Time and forgetting

Oh argh. Had a lovely fortnight of vacation with a niece and nephew, who had never seen Europe before and needed to while I was still here, and now I'm back - missing them, working, facing the mountains of tasks involved in leaving Brussels, and apparently coming down with a cold despite the two-week heatwave. Oh well. I still feel better for it. And have discovered something I didn't know or understand at all in the past: time works differently for children. I should have known that because I can actually remember time working differently for me back in the day. But it was not something I understood on a practical level until now. Two weeks would have been a ridiculously short time for them to do all the stuff we'd done even if they'd been adults . . . at their age I'm shocked we survived. Luckily they're good kids.

Whilst whizzing around the continents on trains, managed to read two books: Middlemarch and King Leopold's Ghost, both awfully good in their very different ways. Middlemarch was a hell of a tasty treat. I don't think I could have read it when I was any younger though . . . back to conceptions of time. It would have defeated me at the first chapter. George Eliot takes a special kind of patience, or a special kind of conception of time, which is basically the same thing as patience - not one that is encouraged by modern patterns of entertainment. It invites you in, and then she talks to you - George Eliot's narrative voice discusses the state of her characters, which could seem long-winded to the impatient, but to the patient, it's the smartest and most understanding person ever having an awesome conversation with you. And this is the case in Middlemarch like in no other book of hers that I've read, though I still consider Adam Bede as the finest piece of ass in literature.

King Leopold's Ghost was wonderfully well-written and interesting, though shocking how the blurb on the back had so little to do with the contents, somebody should tell the author. I recommend it absolutely, even if you know or care nothing about the Congo; it's a good way to start, and it's a fine piece of journalistic writing. What is staying with me the most about it this morning, though, is how it seems - while discussing a hideous episode and worldwide humanitarian movement that rolled out just over a century ago - like it's already a work of semi-archaeological history. I can't remember when I first heard about Leopold II and the Congo, but I think it was well after I should have - probably when I was at school for my masters in IR. And I can't remember when I realized the Congo was having a brutal, never-ending war - I think a couple of years before that, or maybe even around the same time.

How could someone like me - a reasonably informed person who read the papers and who minored in history in the undergrad, etc., have no fucking idea for so long? How is it possible that in cultural terms, Europeans and North Americans are better informed about the abuses of the Chinese government in Tibet than of past colonial abuses, present post-colonial economic dealings, and the jaw-droppingly brutal wars they feed and finance in Africa, where so much of our population has came from by hook or by crook? Why has Africa made our collective eyes glaze over? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Romola rocks

Read Romola whilst stuck on British trains – the trip home morphed from 7 hours long to 27 hours long due to a spot of snow on the tracks and proverbial inselaffen administrative chaos, but that was fine with me, because I had a kabillion pages of Romola to read, plenty of chocolate flapjacks to stuff into my gob, and got to spend the night at Rodelinda's, whose life true to name is taking a bit of the turn for the operatic.

Anyways, Romola was fucking awesome. Obviously George Eliot lived out all of the talent that is no longer available in that country for making the trains run properly. Sometimes I like to imagine that purgatory isn’t a separate world – that it’s nicely integrated into this one – and that Mussolini for his sins is now a daily Oxford to London commuter who has to take First Great Southwestern, and is of course utterly helpless when it comes to making the trains run on time, the poor evil fuck.

But no complaints, again, because I have travel insurance and, as I say, it gave me the time to read the mighty beast Romola, which kicks Daniel Deronda’s ass, and I loved Daniel Deronda. I guess Romola's not so popular anymore because it seems so different from the questionable-class superBrit George Eliot we’re trained to know and love – 15th century Florence, for God’s sake. But it isn't some awkward Victorian precursor to the piles and piles of Angloshit that have been composting on the shelves of bookshops written by limeys etc. dealing with crushing regret/condescending glee they weren't born wops. No.

No. Romola is like Mediciean fanfic written by a genius who Lorenzo himself would have bankrolled. Romola rocks. And the heroine of Romola, Romola her name is, is one of the all-time best female characters ever. And this from the writer who wrote one of the best all-time male characters, Adam Bede. George Eliot is fucking mental, man. She was magic. There are very few writers I'm aware of who can write either gender believably and George Eliot may be the only one who can do both. Also Thomas Hardy. He can do both. Nobody else springs to mind at the mo. In all the other books I can think of right now, either men or women and usually both just seem to show up as plot points instead of people. There's Dorothy Sayers, actually, she could do both. There are probably a lot more. My brain's just at half-mast at the mo due to the hot pizza chef always being at the gym when I go. Maybe he's been sacked. Anyways, Romola, it's great.

Angry grief - Griefgry? Quite griefgry today

The search for my missing colleague is getting dumber and dumber. Really terrific media exposure now . . . I guess that's what happens when you're a missing journalist. And that's great. But . . . gah. I wish the family would try being completely forthcoming with the police before thinking about bringing in a psychic, let me put it like that.

The emotions are rather dreadful - sort of cyclical around the central theme of "I Miss Him" - because this was a man who managed not to annoy me once in two and a half years, and I get fucking annoyed by everything, and he was sweet, funny, warm, seemingly soft but he could stand up for himself, and us, in a professional context, and I miss him, he was such good company. And then swirling around that is "We're All Going to Be Fucked Getting Our Magazine Out", "His Family Is Doing It Wrong", "Why Is Everybody Treating the Locals Like Incompetent Spics When They're the Ones Doing It Wrong", "I Hope It Happened So Fast He Didn't Even Notice", "I Must Try to Hope He's Alive Or It's Bad Luck Somehow", ad nauseum, ad nauseum.

What I have found, bizarrely, is that it really helps to laugh, so much so that I'm starting to think the tragic history of the Jews, on my mind at the moment after knocking off Daniel Deronda, is part of what makes them so fucking funny, which they weren't in Daniel Deronda but oh well. You'd think Poles would be a bit more of a laugh riot in that case, though - maybe they are and the problem is just that I don't speak Polish. Anyways. Here's something that helped.

The driest argument has its hallucinations

My colleague is still missing in Central America. His family has taken an us vs. them mentality with the police that has become factually obstructive. I think he's probably dead but if he isn't, I can't think of anything much less useful than that. But you know what, he's my colleague, not my brother, and if they want to be assholes about it, there's not much I can do besides fucking weep and flag to the authorities that I'll be forthcoming as I can if they question friends and extended family. They probably won't. I hope they don't. I know what I think is right but at the same time I don't like the image of myself colluding with a Central American police force against a grieving family, which is how it will be perceived by said family and by that part of my brain which is all "fuck the po-po".

Part of what is distressing in these situations, I've discovered, beyond the horrible grief and the gnawing worry and the absolute lack of control and other people, is one's own brain.

Other than that, I'm on the home stretch with Daniel Deronda. Still ripping and not a single disappointment so far, beyond the let-down of Mordecai's big life-vision that he needed to share and bequeath to Daniel being Zionism. That was probably more earth-shaking at the time that Eliot was writing but I felt a bit let down. I was hoping for unicorns, or some magical mystery truth of some sort. Oh well.

The first days of SAD

Ugh. SAD. Ugh. Stupid short days and painfully finite mortal lifetime. Ugh.

That having been said, I'm reading Daniel Deronda and it's fucking ace. Don't tell me how it ends, I like to not know that with George Eliot books. Love her writing so much - such characterization, such dialogue, combined with such an aesthetic sense - unique perhaps - that I'm starting to seriously question the hitherto fundamentally unquestioned superiority of my shmancy undergrad degree: why the fuck didn't we read any George Eliot? Maybe they did in the lit concentration. Anyways. Water under the bridge. I'm reading it now and it's good reading material for a thirty year old; perhaps I wouldn't have liked it in my late teens and infant twenties.

We watched The Caine Mutiny last night. Not a waste of time despite that sort of dated direction that patronizes the audience so awfully and makes American movies so distasteful, because Humphrey Bogart was impossible to stop looking at. Also Jose Ferrer, was, well, Jose Ferrer. I didn't think much of the script and even less of his speech at the end to the crew, but when he trotted out the line 'I'm a lot drunker than you are so it'll be a fair fight' it made the whole thing worth it. Most people would have made that line stupid. Not him.

On no longer being in Portugal

Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.

Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.

Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.

Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.

Three rotten things happened last night

1. The Chaser's War on Everything ended forever. Australians apparently have the same habit of axing television programmes before they run out of ideas and turn into painful, undead farce (seasons 5-7 of the Sopranos, anyone?) that the British have. And that's one of the few things I admire about the British. But as a North American, that's foreign to me (every season following the first of Sex and the City, anyone?) and so I'm still so sad they're gone. They say they'll be back with something else, but who, oh who, will embarass themselves with Australian politicians in the meantime, giving me an indirect study of that country's political firmament?

Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:






Sigh.

2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.

3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.

In which I get a better hero

Almost done Adam Bede. I fear Eliot jumped the shark in part six, but Adam Bede has officially become my new literary wank-fantasy. What a man. Much better than that leering shitheel Rochester, or that conversationally-challenged Wentworth in Persuasion. In my brain, Adam Bede is like a guy in a less-murderous Bad Seeds song. Like celebrity wank-fantasy Nick Cave with a chin and muscles and no heroin - and instead of music, carpentry. Hehhehheh. Wood. Sweet.

Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.

In which the biking, kayaking, fishing and boating goes some way to undoing all the smoke damage

Amsterdam has a bit of a reputation of being a tourist hole and I understand that on that basis some people have been disenchanted with it, as in fact I remember being after my first couple of stop'n'smoke visits. But the thing that never stops being so remarkable for me is how the deeper you dig, the more you uncover layers of charm and organization.

We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.

And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.

Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.