I have to force them blinking and cursing into the light
I feel all virtuous: before 10am this morning I'd taken the car through to Diep River to be assessed for bodywork (it leaks like a sieve and they're going to have to remove the front and back windows and do some serious repair to rusted edges) and hit the bank to finalise complicated transfers of money to artisans in France. (This house is costing me a fortune. But the lease is signed and my agent has the cheque for the first month's rent and the deposit: in the next few months it'll hopefully be bringing in money rather than draining it like a giant plughole some bastard just installed on my account).
And all this activity was achieved in the morning's joyously pouring, bucketing, giant-blatting-raindrop rain, accompanied by madly gusting winds and my small cries of uncomplicated glee. I'm now sitting at my desk with the heater cranked to the max, warming my feet and drying my jeans from the recent dash to do some shopping, which necessitated stomping through puddles under my enormous umbrella with a huge and ridiculous grin on my face. I also had to brave the elements to take the gardener to the station on the grounds that there's no way he can possibly work today. The recent lawn-planting activities plus the downpour means that the garden is a treacherous bog, and I rather fear that at any moment the poor guy might step on a particularly soggy patch and vanish up to his neck, there to be trapped in the sucking mud while bedraggled moles gnaw on his lower extremities. I'm not a huge fan of our gardener, but there are limits to my sadism.
I'm not sure why there are limits to my sadism, actually, given that I've spent odd moments of the last few days distracting myself from recalcitrant vampire Snow Whites by devouring the first five volumes of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan graphic novels. These function more or less as a depraved, cynical, evil-minded, hyperactive and deeply political mash-up of gonzo journalism, cyberpunk, black humour, ultraviolence and an extended drug trip of the nastier variety. I love them, but I'm quite frankly surprised that I'm enjoying them as much as I am: there's a level of unabashed nastiness - and bodily fluids - which would usually alienate me completely. Spider Jerusalem, the insane journalist who's the centre character, uses a bowel disruptor as his weapon of choice, and kicks heads in with cheerful abandon and buckets of blood wherever it seems deserved. The various horribly logical and filthy things the future world does with tech have been dreamed up by a particularly acute, corrupt and fevered imagination, although the political beastliness is straight out of the here and now. As literature goes, it's Not Nice.
I think I'm responding to the stories because they're so intelligently angry and so bleakly despairing as well as being so funny: this is a projected future on speed jerky fast-forward, a bewilderingly diverse, cynical, consumerist and corrupt milieu which allows Ellis to point accusing fingers at our own world through the dizzying clouds of exaggeration. The storytelling is superb, built around Spider Jerusalem's own blistering rants which employ a beautifully-balanced dynamic tension between his iconoclastic personal amorality and his bone-deep political morality, and the artwork has a level of nastily vivid detail and hyperactive, unhealthy life which is very, very telling. (Also, Patrick Stewart1, with measured British grace, introduces the fifth volume, which completely blows my brain).
These books are not at all my sort of thing, and I love them unreservedly. I shall aquire the other half of the collection posthaste, once I've tamed my credit card a tad, while somewhere my inner Victorian governess is eroded just a little more. And a good thing too - she's prissy.
1 Whose birthday it was yesterday. You must go here to celebrate, if you're the kind of person who'll dissolve as helplessly into giggles as I did at a perfectly wonderfully horrible STNG joke.
And all this activity was achieved in the morning's joyously pouring, bucketing, giant-blatting-raindrop rain, accompanied by madly gusting winds and my small cries of uncomplicated glee. I'm now sitting at my desk with the heater cranked to the max, warming my feet and drying my jeans from the recent dash to do some shopping, which necessitated stomping through puddles under my enormous umbrella with a huge and ridiculous grin on my face. I also had to brave the elements to take the gardener to the station on the grounds that there's no way he can possibly work today. The recent lawn-planting activities plus the downpour means that the garden is a treacherous bog, and I rather fear that at any moment the poor guy might step on a particularly soggy patch and vanish up to his neck, there to be trapped in the sucking mud while bedraggled moles gnaw on his lower extremities. I'm not a huge fan of our gardener, but there are limits to my sadism.
I'm not sure why there are limits to my sadism, actually, given that I've spent odd moments of the last few days distracting myself from recalcitrant vampire Snow Whites by devouring the first five volumes of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan graphic novels. These function more or less as a depraved, cynical, evil-minded, hyperactive and deeply political mash-up of gonzo journalism, cyberpunk, black humour, ultraviolence and an extended drug trip of the nastier variety. I love them, but I'm quite frankly surprised that I'm enjoying them as much as I am: there's a level of unabashed nastiness - and bodily fluids - which would usually alienate me completely. Spider Jerusalem, the insane journalist who's the centre character, uses a bowel disruptor as his weapon of choice, and kicks heads in with cheerful abandon and buckets of blood wherever it seems deserved. The various horribly logical and filthy things the future world does with tech have been dreamed up by a particularly acute, corrupt and fevered imagination, although the political beastliness is straight out of the here and now. As literature goes, it's Not Nice.
I think I'm responding to the stories because they're so intelligently angry and so bleakly despairing as well as being so funny: this is a projected future on speed jerky fast-forward, a bewilderingly diverse, cynical, consumerist and corrupt milieu which allows Ellis to point accusing fingers at our own world through the dizzying clouds of exaggeration. The storytelling is superb, built around Spider Jerusalem's own blistering rants which employ a beautifully-balanced dynamic tension between his iconoclastic personal amorality and his bone-deep political morality, and the artwork has a level of nastily vivid detail and hyperactive, unhealthy life which is very, very telling. (Also, Patrick Stewart1, with measured British grace, introduces the fifth volume, which completely blows my brain).
These books are not at all my sort of thing, and I love them unreservedly. I shall aquire the other half of the collection posthaste, once I've tamed my credit card a tad, while somewhere my inner Victorian governess is eroded just a little more. And a good thing too - she's prissy.
1 Whose birthday it was yesterday. You must go here to celebrate, if you're the kind of person who'll dissolve as helplessly into giggles as I did at a perfectly wonderfully horrible STNG joke.