Je suis bequem

Over the weekend I finished La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote and found it a bit disappointing. It ends up being merely a cautionary tale: Young ladies of the bourgeoisie, don't even think about trying to snag an aristocratic husband! Still, even Balzac on an off day is better than most writers at their best, so it was time well spent, even if I persist in thinking it shouldn't take me a couple weeks for a hundred pages of literary French. I also question whether my French is really to the stage that I benefit more from reading in the original than I would from reading a first-class translation. Of course, the only way to reach that stage is...to read more literature in French. (Plus how do you tell if your translation is "first-class" anyway?)

I also lost interest in Albanian extraordinarily quickly, so I've laid aside the short story collection and picked up Lodge's Out of the shelter again. I'm what, 70 pages or so in, so it seems a shame not to finish it. So far it doesn't have the humour of his later works, but it seems very well-observed. The vignette of the mother running after a departing train to give her son a fruit pie he didn't really want in the first place was rather touching (and makes me ponder that I recall basically nothing at all of my own departure for Germany).

Meanwhile, I've been missing German, but I waited to see that my Asian kick was spent before turning back to it. Of the three Fontane novellas on my shelf, Mathilde Möhring seemed the most promising. It's a work so mature it's posthumous, which seemed a better place to start than with his first society novel. So far, some fun new words (notably Budiker) but nothing which has frustrated my ready resources--yet.

Beautiful

This whole manufactured furore over Cocaine Cola's Superb Owl ad is getting on my wick. I'm not suggesting that they actually paid Twitteracists to spew abuse on command; they knew they didn't have to. At this point their attention-whoring hate waves are so predictable that it was enough to wave some red-dyed meat in front of them. After that, the media predictably swoops in to serve up their turds with falsepious handwringing commentary as clickbait for all Right Thinking People to share on Fakebook so they can proudly proclaim what Good Liberals they are. The end result is that a hackneyed advertisement by a union-busting polluting Putin-patsy is getting far more exposure than it ever would have on its merits and generating warm brand fuzzies among the very same do-gooders who last week were seeking its hide for giving schoolchildren diabetes.

I know, I know: welcome to the way we do business today. If you don't like it, sign off social media and go find a vacant lot where you can show street urchins how to grow their own flaxseed for smoothies. Sigh. Isn't it enough that I keep stuffing my dollars into the pockets of global corporate predators? Why aren't they satisfied until I'm out there whoring for them as well?