beautifully functioning cog in a rapidly spinning wheel even when I can hardly leave the house in the morning, and when I cry when I see trees get cut down, et cetera. In short, my managers here are the reason that I can spend a good 15 minutes a day dreaming about the Christmas axe and still not take the natural step of beginning to be really bad at my job. That would reflect poorly on them - it would impact their bonuses and their promotion possibilities - which is the last thing I want to do. If they're gone . . . draw your own conclusions.
I don't want to dip into sensitive information on this blog - sure, I dream about getting sacked, but not until December, and while I insist on the right as a free being to call upper management absolutely fucking moronic, I have a vague idea going into the details of our financials wouldn't be quite kosher. But I will say this: the local management structure here has worked wonderfully well in terms of revenue generation. For years. However, in the best case scenario in terms of what the fuck is going through Yankee management's grey matter, we've run into the reason publicly owned companies don't fucking work and a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system is presently necessary: our local product is 'mature'.
Now I'm switching into general terms - the bigger rant. A product being 'mature' means its growth prospects are limited. It's profitable, but the possibility of increasing its profitability is low because, in general terms, all the people who would be interested in buying it are already buying it. In a privately owned company that would be fucking great. But publicly floated companies have shareholders, and the shareholders want to see increases in profit levels so the price of their shares go up. That means that key resources get diverted from mature, profitable assets like ours to unprofitable assets that have a chance, if albeit in the present economic climate NO FUCKING CHANCE AT ALL, of becoming profitable.
This sort of dynamic is problematic at the best of times, because it means you compromise the quality of your mature product, and once that happens it becomes very hard to rebuild trust and an audience; even if the gamble works on the previously unprofitable product, you may have killed the golden goose in the process. Another problematic golden-goose killing dynamic just cutting assets from the mature, profitable activities, and hoping they just keep somehow being profitable, except extra profitable because you've just cut the costs, and knowing they won't; for a mature product, people are used to a certain quality level, and will cut it off if that quality level falls. Nothing's easier to lose than brand reputation.
So, in the present, quality-and-cost-conscious economic situation, these sorts of dynamics are incredibly fucking stupid, because the only place such gambles have a chance of working is on paper. Or - and this is key - in terms of the calculation of the CEO's pay and bonus. This is because CEOs must be seen to be doing something to increase profits, and generally their tenures are quite short, so this doing something just has to be doing something in terms of the pay calculations. . . it doesn't have to actually work - the CEO just moves on if it doesn't work for long enough.
Let's switch back to last week's rant about the uselessness of whining about the big fat bonuses CEOs of companies doing phenomenally badly get. I failed to point something out that day which people really need to know; I thought they did, but it's came up four times in my conversations since Thursday. There is a great deal of anger, when it comes to these bonuses, about how they're often awarded to CEOs or upper management at companies that are laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees or otherwise cutting costs. Where's the money for the bonus, one asks, or how can you excuse that bonus, when so many people are losing their jobs? It looks like thievery.
Look: it's not as simple as all that. CEO's aren't getting these huge bonuses despite cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs; they're getting those huge bonuses because of cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs. They're getting those huge bonuses because taking those sorts of measures means they're doing their jobs well. They're minimizing losses, maybe even nudging the company into the black, or into a position where it will re-enter the black within the next quarter or next year, or next couple of years these days, and that's what their employers - shareholders - you and me, the people who hold mutual funds and retirement investments whatnot - that's what we fucking want.
We usually don't know that's what we want - usually we just curse when our portfolio goes down and are happy when our portfolio goes up, as brainlessly as a dog who gets alternately kicked and brushed by its master. But if you want your portfolio to go up, that's what you want. Big CEO bonuses, mass lay-offs, factory closures, outsourcing to cheaper production zones with poor labour standards and poor environmental standards. That's what all us cunts want. And if you don't want that, I suggest you fucking do something about it besides whine about fat cats and unfairness.
Yesterday Yankee management did something so inexplicable, so wrong-headed, so cost/revenue/HR unconscious to my department that I've ceased to understand them. Or at least I'm telling myself that I've ceased to understand them, because if I do understand them, they're either blithering idiots or bleeding idiots. And as such, they're perfectly capable of doing one thing or another that will ensure the next Christmas axe falls blessedly on my own welcoming cranium.
The first boneheaded thing I now believe they're capable of doing is going for sheer, number-driven employment practices, which would see me replaced with someone new and a few hundred euros cheaper. That person would take six months to be functional, and considering the history of our department, they'd be statistically likely to turn out either incompetent or emotionally fragile, and depart post-haste, beginning the whole process again. And this would be in a department where one of my three direct colleagues has just quit and is being similarly replaced, and another is on maternity leave, and the third is also a new hire. It would be really fucking stupid, in short, and yesterday I was in some despair because it seemed so stupid as to be absolutely fucking impossible. Now . . . hope springs anew.
The second thing I'm now sure they're willing to do is to replace the managers here, in our office, who I'm accountable to. And who, honestly, I'm crazy about. I've worked some ethically-challenging, infuriating jobs, and the present one is no exception. But here as well, I've been blessed in having some of nature's great managers, who understand how to engage with me, make me work my lazy little fingers to the bone, make me care about the product I'm working on, make me most earnestly desire to be a beautifully functioning cog in a rapidly spinning wheel even when I can hardly leave the house in the morning, and when I cry when I see trees get cut down, et cetera. In short, my managers here are the reason that I can spend a good 15 minutes a day dreaming about the Christmas axe and still not take the natural step of beginning to be really bad at my job. That would reflect poorly on them - it would impact their bonuses and their promotion possibilities - which is the last thing I want to do. If they're gone . . . draw your own conclusions.
I don't want to dip into sensitive information on this blog - sure, I dream about getting sacked, but not until December, and while I insist on the right as a free being to call upper management absolutely fucking moronic, I have a vague idea going into the details of our financials wouldn't be quite kosher. But I will say this: the local management structure here has worked wonderfully well in terms of revenue generation. For years. However, in the best case scenario in terms of what the fuck is going through Yankee management's grey matter, we've run into the reason publicly owned companies don't fucking work and a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system is presently necessary: our local product is 'mature'.
Now I'm switching into general terms - the bigger rant. A product being 'mature' means its growth prospects are limited. It's profitable, but the possibility of increasing its profitability is low because, in general terms, all the people who would be interested in buying it are already buying it. In a privately owned company that would be fucking great. But publicly floated companies have shareholders, and the shareholders want to see increases in profit levels so the price of their shares go up. That means that key resources get diverted from mature, profitable assets like ours to unprofitable assets that have a chance, if albeit in the present economic climate NO FUCKING CHANCE AT ALL, of becoming profitable.
This sort of dynamic is problematic at the best of times, because it means you compromise the quality of your mature product, and once that happens it becomes very hard to rebuild trust and an audience; even if the gamble works on the previously unprofitable product, you may have killed the golden goose in the process. Another problematic golden-goose killing dynamic just cutting assets from the mature, profitable activities, and hoping they just keep somehow being profitable, except extra profitable because you've just cut the costs, and knowing they won't; for a mature product, people are used to a certain quality level, and will cut it off if that quality level falls. Nothing's easier to lose than brand reputation.
So, in the present, quality-and-cost-conscious economic situation, these sorts of dynamics are incredibly fucking stupid, because the only place such gambles have a chance of working is on paper. Or - and this is key - in terms of the calculation of the CEO's pay and bonus. This is because CEOs must be seen to be doing something to increase profits, and generally their tenures are quite short, so this doing something just has to be doing something in terms of the pay calculations. . . it doesn't have to actually work - the CEO just moves on if it doesn't work for long enough.
Let's switch back to last week's rant about the uselessness of whining about the big fat bonuses CEOs of companies doing phenomenally badly get. I failed to point something out that day which people really need to know; I thought they did, but it's came up four times in my conversations since Thursday. There is a great deal of anger, when it comes to these bonuses, about how they're often awarded to CEOs or upper management at companies that are laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees or otherwise cutting costs. Where's the money for the bonus, one asks, or how can you excuse that bonus, when so many people are losing their jobs? It looks like thievery.
Look: it's not as simple as all that. CEO's aren't getting these huge bonuses despite cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs; they're getting those huge bonuses because of cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs. They're getting those huge bonuses because taking those sorts of measures means they're doing their jobs well. They're minimizing losses, maybe even nudging the company into the black, or into a position where it will re-enter the black within the next quarter or next year, or next couple of years these days, and that's what their employers - shareholders - you and me, the people who hold mutual funds and retirement investments whatnot - that's what we fucking want.
We usually don't know that's what we want - usually we just curse when our portfolio goes down and are happy when our portfolio goes up, as brainlessly as a dog who gets alternately kicked and brushed by its master. But if you want your portfolio to go up, that's what you want. Big CEO bonuses, mass lay-offs, factory closures, outsourcing to cheaper production zones with poor labour standards and poor environmental standards. That's what all us cunts want. And if you don't want that, I suggest you fucking do something about it besides whine about fat cats and unfairness.
lunedì, marzo 02, 2009
I was the walrus, but now I'm John
I had a dream of being sacked in December, around the time they work out the 2009 books, sort of like how San Francisca got sacked a few months ago. That dream would have seen me get a four-month payout under Belgium's Claeys formula after I'd saved up enough for a down payment on a house, tuition and expenses for another university degree, and a little more besides. Which would mean, with the Claeys formula money, I could have bought us a ticket to Australia for a berth on a freighter, which would give us something like two months on a ship in luxury accommodation, with me reading books and writing books and banging my sweetie and playing in the pool and visiting bizarre ports of call and staring at the horizon and not fucking working, until my corporate brain was healed and I'd be ready to hippy the fuck out in the rain forest. The thinking goes that after two months at sea I'd be so bored that poisonous snakes, plague toads, larrikins ands saltwater crocodiles would be objects of interest rather than fear or disgust.
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
domenica, marzo 01, 2009
Pink Mitfords and white pyjamas
Two things I'd like to share from this lovely weekend, so soon over. Well, there's more, but there's no time for them. First, Nancy Mitford, the pink Mitford sister, is a fucking lovely author to read and I recommend her Louis XIV biography without hesitation. It's written with such an adorable style, in an extremely-clever-dilettante way rather than an academic way, with phrases like 'she would try and persuade the King' and 'Mme de Maintenon was loving the humiliation of Mme de Montespan'. Full of good stories and gory details. Top marks. Jessica, the red Mitford sister, wrote in a punchier (though still amusing) vein, and there's no doubt Jessica's my hero on many levels. But Nancy is nicer when your brain is close to breaking, as mine is at the mo.
Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.
For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.
As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.
Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.
For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.
As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.
venerdì, febbraio 27, 2009
Springtime creeps along
It’s spring. I’ve been saying that for the last month without believing it myself in a desperate attempt to drag my brain out of the doldrums of the black Scandinavian winter and into the gladsome brightness of the Scandinavian sunrise (maybe, maybe this will be the year that summer doesn’t absolutely suck in Belgium – third time lucky – oh fuck, have I really been here that long?).
But now it’s true, for the moment at least . . . there are some flowers in the parks besides snowdrops now, and the waxy pink buds are swelling on the shrubs, and tiny baby leaves are slowly unfurling . . . the sun, she is a’shining, the birds, they are a’singing/fucking/nesting . . . sorry if my language is twee but it’s just so fucking great. There were a lot of reasons I moved to Europe, but a very big one was that it hurt to wait until April for the springtime. And now that it is here – now that there’s a new mildness and dirt-smell to the air, even in the middle of this fucking smoghole of a city – it’s such a relief. Soon the days will be so long . . . soon it will still be daytime for hours and hours and hours after work. Oh fuck, what a relief.
And now we’ve arranged for our Easter holiday too, something more to look forward to, in that it will be an escape from the city – sort of. We were thinking of Aachen and of the German/Belge national park next to it, but some people who we want to do that with couldn’t make it, so instead we’re heading to Bordeaux. I’ve just finished putting together an exhaustive feature on the storm there so we’ll be seeing less trees than we otherwise would have, but we did find a company that runs sea-kayaking even in April. Fuckin’ A.
I guess I’m clutching at such small things and small escapes at the moment. A couple of nights ago I was telling the F-word about how people spend a lot of time yelling at me at work – not colleagues – contacts. It doesn’t get my goat in the normal sense but I do come home rather fagged, and a little cranky, and much more tense than is healthy for our relationship or for me. I’ve been dropping weight – okay, I could have stood to lose a few pounds, but frankly I don’t wholly like losing weight; it makes me feel small and less powerful – I’m the colour of a dirty sink, and I’ve started crying when I see trees get cut down.
Anyways, I told the F-word people yell at me a lot. And he told me he wanted me to quit as soon as possible, and hearing that from him was just so nice – such a relief in itself. I won’t, at least not for awhile – I’m hoping to goodness they sack me in December so I get a payout – but it was so good to hear him say that was what he wanted me to do. And yesterday he learnt how to make Lebanese bread at home. Fuck, he’s great.
But now it’s true, for the moment at least . . . there are some flowers in the parks besides snowdrops now, and the waxy pink buds are swelling on the shrubs, and tiny baby leaves are slowly unfurling . . . the sun, she is a’shining, the birds, they are a’singing/fucking/nesting . . . sorry if my language is twee but it’s just so fucking great. There were a lot of reasons I moved to Europe, but a very big one was that it hurt to wait until April for the springtime. And now that it is here – now that there’s a new mildness and dirt-smell to the air, even in the middle of this fucking smoghole of a city – it’s such a relief. Soon the days will be so long . . . soon it will still be daytime for hours and hours and hours after work. Oh fuck, what a relief.
And now we’ve arranged for our Easter holiday too, something more to look forward to, in that it will be an escape from the city – sort of. We were thinking of Aachen and of the German/Belge national park next to it, but some people who we want to do that with couldn’t make it, so instead we’re heading to Bordeaux. I’ve just finished putting together an exhaustive feature on the storm there so we’ll be seeing less trees than we otherwise would have, but we did find a company that runs sea-kayaking even in April. Fuckin’ A.
I guess I’m clutching at such small things and small escapes at the moment. A couple of nights ago I was telling the F-word about how people spend a lot of time yelling at me at work – not colleagues – contacts. It doesn’t get my goat in the normal sense but I do come home rather fagged, and a little cranky, and much more tense than is healthy for our relationship or for me. I’ve been dropping weight – okay, I could have stood to lose a few pounds, but frankly I don’t wholly like losing weight; it makes me feel small and less powerful – I’m the colour of a dirty sink, and I’ve started crying when I see trees get cut down.
Anyways, I told the F-word people yell at me a lot. And he told me he wanted me to quit as soon as possible, and hearing that from him was just so nice – such a relief in itself. I won’t, at least not for awhile – I’m hoping to goodness they sack me in December so I get a payout – but it was so good to hear him say that was what he wanted me to do. And yesterday he learnt how to make Lebanese bread at home. Fuck, he’s great.
mercoledì, febbraio 25, 2009
Amorrrrrrrrrrr
Watched Che: Part One last night. I had heard bad things but the F-word has some Communist sympathies and I have some sympathies with wanting to fuck Benecio Del Toro. Fuck, that man is hot. So I figured in the worst-case scenario I could just sit there for two hours staring at the manhood. It turns out it was good - solid structure, and believable characters, which was quite a feat as it was based on the memoirs of the lead. Gave itself some credibility, at least as a story, by making him look like a bit of a prig.
Anyways, it was perfectly fine, and Benecio del Toro disappeared into the character, as he has such an unsettling way of doing. I always have to reconvince myself that that really was him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, being that bloated beached whale on angry drugs, and that he's also Ernesto Guavera and that Mexican cop in Traffic and whatever else he's been in, even the dogs like Sin City. It was a really fantastic performance, actually, and while I don't pay the Oscars any attention at all as a rule I'm quite surprised now there was no mention of what he'd managed to do in the Best Actor category. Or looking over the nominee list, there was no mention of Che at all. I mean, it was quite good, at least relative to what was nominated . . . I think . . . I haven't seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but I'm willing to hazard a guess it was way shittier than Che.
It does make me wonder, I'll confess . . . did a stucturally sound movie with such good performances get such shitty reviews because People Don't Like Communists? Or rather, because People Don't Like Violent Revolution? Is the closest we can get about a pop movie about violent revolution that peice of ridiculous, over-marketed shit with bald Natalie Portman that came out a few years ago? Or it just that these days I only read financial newspapers for work and the last thing somebody working for such papers would do is praise a movie about Communists that doesn't villify them, or else the Independent, as it's the least worst of the British papers, but it's still a fucking snotrag? (The love affair is ending, by the way. I keep catching them copying or re-writing Wikipedia entries, and more disturbingly the press releases that I get as well). I don't know. I'm just not sure why this movie inspired so much bile from the critics and got so completely overlooked by a Hollywood awards show that everybody's accusing of getting all pink these days.
Mind you, I don't know how it was released in the US - here it's being released part by part. Possibly if I'd had to sit through four hours instead of two I'd have thought it was a steaming pile of crap as well.
Anyways, it was perfectly fine, and Benecio del Toro disappeared into the character, as he has such an unsettling way of doing. I always have to reconvince myself that that really was him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, being that bloated beached whale on angry drugs, and that he's also Ernesto Guavera and that Mexican cop in Traffic and whatever else he's been in, even the dogs like Sin City. It was a really fantastic performance, actually, and while I don't pay the Oscars any attention at all as a rule I'm quite surprised now there was no mention of what he'd managed to do in the Best Actor category. Or looking over the nominee list, there was no mention of Che at all. I mean, it was quite good, at least relative to what was nominated . . . I think . . . I haven't seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but I'm willing to hazard a guess it was way shittier than Che.
It does make me wonder, I'll confess . . . did a stucturally sound movie with such good performances get such shitty reviews because People Don't Like Communists? Or rather, because People Don't Like Violent Revolution? Is the closest we can get about a pop movie about violent revolution that peice of ridiculous, over-marketed shit with bald Natalie Portman that came out a few years ago? Or it just that these days I only read financial newspapers for work and the last thing somebody working for such papers would do is praise a movie about Communists that doesn't villify them, or else the Independent, as it's the least worst of the British papers, but it's still a fucking snotrag? (The love affair is ending, by the way. I keep catching them copying or re-writing Wikipedia entries, and more disturbingly the press releases that I get as well). I don't know. I'm just not sure why this movie inspired so much bile from the critics and got so completely overlooked by a Hollywood awards show that everybody's accusing of getting all pink these days.
Mind you, I don't know how it was released in the US - here it's being released part by part. Possibly if I'd had to sit through four hours instead of two I'd have thought it was a steaming pile of crap as well.
martedì, febbraio 24, 2009
There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon
Alright, fucking seriously: all this crap about companies getting government aid and then, gasp choke, funding parties or bonuses is getting fucking ridiculous. Let me make something clear that I've learnt through painful and tedious experience over the last three years: a lot of the people involved in a certain level of corporatism have social lives almost completely wrapped up in business events. Unless you count interactions with prostitutes and strippers, which is by no means a completely separate issue. Don't like it? Me neither! But you know what, a single little complete economic meltdown is not going to change that, no matter how angry it makes normal everyday assholes with functioning emotional lives feel. Do you think those fuckin' events are fun? Do you think it's emotionally satisfying for those fat fucks to drink inappropriately and then try to grope the nearest member of the under-represented female sex? But it's the best they've got. Don't take it away from them.
As for the bonuses . . . look, the numbers are opaque, but I have a feeling my company lost money in 2008. Nonetheless if I hadn't got my bonus after working me fingers to the bone all year, I would have screamed to high heaven. Okay, we're not talking seven digits after I oversee the greatest losses in my company's history. But bonuses are part of why people take jobs, and there's no fuckin' reason in the world why some middle-management asshole who busts her ass all year long to make whatever she's in charge of work properly shouldn't get the bonus she's been banking on just because some upper-echelon cunts have decided to equivocate or outright lie about the security of some fund package.
What I'm saying is the money for the parties and conferences and bonuses are drops in the fucking ocean, and what's more, legitimate drops, as far as the ocean is legitimate. There's a reason those drops are dripped. Advertising or marketing drops. HR drops. But they don't make sense to you? They make you angry? Well then, buddy, they're also Chinese water torture drops distracting you from the main fuckin' gushing cataract of an issue: the ideas of growth on which these companies and investment groups are based are completely fucking untenable for the likes of you and me.
We're squealing like dumbfuck little pigs now that things have gone bad, and taxpayer money is bailing out these quagmires, and company people are still giving themselves bonuses. But where were the squeals in the 'good times' when property investment groups were making money with their speculations - when professional couples had to take out 50-year mortgages at extortionate rates if they wanted to live in a decent house in a metropolitan region? Where were the squeals as people with average-to-'good' incomes were pushed out of our capital cities by galloping property prices, while thousands of speculative units stayed empty? Where were the squeals as university tuition shot up, forcing students to take out private loans, again at rates extortionate relative to their income, and then take the first dumbfuck job they could find after graduating so they could start servicing those loans, benefiting fucking no one except the bank's shareholders? Where were the squeals when Western governments stripped down public and private pension schemes, telling us to try our luck in the stock market with private retirement savings instead, thereby massively fuelling the overheated engine of our financial 'organization'?
Were we actually stupid enough to believe that the stock market was just going to get better forever so it was okay to give up the retirement benefits that the labouring classes had fought like devils for over more than a century, or were we just watching too much television to bother protesting? And when the stock market was turning in 12% returns for those of us who bet on the Asians, did we ever sit in our fucking Priuses planning our early retirement and reflecting on what that sort of investment in a series of overheated, under-regulated economies was doing to them socially and ecologically?
And where are the squealers now, when things are bad, and every government initiative to make things 'good' again focuses on rebuilding this shitty, shitty system? I'll tell you where the squealers are, whining themselves hoarse on the idea that everything sucks now because people who work at these companies and banks are greedy, and that the present meltdown has any fucking thing to do with conferences, parties, and bonuses - and not on the absolutely wrong-headed ideas of growth that come from publicly floated companies and from people's retirement savings being forced onto something as fucking bestially stupid, unstable and immoral as the stock market. I tell you it gets my fucking goat. Oh sorry, that's not my goat, it's John Kerry. My fucking mistake.
As for the bonuses . . . look, the numbers are opaque, but I have a feeling my company lost money in 2008. Nonetheless if I hadn't got my bonus after working me fingers to the bone all year, I would have screamed to high heaven. Okay, we're not talking seven digits after I oversee the greatest losses in my company's history. But bonuses are part of why people take jobs, and there's no fuckin' reason in the world why some middle-management asshole who busts her ass all year long to make whatever she's in charge of work properly shouldn't get the bonus she's been banking on just because some upper-echelon cunts have decided to equivocate or outright lie about the security of some fund package.
What I'm saying is the money for the parties and conferences and bonuses are drops in the fucking ocean, and what's more, legitimate drops, as far as the ocean is legitimate. There's a reason those drops are dripped. Advertising or marketing drops. HR drops. But they don't make sense to you? They make you angry? Well then, buddy, they're also Chinese water torture drops distracting you from the main fuckin' gushing cataract of an issue: the ideas of growth on which these companies and investment groups are based are completely fucking untenable for the likes of you and me.
We're squealing like dumbfuck little pigs now that things have gone bad, and taxpayer money is bailing out these quagmires, and company people are still giving themselves bonuses. But where were the squeals in the 'good times' when property investment groups were making money with their speculations - when professional couples had to take out 50-year mortgages at extortionate rates if they wanted to live in a decent house in a metropolitan region? Where were the squeals as people with average-to-'good' incomes were pushed out of our capital cities by galloping property prices, while thousands of speculative units stayed empty? Where were the squeals as university tuition shot up, forcing students to take out private loans, again at rates extortionate relative to their income, and then take the first dumbfuck job they could find after graduating so they could start servicing those loans, benefiting fucking no one except the bank's shareholders? Where were the squeals when Western governments stripped down public and private pension schemes, telling us to try our luck in the stock market with private retirement savings instead, thereby massively fuelling the overheated engine of our financial 'organization'?
Were we actually stupid enough to believe that the stock market was just going to get better forever so it was okay to give up the retirement benefits that the labouring classes had fought like devils for over more than a century, or were we just watching too much television to bother protesting? And when the stock market was turning in 12% returns for those of us who bet on the Asians, did we ever sit in our fucking Priuses planning our early retirement and reflecting on what that sort of investment in a series of overheated, under-regulated economies was doing to them socially and ecologically?
And where are the squealers now, when things are bad, and every government initiative to make things 'good' again focuses on rebuilding this shitty, shitty system? I'll tell you where the squealers are, whining themselves hoarse on the idea that everything sucks now because people who work at these companies and banks are greedy, and that the present meltdown has any fucking thing to do with conferences, parties, and bonuses - and not on the absolutely wrong-headed ideas of growth that come from publicly floated companies and from people's retirement savings being forced onto something as fucking bestially stupid, unstable and immoral as the stock market. I tell you it gets my fucking goat. Oh sorry, that's not my goat, it's John Kerry. My fucking mistake.
lunedì, febbraio 23, 2009
Smashy smashy
The only big problem with The Life of Charlotte Brontë is that now I want to read Shirley instead of moving on with my life and reading more Eliot or Hardy or something. Oh well. I'm not much of a one for biographies, but Brontë had such a strange life, and Gaskell did a fair job of putting that life in some sort of social and cultural context. She did a better job of being all Gaskell-y as she wrote (effervescent, perspective, though with a tendency to force sainthood on her objects of affection), and she was clever enough to lean heavily on letters; not only as source material but, in places, as the bulk of the text.
What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.
But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.
Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.
And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.
Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.
Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.
So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.
And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.
What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.
But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.
Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.
And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.
Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.
Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.
So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.
And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.
domenica, febbraio 22, 2009
Of cleverness and romance
Blew through most of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë this weekend after finding it for 50 centimes whilst hung over, and having Charlotte Brontë on the brain whilst mulling over for the millionth time why she was so down on Jane Austen, and having Elizabeth Gaskell on the brain after last week's Thomas Hardy and wondering what he owed to her in terms of popular acceptance, if not style, vis à vis all that there 'social realism'. Irresistible. It's these stunning, serendipitous shopping conquests that keep me going to the used bookstores instead of messing about with Amazon. It's a delightfully written autobiography, but more on that when my punishing lifestyle (from now on, it may be taken as read that Monday mornings feel absolutely tragic, and weekends feel three hours long) lets me finish the fucker.
And more on the Austen/Brontë split. I had always assumed that the reason Charlotte Brontë found Jane Austen so tedious was that Austen isn't romantic enough, which seems a strange thought now when our screens are perpetually littered with lousy, vaseline-lensed, ladywank fantasy adaptations of Pride and Prejudice et al. But Austen isn't romantic relative to the Brontë sisters, or to Charlotte's big hero Sir Walter Scott; relative to all that, Austen narrates these perfectly believable, self-contained stories wherein the supernatural doesn't intervene and women get by as best they can, and if the lead women always marry men richer than they are at the end it's because Austen chose stories where that makes sense, rather than nudging her characters into acting artificially.
So that's what I thought Charlotte Brontë meant by calling Jane Austen's novels 'more real than true', and why I thought she was being unfair; to me, and to legions of modern fans, I don't doubt, a big part of the charm of Jane Austen's novels is that they're amusing and interesting without seeming artificial in their construction, that once you sink into the world of an Austen novel there are no events or proclamations that seem to interrupt the flow of things making sense.
But now, having gone through most of the autobiography, which is full of Brontë's letters, which are much less wordy and high-falutin' than her books - very engaging, very affectionate, and rather tart - the objection seems a little more clear in a couple of ways.
First, on top of her charms in terms of creating a seamless literary universe, the way Austen puts words together, the sentences she makes - I can't remember who pointed this out to me, but whoever it was was dead right - are very, very nice and characteristic sorts of sentences. This technical skill as a sentence maker extends to how nicely her books are constructed as a whole. So nice, and so consistent, that perhaps writers like Charlotte Brontë, who admired writers like Sir Walter Scott so much, might see them as trite; they use so few words, comparatively, to get an idea across, and the nice symmetrical structure perhaps could seem too facile - perhaps it would all seem flippant rather than substantial. Consider three books I love; first, the first paragraph of Jane Eyre:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
It goes on to introduce us to our heroine, and her miserable life at her aunt's, and the book goes on for a good long bit before we meet our principals, Rochester not coming in until a third of the way through - a breath of the existence of the uncle and the cousins not until towards the middle and end respectively.
And of Ivanhoe:
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.
And there follows more historical background, and our introduction to the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba; the book runs on for nearly its half until we meet all the main characters.
And of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
By the end of the first chapter, we have some idea of every major character in the book, and they stay with us until the end.
Can you spot the difference?
Now, reading Brontë's letters in Gaskell's book, I see she had very clean powers of construction, rather cleaner than are evident in Jane Eyre (I love Jane Eyre's construction, but I love it like I love a baggy, bulging Hundertwasser building, and not like I love beautiful snowflakes). And if she had chosen to - if that had been her fixed idea of great literature throughout her life - I have no doubt she could have written something as tidy and symmetrical as Pride and Prejudice. But she didn't and it wasn't. So, in that case, what's left to do except hate Jane Austen's books? They're a different sort of beast altogether - a different, sparer philosophy of construction - that must either be deeply admired for its cleverness and simplicity, or dismissed by a Romantic as 'more real than true'. From a Romantic perspective they just look too easy - too effortless - to seem as though they hit on something fundamental about our human nature.
And second: yes, maybe Brontë disliked Austen's books for not being romantic enough, but there's a reason for that I hadn't fully appreciated before, in terms of Romance and conventions. Gaskell shows Brontë to be, politically speaking, religiously speaking, conventional - not a bigot, not close-minded, close emotionally to Dissenters, close physically to Luddites, but herself deeply attached to the continuity of the power structures of her father's church and the English political establishment. I can't but feel that for a kind, gentle, unbigoted person to maintain such close attachment to conventional power structures, a little fantasy is necessary - fantastical, romantic notions of history, serendipity, 'unnatural' villainy, and God's/the supernatural's occasional intervention in the blatant unfairness of human life and relationships under these power structures. Which is fine. I enjoy that sort of fantasy when it's well-written.
But those sorts of measures were things Austen ignored completely. Her endings were happy, happy enough to lend themselves well to endless revolting films execs bust their balls trying to turn into bodice-rippers. But they were happy because her heroes and heroines, sometimes through efforts of incredible but banal communicative strength, managed to make each other understand the depth of their emotions across social pitfalls no less steep for being ridiculous and artificial. They're books about human effort and narrow escapes from human misery due to human social folly; human and folly always being the keyword.
There's no divine intervention; there're no ghosts or madwomen or kings riding in and telling everybody what to do, there are no heartless villains. They're just human books in an elegant, simple, symmetrical format; all deeply conscious that no force except self-knowledge and force of character will make things work out in the end in an unfair and profane world. I imagine they would seem almost profane, in the mercilessness of their observational powers, to a writer whose convictions were romantic and conventional.
And more on the Austen/Brontë split. I had always assumed that the reason Charlotte Brontë found Jane Austen so tedious was that Austen isn't romantic enough, which seems a strange thought now when our screens are perpetually littered with lousy, vaseline-lensed, ladywank fantasy adaptations of Pride and Prejudice et al. But Austen isn't romantic relative to the Brontë sisters, or to Charlotte's big hero Sir Walter Scott; relative to all that, Austen narrates these perfectly believable, self-contained stories wherein the supernatural doesn't intervene and women get by as best they can, and if the lead women always marry men richer than they are at the end it's because Austen chose stories where that makes sense, rather than nudging her characters into acting artificially.
So that's what I thought Charlotte Brontë meant by calling Jane Austen's novels 'more real than true', and why I thought she was being unfair; to me, and to legions of modern fans, I don't doubt, a big part of the charm of Jane Austen's novels is that they're amusing and interesting without seeming artificial in their construction, that once you sink into the world of an Austen novel there are no events or proclamations that seem to interrupt the flow of things making sense.
But now, having gone through most of the autobiography, which is full of Brontë's letters, which are much less wordy and high-falutin' than her books - very engaging, very affectionate, and rather tart - the objection seems a little more clear in a couple of ways.
First, on top of her charms in terms of creating a seamless literary universe, the way Austen puts words together, the sentences she makes - I can't remember who pointed this out to me, but whoever it was was dead right - are very, very nice and characteristic sorts of sentences. This technical skill as a sentence maker extends to how nicely her books are constructed as a whole. So nice, and so consistent, that perhaps writers like Charlotte Brontë, who admired writers like Sir Walter Scott so much, might see them as trite; they use so few words, comparatively, to get an idea across, and the nice symmetrical structure perhaps could seem too facile - perhaps it would all seem flippant rather than substantial. Consider three books I love; first, the first paragraph of Jane Eyre:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
It goes on to introduce us to our heroine, and her miserable life at her aunt's, and the book goes on for a good long bit before we meet our principals, Rochester not coming in until a third of the way through - a breath of the existence of the uncle and the cousins not until towards the middle and end respectively.
And of Ivanhoe:
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.
And there follows more historical background, and our introduction to the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba; the book runs on for nearly its half until we meet all the main characters.
And of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
By the end of the first chapter, we have some idea of every major character in the book, and they stay with us until the end.
Can you spot the difference?
Now, reading Brontë's letters in Gaskell's book, I see she had very clean powers of construction, rather cleaner than are evident in Jane Eyre (I love Jane Eyre's construction, but I love it like I love a baggy, bulging Hundertwasser building, and not like I love beautiful snowflakes). And if she had chosen to - if that had been her fixed idea of great literature throughout her life - I have no doubt she could have written something as tidy and symmetrical as Pride and Prejudice. But she didn't and it wasn't. So, in that case, what's left to do except hate Jane Austen's books? They're a different sort of beast altogether - a different, sparer philosophy of construction - that must either be deeply admired for its cleverness and simplicity, or dismissed by a Romantic as 'more real than true'. From a Romantic perspective they just look too easy - too effortless - to seem as though they hit on something fundamental about our human nature.
And second: yes, maybe Brontë disliked Austen's books for not being romantic enough, but there's a reason for that I hadn't fully appreciated before, in terms of Romance and conventions. Gaskell shows Brontë to be, politically speaking, religiously speaking, conventional - not a bigot, not close-minded, close emotionally to Dissenters, close physically to Luddites, but herself deeply attached to the continuity of the power structures of her father's church and the English political establishment. I can't but feel that for a kind, gentle, unbigoted person to maintain such close attachment to conventional power structures, a little fantasy is necessary - fantastical, romantic notions of history, serendipity, 'unnatural' villainy, and God's/the supernatural's occasional intervention in the blatant unfairness of human life and relationships under these power structures. Which is fine. I enjoy that sort of fantasy when it's well-written.
But those sorts of measures were things Austen ignored completely. Her endings were happy, happy enough to lend themselves well to endless revolting films execs bust their balls trying to turn into bodice-rippers. But they were happy because her heroes and heroines, sometimes through efforts of incredible but banal communicative strength, managed to make each other understand the depth of their emotions across social pitfalls no less steep for being ridiculous and artificial. They're books about human effort and narrow escapes from human misery due to human social folly; human and folly always being the keyword.
There's no divine intervention; there're no ghosts or madwomen or kings riding in and telling everybody what to do, there are no heartless villains. They're just human books in an elegant, simple, symmetrical format; all deeply conscious that no force except self-knowledge and force of character will make things work out in the end in an unfair and profane world. I imagine they would seem almost profane, in the mercilessness of their observational powers, to a writer whose convictions were romantic and conventional.
giovedì, febbraio 19, 2009
The Grateful Bourgeoise
To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be anglo-bourgeoise. Seriously. We had a friend over for dinner last night with whom we were discussing our future plans in a desultory sort of way, and there was a gap between our understanding and his; he was baffled by the idea that we'd leave a situation where we both have stable jobs that we don't specifically hate. He was from a deep South European country with traditionally shy-high unemployment, among other social disasters, and it reminded me of chatting with Jeebus this Christmas in Calabria, and him being endlessly amused by my wishing aloud that I could get made redundant next December. To me, there's be nothing amusing and everything lovely about the prospect. Nice big fat Belgian payoff, pogey at 80% of my final paycheque, maybe some language courses and then bam, we fuck off somewhere with our wheelbarrows full of euros - I mean, it's a fucking wet dream, getting made redundant next December, although I'm trying to be conscious that there will be difficult psychological issues in terms of my pride, if it happens.
Anyways, this guy from the deep South we had over for dinner and Jeebus both, they're bourgeois too, by the standards of their own countries and indeed in terms of the relative standard of their living to ours. But they have a really understandable psychological attachment to job stability, even at the expense of satisfaction, that the F-word and I never had to have inculcated in us, because we grew up in such prosperous countries.
Now I can go back home to Canada and whine and complain about the intensely profligate and unsustainable lifestyle there, and I wouldn't be wrong; it is profligate and unsustainable. And I'm not saying I wasn't given rather more work ethic than I think I need, or even than I think is best calculated for my happiness. But I am really, really grateful that growing up in such a prosperous country in such a prosperous way has left me fairly relaxed about some things many other people can't relax about. That's the real blessing of riches, maybe the only real blessing of riches, and one we can forget about to easily because it's negative, in a sense, rather than positive: there's a whole range of neuroses you just don't have to have. What a pity I seek to replace those neuroses so quickly with new and exotic ones, instead of spending a little more time dwelling on how lucky I am.
Anyways, this guy from the deep South we had over for dinner and Jeebus both, they're bourgeois too, by the standards of their own countries and indeed in terms of the relative standard of their living to ours. But they have a really understandable psychological attachment to job stability, even at the expense of satisfaction, that the F-word and I never had to have inculcated in us, because we grew up in such prosperous countries.
Now I can go back home to Canada and whine and complain about the intensely profligate and unsustainable lifestyle there, and I wouldn't be wrong; it is profligate and unsustainable. And I'm not saying I wasn't given rather more work ethic than I think I need, or even than I think is best calculated for my happiness. But I am really, really grateful that growing up in such a prosperous country in such a prosperous way has left me fairly relaxed about some things many other people can't relax about. That's the real blessing of riches, maybe the only real blessing of riches, and one we can forget about to easily because it's negative, in a sense, rather than positive: there's a whole range of neuroses you just don't have to have. What a pity I seek to replace those neuroses so quickly with new and exotic ones, instead of spending a little more time dwelling on how lucky I am.
mercoledì, febbraio 18, 2009
Of truth and coincidences
'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
martedì, febbraio 17, 2009
Of strumpets and wolves among the sheep
A little tired this morning because we went to see an amateur production of Othello an old colleague was in, and then I couldn't stop reading The Mayor of Casterbridge when I got home. The amateur production was okay. Like all amateur productions, once you find three reasonably talented actors it's just a matter of blocking the untalented ones like bits of scenery. And this one - the main problem is that it laboured a bit under the burden that Othello and Desdemona looked like nephew and auntie, with about as much sexual chemistry. I know there's the theory running around that Othello and Desdemona never consummate their marriage, and I understand why it exists though I think it's nonsense and rather too subtle for Shakespeare, but I just don't believe someone's going to smother someone else in a jealous rage over the smotheree's sexual improprieties unless he or she feels a sense of sexual ownership of that person. And whether he actually slipped it to her or not there's enough coo-ey and dirty talk between them to at least have them get in a bit of a cuddle on stage. A touch of tongue while the duke is looking the other way. Something that convinces me he loves her in such a way he can bother to hate her. Not really the actor's fault. The director could have whipped that up easily if she'd chosen to.
But the important thing about Othello is Iago as he's always on the fucking stage, to the degree that I feel, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that Iago is the play's real hero, and the Iago in this production was very watchable. He gets some good lines, Iago. Lots of examples of what Robertson Davies laughed at in some book I can't remember - that lots of Shakespearian aphorisms taken as serious moral advice have came from thoroughly unpleasant or evil characters. One of our group was baffled by the character - just couldn't wrap his head around why someone would be such a cunt. I guess I'd always taken it for granted. I'm used to the idea of the nature of tragedy being that the hero has a fatal flaw, and always thought without questioning it much that Iago's fatal flaw is to be a asshole in a world full of fucking morons, a fox among the hens.
Othello - well, it takes ten minutes of loose talk from someone he's just passed over for promotion to turn him from an uxuriously happy man into a foaming-at-the-mouth stereotype. Desdemona throws a fit of pique over the handkerchief she's lost instead of coming clean with the fact that she can't fucking find it even as her wierdo husband, whose job it is to violently murder people, is getting all mouth-foamy, and then she trots out that retarded little line as she expires about how she did it to herself. Amelia enthusiastically rushes into her death at the end to expose the story of the hankerchief, but if she had three brain cells to rub together she would have realized what the game was with it at the midpoint of the play when Othello starts chiding Desdemona. Cassio gets dangerously shitfaced after two drinks whilst on the job depsite his boss warning him not to, and it takes 30 seconds of urging from an underling to make him so. Rodrigo - well. Obviously he's so fucking dumb it's only fair to assume he was written as comic relief, as a really openly stupid embodiment of all the other character's stupidity.
The only character who shows even a modicum of rationality and intelligence is Iago. And as far as I remember, that's quite unique in Shakespeare's tragedies - all the other ones I can think of have at least a few secondary characters who aren't fucking dumbkopfs and who figure out what's going on pretty early in the game. So, you know, think about Iago's circumstances: surrounded by blithering morons, blithering morons who are mostly more materially and sexually successful than you, what's more, with two of them rumoured to have fucked your wife - even if you're only sort of an asshole, surely you're going to start manipulating the situation.
And from there comes moments of sly but undeniable humour in a script written off as tragedy, as everybody loves on Iago while he destroys them. And then, as Brad Pitt showed in Burn After Reading, retards are funny. ". . . One who loved not wisely, but too well" after spending an hour bellowing about what a slimy wop whore someone is and then killing her? Come on, that's fucking comedy gold. I think the play could be done as a black comedy - something the Coen brothers could do.
But the important thing about Othello is Iago as he's always on the fucking stage, to the degree that I feel, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that Iago is the play's real hero, and the Iago in this production was very watchable. He gets some good lines, Iago. Lots of examples of what Robertson Davies laughed at in some book I can't remember - that lots of Shakespearian aphorisms taken as serious moral advice have came from thoroughly unpleasant or evil characters. One of our group was baffled by the character - just couldn't wrap his head around why someone would be such a cunt. I guess I'd always taken it for granted. I'm used to the idea of the nature of tragedy being that the hero has a fatal flaw, and always thought without questioning it much that Iago's fatal flaw is to be a asshole in a world full of fucking morons, a fox among the hens.
Othello - well, it takes ten minutes of loose talk from someone he's just passed over for promotion to turn him from an uxuriously happy man into a foaming-at-the-mouth stereotype. Desdemona throws a fit of pique over the handkerchief she's lost instead of coming clean with the fact that she can't fucking find it even as her wierdo husband, whose job it is to violently murder people, is getting all mouth-foamy, and then she trots out that retarded little line as she expires about how she did it to herself. Amelia enthusiastically rushes into her death at the end to expose the story of the hankerchief, but if she had three brain cells to rub together she would have realized what the game was with it at the midpoint of the play when Othello starts chiding Desdemona. Cassio gets dangerously shitfaced after two drinks whilst on the job depsite his boss warning him not to, and it takes 30 seconds of urging from an underling to make him so. Rodrigo - well. Obviously he's so fucking dumb it's only fair to assume he was written as comic relief, as a really openly stupid embodiment of all the other character's stupidity.
The only character who shows even a modicum of rationality and intelligence is Iago. And as far as I remember, that's quite unique in Shakespeare's tragedies - all the other ones I can think of have at least a few secondary characters who aren't fucking dumbkopfs and who figure out what's going on pretty early in the game. So, you know, think about Iago's circumstances: surrounded by blithering morons, blithering morons who are mostly more materially and sexually successful than you, what's more, with two of them rumoured to have fucked your wife - even if you're only sort of an asshole, surely you're going to start manipulating the situation.
And from there comes moments of sly but undeniable humour in a script written off as tragedy, as everybody loves on Iago while he destroys them. And then, as Brad Pitt showed in Burn After Reading, retards are funny. ". . . One who loved not wisely, but too well" after spending an hour bellowing about what a slimy wop whore someone is and then killing her? Come on, that's fucking comedy gold. I think the play could be done as a black comedy - something the Coen brothers could do.
lunedì, febbraio 16, 2009
Poor little good girl
Oh my god, I can't believe how good The Mayor of Casterbridge is. It's like Piers Plowman fucked D. H. Lawrence and their baby was raised by Sir Walter Scott. I chose this book in part because I didn't know what it had to offer - back in my days teaching wops and frogs how to speak English, an intermediate edition of Headway featured excerpts from the wife-auctioning chapter - that's all I knew of the book, though it was enough to pique my interest as it was a pretty great excerpt.
The great prose and the hijinks just don't stop, and there are some stunningly good portraits of really unacceptable people, sort of circling like pre-occupied sharks around Elizabeth Jane . . . I suppose he had a thing about nice girls . . . there's always a nice girl somewhere in his books that I've read, a nice, natural girl like Thomasin or Tess or Elizabeth-Jane who gets buffeted about by the passions and pretensions of everybody else whilst cherishing healthy and strong emotions herself.
"There's husks and dust on you. Perhaps you don't know it?" he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. "And it's very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there's chaff on them. It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you--blowing is the best."
As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, "O, thank you," at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in no manner of hurry to be gone.
"Ah--now I'll go and get ye an umbrella," he said.
She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in undertones, "As I came down through
Cannobie."
The great prose and the hijinks just don't stop, and there are some stunningly good portraits of really unacceptable people, sort of circling like pre-occupied sharks around Elizabeth Jane . . . I suppose he had a thing about nice girls . . . there's always a nice girl somewhere in his books that I've read, a nice, natural girl like Thomasin or Tess or Elizabeth-Jane who gets buffeted about by the passions and pretensions of everybody else whilst cherishing healthy and strong emotions herself.
"There's husks and dust on you. Perhaps you don't know it?" he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. "And it's very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there's chaff on them. It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you--blowing is the best."
As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, "O, thank you," at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in no manner of hurry to be gone.
"Ah--now I'll go and get ye an umbrella," he said.
She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in undertones, "As I came down through
Cannobie."
domenica, febbraio 15, 2009
And now she's looking for a furze-cutting man, that's what I am
Once more - bam - the weekend is over. I really, really hate this about the passing of a chemically depressive state. At least a slow burn of mild braindead makes time crawl. Feeling very bitchy this morning. Not just because we got a new bookshelf this weekend and our library has morphed from piles on the floor to nicely arranged tomes on a shelf (I've even grouped the authors, something I haven't had the mental organization to do since 1996) so I know exactly what I'm not reading as I walk out the door to work.
Not just because I listened to an interesting broadcast this weekend whilst sewing which managed to incidentally spell out for me that part of what makes me hate my profession is its ecological parasitism - a fact I was aware of, but which I'm usually able to bury under five or six layers of rationalizations. My relationship with Buddhism is limited to watching 27 episodes of Monkey! but when people get going about it, it reminds me that there are some good and bad choices to make for oneself as a moral creature that I'm not making right now - all I'm making is money. Ouch. I can say to myself endlessly 'it's okay, I'll stop in a year and a half, in a year and a half everything will change,' and maybe it will, but it's not a year and a half from now yet and in the meantime I don't like the ethics of what I do.
No, on top of all that, I've had motherfucking 'Uptown Girl' stuck in my head since I woke up. I know it was a huge success as a single and probably made Billy Joel millions of dollars, but seriously, as an aesthetically aware creature what possesses you to unleash four minutes of such shit on your fellow humans? Ugh.
Possibly what got it stuck in my head was reading the first ten chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge last night, since Thomas Hardy's novels are all about uptown girls and downtown guys, or vice versa, in the framework of rural England. At least I think they are, I'm just getting my feet wet with Hardy, having only read The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles before. I didn't enjoy Tess of the D'Urbervilles - it was a very good book but it was too heavy for me at the time at which I was reading it. The Return of the Native I liked better, though it was also quite heavy - I think because in The Return of the Native, I felt less sympathy for the main characters, though Eustacia really struck a nerve, she seemed so real, than I did for poor Tess. The Mayor of Casterbridge also promises to be heavy. It opens with a wife-auctioning scene, in which the protagonist Henchard gets loaded and sells off his woman and child at a country fair. And hijinks ensue.
Sometimes I wonder if I like sort of depressing authors like Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham as a sort of hangover teenage Curehead thing - if I've just replaced whiny Robert Smith vocals with whiny British authors dealing with the deterioration of their country's social and economic edifices. But then I get over it. I like Thomas Hardy, at least, because of his incredible powers of description - not just of people, but of place and ambience. Read this, from the beginning of chapter 11:
The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain (. . .) The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers (. . .)
Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.
So nice.
Not just because I listened to an interesting broadcast this weekend whilst sewing which managed to incidentally spell out for me that part of what makes me hate my profession is its ecological parasitism - a fact I was aware of, but which I'm usually able to bury under five or six layers of rationalizations. My relationship with Buddhism is limited to watching 27 episodes of Monkey! but when people get going about it, it reminds me that there are some good and bad choices to make for oneself as a moral creature that I'm not making right now - all I'm making is money. Ouch. I can say to myself endlessly 'it's okay, I'll stop in a year and a half, in a year and a half everything will change,' and maybe it will, but it's not a year and a half from now yet and in the meantime I don't like the ethics of what I do.
No, on top of all that, I've had motherfucking 'Uptown Girl' stuck in my head since I woke up. I know it was a huge success as a single and probably made Billy Joel millions of dollars, but seriously, as an aesthetically aware creature what possesses you to unleash four minutes of such shit on your fellow humans? Ugh.
Possibly what got it stuck in my head was reading the first ten chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge last night, since Thomas Hardy's novels are all about uptown girls and downtown guys, or vice versa, in the framework of rural England. At least I think they are, I'm just getting my feet wet with Hardy, having only read The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles before. I didn't enjoy Tess of the D'Urbervilles - it was a very good book but it was too heavy for me at the time at which I was reading it. The Return of the Native I liked better, though it was also quite heavy - I think because in The Return of the Native, I felt less sympathy for the main characters, though Eustacia really struck a nerve, she seemed so real, than I did for poor Tess. The Mayor of Casterbridge also promises to be heavy. It opens with a wife-auctioning scene, in which the protagonist Henchard gets loaded and sells off his woman and child at a country fair. And hijinks ensue.
Sometimes I wonder if I like sort of depressing authors like Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham as a sort of hangover teenage Curehead thing - if I've just replaced whiny Robert Smith vocals with whiny British authors dealing with the deterioration of their country's social and economic edifices. But then I get over it. I like Thomas Hardy, at least, because of his incredible powers of description - not just of people, but of place and ambience. Read this, from the beginning of chapter 11:
The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain (. . .) The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers (. . .)
Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.
So nice.
giovedì, febbraio 12, 2009
Magic diesel necks
A couple of updates. First, my throat ultrasound revealed bubkis, ergo est sweet fuck all. I was so excited and relieved I took the rest of the afternoon off and baked some soda bread and clafouti. Mind you, if the big, scrawled one-word question in the doctor's prescription - "Goitre?" - had been answered in the positive, I would have been so upset and disappointed I would have took the rest of the afternoon off and baked some soda bread and clafouti. Goitres are fucking gross. And I'm trying to treat my time in Belgium ninja-ly - slip in, do my job, slip out with 50 grand - not slip in, have some hideously involved throat procedure to get rid of a goitre, scrape together what I can and slip out. Still feel fine. The F-word's magic yoghurt worked. And yes, I'm aware of how that sounds.
Second update: my driving test, though theoretically possible anytime after March 14, won't be until May, and I don't know when in May because they haven't opened the planning for May yet. It's a good thing I shifted the ambition from 'license before 30' to 'license before 31'. This is not a good country to be in a hurry in. Makes my job as a ninja so much harder. Oh well.
My mind has bounded far ahead of itself to which car it's going to buy when it moves back to a country where you need a car because you live out in the country a bit and you're making babies and have to bring them places. I'm cheap when it comes to small purchases over time, less so for single large purchases, so at first I thought hybrid - protect myself a little from the vagaries of gas prices. But I'm also selfish, and even though I'm not very good at it, stickshift is so much more fun. Into that, throw in the F-word's desire for a station wagon - as an artist he needs something to haul art around in. So far, this car is winning (the TDI model).
But I already know there's basically no way in hell we'll buy a new car - I'm far too tight to buy anything that depreciates that heavily that fast. The odds are excellent we'll end up with some third-hand clunker and I'm happy with that too. I have a bit of a problem with buying a new car for environmental reasons anyways. There are so many used cars on the market that have to be disposed of one way or another, and it doesn't make much sense to bring another into the world. A bit like adoption, I guess.
Second update: my driving test, though theoretically possible anytime after March 14, won't be until May, and I don't know when in May because they haven't opened the planning for May yet. It's a good thing I shifted the ambition from 'license before 30' to 'license before 31'. This is not a good country to be in a hurry in. Makes my job as a ninja so much harder. Oh well.
My mind has bounded far ahead of itself to which car it's going to buy when it moves back to a country where you need a car because you live out in the country a bit and you're making babies and have to bring them places. I'm cheap when it comes to small purchases over time, less so for single large purchases, so at first I thought hybrid - protect myself a little from the vagaries of gas prices. But I'm also selfish, and even though I'm not very good at it, stickshift is so much more fun. Into that, throw in the F-word's desire for a station wagon - as an artist he needs something to haul art around in. So far, this car is winning (the TDI model).
But I already know there's basically no way in hell we'll buy a new car - I'm far too tight to buy anything that depreciates that heavily that fast. The odds are excellent we'll end up with some third-hand clunker and I'm happy with that too. I have a bit of a problem with buying a new car for environmental reasons anyways. There are so many used cars on the market that have to be disposed of one way or another, and it doesn't make much sense to bring another into the world. A bit like adoption, I guess.
mercoledì, febbraio 11, 2009
Driving around in my automobile
I've started practicing again, in anticipation of a driving exam I can take anytime after March 14 - found a company that rents out dual-command cars, and whose owner is willing to accompany me, as my choice was either to buy my own car and drive it around alone, which I have no intention of doing - honestly, here in Brussels I need a car like I need a third nostril (ergo est, "don't") and the prospect of blundering through more bank/civil service escroquerie and incompetence in the quest to get insurance and a parking permit - well, look, I've decided not to do it, and the prospect still makes me want to puke in frustration. Anyways, my choice was between that, buying more Euro 45/hour lessons from the school where my favourite instructor smelt like wine, doing something completely uninsured and irresponsible on Sundays with people willing to rent out their cars and company, or what I've done, which is use a company called LearnCar.
I'm not recommending it yet, as I've only done two hours out of the twenty-two I've bought, but so far it seems pretty awesome and the owner, an ex-highway cop, has already given me some really great tips about driving that my much more expensive instructors never gave me. Nobody ever explained to me, for example, the magic of second gear when it comes to speed bumps, roundabouts, and entering intersections with rightwards priority. I used to hate and fear roundabouts; now that I've learnt the magic of second gear, I'm looking forward to driving in Canada less because we don't have them there. It will also be hard now, I think, to drive in a place that doesn't have rightwards priority, although I do feel it's a rather stupid rule. If you want to slow traffic, why not have obligatory stops at T-junctions, or put in more lights? Spend a bit of a fucking money, for god's sake, people pay 50% income tax here - why not cut off the Parliament's champagne account and use that for more fucking traffic lights? Anyways. And he slaps me when I glance at the gearbox. He understands conditioning. Perfect.
Much more seriously, nobody had previously explained the necessity of tapping the brake when you use the frein moteur, that is, when you switch gears downward to slow down (how do you say that in English?). It's obvious, right? You're slowing down all of a sudden and you need to communicate that to whoever's behind you - but I hadn't been doing it and my instructors had never mentioned it. Okay, luckily someone explained now, before I started driving around on my own and got into a vicious fight, or dead, with someone rear-ending me on a motorway at high speed. But it makes me miss Young Driver's, in Ontario, where I first learnt to drive twelve years ago, though that doesn't count because it was an automatic, and automatics aren't driving, they're a runaway fairground ride, and yet stickshift is much more fun. But the focus at Young Driver's was totally on defensive driving, on getting yourself from point A to point B without being killed either by your own or someone else's ineptitude, and that's really what I'm interested in - especially in Belgium, or rather especially in Europe generally.
I'm not recommending it yet, as I've only done two hours out of the twenty-two I've bought, but so far it seems pretty awesome and the owner, an ex-highway cop, has already given me some really great tips about driving that my much more expensive instructors never gave me. Nobody ever explained to me, for example, the magic of second gear when it comes to speed bumps, roundabouts, and entering intersections with rightwards priority. I used to hate and fear roundabouts; now that I've learnt the magic of second gear, I'm looking forward to driving in Canada less because we don't have them there. It will also be hard now, I think, to drive in a place that doesn't have rightwards priority, although I do feel it's a rather stupid rule. If you want to slow traffic, why not have obligatory stops at T-junctions, or put in more lights? Spend a bit of a fucking money, for god's sake, people pay 50% income tax here - why not cut off the Parliament's champagne account and use that for more fucking traffic lights? Anyways. And he slaps me when I glance at the gearbox. He understands conditioning. Perfect.
Much more seriously, nobody had previously explained the necessity of tapping the brake when you use the frein moteur, that is, when you switch gears downward to slow down (how do you say that in English?). It's obvious, right? You're slowing down all of a sudden and you need to communicate that to whoever's behind you - but I hadn't been doing it and my instructors had never mentioned it. Okay, luckily someone explained now, before I started driving around on my own and got into a vicious fight, or dead, with someone rear-ending me on a motorway at high speed. But it makes me miss Young Driver's, in Ontario, where I first learnt to drive twelve years ago, though that doesn't count because it was an automatic, and automatics aren't driving, they're a runaway fairground ride, and yet stickshift is much more fun. But the focus at Young Driver's was totally on defensive driving, on getting yourself from point A to point B without being killed either by your own or someone else's ineptitude, and that's really what I'm interested in - especially in Belgium, or rather especially in Europe generally.
'Allo, 'allo?
Testerday I went to the doctor because of a dreadful stabbing sort of pain in my throat. 'Probably your thyroid,' she said, 'and I think maybe I feel a lump,' freaking me the fuck out with visions of radiation and goiters and cancer and scars and everything as she prescribed me an ultrasound. The thing is I'm very vain of my neck; it's a really awesome neck. Also I'm really into not dying of cancer. Went home. Stayed here today, working from here. The F-word's day off. He made a batch of acidophillus-rich yoghurt, I ate it like a greedy little pig, and now the dreadful stabbing pain is nearly gone. So yeah, it was probably just some sort of retarded, gross fungal infection. And the lump? The F-word felt it. It's my mannishness in action. An eensy weensy vestigial Adam's apple that's always been there, in the ten years he's been admiring my neck with his hands.
Look, I read Bad Science, I'm down on the homeopathy rip-off, I've got a cancer-survivor buddy who got hepatitis from a natural remedy, I'm into all that. But if the dreadful stabby problem with my throat was just some retarded, gross fungal infection and my mannishness in action and not a thyroid problem and a lump, well, geez. It's obviously not that I'd be disappointed, obviously I'd be thrilled, and obviously it's a doctor's job to rule out the worst things first so that serious problems don't go untreated, and obviously I'm lucky to always live in countries with good enough medical systems that I can get ultrasounds really fast after doctors say I need one.
But, you know, holy fuck. No wonder naturopaths can drum up all sort of hate and fear against what they call 'allopaths'. Okay, you need more than a good bedside manner to help people out, but would it really hurt to have sound medical knowledge and a good bedside manner? Would it hurt to say 'it might be your thyroid' and also 'it might not - try eating yoghurt and watching your diet while you're waiting for the tests to come out'? Oh, fuck it. I just think it's funny doctors get so fucking huffy about naturopaths when they could quash the naturopathic industry in a heartbeat by engaging, just a little bit, in the lifestyle and emotions of their patients.
Look, I read Bad Science, I'm down on the homeopathy rip-off, I've got a cancer-survivor buddy who got hepatitis from a natural remedy, I'm into all that. But if the dreadful stabby problem with my throat was just some retarded, gross fungal infection and my mannishness in action and not a thyroid problem and a lump, well, geez. It's obviously not that I'd be disappointed, obviously I'd be thrilled, and obviously it's a doctor's job to rule out the worst things first so that serious problems don't go untreated, and obviously I'm lucky to always live in countries with good enough medical systems that I can get ultrasounds really fast after doctors say I need one.
But, you know, holy fuck. No wonder naturopaths can drum up all sort of hate and fear against what they call 'allopaths'. Okay, you need more than a good bedside manner to help people out, but would it really hurt to have sound medical knowledge and a good bedside manner? Would it hurt to say 'it might be your thyroid' and also 'it might not - try eating yoghurt and watching your diet while you're waiting for the tests to come out'? Oh, fuck it. I just think it's funny doctors get so fucking huffy about naturopaths when they could quash the naturopathic industry in a heartbeat by engaging, just a little bit, in the lifestyle and emotions of their patients.
lunedì, febbraio 09, 2009
Australia: not just good for exporting actors who can play a bit of rough
For someone who 'doesn't watch television', I am fucking excited about television. The Australian TV season has started again and those people do documentaries like nobody's business. And their national television streams internationally. I love you, ABC. Whilst sewing and cooking this weekend we sort-of watched The Howard Years in the background, about the prime ministry of a man his predecessor Paul Keating famously described as a 'little dessicated coconut', featuring all the sorts of lies and iniquities and quiet political perversions you'd expect in the post-mortem of any right wing government - but something I've never seen done on British, Canadian, or American television, or at least not so soon after the fall (end of 2007).
And then last night, when I needed something sort of short to fix my mind on - my throat is doing something very, very strange to me and is excruciatingly painful - we watched a series of shorts by a team called Clarke and Dawe, who make fun of politicians through mock interviews on the ABC's 7:30 report, the Clarke half of the team being the politician but not making any sort of effort to actually ape the politician - just talking. Again, compared to any sort of political humour I've seen on other Anglo-Saxon TV, it's unique - so stylistically subtle whilst being holleringly funny. My favourite by far is a bit they did about Philip Ruddock, an old attorney general, minister of immigration and multicultural et cetera who oversaw some very bad things, wherein for once Clarke actually changed his act to ape the man, and ended it bizarrely with a quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was funny and chilling to the bone - perfect - I mean, what the fuck? Quoting poetry? Even a poem 80% of the Anglo world's highschool students have been forced to read? That's not for us brainless noughties, is it? But it is.
So yes, I'm rather going on about things nobody reading this can be expected to be interested in, but I have to say I'm endlessly fascinated by Australian history and society at the moment. If we do move there, it'll be, hopefully, the last big move I make. The next place needs to be much more permanent so I can make babies and establish the lifestyle I want. So the more I know about Australia, the better - and aside from all that it's a fascinating and fucked-up country. Just finished reading A Secret Country, by John Pilger. Not the world's biggest fan of John Pilger. I find his documentaries hard to watch because the man's voice is like a bucket of clumpy cream thrown at a blackboard, scraped through over and over with a screwdriver. It's beastly. Luckily when you read his books you can't hear his voice and at least in the case of A Secret Country the result is good, although it seems to go all messy at the end in terms of its construction. He needed more of a martinet for an editor. But interesting enough to finish.
And then last night, when I needed something sort of short to fix my mind on - my throat is doing something very, very strange to me and is excruciatingly painful - we watched a series of shorts by a team called Clarke and Dawe, who make fun of politicians through mock interviews on the ABC's 7:30 report, the Clarke half of the team being the politician but not making any sort of effort to actually ape the politician - just talking. Again, compared to any sort of political humour I've seen on other Anglo-Saxon TV, it's unique - so stylistically subtle whilst being holleringly funny. My favourite by far is a bit they did about Philip Ruddock, an old attorney general, minister of immigration and multicultural et cetera who oversaw some very bad things, wherein for once Clarke actually changed his act to ape the man, and ended it bizarrely with a quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was funny and chilling to the bone - perfect - I mean, what the fuck? Quoting poetry? Even a poem 80% of the Anglo world's highschool students have been forced to read? That's not for us brainless noughties, is it? But it is.
So yes, I'm rather going on about things nobody reading this can be expected to be interested in, but I have to say I'm endlessly fascinated by Australian history and society at the moment. If we do move there, it'll be, hopefully, the last big move I make. The next place needs to be much more permanent so I can make babies and establish the lifestyle I want. So the more I know about Australia, the better - and aside from all that it's a fascinating and fucked-up country. Just finished reading A Secret Country, by John Pilger. Not the world's biggest fan of John Pilger. I find his documentaries hard to watch because the man's voice is like a bucket of clumpy cream thrown at a blackboard, scraped through over and over with a screwdriver. It's beastly. Luckily when you read his books you can't hear his voice and at least in the case of A Secret Country the result is good, although it seems to go all messy at the end in terms of its construction. He needed more of a martinet for an editor. But interesting enough to finish.
domenica, febbraio 08, 2009
The Red Dragon verges on the lachrymose
I could fucking weep. Here it is, cocking squatting bullshitting Monday morning, and I fucking swear, it feels as though it was Friday night three fucking hours ago. This is the thing. Like a lot of people, I have a bit of a seasonal affective disorder. Key parts of my brain and personality, most of the ones involving enthusiasm and tenderness for example, shut down pretty solidly for ten weeks of the year out of what feels like sheer self-protection. I mourn that and I mourn the impact it has on the people I'm closest to - it's unpleasant to watch yourself being a bitch to the man of your dreams, for example, though one supposes it's rather harder for him.
And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!
Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.
So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.
And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!
Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.
So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.
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