Love in the Time of Cholera

I finished "Love in the Time of Cholera" last night, if anyone here plans to read it -- or apparently there is a movie being made of it -- and doesn't want it spoiled, look away now.

I did not like Florentino Ariza in the slightest. I don't know if he was meant to be a likeable, or pityable character, but I thought he was deluded, selfish and manipulative. I didn't believe he really loved Fermina Daza -- after all he doesn't actually spend any time with her in person until Juvenal Urbino dies. I'm not sure if this is one of those things you are required to just "accept", that he does love her, but I don't agree with it. Naturally, Fermina Daza is enamoured with him when he first contacts her, she is young and impressionable and unused to the attention. But I don't believe she was in love with Ariza and fully agreed with her when she told him it had been a mistake. Ariza then continues to obsess over her for the
rest of his life and everything in his life seems to be motivated by her -- he makes a success of his life in order to be 'worthy' of her, without ever really understanding who she really is.

After his 'experience' with the woman who may or may not have been Rosalba he effectively becomes a sexual predator -- preying on the emotionally vulnerable, under the pretext that he can relieve his desire for Fermina Daza. He quickly discards the idea of staying a virgin for her -- although the idea that virginity might be more a
matter of what you choose to give up reminds me of "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me". It also seems like he would have been happy to give up on Fermina Daza if Leona Cassiani had given in to him. I disliked how predatory he was -- and the affair with America Vicuna was almost sickening to me, especially her untimely end when he just drops her. He is responsible -- albeit indirectly -- for the deaths
of at least two people, but never seems to stop to consider his actions. Would Fermina have felt the same way, had she known how he had behaved? He even outrightly lies to her, and although she knows it she probably has little idea of the scale of the lie. Florentino then preys on Fermina -- still vulnerable after her husband's death, and seems not to have a second thought about it, so long as he gets
his own way.

I feel a lot more generous about Dr Juvenal Urbino, who genuinely seemed to care about Fermina Daza, in his own old-fashioned way -- and I like that although they didn't marry out of love his dying words were "God alone knows how much I love you". It's his relationship with Fermina Daza that I think is more representative of love -- not the obsessive and largely ignorant thoughts and behaviour of Florentino Ariza.

Maybe I will elaborate more on this later.

February 15, Geneva. 2.30 pm

(from my notebook)

It's sort of lonesome, travelling alone. I enjoy the freedom of it, I enjoy my independence -- but it's not the same without someone to talk to, or to share a beer with. I amuse myself with music and a drink, and my notebook, and I watch all the people as they pass.

It's impossible to know what the week ahead holds for me, but so long as I have my board and my notebook I know I will be fine, and I am determined to enjoy myself.

As ever, San is on my mind. She has suddenly seemed more affectionate towards me lately, in the last day or two. I'm not complaining, and I do still love the girl on some level, but we both know -- by now, we all know why we can't go back again. As for Lyndsay, I would love for something to come of it, but don't think it ever can -- or will.

I get the feeling people are looking at me, as I tap my foot along to Johnny Cash. What sort of music does suit an airport in Switzerland? Probably not "Ring of Fire" I'm guessing. I like to have music that's so completely and deliberately out of place. Oh, and it would seem that 100 Swiss Francs isn't roughly the same as £10 after all. Who knew?

Watching the people get lairy

My deviantArt space has now been updated with pictures from France -- I have set the critique level to encourage advanced critiques, so feel free to offer suggestions, advice, criticisms or just heap praise upon me for my unrivalled talent.

I have been fiddling with photoshop, and have set up a plug in for writing scripts which I am told will help me able to automatically add a watermark to all of my artwork. This is a first step before I set up a print account with dA. I want to be able to sell my work through the site -- before hopefully one day being able to sell my work independently -- but I live in paranoia of people buying or copying my work and passing it off as their own. A nightmarish vision of my art ending up on mass produced postcards and being unable to prove that it was ever my original work. Perhaps that's a little vain, I don't know.

I've also set Photoshop up with the 'urban acid' plugin, which monkeys around with the hue and saturation of pictures to give them a washed-out, nightmarish feel. It's very cool, but hasn't yet warranted creating a new deviation on the strength of it. I might do at a later date, or I might reserve it for making a photoblog -- there's only so many times you can see the same picture otherwise.

I had an interesting moment at work today, where I realised that even if I quite like the job and the industry sometimes, and even if I am good at what I do, maybe I really am in the wrong job. It went like this: It's like this; at work, Laura was doing some work on her NVQ (a vocational qualification, for non-English folk) and her assessor person asked me to come over to do something. Turned out she wanted me to write a couple of "witness statements", in relation to some situations Laura had written about for her evidence. It was just bullshit, saying she was good at her job and whatever in the contexts she had given. The thing was it gave me a bit of an opportunity to write well, if only very briefly for a couple of paragraphs. But the assessor actually commented on how well they were written, laughingly asked me if I wanted a job. I bit my tongue from saying "Yes! Please! Give me a job writing!" but it made me stop and think. Maybe I should be doing something with my talent -- other than blogging.

I was actually thinking last night when I was at a concert that perhaps I should set up a blog exclusively to review music in -- live and recorded -- and advertise it. It would be like a blog of the music press. Or I could set up my own domain where I blog -- though I don't think the content of this blog would be suitable for mass consumption -- and integrate my art work from deviantart, including the option to buy my work, into one big site. It actually all sounds a lot like my friend Calvin's recommendation that I look at trying to train for jobs as a web editor, if I could get some design skills I could combine them with my writing ability... But nobody wants to train you for those IT jobs.

This was more or less just to tout my dA page, anyway. And soon I will start including some of my random scribblings from my travels.... I might even look at copying into here my old dx entries, since I don't know if I will be going back there again even if it comes back online.

Whiskey bottle and a .45

I've renamed my blog. I decided today that this blog needs a spring clean to try and reflect better the changes in my life. I said before that the profile with its solipsist "unless someone is watching, you don't exist" sentiment isn't exactly what I feel any more. I like the way it's written though, and I guess so long as I'm keeping a blog (or an interent diary) it must ring true on some level.

But yes, the wholly depressing "This is all" wasn't doing it for me any more. For a start, I do adore the Pablo Neruda poem -- but the poem is incredibly sad, and not a good starting point. Taken out of context it also seems to be putting me down -- as if I'm saying "this isn't much", or "I'm not much". And that's not the way it should be. Instead, it is now called "whiskey bottle and a .45", after a line from the Gomez song "Bubblegum years". Gomez need a whole update to themself to really do them justice -- from their bluesy sound and the quirky songs, to songs full of heartache. Their bluesy sound might seem depressing, but the music is original, inspiring and uplifting -- and you can't wallow in your self pity with it.

I love Gomez, and I love the song the line is taken from -- even though it might not be a huge improvement as far as moods go.

You can read a whole bunch into it, I think it's a very visual title -- unlike what it is replacing. It reminds me of Raymond Chandler novels with Phillip Marlowe, which in turn inspire my own occasional fictional nihilist entries -- involving guns and whiskey. I think it's a much more interesting title all the same.

Next up I need to change the profile and the synopsis, as soon as I work out what they are going to say...

It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything

It's only after you've lost
everything that you're
free to do anything

nothing is static,
everything is evolving,
everything is
falling apart

you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
you are the same decaying
organic matter as everything else
we are all a part of the same compost heap

you have to give up

you have to realise that someday you will die,
until you know that you are useless
i say let me never be complete
i say may i never be content
i say deliver me from swedish furniture
i say deliver me from clever art
i say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth
i say you have to give up
i say evolve, and let the chips
fall where they may