| G. |
[May. 25th, 2012|11:48 pm] |
G. was good with numbers, so he got a job in a hedge fund in Zurich. His boss used to work hard; not so with G. It's not that G. was lazy, exactly; nor was it that he had to seek some inspiration from a divine source; it's rather, things had to be just so. Once he made a ragu; his method had an indescribable purity, as if he, the knife, the veal had reached some sort of metaphysical unity, where one could not tell where the veal began and G. ended. G. didn't like working, he was lazy like that. He preferred to play bridge, and not say very much, and be gently amused at things. So he didn't do the whole turning up to work thing. But that was OK, nobody really missed him that much. But G. started to feel guilty about the whole thing. Once he thought he was going to go to work. He made a decision. It was late at night. Obviously he couldn't go to bed. G. was a guy who liked to sleep in late, stay up late...G. went to play basketball, by himself, in the courtyard. G. once coached basketball to dwarves. G. drank coffee, he read those hip books, Paul Auster and that, in their covers, that we used to read, hanging outside cafes near the LRB bookshop...it was dawn, work would be there in a few hours. He had best spruce himself up! Iron his suit, choose a perfume, the usual stuff. So he ran a bath, and bathed, and then went for a little nap, and then woke up at four pm, and felt disgusted with himself, and mixed a mojito, and phoned his boss to quit his job.
I watched a film on the weekend. I go to the cinema to drink beer in the middle of the day; I go see films as a cover for my drinking problem, just go see whatever's there. What was there was some stupid indie rubbish with some stupid indie plot about quirky losers who go around doing quirky loser things until they have some gay epiphany and their existences are somehow justified and you well up a bit, the whole Little Miss Sunshine/Royal Tenenbaums sort of deal. Gets things all wrong, of course, as if life ever climaxes thus, instead of being a series of steady build-ups to a payoff that never, and can never happen. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 1st, 2012|11:06 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  German | ] |
Does anybody know a good way to learn German by going to Germany? I suppose what I'm asking for is details of a course of some kind, in Germany. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 27th, 2012|09:13 pm] |
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Then again, I was talking to this Italian girl, who was all 'I spent last summer on the beach in Sicily. Then I was in a terrible car accident. It was terrible, by the time I'd got out of hospital I'd lost my tan!'. So people say a lot of things. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 27th, 2012|09:10 pm] |
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We drank vodka, Max and I, in his flat; he froze the bottle with raspberries therein, delicious. Max was on, perhaps, his third glass; I'd had around half the bottle at this point. Max judged, of course—how could one not?—but took it with good humour. We had both attended a university which, since it specialised in producing the human detritus that are now our financial and political elites, neither of us could fit into. We discussed possible plans, maybe make something of our lives, discussing options, each plan fell into naught. The bottle emptied, Max said, 'I hate this world, Mike'. |
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| Busker |
[Dec. 22nd, 2011|12:25 am] |
One day, I was standing around Senate House, pipe in my mouth, sardonic look on face. What's new, one may ask, do you ever do anything else? But what else could one do. The Church is moribund, the Monarchy disrespected; Parliament sneered at, the banks in disarray, even The Times isn't what it once was. There are those young men who, seeing the world in disorder, seek to arrange it according to some phantom of their imagination, to find themselves forevermore praised as its demiurge. Frankly, I lack either the time or the inclination for such things; anyway, my political philosophy is not that of the mechanic, but the gardener, believing that the goods of politics are its institutions, to be assiduously cultivated by tradition against the forces of barbarism that forever threaten. But these forces have won; there remains no such institution to cultivate. Hence, I cultivate the only thing I can: the pose. Socrates may have undermined his contemporaries through speech; Diogenes, through his actions; I, on the other hand, seek to do so by my very inaction: the eyebrow raised, the pipe alight, the entire pose cultivated to cock a snook at the banality of the age.
Anyway. I stand to the North of Senate House. Round about is the School of Oriental and African Studies, and therefore the hipsters that make up its clientele, and therefore the various cults that seek to impress their visions upon their feverish minds: the usual mish-mash of radical socialists and evangelical Christians, the latter only slightly less contemptous for not believing their kingdom to be of this world. There is, every day, a Hare Krishna who gives out free vegan curries which, when good, are bland, when bad, utterly repellent. Sometimes, people campaign for more sensible things: a couple of people once got me to sign a petition to do something about somewhere called Camp Ashraf, about which I (not following the news) knew nothing; having gleaned some information about this, my carefully-maintained mask of irony rather failed, and I decided to spend the rest of the day outside the Lord John Russell.
One day there was a busker. She had a guitar. She wasn't very good. Her 'playing' consisted of repeating the same two arpeggios, one after the other, in a cycle; she accompanied this with a song. I forget what the song was. It was something to do with starlight, that I do remember. 'Starlight...starlight...', it went like that. The busking wasn't the thing, though: she was just sitting there, being charming. Her dress was slightly outre; her smile, the right side of mocking; her accent, French. Between the 'starlight...starlight...' refrain, she'd chat to the audience, telling us silly little stories that went nowhere. To impress upon her audience the importance of right behaviour, she had erected two cardboard tablets of commandments. I forget all but one, running 'this is not an AA meeting! No smoking or drinking in 10 metres'.
I am not one for rules, the only rules I follow being my own; as such, as I joined her meagre audience, I failed to extinguish my pipe. She thought it was quite amusing. 'That's so cool for a man your age!', quoth she. Then on with the song. 'Starlight...starlight...', something like that. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 7th, 2011|01:23 am] |
Once I saw two little girls, sisters, one five, one three, walking with their mother past some flowers in Regent's Park. Both, being barbaric little things thought little of the flowers in question, blew raspberries at the aforementioned flowers. *Bphllp!* *BPhllp!*, they went, rejecting the classical aesthetic with as feverently as the Christians who destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Such a definite expression in ones so young!—reader, could I help but be charmed?
A few days later, I cycled up a hill. My destination was Senate House, such that I could access their concordance to Plato. A bus was behind me. Alas and Alack, my cycle briefly broke down, meaning that I had to push the bicycle with my feet up the hill, inconveniencing the bus behind me for all of twenty or thirty seconds. Having gotten onto his junction, the driver of the bus in question opened his window to address me, using such words as begin with 'F' and 'C'. Remembering the excellent example of the aforementioned girls, I blew a raspberry at the driver in question. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2011|05:02 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  melancholy | ] |
The frock coat in question was two sizes too small.
A pervasive, unutterable melancholy has now descended upon my happy little world, rendering gray the hitherto technicolour splendour that is my life. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2011|12:30 am] |
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I should buy a frock coat, right? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2011|07:57 am] |
FUCKING HELL
Drunk last night I opened up a new tin of tobacco. Now I have to smoke like 100g of the stuff before it gets stale. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 16th, 2011|11:49 pm] |
Questions
1. Which cabinet member do you despise most, and why?
This question errs, in assuming that, having dedicated my life to Kate Bush and Plato, that I would have time to follow the unartistic chaos that is politics. However, my hypothetical ire is not quelled! As far as I can tell, I can still not light up my cigarette in public places, hence disrupting my social life. Hence, whichever cabinet member to whom the responsibility of repealing the smoking ban is and has not repealed it will be the objective of my ire.
- I have also heard rumour that the hereditary peerage is to be removed from the Lords, replacing our aristocracy with the sort of pissants who would deign to be elected by the masses. Whomsoever enacted this reform is also the object of my ire, etc.
2. What are you DOING these days?
I drink a lot. I mean really a lot, it's a problem yo.
3. Is there anything we can do to prevent Torygeddon?
I dunno, if I have troubles I tend to dance them away.
4. Social media: the death of the academy or its salvation? Or, you know, an annoying aside?
Almost certainly the third.
5. Why do you still read LJ if you don't post any more?
A good question! I keep trying to write beautifully-written prose about the postmodern condition, but cannot do so: precisely because the postmodern condition has deprived me of my ability to write! How deliciously ironic. |
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