So much me in one little morning

Dale of the Passion came into this blog back in the winter by saying something nice about it, and then became a fixture in the links that I visit obsessively by making me laugh whenever he cares to and using punctuation in the economical yet expressive way I love. Yesterday he was kind enough to pay me attention on a Thursday with a series of searching questions, so now he's become a fixture in my heart.

Here's the result of the sit-down:

1. Your blog comes in a wide variety of flavours Mistress La Spliffe. Book and movie reviews, the general stuff of life, your dreams and so on. If all your favourite magazines started asking for writing contributions, where would we be reading you next?

The only magazine in my heart is the Economist. I love it to the bones even when it makes me angry with its heartless right-wingery. It has just the right amount of commas and adjectives, I don't feel targeted by its advertisements since they're for the rich, and its obituaries are astounding. On Thursday afternoons I'll check Economist.com again and again to see if they've posted the print version yet so I can skip straight to the obituary.

And that's something else I like about it: it's available in full online, and it has good web-only features. It hasn't run scared from the Internet like most of the print industry has.

2. You recently mentioned that you feel psychoanalysis (and health care) should be free and available to everyone as a basic human right. I agree but how much do you feel that having your blog helps negate the need for formalized therapy?

15%, because 85% of a blog, or at least this blog (despite the spelling mistakes and superfluous words), is much more edited than what a good analyst can drag out of people. And all that editing probably just backs up lots of one's neuroses, in the end.

Your blog is a little different, though, as it's the only one I've read that turns memories from your life and childhood into engaging stories that obviously go somewhere in your own head, so I'd imagine you're working something important out for yourself while you're making us laugh.

3. A while back, you gave me a recommendation on a book I really enjoyed: 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. What should I read next?

For you in particular I'd recommend When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I love everything I've read of his, and I'd recommend his whole body of work with few reservations (Never Let Me Go is too sad for some moods, for example, and The Unconsoled is probably only appropriate for people who like both David Lynch films and small print).

But I think you'd get a particular kick out of When We Were Orphans. As you know, Paul Auster has not floated my boat and I was particularly annoyed by City of Glass. But When We Were Orphans shares some themes with City of Glass and pulls off some of the stunts I think Auster was trying. There's a similar feeling, though When We Were Orphans reads like a lot more work and thought went into it.

For you, I'd also recommend a novella/short story called (I think) Maitre Muissard's Bequest by Patrick Süskind, the guy who wrote Perfume. I found MMB in a slim Penguin pocket book a couple of years ago but now I think you can only find it as part of the compilation Three Stories and a Reflection, if you can find it at all. Although it's different from the Reluctant Fundamentalist in every apparent way, it has a similar driving tension sort of spinning you down towards the ending - although MMB is way scarier. It's a real headfuck.

4. You're making your home far far away from Toronto now and I feel cheated only have stumbled across your blog just as you were leaving town. Was it something I said? Where have you enjoyed living most?

You made it too easy for me to leave by being available in blog form, which I can get here. If you were only available by mail order, for example, I might have stayed in Toronto to cut down on the postage bills.

I've found something to love about all the places I've lived in, so the one I'm in at the time is usually my favourite (and my least favourite, since I find lots of stuff to hate, too). The most paradisaical place, though, was a city called Pinerolo nestled in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy. It was beautiful enough, but also ugly enough to be untouched by tourists. Wonderful food, nice people, low rent but well enough connected to major cities - just lovely.

Unfortunately I was young and foolish during my time there, and spent a mere half-year shitting where I lived with the dedication of an undiapered copraphiliac before I had to sneak out of town with all my possessions at first light on a February morning.

5. Do you have an expression that you find yourself overusing? I especially want to hear it if it's a swear word.

People say I use the word 'cunt' too much. That probably won't stop, because I enjoy the way it makes people flinch, like a tampon commercial. Also, last night the F-word and I were chatting about England, and he called the Duke and Duchess of Kent the Duke and Duchess of Cunt, and I called the Archbishop of Canterbury the Archbishop of Cunterbury, and oh, how we laughed.

I also say 'take it easy, portugeezy' too much.

Being interviewed is so much fun that now I'm determined to spread the joy. Anyone else who wants a series of questions has only to ask.

Well well well you're feeling fine

Last night I had a dream I was giving birth to my daughter late at night on November 24th, which the erudite among you know is the day before my birthday. It was a charming dream but in the same sort of soft focus infantile cast as my occasional 'I've just murdered someone, oh shit' dreams - me as a short, pale, glabrous (Germaine Greer taught me that word yesterday, I'm reading The Female Eunuch) streak, with hair like I had in grade five. Anyways, it was a telling dream full of symbolism and stuff, and it made me miss psychoanalysis some, but not enough to do it over the phone and at a higher hourly tariff, as my analyst suggested when I left Canada.

Also, I'm not sure finding someone here and continuing would be a wholly worthwhile investment, as, and I don't know if I've mentioned this, I think I've decided I don't want to be an analyst. Too hard, and the intrusion of the money factor into the dynamic is something I think I'd always have a difficult time with. Psychoanalysis feels like it should be a basic human right somehow, like health care should be, not a commodity you can sell for so much an hour. Like, in Switzerland, euthanasia is legal, which is fine and no doubt necessary for some people who go where for but the grace of God we don't. But it costs Euro 3,500, which is more than many cosmetic surgery procedures.

There's some sort of wrongness to all this I can't get over. But I think it comes down to the fact that I don't want people to make money off other people's sincere quests to end their own pain. It also comes down to the fact that, having rejected the poss of becoming an analyst, I'm now looking for a new post-corporate profession and am open to suggestions from the floor.

Started up in the Sally Ann

So at the wedding, the young bride was much more of a Rolling Stones type girl than a Beatles one, although we did almost an album's worth of John Lennon singing 50's standards in 1975 (loved it). And it really reminded me how great the Rolling Stones were in the 60's. Every one of those standards are the best songs to dance to ever. That's what I noticed night-of. You can even smoke reefer in time to "Satisfaction". It really made me miss Shake-a-Tail in Toronto and I think I'll time my next visit to that city to make sure I make it there, although I guess a more pro-active thing to do would be to find a night like that here.

Anyhoo, what I noticed yesterday when I was shopping in the Belgian version of Sally Ann was that "Let's Spend the Night Together", which was playing over the PA system, is a really horny song. Duh, yes, I know. But even today it remains a very, very horny song relative to the current industry climate which makes desperate efforts to produce very, very horny songs. "Let's Spend the Night Together" simply makes me want to fuck. Dance, and then fuck.

And as I was thinking about how I suddenly wanted to fuck in the middle of the Belgian Sally Ann, I reflected about what it must have been like in 1967 when young girls were hearing that for the first time - in a musical climate which wasn't all hyper-sexual and the pop charts certainly weren't saturated with singers shouting that they'd give you as much cunnilingus as you could handle (because you know the words 'I'll satisfy your every need' coming out of a big ugly mouth like Mick Jagger's only mean one thing). I don't have much seventies-born-pseudo-nostalgia for the sixties. But I have moments of wishing I had a time machine just to see the impact of little things like that.

Small and constant pleasures

So much to say, so little time. Suffice it to say: the sun is out and while I have to go to work, at least I get to go there on my faithful darling Specialized mountain bike which has just been tuned up. AND last night I found a new vendor for farm-fresh goat milk. So much joy in one little morning.

Cold reality

It was fucking brilliant in Carcassone - the wedding, the hot hot hot hot sunny weather, the everything. Fantabulous. It was hard to leave - not that I mind going back to my job so awfully much - more that I knew I'd be heading back into the fucking, fucking cold. I nearly burst into tears when I was shivering outside the train station for a taxi last night. I was giving myself three years here, but - you know - it's fucking cold. No more promises.

Anyways, tomorrow I'll pull out a story about one of the things that happened; today I must get back to looking like I'm paying attention.

My old flame, I can't even think of his name . . . oh wait . . . it's Gold Stone Noodle House.

There aren't many things I miss about Canada, friends and family aside, although even they are doing a relatively good job of visiting; it feels like there are people here more weekends than not, although that's probably my afore-mentioned lack of Me time speaking rather than reality. One thing I do miss is hot sunny summers, but I should suck that up because at least this way I don't get life-threatening winters (but oh, I miss the sun).

The other thing I miss is the Gold Stone Noodle House. I would say I miss Chinese food in general - I do - it sucks as much in Belgium as it sucked in France and Italy (actually Italy wasn't so bad, there was one place in Milan and one place in Turin I was pretty fond of). But emotionally, what I really, really miss is the Gold Stone.

I miss their chicken and chinese mushroom chow mein, to be specific. I miss it to madness. The noodles were so crispy around the dish and so tender in the middle, and it wasn't too greasy though it was absolutely unwholesome. Noodles here are always too limp or greasy, or else the restaurants are Thai and use peanut oil. And the chinese mushroom - I can still remember my first chinese mushroom, which coincidentally I had at the Gold Stone in a chicken and chinese mushroom chow mein. I can remember how springy and exciting it was, how rich the taste and texture . . .

I'd only started eating non-hallucinatory mushrooms at all about six months before that when I'd been doing my third year in Florence because I'd thought they were gross looking. I was such a fool. I knew that already before I had my first Chinese mushroom, and after I had my first Chinese mushroom I became even more devoted to making up for the first 20 years of my life I'd wasted not eating non-hallucinatory mushrooms. Fuck me, it was good. I could really work myself up into tears over how I don't have the Gold Stone a five minute bike ride away anymore, so time to go to work.

L'enfer, c'est les autres

Saw Gilda last night after a busy weekend. It was pretty good, in a French music kind of way. The key to liking French music is to ignore the shitty singing and concentrate on the nice lyrics, and the key to enjoying classic noir is to ignore the plotholes and concentrate on how they talked about sex when the Production Code tried to forbid them to. Rita Hayworth was fucking hot. Holy, as they say, shit.

Looking forward to the trip to Carcassonne on Wednesday like a madwoman. Not just to the possibility of enjoying their interminable heatwave after summer flits away from Belgium in favour of more shitty, shitty rain and cold, not just to the wedding and the attendant drinking and fun times, not just to not working for four days in a row.

Franky what's doing it for me this morning is the prospect of my solo journey itself. Something like 20 hours altogether on trains, all by myself. I know that sounds like lots, and it is, but it's cheaper and more environmentally nice than the plane, which would probably end up taking something close to the same amount time, what with getting out to Charleroi, waiting around in a fucking aeroport, baggage, blah blah blah.

And the prospect of all those hours ALL TO MYSELF (though I will be spending six or so of them trying to sleep on a couchette) is so nice. I have exciting books to read. Only two though. I need at least two more. Maybe four more, because I'm hoping to escape the wedding a bit there and go read on the beach for the Friday. Oh boy oh boy. Good lord. How did personal time get this sort of premium on it, that I'm waiting with trembling anticipation to a train trip by myself? How the fuck am I going to cope when I have children?

Do the corporation with me

I am not insane, or at least not when it comes to monk parakeets. They have taken over.

Yesterday was the corporate party, which is the first such thing I've been to, this being the first honest to goodness corporate type entity I've ever worked for; the television and energy things were non-profits, ridiculous as that may be. It was fun. The locale was pretty and played Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Temptations and such. I guess I like corporate type music. The communist hippie in me, who bulges through the skin in a few places, is still trying to process that people involved in big business are still often fun, nice, witty and intelligent, and that I'm one of them, both for the moment and probably for years to come.

I think what has been stopping me from doing that is that most of my prior corporate-type exposure was to the direct money generators, the sales people. At the party is was so easy to tell who was on the sales team, though I'd met them at most once before - they were taking off their shirts and playing volleyball really seriously. They also told lots of stories about themselves. It was interesting. And I don't mean the stories.

Death struggle between a hippo and a crocodile

Last night I dreamt I was on a tepid jungly littoral, with one bit of safe clean beach and one bit of scuzzy, ominous algaeish beach. I wandered between the two, going 'ewww, eww', until I saw an old man on the dangerous side who had been irresistably drawn to somehow get in the middle of a hippopatamous and crocodile locked in a death struggle there, even though he knew it would mean his own demise. We watched a giant oyster swim away and then I took him ashore. He put on a nice trench coat and his face turned heart attack red. I also dressed, as the weather had turned and we were in something like Vienna, with pagodas and shit, and wet snow falling dully from the sky.

My father, who had also been on the beach, joined us, also wearing a trench coat, though much more dapper of course; my father has a tailor and Brillantine. He offered the suffering old man a cigarette and a slug of scotch from his flask, which he enjoyed briefly before he expired and I woke up. In my dream, I gawped at my putatively non-smoking, non-flask carrying daddy as he handed his contraband over to the gasping man, who was obviously pleased with the attention on the cold, drizzly afternoon it had become.

'Yeah,' my father said, in response to the semi-admiring semi-accusation in my eyes. 'That's right.'

Less defiance, than a note of 'aren't you dense for not cottoning on that I'd been carrying around a flask of scotch and some quality smokes longer than you've been alive, and it's my right, my girl, because I raised you from a blob, what's more this poor old man has probably never had good shit like this in years, and that's the only reason you're finding out about it now.' Except my father is Calabrian, and Calabrians don't need as many words to get things across with crystal clarity. I love that about Calabrians.

I try to tap into my Calabrian heritage at work, when I cram maximum information into my reports, which shouldn't go past a thousand words; I miss 10,000 word academic type essays because I'm a mangiacake. No more reports until the end of September now. That's nice, except I like writing them more than the normal articles. Oh well.

Yesterday there was a mighty explosion at work, as one of my seniors quit and HR asked her to leave right away, paying out her notice instead of her working it out. Something I'd jump at, of course, as every time I quit a job I feel ripped off as if I'd been fired I might have got some free money, or at least pogey. But the manner of the request made her really angry and there was a 'scene,' as us cakers call it. Afterwards, both management and the senior in question were very, very apologetic. Management even took us out for lunch. A nice one, with smoked salmon and buffalo mozzarella. I'm not complaining.

I am wondering what the big fucking deal is, though. People explode, people fight. At the office we button ourselves in so tight and I don't know why, because we aren't any less people for being there. Part of that thing, I think, about how it's rude to discuss your pay when obviously discussing your pay would be a really useful and interesting thing for employees, posing a problem only for the employer who might be held to account for discrepancies.

How did something against employee interest get to be the norm? Why are we all so tame? Okay - we're apathetic about the 'big issues' that happen in countries we can't see and haven't visited: we can go days without thinking about children starving to death or lepers or any number of constant realities. But why approach our own lives and the realities we spend hours of the day living in as though we were potted plants? It's a very caker quality and it's something that pisses me off, about cakerism and about myself as a caker.

Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand

Last night, mined a rich vein of Simpsons we'd found streamed that I'd never seen before. Oh, the pleasure. And I found the answer to the question I'd asked myself so many times, every time I caught an episode of South Park - 'why do I only watch this accidentally?'

It turns out it's because I don't care. South Park could go off the air tomorrow and it would be pretty much okay; considering I get my TV free and on a computer after searching, waiting, and snatching, I might not even notice for a few months. But the Simpsons - oh, I care, and it's hurt not to have it, fucking intellectual property protection.

There's also the fact I'd take five minutes of the Simpsons over a whole season of South Park because it's way fucking funnier. It may be comparing apples and oranges - fewer writers for South Park, lower budget, rightwards Libertarian political sloping, blah blah blah - but then I've never had a problem saying oranges are way fucking better than apples.

What is reality?

A parrot fighting pigeons for scraps on a Saint-Gilles tram track.

Air conditioned discomfort

Like any good colonialists, the F-word and I complain about shitty winter weather but as soon as it very hot we flee towards the air-conditioning, in yesterday's circumstances meaning the Cinéma Arenberg (in the Royal Passages close to the Grand Place, which are full of amazingly useful stuff for a tourist centre feature, like Haagen Das - not the best ice cream but they make milkshakes - book and music stores, and the Taverne du Passage, where the food is both reasonably priced and delicious).

And we fled there because it was playing Inland Empire, the newish David Lynch, and holy shit. I loved it like I haven't loved a movie in years and years. It really appealed to me as a sort of savage fairy tale with all the attendant surreality, with magic, enchantment and cursing all playing roles as though they were people - but for the first time I'd ever seen, done on film perfectly. Not like a film that tries to copy a surreal fairytale book or narrative, but a film that films a fairy tale, letting narrative slide a little since there's only so much you can do in two or three hours, and picking up on the images and the linking. I had never seen that before. Unless you count The Princess and the Warrior, but next to Inland Empire, I don't.

Laura Dern is fantastic as the hero; she made me suspend my disbelief when I didn't even know what I was believing. Great supporting actors. As for the rest I don't really know what to say. David Lynch has a talent for throwing in the most visually disturbing images, and he threw a lot in here. Lots of beautiful ones too. I guess that's what made the three hour progress not really countable or long. There was a lot to fill the eyes.

So that's how it works

It turns out I didn't have culture shock. Just a really upset tummy, in token of which I'm about to take a sick day. After I show up at work, fill in a price chart, update my newslead file, and print off a bunch of phone numbers and notes so that I can go on making research calls from home. It's very strange, this job, in the sense that for the first time ever, I want to do well. I handed in my first big industry feature yesterday, and it was well-received, which sent me over the moon, quietly-like, because of my upset tummy, but over the moon nonetheless.

I've been feeling under the weather for a little while though, so it's time to stay prone for a day. Especially because the lovely F-word has a student who works at an upmarket chocolate store here, and last night he brought me home a bag of nut-free samples, which if I was any sort of woman I would have eaten already. At the moment I'm just staring at it glumly. Awful.

Oh, and you know how when you get in an elevator, you wonder sometimes if it's within the realm of human possibility to accidentally drop your cellphone into the gap between the lift and the floor? It turns out it is not only possible, but that I did it. I'm going to see if they retrieved my SIM card for me - the phone itself is probably a lost cause after falling five floors to the parking lot level - but I'd say the odds are pretty good I'll switch to just using my work cell number this afternoon, which will shortly be on Facebook, as is our new fixed line, which is much cheaper to call from Canada, but I know how fond some of you are of SMSes.

The Outpost of Propaganda

I think I’m starting to have something like culture shock, and I’m pleased it’s come so late after my arrival. A good sign. The weather is just so shitty and depressing. I’m having a hard time figuring out why the fuck anybody lives here, it’s like Vancouver without the sea. That’s not fair, of course; shitty weather aside there’s no comparison. As I’ve wrote a million times it’s pretty and quaint here, just reeking with history and the traces of colonial expropriation. We went to the African museum last weekend and that was a trip . . . and eye-opening trip.

It was founded as a propaganda piece by Leopold, the Belgian king who contracted out the Congo out in the 19th century as though he was having his back yard landscaped, resulting in the de facto slavery of generations of Congolese and laying the groundwork for the intense struggle over resources there that has sparked the slaughter of so many people. An unqualified disaster, and the obsession of Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness and The Outpost of Progress about it.

So everybody in Canada, who’s forced to read Heart of Darkness in school – usually when they’re around 15 and utterly unprepared for such a bleak vision of life, Goths included, and they complain about it endlessly – has some idea that the Belgian experience in the Congo was not an edifying one.

But based on the African museum here, and excepting one new exhibit, the museum still stands for the most part as a propaganda piece for the cause of bringing the darkies civilization and rescuing them from the Arab slave traders.

Well. I guess if they just changed the museum altogether, denied the propaganda as it were, that would be a denial of history, since the propaganda was so strong. It was still odd to be there though. In any old colonial power you can show up at the museums and gawk at the emblems of a time when they stripped the land and people of all they could, but this one was quite special.

And in my culture shock resulting from shitty weather, I walk through Brussels, geek on the lovely architecture, and sometimes go up to the royal district with its beautiful stately whitewashed buildings – and you know, maybe Paris is what it is and London is what it is because of what the French and English once did to their colonies, but here, because of Joseph Conrad and now that museum, it’s always on my mind.

Flemish blogger won't let me give names to my posts anymore. Not that it matters, because today all I want to say is "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuurgggggggh I fucking hate working." I mean, it's less stressful than it was I suppose, as far as stress goes, but I can't get used to feeling like such a sucker - maybe because all of my money to date has been shunted into debt holes and retirement funds that I just might never see in this naughty naughty life so all I feel like my job is getting me is the possibility of impulse buying, which I'm not really into anymore.

Watched The Dirty Dozen last night and thought it was crap, even with Charles Bronson running around in the sort of manly yet tight clothes that were made to be run around in by him and with John Cassavetes being just phenomenal. But the 'boy's own army' whistling and drum music and the winking, winking, winking did not suit a story that culminated in the living immolation of dozens of screaming people, nor did it suit Telly Savalas's freak turn. This movie is a candidate to be remade in the same way Ocean's Eleven was - the original being crap. Of course, when it is - which it will be, Hollywood being what it is these naughty days - I'll hate it because they will never find anyone to cast who's as fucking hot as Charles Bronson or as good at playing an emotionally engaging violent asshole as John Cassavetes. Poor Hollywood.

Just had a weekend visit from Mummy, who was on her way from her own mum in Yorkshire. These visits and the attendant wide eyes and hungry cutlery attending cauliflower that isn't soggy and starches that aren't yorkshire puddings or boiled potatoes make me realize how good the food is here. Too good. So good. If ever I truly become a Belgian, I'll be a'bulgin, and if you don't appreciate the quality of that pun I don't care - I'm too full of food and beer.

During the weekend much family gossip was heard by me. My family gossip has taken a turn for the gross and melodramatic. The details aren't bloggable, but neither are they actually illegal, so just let me say this: I am a caker, and proud of it. Maybe I can eat pig's feet without gagging, maybe I can spend time in the sun without burning, maybe I've spent more time in Italy than most of my generation, maybe I've had more carnal relationships with Italians than have my family members who are actually legally Italian, and maybe there's a whole litany of things that pisses me off about cakers.

None of that changes the fact that I'm a caker through and through: that I'd probably join the Freemasons if they let ladies past the auxiliary; that sometimes I just plain like boiled potatoes, as long as they're dirt fresh spring ones done with a little mint; that I will always take the comfy shoes over the pretty shoes; and that there are some things which are simply not said or done, blush, harumph, let's talk about the weather and just let people live their bloody lives, please.

This is the long way to say that I've always been really, really glad Mummy is my mum, and that I don't have a Mamma, and with this new onslaught of gossip I'm even more so.

But you don't see me

While anybody who even glances at this blog must be sick of my Charles Bronson fangirldom, I can only advise you to suck it up or look away, because it’s the indirect subject of today’s post. You see, this is the first time in ages I’ve been a fangirl, and certainly it’s my first posthumous fangirldom since Alexander the Great got ruined for me by that piece of Oliver Stone shit, but most of all, it’s my first fangirldom since I had reliable access to da Internet, unless you count Stéphane Rousseau, which I don’t because he’s Francophone, which will be the subject of another post.

And what’s striking me as I spend my whole minutes of downtime at work geeking on Charles Bronson websites, topless photos, and Wikitrivia is that there are lots of celebrities who are still alive who probably have even more websites, topless photos, and Wikitrivia being geeked on, and who know it. Let's leave the geeking alone for awhile - being fangirls and fanboys is such a part of human nature I'm not even going to try to attack or defend it - and wonder how famous people deal these days.

At least there was an illusion of privacy back in the day, if you weren't a slavey to a studio who had to date other studio slaveys to stay in the gossip columns and out of gay talk, and who knows if that still happens today anyways. But now anybody who wants to can see Jude Law's smallish nob on holiday for free thanks to da Internet. Back in the day, to see Rudolph Valentino's smallish nob you had to pay backstreet money to shady characters for crummy pictures of his dead body naked in a morgue, if James Elroy is to be believed. Which he is, as with the CIA's publication of "The Family Jewels," we know now that at least half of American Tabloid is true.

I guess what I mean is the Anglo celebrity system has always been voyeuristic and kind of gross, but now the voyeurism and grossness is idiot proof, and something we can do during downtime at work, and open to everyone, all the time. So why do people want to be famous anymore? I mean - it's so obvious you're going to be exposed like that as an intrinsic part of the lifestyle, and I can't imagine even the most pathological attention seeker thinking that would be okay for themselves, that all the adoration would make up for the complete hijacking, it seems, of one's persona. So why?

Speaking of adoration and Charles Bronson wikitrivia, he decided to become an actor for the money. And he used to room with Jack Klugman, who said that he was really good at ironing. Isn't that adorable? Adorable.

Hollywood clockwork

Watched A Clockwork Orange last night, as I had read the book and wanted to see the film again to see what I thought of it now. And I thought that it was sort of shitty and that the book is way, way better. Thought that the film was a popular success, that people don't name it with The House of the Spirits and such like in the 'fuckin' atrocious films made out of good books' category, not because of any directorial genius from Stanley Kubrick, but because of Malcolm McDowell's fantastic portrayal of a flamboyantly evil prole kid.

I don't like Stanley Kubrick much - thought Barry Lyndon was a massive snore and liked Spartacus a lot, which he disowned. Maybe I would like him more if I knew more about cinema and ground-breaking cineaste techniques, but you know what? I don't. And I don't want to. I want to watch movies and not have them be big fucking snores. I want movies based on books to not change the themes of the book unless the themes of the book sucked, which the themes in A Clockwork Orange didn't.

I think this is where my hostility to the movie is coming from. Most of the reason I watched it again is that I couldn't remember how it ended, and it ends very differently from the book - with the idea that now Alex has been 'reformed' into a gleeful monster and is being let out into the world again. And this after the film has toned down his violence, depravity and animal prole-ishness (seriously) so that we have some sort of savage sympathy, the desire to cheer on that beast - in no small part thanks to Malcolm McDowell's performance, but mostly because of subtle changes to the narrative, like the age of some of his victims and an increased focus on consensual sex.

So besides playing down the class-y and violent, perverse elements of the book, the movie utterly changes the much more satisfying ending of the book which I feel all that ultraviolence was naturally leading to and nowhere else. The movie was just too fucking Hollywood in comparison; nothing but a normal heroic pattern except with an anti-hero instead.

Great escapism

Quite sulky about being alive to the world this morning, my head aches and my tummy is telling me I haven't shaken whatever was shaking me this weekend - but Wednesday is the do or die day at work so off I go. I have started to understand why journalists drink so heavily. There is something about the monotony of a weekly or daily deadline - a building effort of brain and nerves. Because right afterwards, there's a release, combined with the awareness that this is as far as you're getting from your next deadline, so you should hurry up and relax.

Don't judge the drunken journalists. There but for the grace of God go we all.

Anyways, to distract me from my impending work, I'd just like to say a word about the hottest movie ever, full of the hottest men ever, because it cheers me up. That's The Great Escape, featuring the hottermost of the toppermost Steve McQueen, James Garner (oh yes he was, bear in mind this was1963), and the king of my fangirl heart Charles Bronson. Steve McQueen always looking at the Nazi guards with that blonde, blue-eyed smart-ass "throw me in solitary all you want because I'm already INSANE" look that was borne out by that deservedly iconic motorcycle ride towards the end, which I've heard he insisted get thrown into the movie - just 'cause.

But nothing compares with Charles Bronson, young and cleanshaven in this movie, talking with an adorable Polish accent, dealing with his claustrophobia and vulnerability, and hanging around in a wifebeater constantly, dwarfing all the other men with his tremendous termendousness. Arms like whole prosciuttos. Jeebus. Actors aren't hot anymore.

If we could take a holiday

I think I'm finally sick of South Park, which is a mercy. I also think I'm getting into some sort of rhythm with my job - maybe because I've been getting bits and bobs of positive feedback and I'm a vain, vain person; maybe because I have to go to a conference for it in the Iberian peninsula at the tail end of the summer over a Thursday and Friday, so I can take some personal time on the Saturday and Sunday to lie on the beach, smoke hash and listen to fado. This fantasy has already become my happy place, or rather my bittersweet, moany place, fado being fado and Iberian hash being what it, also, is.

By way of vacation, that looks like all I get until the end of October when the F-word has his first school holidays and we head to Calabria and Sicily. There's the Pariyorker's wedding in Carcassone which I'm taking four days for in a couple of weeks, but that doesn't count as vacation because it's a wedding so I'll have to think logistically about it and spend at least one day brutally hungover.

I was talking to a co-worker last night from da land of England who was complaining about the paucity of vacations at our company - she's in her first year too and pissed that we only get 10 paid days off in that time, 20 in our second or something like that. I explained to her that in Canada two weeks off is the norm even for people who have been working in our types of job for years, and that we also didn't usually get to choose when we took our paid bank holidays (although I think that might be something special about our job, being all journalistic and shit, and news happening every day).

She looked at me and listened to the words, but you could tell she just wasn't taking them in. Finally she said that at least our company lets you take unpaid time off whenever you want it, and carried on talking about this and that, obviously as relieved conversationally to have gotten away from the realm of labour nonsense that is North America as I was professionally.

The Red Dragon has a rapacious appetite for whist players

Learnt how to play whist last night at the tail end of a pleasurable/painful visit from the Pariyorkers. The pain had little enough to do with them - that was mostly me being relieved and exhausted by work on Saturday to the point of illness, and then more mishaps Sunday, et cetera. Stress, hard work; that all makes me stupid and sick. Oh well. Oooooooh well. Man was born to get and eat his bread in sorrow and in the sweat of his brow, and women were born to work full time for awhile, save a nest egg, invest it and switch to part time work before they lose their minds. Or so the Bible has selectively taught me.

Anyways, whist was great and it reminded me of Mrs. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, which is a great book to be reminded of.

The Pariyorkers are slow movers and lovers of fat mornings, so I had time to dip my foot into the two Bloomsbury books - Madeleines in Manhattan and Mediated. Of course I meant to just read one and then the other, but Mediated, from the first 30 pages or so, looks really, really shitty. I mean, really shitty. A big shitty mess. So I switched to Madeleines in Manhattan and it looks incomparably better - less ambitious in terms of critiquing Modern Living, but charming, atmospheric, coherent and not fucking whiny at least, which is good because I'd prefer to start my relationship with this book provider with a review that isn't foaming over with annoyed bile because I've been forced to read through a whole shitty book that I wouldn't have chosen if I'd been in a bookshop and looked at the wankerish introduction.

Gilgakitty and Encatu

Look - my feisty feline has a purer civilizational provenance than I do, as I'm quite sure I have a significant amount of Neanderthal blood in me, hence my fondness for a cappella music and my eyebrows that shelter me from the rain.

In any case, how amazing to think that a glorious, affectionate creature like my darling calico Lexie is likely to have had the same grandmother 100,000 years removed as a revolting line of bony, ill Siameses that people pay money for. Buying a cat, indeed. How absurd, as if giving money makes it yours. Feeding it and getting it to like you more than all the other people who'd feed it are what makes a cat yours.

I need this weekend - I'm exhausted. Some visitors invited themselves over from Paris and anxious as I am to see them I hope to fuck they don't show up until tomorrow. Also I have some new books to review, this time from Bloomsbury, and they look like I'll have to try hard to like them.

If it wasn't already taken, they should just call that place The Pottery Barn; I don't think I saw a single title I recognized in their catalogue besides Harry Potter's adventures. All the other authors must be pisssed off the entire marketing budget of the place is going into one mega-institution (besides a something for sending review copies to bloggers).

Comics

While we were living in the executive suite, we watched 300, and the last drama whose climax made me laugh that hard was Titanic. I don't consider the film wasted time because the F-word insisted on getting it. That means he's not allowed to mock my film choices ever again without me feigning slow-mo and narrating how shitty I think 300 was in a hoarse voice-over for awhile. These sorts of events have to happen in the life of every couple, sort of like farting or accidentally saying someone else's name whilst intimate - the primary thing is that the other person does it first.

I don't fully understand why things that were obviously much better as comic books are translated to film - they're bringing out Tintin soon, you know, not the Belgians who invented him but Steven Spielberg or some such, and then all this Frank Miller stuff and every super hero but Wonder Woman, though I'm sure she's just a matter of time and I'll see that for sure if they keep the awesome music from the television series. And it's not just Americans, Europeans do it too - Blueberry the cowboy, Asterix, Enki Bilal shit, et cetera. So it's not a particularly New World illness, and not necessarily anything to do with getting comic books to old guys once they figure they're too old to read them, as here guys still read them when they're old.

So I have a feeling the international film industry is simply bereft of any ideas and will take them wherever they find them, even if as unsuitable as, say, Frank Miller or Enki Bilal, who are lovely for comic books and ridiculous for films, as hearing the dialogue they create out loud without being able to geek on their pretty pictures is just fucking embarrassing.

None of this was my point, though. My point was that last night I saw the episode of South Park wherein Mrs. Garrison becomes a lesbian and defends 'Les Bos' from the Persian decorators. And now 300 REALLY wasn't wasted time.

Throw the books at me

Finished an Anthropologist on Mars and I can't do anything except recommend it. I'm going through some sort of analytic crisis - not sure I want to continue because at this point and for the next few months I'd just be paying $80 an hour to narrate a travelogue and that money would be better spent on opera lessons and massages - also starting to think actually being an analyst might be far too much of a combination of bourgeois and fucking hard for me - but obviously I'm still dewdropped over the brain and how it works.

And while it wasn't the most satisfying book in the world - the amount of time Oliver Sacks spent injecting himself into the narrative made me uncomfortable in the same way the amount of time an analyst spends in his analysand's narrative makes me uncomfortable, though I suppose you don't want a neurologist outside of your narrative if you need him - it was fucking astounding. So, nothing but yes. Read it.

Next decided to switch back to novels, thinking that it's best to swing back and forth between fiction and non, and this time it was a copy of A Clockwork Orange that the F-word brought home for me, knowing I liked the movie. It was very different from the movie, or maybe I was different, not having seen the movie in a few years, but I feel like the book spent much more time on class divisions and the movie much more time on Malcolm McDowell, both of which are interesting in their seperate ways. The book felt miles more political and I'd say it's more timely - I think maybe I liked it better, though I'd have to see the movie again to speak with more conviction. I don't remember the movie's ending, for example, and I found the book's ending a little pat, so I must see.

I do know the book achieved something, like it or not, that was as special as Team America and all those marionettes. I wonder if Burgess wrote it and translated it, or just managed to make himself write like that.

A brolly in the wind

Sorry for the silence but our neighbours moved away and took our free internet access with them. It's not as though nothing is happening, not so much navel-gazing as navel-spelunking these days but with good results as far as good results can be expected. I'm getting my priorities in order. At the same time we have been meeting some great people and we are establishing a circle of – maybe – perhaps? – friends, and not just because they're there, but because we all – maybe – possibly? – like each other.

Anyways. More on that when there's more on that. In the meantime: today I heard 'Candle in the Wind II' (the thing Elton John 'sang' after Diana Spencer was smushed up by a bunch of soulless assfucking French paparazzi who probably made a good dollar off of it thanks to Channel 4 and other tasteful media outlets being so fucking classy) while I was shopping for umbrellas on a rainy day. I knew this year would mark the tenth anniversary of her death but I hadn't realized, silly me, that 'song' would go into play rotation again, certainly not that it would go into rotation in Belgium while I was shopping for an umbrella.

This was the first time I'd heard it, as back in 1997 I'd avoided it, just having moved into a university residence where everybody was listening to Pulp and Belle and Sebastien or some such - not music so much as a wall of gentle sound and clever lyrics to protect you from less gentle sounds and stupider lyrics, you remember the defensive nature of young people's music in the late 90's - and even at that tender age I'd taken a deep dislike to that 'song' as 'sung' about Marilyn Monroe.

Because I don't know anything about Marilyn Monroe, but I know she hadn't lived her life like a candle in the wind. You know what lives its life like a candle in the wind? Nothing. You know where a candle in the wind turns to when the rain cuts in? Nowhere. It's a fucking candle. It doesn't live or turn or do anything except burn. It's made of some string and the shit that bees clean off their fucking mandibles, or whatever.

But today I was a captive audience at the umbrella shop for a full 30 seconds because the weather was really quite bad and I really wanted a burgundy umbrella, which wasn't immediately forthcoming. So for a good minute I had to hear the newer abuses of the 'candle in the wind' simile - even fucking stupider this time, followed up by lines about how the candle in the wind didn't falter, when obviously a candle in the wind is going to fucking falter constantly until it just goes out. Finally I left the shop without an umbrella, got rained on, and bought myself a waffle to make up for it.

It's too bad, that shit Diana Spencer did about land mines was classy and somebody should have written a good song about it - I mean a princess and a bunch of landmines, surely that's a sweet spot to start composing from, half Sir Walter Scott and half Tank Girl - but it's 10 years after she gets dead and we're still getting this saccharine vampiric dribble about waxy dripping English Roses feet pitter-pattying against her country's shores. Ugh.

Eating parties

Yesterday Work had a lunchtime pizza party to 'celebrate' the firing of a management guy who'd been there for years and years. It was a light-hearted occasion, made so mostly by the fired man , a popular figure, who in his speech ripped gently into the company and mentioned a bunch of people who'd been fired in various re-shufflings already. It's a good thing I don't visualize a future for myself there because I don't have one - that was sobering. The pizza was good though.

There was also a drinking party for the fired man after work, which I didn't show up to because I had to hurry home to cook for a little dinner party here. It wasn't quite our first, but it was our first involving local people, so that was exciting and nice. People here are so personable, but not supine - it's easy to disagree with them in a friendly sort of way. I like it a lot.

Had a dream that I was yelling at a group of fighting girls who'd got a lawyer in to sort out their troubles. I was insisting that the economic model of the anglo-saxon legal systems meant that no lawyer was ever going to want to sort out a problem and any resolution they arrived at with his 'help' would be a pure accident. Woke up and thought about that, hoped it wasn't true, thought it probably was.

The Triumph of the Passion

Last night I watched The Triumph of the Will and The Passion of the Jew back to back. The F-word was quite excited about The Triumph of the Will, pointing out its influences on modern propoganda and how undated that made it - how its tricks had been exploited - and also how people in the German backwaters must have felt when they saw it in the cinema, how they'd just be so impressed by the movement and decide to join it.

I wondered how many of the people in it were dead ten years later and wondered how many of the people in the crowd scenes had just showed up to all those parades because television hadn't been invented yet and there was nothing else on that day. Mostly I wanted it to end. Maybe I have no attention span, but not even Leni's loving, lingering shots of hot genetically pure men could keep me interested in all the hours and hours of Nazis and towns and banners and blah blah blah. I don't know what all the fuss is about, unless it's to get old twats back into The Guardian.

Obviously, The Passion of the Jew was much, much, much better. I think the F-word enjoyed it more because the poor bastard has actually had to sit through The Passion when someone he was visiting rented it, but for myself I don't know when I've laughed so hard.

I found myself an easy way out

I have given up The Fatal Shore as a bad job and now I'm reading An Anthropologist on Mars. This represents a huge improvement in my quality of life and I'm wondering if I hate Robert Hughes: he's far too sloppy a writer and organizer of thoughts and references to be useful or smoothly enjoyable academically, and he uses too many big words to be widely popularly accessible, which in my head looks like being clever for the sake of it and not being clever for the sake of passing the cleverness on. But whatever. He built a career out of it so it must be working, and when I think back hard I remember his enthusiasm made his art books really nice to read.

Anyways, An Anthropologist on Mars is fucking terrific and organized at this point, which is, mind you, only about sixty pages in. The first case study is about an artist who loses any relationship with colour after a brain injury and the little exploration of colour given in it in neurological terms is so very interesting.

Never so sugary

Went back to the instrument museum with my mum, who is visiting, and managed to get through the whole thing because we started early. That meant we got to go to the yummy and reasonably priced restaurant on the roof - delish though too salty, like all 'classy' food. Got to listen to my fave thing again - let's see what YouTube has in the way of that - not much. Oh well. Look out for the Ivory Coast horns when you go. Got to see and hear the glass harmonica too. So can you, because YouTube sucks less for that. Enjoy.

Glowers hath murdered sleep

Wednesday is the peak of work hardness, and I must thank heaven for that small mercy because by my reckoning I got shit-all sleep last night. Anything I write today will be in reference to what took away my sleep, which will be more appropriate to write about either a year from now or never. So I'll direct you instead to an extended review of After Dark and wish you good day, sir, madam.

Spinning off the shoulders

I'm trying to pretend my job isn't eating my brain by spending at least a few minutes a day with Robert Hughes' Fatal Shore. Some day when I'm not rushing off to work, watching my twenties spin away from me like a dead goldfish down the shitter, I'll write about it more at length, but suffice to say now it's like watching an awesome car wreck.

I liked his book about Goya better because it had more pictures and was better organized; Fatal Shore is all over the place, with apparently the only organizing factor being an artistic rise and fall of gross-out factors and accounts of indignation-rousing monstrosities. Of course, that has its own morbid charm, and I'm not considering looking away as long as I'm not slowing down the traffic behind me.

Vagaries of the male race

Masonic Boom is back and her latest post reminded me of my walk home from work last night. I don't know what it is about Brussels - if this is a wierd place or if I just notice weird stuff more here . . .

Anyways, I was walking down the same street I saw the window-jumper on, thinking about who knows what, and suddenly a front door opens to the view of a lovely naked man picking up his copy of Vlan. Perfectly timed, to the degree that I wondered if I was being flashed, but then his attitude was one of a man who had opened the door to get his magazine caught in the hinge without really considering the consequences of doing so naked on a busy street; he performed a little dance to try to shield his bits. All of this happened in the span of two seconds and I kept walking without turning my head or doing anything extraordinary with my eyes as though I'd noticed nothing, while thinking ROCK AND ROLL. ROCK AND ROLL.

I was in a really good mood after that, and I remembered posing for an artist a few years ago who hadn't had a naked chick model for years before that, and how he said afterwards looking at tits he hadn't seen before always put him in a really good mood. This story doesn't have a point and now it's over.

A few minutes later, when I was nearing the flat, a 10-ish boy was keeping pace with me while walking his bicycle on the pavement. My heart was going out to him because he kept crashing the pedals into his calves. He looked slightly perturbed, and kept looking at me, finally approaching me in his formal kiddie French.

'Excuse me, madame, may I ask you a question?'

'Good sure that yes.'

'Is it normal to have a red mark on my arm like this after walking my bike as I hold it by the handlebars?' And he indicated a very faint reddening on his forearm.

'No, not for truly. A little bit of ache, could be, but not a mark red. It must be something of other.'

As you see I'm not fully confident in my French so the conversation ended there. I should have reassured him it was nothing, of course, instead of leaving him hanging, wondering if the 'something of else' was leprosy or the bubonic plague, but that didn't even occur to me until five minutes later. I must shed my discomfort with this language. After all, I'm fully capable of expressing 'I am certain that it not is the plague bubonic, but you could consider of to put on it some creme anti-bacterial' and there is no need for me to go around scaring cute little Belgian kids.

Music makes the Belgian museum come together

It has started being a right bitch to go to work on Mondays. Nice weekend - met some very nice new people and saw the best museum ever, or one of them, which is the Musée des Instruments de Musique. It's in the finest Art Nouveau building in a city of staggeringly fine Art Nouveau buildings - fuck, do I love Art Nouveau - as the F-Word says, the last time architects tried to make their art aesthetically pleasing and livable - anyhoo, it's in one of those.

And it has intruments from all over the world on the ground floor, and then classical instruments on the first, and then I don't know because we got kicked out when it closed. Which is something, because we were there for two hours and usually after an hour in a museum, I'm thinking of getting a waffle or having a beer - sad but true. The charm isn't just the insane variety of instruments, like glass trumpets and displays of international jew's harps and bagpipes, although that's worth the price of admission - they also soundtrack it, so that most of the display cases broadcast a performance on the instrument it displays to the headsets they hand out. Fucking amazing.

And I'll tell you one thing: without Africa, we'd all be fucked. We would have no rock and roll or dirty beats, and no bass at all. We'd all be fucking polka-ing to violins and Edith Piaf, not that that would be so bad occasionally, but I like having a little more. It was really striking how contemporary the African instruments sounded, especially from the Congo - the beats and the instruments.

Here's an extended Suite Française review, and I am off.

Knowing my ABCs

For awhile my job was subjecting me to near-functional illiteracy- I'm so busy I stagger home like a zombie, cook dinner, chat, and fall asleep after watching whatever episode of South Park the F-word downloaded. One good thing about the hours and hours of travelling from that last trip to Canada was being able to wallow through books like a pig in tasty, tasty shit.

1. City of Glass, Paul Auster. I want to like Paul Auster because Smoke and Blue in the Face were such great movies and because he was recommended by Dale, whose blog I can read until I'm blue in the face, but I just don't, at least on the basis of The Brooklyn Follies and this book.

One thing City of Glass has in common with Brooklyn Follies is that they both have really great titles. Somehow that just makes it worse for me that the novels themselves aren't better. The ideas he plays with are fun but his characters are so wooden, so stock, so unbelievable as creatures - I wish he'd just write essays. City of Glass was extra annoying because he introduced himself as a non-omniscient character in it, and I hate when people do that. Makes me think of Martin Amis and then I'm in a bad mood.

2. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, A.S. Byatt. This was a re-read - I had to re-read it when I leant it to a friend, who then wanted to talk about it, and I couldn't because I didn't remember a damn thing. That's great. I hope I forget it again so I can read it afresh again. Marketed as fairy tales for grownups, but actually about the same level of sex and violence you'd find in the source material for Disney, besides the eponymous novella in the collection which has slightly more sex perhaps, and with a genie no less, which is hot.

The shorter stories are charmingly told without Margaret Atwood-style heavy-handedness, and the novella has that yummy A.S. Byatt charm of playing with delightful, abstract or difficult ideas within an engaging, beautiful narrative structure that was so evident in Morpho Eugenia, the novella that got turned into the vastly inferior Angels and Insects . . . Paul Auster, take note . . .

3. After Dark, Haruki Murakami. Japanese deliciousness. It goes somewhere inside the reader without going anywhere at all, really. Short, seemingly slight, and yet each secondary character is so well delineated they don't seem like secondary characters . . . each coincidence so well written there doesn't seem to be a coincidence . . . Paul Auster, take more notes. I have to write an extended review of this one to keep getting free books, so I'll give the hollas a rest for now, but it's great.

4. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. So fucking good. I'd read David Golder before and not really liked it, besides the great scene at the end, so I was thinking this would be more free-book-getting-duty-reading, but no. No no. Rough draft of two parts of a planned four or five part epic, that reads better than most books that get all the time they need. If someone handed it to me without telling me that, I wouldn't have been able to tell, I don't think. Doesn't feel like it ends up lickety-split. Charlotte Bronte-ish in how the descriptive passages surpass the dialogue, though the dialogue is good, and yet so very Russian in its scope, and so very harsh on the decline of the French.

It sounds trite to say it's a tragedy she wasn't able to finish it, when the death of the dimmest dimbulb in the Holocaust was a greater tragedy than a mere book getting abandoned. But I will say I hate the French a little more than I did before for allowing this woman's death before the epic was finished. She was writing at the height of her powers and it would have been a classic, a staggering classic, and it probably already is.

Pop! goes my ears

Two plane rides. Four movies. Hours of pain.

1. Night at the Museum. Masculine fantasy about being a slacker loser and still being a good father because the waxworks come to life at the place where you're a security guard. Especially the cute 'waxworks' of the cute animals who were cutely shot and stuffed. Lousier than it sounds, thanks to efforts at emotional interaction between the horrid Ben Stiller and a bunch of off-set semi-famous types doing cameos as midgets. Whole lines that mean nothing. Rubbish. Pain. Ugh.

2. The Pursuit of Happyness. The story of becoming a stockbroker and rescuing yourself and your son from penury. The premenstrual part of my brain thought it was another masculine fantasy, but the brain brain part enjoyed its message of fortune favouring the brave. It was fine.

3. Wild Hogs. Pain. Pain pain pain. I understand this movie didn't tank and disappear immediately upon release, which is only explicable if the masculine fantasy put forth here - geeky, henpecked half-men can find themselves and earn the world's and their families' respect by driving across the country having unfunny pratfalls - is one that struck some sort of popular chord. Vomit excrement Harley Davidson commercial shit. This movie airs in hell.

4. Music and Lyrics. After all that masculine fantasy I was quite looking forward to some feminine fantasy, figuring a change must be as good as a rest. I was wrong. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore acting in two different movies, spliced together, both of them really shitty and the result more shitty than the sum of its parts. The chemistry between them was so bad I was confused when they started making out. Opening and closing 80's music video sequences featuring Hugh Grant as a A-Ha-type got plugged by my boss, who liked the film, as a 'redeeming' feature. I just saw an insult to A-Ha.

Home again, home again

Jiggedy jog. Funny how soon this place got to feel like home. Maybe it was because in Canada I didn't go anywhere that could have been home - Luke Duke's place on the very night he bought another house, a (half) night at Giulietta's, a night at the smashing place Sugar had found for her wedding, and one surreal-y awful sleepless night on the plane that I spent wondering how my cat was doing in the hold. Yes. Lexie is here with us now. We braved the douanes and her too-fresh rabies vaccination and her cuteness won us through.

In fact it was quite striking how people didn't crash into my luggage cart and how they smiled constantly and obligingly in my direction when there was a cat carrier perched on top of my heavy, heavy stuff. I imagine it's something like carrying around a cute baby. Nonetheless I am very, very happy the trip is over, and I'm sure my darling is too. She looks perfectly content but I won't be sure she is until it's evident she's figured out this complicated new European kitty litter.

The wedding was incredible, incidentally, the most emotionally and spiritually honest and true ceremony I'd ever attended, and the most evidently happy bride and groom. They did lots of things outside of the tradition that was established over the last hundred and fifty years or so - you know, in the time where the wedding industry took over so getting married became more than getting a bunch of townsfolk to stand on the church steps while the priest shouted "these people are allowed to fuck now" and everybody got liquored up. Despite this I'm sure it appealed to all the traditionalists in the crowd and it was certainly very touching for me. The events and location of the wedding were also incredible - forest vermin and my five horrid mosquito bites notwithstanding it was a great idea to have the events in a place that was like a playground for grownups, where we could run around barefoot and relax.

So, so good to see everyone too - so good - even better than I'd thought. Their spawn, too. Little Bitch's little baby is stunning, and Spencer Tracy is awesomer every time I see him. How scattered we all are. . . representing all over the world, besides Africa and South America. Something should be done about that. I do think it would be a good idea for semi-annual group vacations. See how we change, see how our attachments change, all over the world. Very pretty idea.

I can see every obstacle in my way

My, it was an awful trip getting here; I'm boycotting France for awhile, I think, although Carmen kindly offered the loan of her apartment during her next holiday and we'll probably accept, being fond of lovely, tastefully furnished Parisian lofts and handsome neighborhoods with more patisseries than yoga - erm - what do you call a yoga gym? A depot? I don't know - than yoga depots.

So many things have been so trying that last night, after finally getting to bed in my brother's vermin-infested Donlands basement (which is no reflection on his family's housekeeping as Toronto is full of vermin - I hope Charlie and Minou like eating bugs, Sugarplum), despite my extreme exhaustion I couldn't sleep with frustration and tears of unwarranted self pity until I took fifteen minutes to take stock of each of the problems I was currently facing and think up three or four solutions for each. Then I felt good. I've been under a mischievous star which hasn't interfered with the overall good qualities of my life but has been making almost every small thing that could go wrong go wrong - one of those situations where the temptation is to stamp your feet but the only solution is taking control.

In any case, it's lovely to be with my family now - everybody but Elvis is here - and while I'm not in the thralls of ecstatic return because frankly, Toronto is a lot uglier than Brussels, it was great this morning to speed around on Luke Duke's big manly bike on the wide roads where I wasn't flipping over tram tracks or atmospherically quaint cobblestones, and then getting epilated by those nice Indochinese ladies up the street from my old apartment and buying enough Burt's Bees cosmetics to see me through until an understanding friend or relative visits Brussels.

Every Stygian stench of the rainbow

Just a quick note to say I'm in Paris. Getting off Thalys at that post-apocalyptic stinkhole, the Gare de Nord, made me hate the French for mocking the intelligence of Belgians, who at least have public transportation that doesn't smell like incontinent corpses.

Stormed to the filthy metro station and had an internal debate over which underground line here is sketchiest. I think it's probably the magenta line, though the navy blue line and the provençal orange line are also both unsettling in terms of violence. The forest green line is fine, but there are too many shitty buskers on it due to the Montmartre stops and security being intimidated by the Marx Dormoy crowd. And the space age Tyrian purple line goes through Madeleine, which smells like stewed shit. It ties with the magenta line for nasal offensiveness.

When it comes to the RER, the lapus lazuli line wins the stench, violence and sketch factor hands down. That's magnifique because as it goes to the aeroports and a couple of the train stations, it's how most unsuspecting tourists are introduced to the city. The seemingly inoffensive beige line, however, is the only public tranport line here where I've seen purse snatchers or muggers in action. Besides the magenta line, of course, which only sort of counts as the victim was a bellowing American who was silly enough to keep his cash in his sock, where it made a big cash-shaped lump.

Also, the magenta line has the benefit of being the one that takes me to Carmen's house in the south, where I'm very happy to be, not having seen her for a year, how ridiculous. This is where I realized I was obliged to move back to Europe after I'd finished my thesis. Because of people like her and the human beauty of this continent - even though bits of its public transport smell like a sweaty giant's ass crack - this is where I realize now that that's so fucking awesome I could weep.

Seems like folks turn into things that they'd never want

Starting to get a really put-upon feeling about the events of the next week or so. I wonder when I started not being able to handle stress all that well. I blame the thesis, or just Paris in general. Just robbed me of my ability to let things slide. Or it could be that things matter more these days. I don't know. Anyways, I'm going to Paris tomorrow night, and Canada the next morning, and then running around like a chicken that's just lost its head. Thank god I love the people involved. As I get older I realize more and more how fucking lazy I am and have less and less of a problem with it.

Old colleagues came to visit from shithole school and brought box of books I'd had shipped to it. Finally get to read City of Glass. Also got the shoes for Sugar's wedding, just in the nick of time. And now to work.

There's more than one kind of herb

I haven't had a mouthful of reefer since arriving in Europe, and now we have plants on our back balcony we can't actually smoke. But I'm so proud of them. Aren't they lovely? Just corner grocer's seedlings but they're doing well.

This is a lousy photograph trying to give some idea of what our back view is like; trying to get across how expansive and cosy it is at the same time. There are so many birds here too.

I want a day or two to just hang around my apartment and this weekend is supposed to be three days long, but once more I'm working through the holiday so I can go to Canada on Wednesday without losing too much money. And on Sunday, we're going to Leuven to meet some old colleagues - not that I mind - Leuven is a fun town, though I question how fun it will be without Little Bitch, who, thank goodness, I'll finally see at Sugarplum's wedding.

Spent yesterday's lunchtime looking for bras that would look okay under the bridesmaid dress, which has a low back that doesn't accomodate my need for tit scaffolding well. My chest is honestly not that big compared to what I see on the street every day, but every time I shop for a specialty bra I feel like I'm trying to fit a beanbag chair in a ladle. Oh well. At least they're sexy.

Watchagonnado

Yesterday was hard - high point was saline gargle and snort to stop myself from getting the F-word's cold, and realizing that now I can drink through my nose. Much stricter editor at the job, and instead of a few green squiggles there were many red crosses across my articles. So I was in a foul mood going home, and as I did I saw a man on the pavement who I think had jumped out of a window.

It's not like in the movies because you think that he looks so normal, except with maybe three things that are really wrong. There were already people screaming into their cellphones at the emergency services, who tore around the corner as I walked past. It was odd to just walk past, but odder to not know what to do, I suppose because there was nothing to be done. No more cries for help that needed answering there.

What a world. I don't even know what's on my mind today.

I forgot the storm in music.

I'm reading Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott to calm down a bit in the evenings. I picked it up because it's one of the handsome old books that came to me when my Grandfather died, I didn't feel like reading Jung's lecture notes, and the F-word is monopolizing The Fatal Shore, which we're reading concurrently (not a good idea - note to couples: always buy two copies of Robert Hughes' histories at a time to preserve domestic harmony).

And it's beautiful. Magical even - words like 'snood' make me giggle but whenever I'm distracted away from the poem by something outside it I realize that it's been painting the most incredible pictures in my head, and that all the alterants I've snorted, licked, swallowed, smoked or absorbed through my mucous membranes don't come close - not to the waving banners of beauty or fear all those words can start flapping in my brain.

I haven't read poetry very much since my undergrad, when I went on a fantastic binge in the last year, courtesy of a lovely professor who made the English romantics make sense and who led me on a directed study through Donne, Wyatt and Petrarch to make me use my Italian in a poetic context. We also got to study the Dorothy Sayers translation of the Divine Comedy and I got to do that in Italian too, though I found it about as basculating as reading the Canterbury Tales (that is, quite). We also studied the Canterbury Tales, and lots and lots of classical poetry too, including and especially Homer and Virgil.

So it was lots and lots of poetry, really, and I enjoyed it, and until I went to Italy and found myself under a massive pile of men I was quite sure I'd go back to school to study comparative literature or something of the sort. Now, my point isn't that I couldn't have done something more different from that if I'd tried (honestly - because I'd have flunked out of a math or science course, numbers giving me wrinkles and all). My point, or rather the destinations of my thoughts which are not particularly pointy, is that

1. Now I understand why I hate modern novels with too many adjectives (Zadie Smith, anyone?). For me descriptive language should be beautiful - not just descriptive - or else I might as well just read some fucking poetry, mightn't I?

2. I'm glad I didn't study poetry in a graduate context because my instinct that the institution would rob me of my love for the poems was probably right, as my enjoyment of them is very visual and not particularly analytic, as my enjoyment of almost everything else is.

But. That's only the case if I start reading more poetry than I've been reading over the last seven years.

Internetworking

I hate networking and I'm trying to work out why . . . maybe it's because human relationships should be built on love, the exchange of ideas and fucking, in that order, and networking would have no place in that if people were more direct animals. Don't get me too wrong - I'm better with conferences, for example, than I used to be and usually end up enjoying them at least a little, because I can often find enough people at them who can start talking to me at an intellectual level above the 'networking' plane once they get going about something they care about.

But I don't like networking, and I think I don't like it because there's the idea that you have to be nice to a person because they're being nice to you when you know they're only being nice to you because they're professionals who want something, and there's no visible way the exchange is going to work out all that well for me since all I want to do with my corporate future is quit and be an analyst or a writer or a muckraking journalist instead.

As if networking is limited to corporate structures though. Sigh. Anyways and especially, it's been on my mind because of Facebook. Some people are more network-y on it than others and it really annoys me - brings networking down to its laziest denominator - you don't even have to pretend to smile at your interlocutor while you're using it. You can just do this :-), or possibly this ;-), even this :-D, and not risk getting extra wrinkles.

In other news, they sell Pocket Coffees here and I think this may be my home city. I've felt that way before though.

So much money, so little truth

So my job is giving me strange ideas about human nature, or just backing up ones I already had - I don't know.

This one story, which obviously I can't tell you much about because people pay kajillions of dollars for the magazine so copyright is what it is, is getting to me a little. A factory is closing down in a district that has had lots of shutdowns recently, and my job was to write an article about why, how much product volume is leaving the sector, how many workers getting shafted, et cetera - you know, a normal trade magazine article.

Investigating it was interesting because, outside of a couple of friendly temp and tech guys, everybody referred me to TWO P.R. agencies or else didn't have a word to say outside of referring me to a very vague press release. Neither did the P.R. agencies, with the bonus that they tried to get psychomological by talking about how the story was already old news . . .

Professionally speaking for me it wasn't a problem, though it will be for the company in question if they care about such things, because the worker's unions were ecstatic to talk to me and tell me whatever they thought I wanted to hear. I got the material I need. But it was interesting in that everybody I spoke to at the company who was too temporary or techy (that is, essential to the physical functioning of the business) to really be a part of the company hierarchy was very friendly and willing to talk. And then, the hierarchy people weren't only unwilling to talk, but were unwilling to talk and then referred me to outsourced labour units (the P.R. companies) whose job was to be unwilling to talk, and who could be expected to have no practical relationship to the sector or practical sympathies with the workers getting shafted.

It was puzzling to me at first - why would so much money be spent on something so seemingly redundant, when you could just insist your workers refer inquiries obliquely to the press release, instead of insisting your workers refer inquiries to the press release AND then to these two outsourced stonewallers who were using psycholomogy a teenager who'd watched Mean Girls without understanding it would be able to see through?

And then as I thought about my job over the past couple of weeks, I came up with three thoughts that feel right:

1. People have an instinct to tell the truth

2. People have an instinct to sympathize with other people

So. Groups of people - companies - have to spend millions of dollars outsourcing third person inquiries to public relations firms, whose employees don't have an emotional attachment to the truths and people concerned. Because if they didn't, eventually people's instinct to tell the truth and to sympathize with other people will overwhelm their instinct to obey a hierarchical instruction.

Maybe this is just common sense but it still shocked me. What strange beasts we are, what a mass of contradictions and social neuroses . . . Anyways, I'm off to work again. If you get bored today and feel like something funny/depressing, look for the animated BBC series Monkey Dust. So much guilty, disgusted laughter.

Oddities

Yesterday was odd. Odd enough that I won't resist the urge to gradually make this blog more and more like a journal - I left work totally unsettled because of it all.

The day started with walking to work through the absolutely silent streets of Ascension Day, a public holiday here. That was odd enough because the streets are generally jam packed to a stupid degree with back-ups from fender benders or from some twat trying to parallel park on a badly placed dime. Too much money, too many big cars. I could hear the birds all the way to the office and seemed to see a lot of things I'm too busy avoiding being hit by a car to see generally.

When I was walking down my erstwhile business class but presently abandoned avenue, I was accosted by a man who looked to be tidy but fairly fresh off a Congolese boat, the Congo being landlocked I know, but there you are. I saw him smiling ingratiatingly as he approached me, and in those few seconds I decided I knew the neighborhood well enough to give directions, that I had enough change to be panhandled, that I had a repertoire of ripostes to invitations to join religions and sexual situations, and that I remembered the lower-body skeletal manipulation movements that would let me fight off anything aggressive.

But then he said, in a childish voice and using a familiar address but with perfectly correct French, "I'd like to say that it would be nice to be friends, if you want."

I was shocked and quickly went on a cold autopilot, assuming there was a sexual aspect to all of it; made a dismissive sound and went to my office. Then I proceeded to feel awful about it the rest of the day.

It's statistically probable I was right to assume it was the beginning of a pass, but the least I could have done was ask him how I could have been his friend. F-word pointed out there was a fair chance the answer would have been disgusting. But I was ready to be disgusted - I assumed I'd be disgusted - and maybe I wouldn't have been disgusted, so it couldn't have hurt to ask. Maybe he was too embarrassed to just ask for the euro or two I would have given him if he'd asked flat out.

Or worse: maybe he really did need some sort of help that I could possibly have given and I've got to a point where I just don't give strangers that kind of help anymore because my perception of the human race is so low, which sucks for him, and sucks for me, because it means I'm at least a little bit disgusted all the time now. I don't know what to do about that, but I think it means I should volunteer within a structure with people who need help, since the rest of the world shouldn't have to pay for me being disgusted with it.

Anyways, once I got to the office the day kept getting stranger, but I'll have to write about that tomorrow because now it's time to go to the office again.

I happily disgust me

Guess who has free Internet at home? And a HIGHER paycheque than she'd been told in the interview? And a job she's getting to like? And a boy who is the one she likes best? Things, big and small, are just so fucking lovely at the moment that I can't help but be paranoid they'll stop - that I'll be hit by a car or suffer an embolism mid-song. I should probably relax; no doubt I'll fuck it up before long without any need for paranoia.

That sentence had a tree-falling-in-the-forest-making-a-sound feel.

Anyways, I'm visiting home in a little while. It won't be a big trip, hardly big enough to make any effort to change my internal clock (that fucking cockwank of a school where I worked gave me my Early Waking Powers ultra-fast), but I'll see my family and with any luck a good number of friends too; even if Toronto goes ballsy with all the running around and trying to bond with the children I'll see lots and lots of people at Sugarplum's wedding.

My generation is in the wedding period of socialization, seems like - we get this, and then we get baby showers and stuff, and eventually funerals, I suppose. Sorry, but being in a good mood always makes me morbid. And I think that socialization in itself is the best reason in the world to get married; weddings are more fun than funerals, at least for the people who aren't suffering through all the preparation. It's age old social glue, whether one does it in a mayor's office or not.

Like Nicholas Sarkozy's wife, who he met when he was marrying her to another man. I stand by everything I wrote in my last blog entry, but I'm also getting discomfiting love butterflies for that snide little troll, which I'm shocked to realize I've had on and off since an interviewer asked him if he ever imagined being president while he looked in the mirror shaving in the morning, and he just said "Pas seulement quand je me rase." I don't know if it's a question of sexuality shifting with age, but I'm starting to have a fetish for off-the-cuff, simple, yet smart-ass and loaded statements. At least, I think that's what all this is about. Or else this is just what happens when I don't see my analyst for a couple of months.

Liking things more

Predictably, I like my job way more now that I've got used to being in an office again and have scraped together the balls to start pursuing people for stories. I was having a three-day blockage (hmm) about the audacity of it all; it goes against every fibre of my Calabrian three-monkeys convictions to call strangers and ask them to tell me things about their business. Especially since all the tips my predecessor left were for Russians, and I find Russians intimidating. But then I realized time would pass slllllooooowwwly until I was fired if I didn't start doing things, and now I do it, and it's not bad - they need the publicity as much as we want to give it and the worst they can do to me isn't much.

Saw "Dick in a Box'" for the first time last night. I wonder how many cockbrains actually did that on their ladies' special occasions immediately afterwards.

Speaking of cockbrains, have you heard about this past election in France - the one that has been all about change, an end to stagnation, while featuring both parties who have been stagnating filthily along since the establishment of whatever fucking millionth republic the French have rioted their way to now?

Sarkozy and Royal could present themselves in whatever shiny white suits and snarly toff poses they liked, but only a huge pack of idiots could have forgotten the people behind them were exactly the same as those behind their revolting predecessors, and that Sarkozy only started representing a change from his political godfather and mentor, Chirac, when he made a strategic party power grab too early. Luckily for Sarkozy and Royal, the huge pack of idiots turned out in droves over the French elections.

I try to remember that the French electoral system isn't as representative as it seems from being so complicated, and that it's madness to expect Corsicans, Parisians, Bretons, Alsatians and such like to create a functioning centralized government together. But when 85% of the population turns out for a vote for change and this shit is the best they can do, it makes me think they just keep on getting the government they deserve.

I like Belgium so much better it's not even human.

Wahhhh

Predictably, the first weekend I have that involves a fair amount of laxity in the stress department I've got wildly sick - that clever body of mine saving it all up for when I have the leisure to huddle in the executive suite for a day or two, and when the F-word is feeling indulgent enough to get groceries and DVDs. It's not so pleasant - running a temperature and having all this new industry jargon swimming endlessly through my dozy brain, and occasional moments of semi-clarity when I go into a deep, deep rebellion at my own plan of spending the last years of my twenties working in an office.

I feel like a big impostor there, which is strange because by yesterday I was pretty comfortable with most of the things I'll have to do. And it's not as though the other employees seem off - certainly more 'authentic', whatever that means, than people who were gung-ho about the television business. I don't know. I guess I haven't completely dealt with the fact that I'm going to be working hard and working full time just at the time in my life when I'm realizing that avoiding that was the whole point of the human race having an Industrial Revolution and female emancipation.

Anyways. We don't live in a post-industrial paradise yet and I have to make my money someday. And I'm doing it in a beautiful city, from a beautiful apartment, and getting good money working in a seemingly good office to do it. I don't give myself much more than three years before I start popping babies or just say fuck it and go to shrink school, but even that sounds like a jail sentence. Maybe two years would be enough . . . or maybe they'll sack me next week. We'll see.

Quickie

New apartment is beautiful and signed for and things are great but stressful.

Drought still in progress and it has started to annoy and disturb me. Holocaust denial is a crime in a whole whackload of countries, climate change denial should be too . . . such a law would serve a much more practical purpose than spending public money prosecuting silly pisspot 'academics' whose girlfriends had dumped them for Jewish men, or whatever.

This is the land of random, surreal beauty and I don't think the EU would work based anywhere besides the bizarre fantasy place.

It's all about the French

The new job starts in an hour and a half. Excited and happy, and very very happy to be in Brussels. We spent the weekend looking at apartments and pounding the pavement to see For Rent signs in appropriate neighborhoods, and holy FUCK, people here are nice. In the south I thought people were so nice (outside of the cockhead administrators of my ex-school, but more on that later) because they were country folk, but so many absolute strangers have volunteered their help here, so many absolute strangers have put themselves out of their way to advise or direct us, without us even asking . . .

In France, Belgians had a reputation for being dumb - like people from Newfoundland in Canada. I think that's because they're about ten times nicer than the French, pound for pound, even with the huge influx of expats in Brussels matching up to the huge influx of tourists in Paris. This niceness must baffle the French so much that they assume they're stupid. Even though childcare, the health service, and pensions here continue to work after a fashion, and even though half of France's cultural icons from the last century (weak though some, like Johnny Hallyday, appear to my critical faculties) are of Belgian descent.

Anyways. Time to memorize industry jargon.