I swim six pool lengths of freestyle and am out of breath. After that, I need to stop to recover after every lap. Sad. This, down from the forty consecutive lengths I used to do three or four nights a week, between 2000 and 2003. One’s physical fitness can slide a long way in three years of no workouts. In truth, I am amazed that I even make it to six lengths, that I am not gaspingly clutching the opposite wall after only one.

Twenty-two years old — good lord, what a fossil.
Happy birthday from your devoted heap of dust.

To salute this morning’s arrival in the mail of our Deadwood Season One and Season Two DVD sets, I want to share the text of the ingenious monologue that first got me watching the show. (I lived in ignorance of Deadwood until late last year, when someone posted a transcript of this monologue to a mailing list I’m on. I read it without the slightest idea what it was even about, and thought I have to see this. It didn’t take long for me to get hooked on the show, and Laura soon followed suit.) What this is is Al Swearengen, alone in his office, soliloquizing thoughtfully to a parcel containing the head of a Sioux warrior whom he addresses as Chief, in what is probably the pinnacle of the show’s vaunted Shakespearean language.

A man — as it happens a rival of mine —
learning the secret of a great man’s lieutenant,
would make that lieutenant his slave.

My rival knows that expanding the circle of the informed,
diluting his power, will confound his intention.
So he takes precaution …
to be sole sharer of his secret.

Then, the world being the world,
along comes a half-assed knight errant —
Utter, Hickok’s ex-partner —
to put all my rival’s plans at risk.

I’d seek audience with Utter, verify my thinking.
He earns his bread shipping packages.

And, as the dimwit nobility that made him intercede
may now make him reticent,
YOU, Chief, will be my prop and ploy,
whilst I seek to draw — him — out.

I congratulate myself on having kept you around.
Why make a show of disposing of you, was my fucking thinking.

It’s not like we need the storage space.

And, if there’s a chance in a thousand
you people have been praying right,
why get your boss’s attention?

Anyways, I’ve no plans of us parting company.

As you will note,
I have inscribed
no address.

Conrad Aiken, from “Tetélestai”:

Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.

I have been checking Aiken’s mesmerizing thousand-page Collected Poems out of the library, renewing it, returning it (one may only renew twice at this library), then checking it back out again. Through some ghastly miscarriage of literary justice, the book is out of print, and so the only way one can purchase it is from rare book dealers, for upwards of US$80 — and I will inevitably end up coughing up that $80+ for it someday — and so right now this is the closest I can get to owning the book, having it always on hand to flip through, pore over, prop doors open with, etc.

Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life that she reads Aiken’s poems aloud because they are pure sound, unencumbered by sense. I think I agree with her in principle — the majority of the poetry I like could be characterized that way — though it seems like a bit of a backhanded compliment. Dillard is one of my favorite writers, and she is certainly capable of striking an artful balance between sound and sense in her books, never one at the expense of the other. (Her authorial voice, in general, seems to be a kind of rapturous lyricism — the sort of thing that gets over-labeled luminous prose — combined with, at other times, an icy, disquieting harshness: a darkness of tone.) I guess it depends whether, when she talks of reading Aiken, she truly feels that sense, coherence, meaning, etc., are cumbersome things in poetry, and prefers works that place sound above all else; or whether this is a bit of Dillardian cheekiness, dismissing the content of Aiken’s poems in particular, praising them ironically, as if describing someone’s homemade dinner as pure food, unencumbered by flavor.

James Richardson: If the sky falls you get to see what’s behind it.

Not to leave out the other book that I’m in the middle of (and then some) from the unconsolatory wartime perspective department: I cheat and look ahead into Part Three of Ulysses to find this thought from Bloom:

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood — bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag — were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything, greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.

I find this to be a piece with the Murphy’s Law axioms known as Todd’s Two Political Principles, always useful when listening to politicians and world leaders:

1. No matter what they’re telling you, they’re not telling you the whole truth.
2. No matter what they’re talking about, they’re talking about money.

I haven’t the faintest idea what or how to think about the wars (or is it really all one war?) happening in the Middle East. The books I am in the middle of offer perspective, if not consolation. Saint-Ex’s WWII memoirs: how hopeless and pointless war is. Brian Greene’s cosmology lessons: how small and insignificant we are.

Am reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, his ruminative, bitter narrative of his time as a recon pilot for France during WWII. It is one of three books compiled in the posthumous volume Airman’s Odyssey, a battered, enscribbled hardcover copy of which I get from the library. (The other two books in there are his nonfiction Wind, Sand and Stars and his novel Night Flight, both of which I’ll get to later.) I tend to trip over his five-syllable surname, so, at first, as a kind of private shorthand, I refer to him by his first name. Antoine writes such-and-such. The Antoine books. I am reading Antoine. Antoine’s plane. It strikes the wrong chord, feels too familiar. A few pages into Flight to Arras, I find something better: the rock-star nickname given to him by his fellow pilots, and which evidently everyone except me has already heard of: Saint-Ex.

We go to see My Super Ex-Girlfriend pretty much just because Eddie Izzard, our favorite British transvestite stand-up comedian, is in it. We harbor no illusions that the movie will be anything other than stupidly amusing (and we’re right), but we are nonetheless curious to see it, since we hear that Eddie plays Uma Thurman’s nemesis, an arch-criminal named Professor Bedlam. Eddie Izzard trying his hand at scenery-chewing super-villainy? We’re there. Sadly, he only gets a few minutes of screen time, has no memorable lines, doesn’t really do anything all that villainous, and talks in a thin American accent. What a waste. (Next up: we will probably rent The Wild just to hear his voice performance as Nigel the slightly gay koala.)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in a letter he wrote relating his experiences flying the Casablanca-Dakar air mail route in the twenties, says this of courage:

It’s a concoction of feelings that are not so very admirable. A touch of anger, a spice of vanity, a lot of obstinacy and a tawdry “sporting” thrill. Above all, a stimulation of one’s physical energies, which, however, is oddly out of place. One just folds one’s arms, taking deep breaths, across one’s opened shirt. Rather a pleasant feeling. When it happens at night another feeling creeps into it — of having done something immensely silly. I shall never again admire a merely brave man.

My parents take us out to dinner at the diminutive yet acclaimed Stone Road Grille in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Casual eclectic fine dining with a Niagara Peninsula wine fetish. At this establishment I eat what is probably the most excellent chicken dish I have ever tasted: the Charlie Baker Chicken, which the menu tells me is a Marinated Half Chicken Cooked Under A Brick With Roasted Potato Salad, Grilled Zucchini, Pancetta And Smoked Paprika “Bubbly” Sauce. (Scare quotes theirs.) No mention of what it’s marinated in, though whatever it is is why the thing is so palate-nukingly great.

And how could that Cooked Under A Brick bit fail to put me irretrievably in mind of the inverted version that appears in Withnail and I?

I’m entertained by the fact that my rereading of Einstein’s Dreams coincides with the recent public release of 3500 pages of Einstein’s personal correspondence, and the press’s subsequent field day (physics joke: a unified field day?) over the letters’ details of his many love affairs. The wiseassery pretty much writes itself: Einstein’s dreams indeed, as it were! Wink wink nudge nudge!, etc., etc.

Letterman makes the same naughty (if mathematically nonsensical) Einstein joke three nights in a row: I guess E went into a lot more than mc squared.

I finish Alan Lightman’s novella Einstein’s Dreams. This is my second or third read of it. I’ve reread it this time as a companion piece to The Fabric of the Cosmos and its pervasive dealings with Einstein’s theory of special relativity. (I.e. that motion through space and motion through time are complementary, such that time elapses more slowly from one’s point of view as one approaches the speed of light.)

Lightman’s book, as the title suggests, imagines alternative models of time that the young Einstein might have thought of, told in a series of poignant magic-realism-style vignettes, each one briefly acted out by nameless inhabitants of Bern, Switzerland. All of the vignettes hint at aspects of the time we actually experience.

In one world, time has three dimensions. In another, time flows backward and forward arbitrarily. Others include a world where the passage of time is different for each city, a world where time is perceptibly slower the more one remains in motion, a world where time passes more slowly at higher altitudes, a world where time is frozen in place. There is the world in which a single solar day spans the entirety of a human life: some people are born at night and only see sunlight in the second half of their lives; others are born during the day and then gradually move into darkness. And there is the world in which time is finite, and has a predetermined end that everyone on Earth knows about, prepares for, and faces together.

There is one vignette in the book that contains no magic realism, and this is the one that I find uncannily familiar, almost a rebuke. It is the one in which two couples, longtime friends, assemble at a resort for an annual holiday together. For a few pages they do nothing but exchange friendly, vacuous small talk about their lives, which inevitably remain the same year after year. The chapter then ends thus:

And it is just the same in every hotel, in every house, in every town. For in this world, time does pass, but little happens. Just as little happens from year to year, little happens from month to month, day to day. If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

Postscript: Yesterday we receive in the mail a card from Laura’s uncle, aunt, and infant cousin in Holland, congratulating us on our marriage. Inside the card it reads Veel geluk samen, which Laura’s uncle translates from the Dutch for us as Much happiness together. When I first read this, though, I mistake his handwritten note for Much happens together — a misreading that, it turns out, Laura and I both prefer.

The Humor Issue of Poetry (aka PEOTRY) arrives in the mail. I am repeatedly reduced to lunatic snickering by the magazine’s first piece, Billy Collins’s “Irish Poetry”.

Only later, by the galvanized washstand,
while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers
swam beyond the windows,
did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite
wobble me into knowledge.

This is a small masterpiece of lit-geek comedy. Anyone who can dream up a sublime monstrosity like gaunt, phosphorescent heifers is someone I must respect.