Saturday we sneak into Toronto despite the Boxing Week/New Year’s Weekend crowds in order to go see Children of Men at the downtown Paramount and then Pan’s Labyrinth at the Varsity up on Bloor — a double feature of awesomeness. In between, Korean sweet-and-sour-swamped Chef’s Special fowl burns my mouth off.

Answers to Friday afternoon’s questions: No, not misguided; Yes, same thing.

Am I misguided for enjoying certain authors’ thoughts about writing — what they say in the literary interviews and the “why I write” essays, etc. — more than I enjoy the actual writing output they’re referring to, the stuff in their books?

And is this basically just the same thing as poring over special-edition multi-disc DVDs’ commentaries and behind-the-scenes features — the stuff that documents in geeky detail how they did all the special effects and concept art and sound design and sets and cinematography and so on — and finding all this supplemental material way more interesting and enjoyable than the actual movies? (Which I also do.)

Amis, Money: Friday came, and did its thing, and vanished, as Fridays will.

Scary, yet potentially useful: Maximum-strength Benadryl + strong coffee = dramatic increase in book-reading speed. (Your mileage may vary.)

A new kink in my exercise regimen: the YMCA pool is closed until January 5. Renovations, apparently — I’m guessing it’s time to sandblast the past year’s worth of octogenarian dead skin and hair off the bottom of the deep end. I celebrate by getting sick. I have this deal worked out wherein I only get sick for one day each year. Friday is the day. I blearily acquiesce to the phlegmatic palpitations and headaches and innardaches and chills and snifflings and the whole gamut of ear/nose/throat misery; I later self-administer a few eventide gins and tonic, chased by several glasses of water, and then creep into bed mummified in sweatshirts and socks. I copiously perspire away my illness in the night and wake up Saturday morning all better, positively hale and hearty. It’s sort of just an annual run-through.

No longer the high minuses around here. Unseasonably mild, up in the respectable pluses, and no snow — aside from that one picturesque early-evening snow a couple weeks ago, at the sight of which we cheerily break out the yuletide tunes and the hot chocolate and feel like we’re a greeting card. Ever since then, a long stretch of half-assed non-weather, uncold, unwarm. Like a tedious extended mid-November. There are rumblings of a healthy snowstorm-type event possibly showing up the day after Christmas; we’ll hunker down with our food and spirits and hold out for that.

Until then: red wine, green tea.

2006 was the year I discovered that one may bring two 750mL bottles of wine per person, duty-free, into Canada from the U.S. (where both the selection and prices are better), but only if one has been outside Canada for more than forty-eight hours. If one has not been out of Canada that long, and one has the good manners to declare one’s U.S. wine purchases at the border, one must then cough up highway-robbery import duties that amount to a 50% markup on each bottle, give or take.

Corollary: 2006 was the year I subsequently discovered that neglecting to declare one’s U.S. wine purchases at the border never really seems to present a problem.

2006 was also the year I discovered that I actually do like drinking Scotch, after many years of believing I hated it. My hate can be traced back to an especially unwise moment of mine at age twenty or twenty-one, when I picked up a glass of Scotch neat, and, having no idea how to drink it, I gulped it down as if I were pounding a shot of saloon whiskey — whereupon my tonsils and tongue transformed into molten lava, several fingers of single-malt tears fountained out of my eyes, and a few semesters’ worth of expensive higher-level education projectile-bled out through my earholes. 2006 was the year I tried drinking Scotch like normal people drink it: slow.

And 2006 was the year I discovered fancy-pants bourbon, and, as a result, a new favorite drink: Bourbon and Branch. (“Branch” = mineral water. This drink’s appeal for me has nothing to do with its sharing a name with a certain pop star I may have at one point in the distant past been fixated on. OK, almost nothing to do with.)

A challenge: See if you can determine the point at which the following beautiful, haunting three-and-a-half-minute Edvard Grieg piano piece (“Borghild’s Dream. Introduction and Melodrama”, as performed by Einar Steen-Nøkleberg), just about gives me a heart attack yesterday:

Richardson: The sun sees nothing.

Porchia: If I did not believe that the sun looked at me a little bit, I would not look at it.

Length of day: 8 hours, 59 minutes. Tomorrow will be 25 seconds shorter.

At twelve noon, the winter sun at its highest point sits low in the southern sky. Casts long, late-afternoon-like shadows all day. Somehow I have lived this long without ever before registering this obvious property of winter, the diminished arc the sun describes as it travels from east to west, its confinement to one side of the sky. Light seeking light doth light of light beguile. The sun’s midmorning appearance in different windows than the ones it frequents in the fall. Those strange elongated shadows that precede me as I walk north downtown at lunchtime. That low noon sun that looks like a summertime 4pm. Ridiculous. How is it possible I never noticed until now? Did I think the days grew shorter because the sun moved faster? I miss a lot.

Requiescat.

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn’t king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world — huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care — everything — even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

Thus Bridge to Terabithia.

Michael Heffernan, from “Legends of Old Castile”:

Javier clicked his heels and bowed and dropped
the flowers in Mother’s lap, leaped back
and clicked through the French doors into the hall

so elastically backwards none of us noticed
that he was not departing like a normal individual.

Back in I think late 1998, when I’m in my senior year at UVA, the phrase No Holds Bard — a wince-inducing Shakespeare/wrestling pun — occurs to me. According to the search engines of the day (those primitive pre-Google days of Hotbot and Lycos and Webcrawler and whatnot, may they rest in peace), no one else on the web appears to have thought of it. The phrase turns up no results! (In retrospect, this now seems unlikely, so I may be misremembering.) I congratulate myself on my cleverness at having thought up such an ingenious, original witticism, and I set it aside as a good name for a Shakespeare website of some sort. (No idea what exactly I had in mind.)

Of course, today, Google informs me that I may have been a bit hasty, and that indeed a great many people have thought up this joke on their own, seeing as how hundreds of web pages employ No Holds Bard as a headline or title — including a Shakespeare acting troupe that performs under that name and even owns noholdsbard.com, the lucky bastards. And no wonder — that pun is fucking funny.

At least I can still claim originality on The Sound and the Furby.

(In the UVA student mag I was on staff of. A hideous jokey placeholder title that somehow made it to press.)

Another pun-based name that cracks me up: the Toronto DJ Big League Chu.

(For those readers who did not grow up watching U.S. Saturday-morning commercials in the 80s: hence.)

I think I must amend (or at least supplement) my thought last week about whether or not one can be said to have truly read a book one doesn’t understand.
(Which thought was chiefly meant as self-deprecation, but whatever.) “Bookworm” host Michael Silverblatt makes a good case for what he calls “the rich and valuable experience of incomprehension, the most important element of reading.”

The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age, with rereading.

[…]

If the teacher read you a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in third grade, and then you struggled to read it out loud with the rest of the class in fourth grade, and you read the complete play in seventh grade — you would have the incredible experience of discovering that the mind comes to terms with its own incomprehension. The clearing of the fog of incomprehension is the yardstick of growth, every kind of growth: emotional, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, human growth.

Though this idea assumes we’re talking about books that are somehow enticing enough to make us want to reread them in spite of their difficulty; works that have some compelling element in them, or that strike some chord in us personally, that transcends whatever it is we’re not understanding the first time around.

Laundry night. I have given up trying to read at the laundromat: something about the atmosphere, the sound of the machines howling and humming around us, nukes my concentration and leaves me drowsing brainlessly before the clothes even hit the dryer. Instead, I haul out a cryptic crossword. I have recently become loserishly, nerdily addicted to cryptics, which makes it all the more infuriating when I meet a difficult one in an easy-looking guise. Such as the one I work on tonight. (It’s just one from a book of New Yorker cryptics. Tiny grid. Nothing too Byzantine.) I keep the words of cryptic-crossword authority Henri (“Hot”) Picciotto of the National Puzzler’s League ever in mind: A good puzzle should seem nearly impossible at first, but provide ways to progress that make the solution possible. It sounds like a life manifesto.