W.H. Auden, from his “Reading” essay in The Dyer’s Hand:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes … When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

Lorrie Moore, from her novel Anagrams (via Vintage & Anchor):

Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Last week I spend some time during the day sanding and oiling a new pair of butcher-block countertops that I did not construct. One sits atop a kitchen cabinet and the other sits on a matching utility shelf. Both are freestanding and kitchen-counter height. I sand them with 150 and 220 grit sandpaper first. A few hours later between computer tasks I oil the countertops with butcher block oil — actually labeled oil and finish, which sounds like a command. I am informed that this brand of oil and finish I’ve bought is not really an oil, but rather a complex, occult cocktail of tung oil, long oil alkyd resin, Stoddard solvent, mixed isomers, and a grand goulash of other chemical schmutzes. I refer to it as an an oil anyway, since the word oil appears first on the label. Evidently woodworking pros scoff at anyone who uses this shit. The fumes smell sweet and dangerous. I have unwisely disregarded the warnings to wear a face mask and to apply in a well-ventilated area. As a result I have breathed too much of the stuff. Not a lot a lot, but too much nonetheless. I have no doubt inhaled volumes of sanding sawdust too. I will pay for this in my old age — or possibly the payment will be an old age hastened.

The wood drinks up the oil, amplifying the grain colors very beautifully. In many places the oiled grain takes on an affecting pearlescent luster, which I did not expect but am glad to see. This first coat takes several hours to dry. I return to working at the computer as the drying oil’s fragrance fills up the house, sickening the houseplants and ironing out my cortical gyri and sulci. A couple days later I re-sand lightly with 400 grit, then apply another oil coat. I may be building up an immunity to the oil fumes, or else succumbing to them. The oil-soaked cloth I’ve used must be disposed of in an oil-soaked-cloth-type disposal place and I promise not to disregard this part. I still need to re-sand again and may add more coats this week. I am obviously not good at this but the idea here is for the countertops to look a notch above OK-to-passable while being able to withstand grievous kitchen abuse. They can always be re-oiled and are supposed to be, periodically. Just kidding about the grievous kitchen abuse. The worst these countertops need to withstand is being covered with clutter, being splashed with bad beverages, being leaned on in moments of vacuous contemplation, and being bumped into in the dark.

So today has been the day of the web’s big SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. I do not black out erasing.org. The extent of my participation is a lunch-break impulse to post the above picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s 2010 relief “Black Curve Diagonal” on erasing.tumblr.com. An egregious co-opting and misuse of art on my part, but to me somehow it looks correct for the occasion. And now I am cross-posting it here. Forgive me, Ellsworth Kelly, wherever you are.

Via A Piece of Monologue: Thomas Bernhard, from his autobiography, Gathering Evidence:

For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body … Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe — whatever it is — I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself — in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant.

And:

There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.

Ogden Nash: Besides pollution and erosion / We now must face a goose explosion.

Yesterday I dig out the industrial glue and reconstruct the exploded goose from last weekend. No problem. The cracks are an aesthetic improvement. Am feeling better about 2012 already.

As shown in the first photo above, after I reduce the number of pieces from twenty-six down to two, and am all set to close up the bird for good, I inscribe a message to future goose-breakers (most likely me) inside the tail, along with the dates of breakage and repair. How often does one get a chance to write on a sealed object’s inside surface? To hide a quote-unquote Easter egg inside a bird? At the time this seems clever, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t done it — I feel like from now on whenever I see the goose around the house I’m always just going to think of the concealed message inside it. I can see this eventually bothering me. It’s possible I’ll have to re-break the bird so I can blacken the writing out.

Also: Somehow I’m reminded of that old, bad Groucho Marx joke (though it involves the wrong animal): Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Department of Bad Starts: Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve I accidentally drop a full champagne flute on the floor. And on New Year’s Day I accidentally knock a vintagey folk-art ceramic goose off a table onto the floor. Both items fight the concrete and lose. Better them than me. Fragments of shallow symbolism fly all over the place and have to be carefully swept and vacuumed up. The goose ends up in twenty-six grabbable pieces and can probably be glued back together. Maybe if I leave a few pieces missing I can drink champagne out of it.

Farewell and goodnight to two-thousand-eleven.
We’ll toast your ascent into Calendar Heaven.

Hello and good morning, two-thousand-and-twelve.
We have bottles to empty and books to unshelve.

Goodbye and good riddance, December the last.
The best Christmas present: you’re now in the past.

How joyful to see January the one’th.
Though I figure this year will fly by in a month.

Well, Xmas happened on schedule and I have emerged on the other side of it. Have you?

Today is Back To Work Tuesday for us unfortunate cogs who don’t get the whole holiday week off. To celebrate, this evening here in Hamilton we get a dose of snow disguised as rain. The season’s first snowfall and it’s nothing but a low-energy mitten-soaker, adding some extra blah to the slough of deadness between holiday weekends. (A Special Weather Statement for our area cautions that there may be a flash-freeze overnight, which bodes darkly for tomorrow morning’s unfortunate-cog commute. Speaking of deadness.)

In Measure for Measure, Lucio describes Angelo as: a man whose blood is very snow-broth. Yeah. Snow-broth. A slightly silly Shakespearean way to say ice water, but it strikes me as the correct name for the stuff that falls out of the sky in this sort of not-quite-freezing winter weather. Tonight’s snow-broth spends a few hours raining straight down, without wind, a steady shower, all business, thudding wetly on the window panes and glazing the sidewalks in an insipid slush reduction, accumulating zero.

I get the above photos when I go out walking to return a library book and to get a closer look at the downtown holiday lights before they’re taken down. I stop by the big Xmas tree in front of City Hall and circle the other big Xmas tree in Gore Park and pace back and forth under the canopies of the park’s strung-up tree-branch lights. Weather spatters my glasses and camera lens, saturates my hat. The snowy air and rainy pavements make all the lights’ glows bleed in a pretty and melancholy way, though I suppose they were already doing the pretty-and-melancholy thing well enough on their own these past two days, being holiday lights still up after the holiday’s over and gone, lingering, looking all post-jolly, after-merry, ex-festive, etc.

W.H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”:

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, talking about bygone-era periodicals like The Century that made a habit of publishing lots of poems in each issue, but as little more than decoration:

The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it’s about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. “The shades of summer’s bosky hue, o’erlie thy modest floobie doo.”

(Pause while I snicker uncontrollably for a few minutes. — Also, Baker’s jokey imitation couplet makes me think of Holmes’s “Æstivation” … i.e. a parody of badness that’s almost too good.)

Continuing:

The editors of The Century didn’t expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth.

Holiday fun fact: On Canadian bilingual packaging, the French name for eggnog is “lait de poule” — chicken milk.

Just a quick note here to say that I could not be happier that the insane presidential candidate whose first name is my last name (how embarrassing) is finally political toast.

Samuel Butler, from his notebooks:

I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip. But then half, or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip consists in the mere fact of having something to squander. Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life in my younger days. I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry that I have squandered a good deal of it. What a heap of rubbish there would have been if I had not! Had I not better set about squandering what is left of it?