On Saturday the cable internet is hooked up without incident. We definitively abandon the old apartment and count ourselves 100% moved in to the new one.
On Tuesday I celebrate my second day in my new workday environment by annihilating my right foot’s second-smallest toe on a metal chair leg. The chair is an IKEA chair named SKRUVSTA, which roughly approximates the sound of my toe colliding with it. A slice of skin shears off the toe’s top, and a large, dark, evil-looking toe-bruise soon materializes up the side. On my desk at the time, beside my work laptop, is an old pocket paperback of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, which for some reason I have only just been looking at, combing through Prufrock yet again. At some point after I’ve applied ice, tissue, and band-aid to the bleeding digit, it comes to me that T.S. Eliot is an anagram of slit toe. The eternal Footman?
So, Snakes on a Plane. We succumb. What can one say? It is not unfun, and it cracks us up, but … it sucks. Laura utters her verdict as soon as the credits roll: Seriously, worst movie ever. I think that is too generous. The problem is that the movie is not really bad enough — it’s like only medium stupid. Which renders its badness boring.
David Foster Wallace, on Roger Federer:
Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it.
Wallace seems to be unintentionally describing here what it’s like to be the kind of writer he is. I gather that his own experience is not that he is particularly intelligent or observant or articulate, but rather that the things he wants to describe, imagine, evoke, etc., appear to him perfectly obvious and right within reach; and that, when it comes to writing these things down, the whole breadth of the English language appears quite compact and unbelievably easy to use.
There are, of course, bats in the new building too. We hear this from a neighboring tenant, who has apparently had a few visitations lately.
I am not that concerned. This other tenant’s apartment is a two-level loft unit, on both the second and third floors. Its ceilings are thus close to the attics and roof, plus he has a fireplace or two that might amply admit your basic chimney-diving bat.
Our place, on the other hand, is not on the top floor. Our fireplace is decorative and has a sealed flue. The windows do not open. There are few if any evident avenues of bat-ingress into the apartment, so it seems unlikely that one could get in, even if it did elect to bypass the upstairs tenants and venture down to the second floor. Not impossible, but perhaps more of a challenge than the average bat could be expected to summon up the ambition for.
As best I can figure, the little beast would have to John-McClane-ishly insinuate itself into our central air ducts, then open its little tool belt and somehow unscrew the vent grilles. Naturally, one must also not rule out the possibility of its taking a deep breath and paddling up through the pipes, or eating its way through a few layers of drywall, or stuffing itself into a stamped envelope and mailing itself to us.
The aforementioned neighbor, by the way, is a good Samaritan. He calls Animal Control when he catches his bats. Unlike us law-breaking bat-snuffers.
In short order the new apartment coalesces into a living-space. The shelves fill up with books; the walls sprout the occasional picture. Boxes vanish. Loitering potted plants patiently rebreathe the air. We put the area rug down, the blinds and curtains up. Our bedroom windows are two pairs of narrow but tall panes, seven and a half feet high, stretching to the ceiling. They look to the east, and so the room becomes a solarium each morning, brightening and warming dramatically as the sun pours in.
This is the last week that I have to spend my working hours in the nearly-empty old apartment. (Assuming the cable-internet magician successfully graces us with his presence on Saturday and presses whatever ridiculous button needs pressing in order to activate the new place’s broadband.) Five more days of of camping out with laptops, speakers, table, and chair in the middle of an abandoned room. The floors adorned only with islands of as-yet-unmoved books, boxes, cords, orphaned furniture parts, and disordered clusters of random stuff. The disconcerting echo-chamber acoustics of a vacant apartment interior, every sound reverberating hollowly off bare walls. The fresh floor-to-ceiling spider-webs I hit everywhere I walk.
The last thing I’ll say about swimming for a while: I do not mean to imply that I am finding it easy to swim that half-mile each morning. It is exhausting, and afterward my full-body fatigue lasts all day, and on my non-swimming days good lord do my sorry excuses for muscles ever ache. I am still laughably out of shape, and obviously it will take some time for me to view that half-mile as the comparative weeknight cakewalk it seemed to be back when I was at my peak fitness level three or so years ago. (Which peak fitness level, I hasten to add, was hardly the sort of level I should be all that terribly proud of.) Some time. Will I have the willpower to continue my morning swims once winter rolls around, I wonder? Walking those six blocks to the YMCA just after sunup, trudging home in the possibly snowy subzeros with damp hair?
Laura reminds me that Murakami also writes about swimming in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (Although I read the novel a few years ago, and have a vague sense of having liked it, I confess that I now seem to remember little about it.) So are we to conclude from this recurring motif that Murakami is himself a swimmer, we wonder? According to Le Grauniad, he is indeed. As well as a jogger and a squash player. But does he write evocative descriptions of jogging or squash? Perhaps something about swimming just lends itself to the Murakami canon. The transfiguration of it, maybe. The strangeness of our being land-dwellers who go into the water and pretend we’re sea-dwellers, for the purposes of recreation. Or because swimming resembles flying?
I go back to Wind-Up and find this fine excursus on swimming (and flying), courtesy of Toru, the main character, who narrates the following from the bottom of a well:
As had happened last time, I was unable to achieve the mental concentration I wanted. All kinds of thoughts came crowding in, blocking the way. To get rid of them, I tried thinking about the pool — the twenty-five-meter indoor ward pool where I usually went for exercise. I imagined myself doing the crawl there, doing laps. I’m not trying for speed, just using a quiet, steady stroke, over and over. I bring my elbows out smoothly with a minimum of noise and splashing, then stroke gently, fingers first. I take water into my mouth and let it out slowly, as if breathing underwater. After a while, I feel my body flowing naturally through the water, as if it’s riding on a soft wind. The only sound reaching my ears is that of my own regular breathing. I’m floating on the wind like a bird in the sky, looking down at the earth below. I see distant towns and tiny people and flowing rivers. A sense of calm envelops me, a feeling close to rapture. Swimming is one of the best things in my life. It has never solved any problems, but it has done no harm, and nothing has ever ruined it for me. Swimming.
From Matthea Harvey’s prose poem “Thermae”:
He shivers, jumps in, starts swimming. When his fingers hit the pool-end he surfaces. His hair, brown and curly before, is sleek. Squint and he might be the figure he will describe at the start of his poem — Triton, man from the waist up, fish from the waist down, a heart that can’t tell the difference.
I establish that the pool is twenty-five yards long. My regimen of forty lengths equals a thousand yards, or a little over half a mile. A full mile would be seventy lengths: something to work up to.
I credit Haruki Murakami’s novel South of the Border, West of the Sun with getting me started swimming laps during the summer of 2000. Hajime, the narrator, seems to take to swimming laps as isolatory escapes from the external world and from his own thoughts, a way to almost shut down his mind, interludes of pure physicality that divide up his often dreamlike, listless day-to-day life. Swimming as a kind of denial of self. “In the morning after dropping off my daughters at nursery school,” he says, “I went to the pool and swam my usual two thousand meters. I imagined I was a fish. Just a fish, with no need to think, not even about swimming.”
Toward the end of the book, Hajime reflects:
I remembered the pool I used to swim in during junior high. The smell of the place, the way voices echoed off the ceiling. I was in the midst of becoming something new. Standing in front of the mirror, I could see the changes in my body. At night, in the stillness, I swore I could hear the sound of my flesh growing. I was about to be clothed in a new self, about to step into a place where I’d never been.
Strangely, after two weeks of four morning swims per week, I am back up to my 2003 level of forty pool lengths without a break. (Not exactly at Olympian speed, but still.) How did this happen? Are Canadian exercise pools shorter? Maybe I am miscounting.
I understand the Middle East cease-fire situation even less than I understand the conflict that preceded it. (The peace that passeth understanding.) At this distance, it feels presumptuous to even try to remain informed about what is happening. As if the latest round of bombings, shootings, destruction, and death are merely things one gets informed about, like sports scores, so one can have something intelligent to say about them in conversation. So one can be up on current events. So one can be a citizen of the world. What an interesting hobby! I think of something Annie Dillard writes in For the Time Being: after mentioning a 1991 cyclone that killed 138,000 people, she unleashes on the reader a series of merciless, half-taunting questions:
Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?
Meanwhile, I hit a passage in Flight to Arras in which Saint-Ex might as well be describing things today, in Lebanon, Iraq, everywhere:
Already as I move in the direction of Arras, peace is everywhere beginning to take shape. Not that well-defined peace which, like a new period in history, follows upon a war decorously terminated by a treaty. This is a nameless peace that stands for the end of everything. For an end of things that go on endlessly ending … There is no feeling that either a good or a bad conclusion is on the way. Quite the contrary. Little by little the notion that this putrefaction is provisional gives way to the feeling that it may be eternal.
Another August thirteenth rolls around, which means that erasing.org is now seven years old. And it is with a degree of remorse that I recall that the first thing I posted on the website back in 1999 was this quote:
Direct action is a proclamation of personal independence. It happens, for the first time, at the intersection of your self-consciousness and your tolerance for being screwed over. You act. You thrust yourself forward and intervene. And then you hang loose and deal with whatever comes. — Kalle Lasn
Still undeniably a fine quote, but the truth is that it is howlingly out of context as erasing.org’s inaugural entry. When I posted it, I made no mention of the fact that Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters, nor did I say that I found the quote in an essay of Lasn’s from Emigre magazine’s consumerism-themed “Everything is for Sale“ issue. (That essay would later appear as “The Meme Warrior” in Lasn’s 2000 book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge — And Why We Must.) Worse, I ignored the fact that Lasn’s quote is a lead-in to talking about Adbusters’s acts of culture jamming, political activism, and appropriating the media’s methods to rail creatively against corporations — not the sort of general-purpose inspirational aphorism I seemed to take it for. All I can do is wearily shake my head at my twenty-two-year-old self for having so cravenly co-opted a bit of an anti-consumerist manifesto to use as a melodramatic epigraph for a hail of sad-bastard journal entries.
This then is my delayed contrition. Here is Lasn’s quote again, this time with its surrounding material:
Next time you’re in a particularly soul-searching mood, ask yourself this simple question: What would it take for me to make a spontaneous, radical gesture in support of something I believe in? Do I believe in anything strongly enough? What would it take for me to say, This may not be nice, it may not be considerate, it may not even be rational — but damn it, I’m going to do it anyway because it feels right? I’m going to take this pair of scissors and cut my credit card in half. I’m going to take this little doll I’ve bought out of its huge box, right here at Toys “R” Us, and leave the wasteful packaging on the counter. Next time I’m caught standing in a long line at the bank, I’m going to shout cheerfully, “Hey, how about opening another teller!”
Direct action is a proclamation of personal independence. It happens, for the first time, at the intersection of your self-consciousness and your tolerance for being screwed over. You act. You thrust yourself forward and intervene. And then you hang loose and deal with whatever comes. In that moment of decision, in that leap into the unknown, you come to life. Your interior world is suddenly vivid. You’re like a cat on the prowl: alive, alert and still a little wild.
It’s fun to wrestle with titans. It’s exhilarating to throw a megacorporation like McDonald’s or Nike or Calvin Klein to the mat with the awesome momentum of its own icons and marketing hype — leveraging the very brand recognition the company so painstakingly built over the years. It’s a fascinating exercise to take on a cartel like the global automakers and try to make it question its mandate. It’s empowering to try to force a whole academic discipline like neoclassical economics to rethink its axioms. In any such fight the underdog is perfectly positioned to take risks and test theories. Culture jammers are continually trying out new strategic ploys in the meme wars. Here are a few we’ve found so far.
And so on.
No internet set up in the new apartment yet, and none due for two more weeks, courtesy of our shiftless broadband provider’s glacially-paced service. So I have to spend weekday working hours in the old and slowly emptying apartment until then, to be online for work. Living between places like this, neither one entirely moved into or moved out of yet, summons up a phrase of Wallace Stevens’s: the celestial ennui of apartments. (Stevens’s Collected Poems, incidentally, is what we anchor the anti-bat bedsheet with last week when we drape it over the radiator during the day.)
