the prairie tune

its not because of the regina pats, and its not the drive from the jaw to pense; its a nice drive, though sometimes you want the back door, if you will, sometimes you prefer the moscow - tver; or its nice to drop in on a peaceful slumbering lumsden without warning and honk your horn: though you must believe me if i say its not childish public mischief. i wish there was a way to honk my horn in lumsden, or stony plain for that matter, without upsetting the natives. geez buddy, its just an animal thing, its just an instinct for self-preservation, its just the same thing that mixes all the words up in the dyslexic's eyes EVERY day, on purpose. its just the same thing that shakes the hands in saskatoon, and worries the heart in medicine hat - its flat buddy! its all flat! its true: my dog did run away! my childhood was only dogs running away, always away! where were the dogs with the ill-tempers?! where were the jumping, biting dogs?! the ones agressive with the hatred of their previous beating owners? has it all been swallowed up by the south saskatchewan? or the north!? did it ever make it past the bend in wakamaw?
whatever

A Buyer's Market

It took me a good minute to finish Anthony Powell's second novella. There were a number of reasons for this.
First, I became discouraged by the banality of it all. Knowing that there was no deeper meaning, no great (of even mundane) revelation waiting for me at the end, I swiftly tired of the narrative. I believe I mentioned in my review of 'A Question of Upbringing' that I was magnanimous. Well, nothing much has changed since then - at least, not in terms of my own personal magnanimity. Hence, I'm happy to report that I was content to pass off the relative banality of 'A Buyer's Market' - just as I passed off the relative banality of 'A Question of Upbringing' - as being the consequence of the relative banality of the life of the average upper-middle class English wanker in the early 20th century. But frankly, magnanimity based on upper-middle class English wankery can only last for so long. Sooner or later the silly bastards need a slap around the chops to smarten them up a bit. After all, an arched eyebrow and stiff upper lip might do the job in the clubs and ballrooms of dank old London, but the rest of us find invective and personal abuse delivers the same sentiment with much greater gratification.
Which brings me to my second beef: the sheer wankosity of upper-middle class poms. No, wait - I should apologise, for I've misrepresented the fuckers. They're not wankers, they're pansies. Pussies. Softcocks. Choose you own satisfyingly derogatory term at will, the characteristics of the folk who wander the pages of 'A Buyer's Market' can be easily summarised: pompous, weak-willed, egoistic, and ever so fucking boring.
And yet...
And yet I felt a certain kinship with the narrator. Nicholas Jenkins deserves a brand of sympathy. His first clumsy attempts to construct himself a relationship which will astonish the ages with the intensity of its love strike a chord (albeit melancholy) and evoke a smile (albeit wry). True enough, I was never in love with an emotionally volatile upper middle class English lass (and if I had been, I would have demanded considerably more pussy than Jenkins ever got) yet there is something poignant about young Nick's hopeless attempts to construct a relationship which is clearly doomed from the outset.
Having said that, Jenkins is not off the hook. I forgot about the pansisity, the pussyism, the softcockery for a moment there. What Jenkins - indeed, every blasted character in this book - needs to do is tell someone to fuck right off. Too often, in the course of conversation Jenkins is confronted with a remark which he finds 'intolerable' or 'absurd' or affronting in some other manner. His reaction? Invariably along the lines of: 'There was no possible answer to such a remark' or 'there nothing one could possibly say in the face of this'.
Ah... yes there is, tiger. Try this one on for size: 'Go fuck yourself!' Or this one: 'Fuck off, cunt!' Evan a simple 'Get fucked!' often does the trick.
But no. Jenkins and all the rest of the timid fools in 'A Buyer's Market' seem so terriby, terribly concerned not to give offence that they're prepared to suppress a welter of rampantly negative emotion, compress it, and spew it back out in an absurdly polite exchange such as this one:

'Please,' she said. 'You must.'
'On the contrary'.
'I insist.'
'No, no, absurd.'
'Mr. Gilbert!'
'Really.'
'I shall be very cross'.
'Not possibly'.

Let's be frank: no sane person on the face of the planet would contemplate speaking - let alone arguing - in such a fashion. Hence, the translation into real terms:

'Look cunt,' she said. 'Do it'.
'Make me, you fucken whore'.
'I fucken will, cunt!'
'Come on then!'
'Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!'
'Well fucken come on!'
'I'll smash yer fucken head in!'
'Try it, cunt! Just fucken try!'

See what I mean? No wonder Hitler was allowed to run rampant across the continent.

Total Control Racing

Oui mais non, en fait, laissez-moi reflechir un instant...





oui oui.


J'ai l'esprit plonge dans la melasse, un sirupeux melange de jus de cerise et de struddel aux pommes, laissez-moi vous dire que cette forme d'expression m'entrave.L'ecrit. Je ne suis en aucun cas tenu de vous parler. C'est juste une facon de plus de se jeter dans le vide ce blog. Oui, je pose la question : " Qui etes-vous ? " Sincerement, je ne pense pas que vous existiez vraiment, vous faites tous semblant d'etre, entre l'ecran et vos appareils cognitifs, mon spectateur, c'est le neant comme un tout inverse, ce truc, c'est mechant. Pour vous dire la verite, je suis comme un circuit TCR, ou les idees tournent en rond comme ces bolides a lamelles. Rien de bon, rien d'hilarant, rien d'original a cette non-pensee... mais tout bien considere un circuit TCR, TOTAL CONTROL RACING, c'est bon comme du bon pain, eh ouais mec !

Sinon, est-ce-que vous voulez du the ?

vive le M--(otherwise known as jean luc) libre

hello buddy, ou est tu? non, i have not seen you here for many long times, what are doing? oui, i know that you want nothing but your little ideas and sex and charles de gaulle, but what way are we worse than them? in which way are we not charles de gaulle? every one of us, mon cheri, is something of a president, every one of us is a little bit of charles de gaulle.

my childhood and guy lafleur

i remember being a lost child on the st. laurence seaway, swimming around, and bragging around, like a lost popsicle stick on an emtpy highway. usually i was wearing a red away guy lafleur jersey - my father always said that guy lafleur was the only real hockey player for women to love - and i would brag around in front of the women, hoping they would see me and think that i - was in fact guy. it was many years before they did. it was many very lonely st. laurence years. then there were the lonely laval years, and the lonely years by les chutes de montmorency. they were the worst, because they were very wet and lonely.
but before my life could end, possibly right at the one day when i was thinking to myself - guillaume, you are very wet and lonely, maybe it is time to be finished with all of this wet loneliness, eh? - yes, right about this time, it happened! i was standing on the bridge over les chutes, and looking down, letting the gravity and seriousness pull me in - you know, dostoyevsky said often enough it is simply the gravity that makes a man jump - when a woman with very dark hair said, peeping her little eyes over my shoulder: what are you looking at guy? i jumped so far into the air over the chutes i thought i would be joining dostoyevsky in space, but eventually i came down, and i was so happy, i was still wearing my red jersey, though the years had left it almost brown and indistinguishable; nonetheless i was so happy that at last the woman had loved me for being guy, but i could not lie to her if she was going to be mine for ever to love. so i looked at her and asked: why is it madamoiselle that you think i am guy lafleur, i am not guy lafleur, i am guillaume bonneau. she looked back at me and said: i did not think you were guy lafleur, though you are also bald of hair, i simply love you and want to swim with in the chutes.
it was a very difficult chidlhood.

The Coolsification of Sydney Road

Started with a Porsche. A black Porsche, parked outside the cafe. Then it was the fucking cafe. Open front. Box seats. Vegan brekky. Good coffee and a troubled ride home.

More Porsches.

I cracked a girl's skull open outside a streetcorner cafe. No, I didn't, only dreamed about the consequences of dickheads whacking people and tables on my fucking bikepath.

Downtown Bendigo on a Saturday night? I wish. Old Studio 54, eh? That was a cunt of a place. So's the Spot, doorbitches and all. Go back to your own fucking suburb, mate.

'You are fucking joking me - a line outside the Retreat!'
'Oh my god, did you hear what he said?'

That son of a bitch looks like me. So does that one. Looks like it's time for a shave.

It's Coburg o'clock; Glenroy or Pascoe Vale for the homebuyers.

welcome to this special holiday edition of sub-space

wed like to welcome you folks to this special holiday edition of sub space live, so to speak, were still alive, from buddy's head. what do you say to the folks, buddy?
- welcome buddies! welcome and merry new year!
-thats right little buddy, new years is coming!
-bah humbug! as they say.
-come on buddy, tell us how you fell then, dont hold back.
-i feel like berlin in the eighties; i feel like a glass roof in a train station; i feel like a man!
-yeah! applause for buddy.......
-and i feel like dvds!
-oh, come on now buddy, easy up on the dvds...
-i feel like a tornado with no mother! a potato with no brother! a child with no game...
-wow! applause for buddy on this special edition of sub-space.....
-no! i feel like a wicked wicked tom cruise has done; i feel like bears in mini skirts eating honey to russian folk songs and dancing on their hands in late july when NOBODY should be eating honey! i feel like a miracle of modern science! long live the king! long live the king!

take my picture

take my picture, make me famous, take my picture. put my face in the tabloid press and tell children about my name and what it means.
everyone stood around and took my picture, and some people pointed their fingers; one lady smiled and smiled, she was loving it. she didnt know who i was at first, until the photographer started to take my picture, then she started to smile. before, when she didnt know, and i said: take my picture, make me famous, and she just frowned and said nothing, but laughed under her breath and off to the side in a mean, bragging around way.
but in the end, they took my picture, and everybody smiled, even the other ones.

A Question of Upbringing

Anthony Powell’s first installation in his ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ series sets the standard for the subsequent eleven novellas. Given it was written some twenty years before the final novella, it is a standard curiously consistent throughout the series. One wonders whether Powell diligently planned every miniscule detail of the series before embarking upon the actual process of writing.

Like all of the novellas in the series, ‘A Question of Upbringing’ is notable for possessing one extremely strong feature – a tender, almost obsessive, attention to the craft of the English language – and one extremely weak feature – a refusal to countenance the deeper philosophical questions of our existence, indeed to construct a storyline of any kind other than ‘this is life’. This is not to say that Powell completely ignores human existence – a series entitled ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ could hardly fail to comment on this subject. Rather, Powell’s observations on human existence are frequent but fleeting. Often they ring true, sometimes they are banal. Powell is not seeking to solve any ethical dilemmas here.

The great strength of ‘A Question of Upbringing’ is Powell’s attention to each carefully constructed sentence. His writing is elegant and often ornate – at times even pedantic. Indeed, many of his sentences are extremely long and permeated with an abundance of punctuation; yet they are read clearly and easily. It is an unusual and perhaps old-fashioned style of writing, but one that appeals, at the least, to me.

Though I may, of course, be completely wrong, I do seem to recall Powell’s work coming under some considerable criticism from Salman Rushdie. My recollections of Rushdie’s criticism are vague, but seem to revolve around a general complaint that Powell’s novellas are boring. I was not at all bored by ‘A Question of Upbringing’, but I can sympathise with Rushdie’s criticism (or at least, with my recollection of it). Upon reading the final page of this first novella, the reader is left with the feeling: ‘is that all?’ The answer, of course, is: ‘no’. There are eleven more novellas to follow, but nonetheless, reading the entire series does not entirely rid the reader of this uneasy feeling that perhaps they have wasted a large amount of time. Unlike Dostoevsky, Powell’s intention is not to ponder over the larger moral paradoxes of our existence, but rather to feed a whole series of reflections into our minds, presumably that we may bubble over them at our leisure, and extract from them what we will. He certainly has no blatantly ideological wheelbarrow to push, no sermon to deliver, not even any confusion over the vagaries of life. He simply depicts the lives of the narrator and his contemporaries, without passing judgment or seeking further enlightenment.

Frankly, at times I found the prudishness and conservatism of the narrator to be quite off-putting, but was magnanimous enough to put this down to the context of Powell’s own upbringing, and indeed the historical context of the novella. From this point of view, it can be said that Powell has done well to so accurately capture the concerns – mundane and childish as they may be – of the early 20th century English upper-middle class.

On the whole, I recommend ‘A Question of Upbringing’, if only because Powell’s writing style is unusual enough to warrant reading, and it is such a short novella (only 200 pages) that the reader has little to lose and much to gain.

driving is for buttheads

i cant drive! i dont even want to see driving! when i see people, in their little car machines, i turn my head around and look at the ground, and not at the stupid asshole car machines! i hate them! they are for little chicken brains. they are for the marginalized and the abused who like to feel power instead of life. i dont like power. i like life. i like the rain. i like the warmth of friendship. i like being with you, and i like being alone. but not power. oh no, not me.

I luv da machine

Because we don't have to beat the shit out of one another. We can just be little chicken afraid of telling what we really think over the Xmas turkey and give meanings to the definition of humanity. Darn cowards little beings. Instead of that, we're here, typing this bile and spread the humor over the world. Go on ! Good job chicken !

its an answer

thats a typical mistake, really just typical; sitting around, braggin around about how you make mistakes and everyone has elastic in their jeans and its not your fault, its not you mistake. well, thats your mistake, you just made the biggest mistake - being a stupid asshole with wings on your shoes and stars in your eyes! shame on you! shame! how dare you! brag around like that!

I'm not responsible for your family mistakes

If you don't like your name, really, there is nothing I can do.
If you don't like the way you wear your jacket with your funny elastic shoulders, there's nothing I can do.
If you don't like the way you sound when you speak around about these little incidents of life, I can just listen to you and notice that and give you reasons to hate your parents.

another bi-monthly salary

In fact, these guys eat money or they put it into socks or under a cheap persian-style carpet, they put it aside for one day, when it would be sunny and bright enough to burn it on pina coladas and havana cigars, or between two wide spread silicon legs of some robotic prostitutes, because, here we are, we don't money, what we is love.

But here we go again

-DVD's
-Gave some money back
-a card for the internet cafe
-food : Hawaiian pizzas, chicken fingers, barbecue sauce, cranberries sauce, bananas, beer
-a lot of soap, enough for 4 months

and of course nothing for the charity, nobody deserves nothing.

one bi-monthly salary

'i dont have any money left?'
'pay day was last week...?'
'oui.'
'what did you spend your money on?'
'i bought twenty dvds, a belt thats useless because its too big, food...'
'what kind of food?'
'pizzas.'
'pizzas?'
'oui. and champagne and martinis. and i bought a card for the internet cafe and sausages.'
'anything else?'
'i bought shampoo. and dried fruit.'

Cuty Cuty Cute

Japan.
1859

This Bleak State of Abandonment 2 (with apologies to Andrew Lang)

Ah! leave the smog, the opulence, the screams
Of Moscow, and the black-clad street.
For still, by the Australian shore,
The warmth of the wind is narcotic.
Still, still the suns of summer greet
The backyard of Seth,
And yobbos still their songs repeat,
Where breaks the blue Australian sea.

fine me please, find me please, find me please, find me please, fine me please, fine me please, fine me please

Peter Forsberg 9 (unassisted)
Minnesota power-play
hooking - 2 min
hooking - 2 min
tripping - 2 min
hooking - 2 min
fighting - 5 min
fighting - 5 min
tripping - 2 min

good job buddy

i cant stand on my hands in the shower
i cant find the oboe you left under my pillow
in agony
in despair
at the leaving
i would say
at any leaving

i cant eat my own fingers
because they arent chocolate covered
and i certainly cant invent a machine
to cut my two hands off
and maybe my feet
because im just not the creative type
though im sure if i could everything would be alright
everythings gonna be alright
everythings gonna be alright
if i can just finish that damn machine

Song dedicated to my former lover

I can't fuck
the wall facing me
the wall behind me
the wall beside me
the ceiling
the floor
I can't
fuck you
fuck y'all