Yesterday a local five-year-old kid falls off a ninth-floor balcony and survives — he breaks his legs and his pelvis but is otherwise OK. Full recovery expected. I learn about this from James Street South’s newspaper dispensers; the story makes the front page of today’s Hamilton Spectator and the local edition of the Globe and Mail.

I also learn from the dispensers that the Spectator has unintentionally imbued the story with a distinct Looney Tunes flavor by devoting almost their entire above-the-fold front page to a photo of the kid-shaped dent in the ground.

The Tick: Gravity is a harsh mistress.

Garry Wills, in a recent issue of Poetry, reviewing the new Robert Fagles translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “When new translations of the Aeneid appear — and they come along at a fairly steady rate — I read them backwards, Book Twelve first, then Book Eleven, and so on.” Glad to see someone else does this. I’ve been rereading Infinite Jest this way, going through the chapters in reverse sequence. Very interesting to encounter all the great writing of those late chapters as if they were initial chapters, taking in the details with a fresh eye, all the stuff that may have been a bit foggily blipped over the first two times, after Long Book Fatigue kicks in around page 600. (Backwards, the book’s opening line is no longer I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies, but instead becomes Human beings came and went. Not bad.)

Probably not too many books you could read like this, though. They’d need to be big dense books that span a great deal of time, or skip around a lot, or are structured strangely, or somehow encompass a vast amount of material, and make you want to return to them — books that you know well, but that are complex or confusing enough (or over-read enough) that you’d be enlightened by a fresh look at their late chapters and an unfamiliar route back through the narrative. It could work with the likes of Joyce, Pynchon, Dostoevsky, Melville, Woolf, Proust, William Gaddis, Malcolm Lowry. Garry Wills mentions Virgil, but other big classics could also work: Homer, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes. (Perhaps Shakespeare? The acts and/or scenes in reverse order? Good for de-familiarizing. Hamlet would begin not with Who’s there? but with So much for this, sir; now you shall see the other. Also not bad!)

An Xbox is now in our house. A surprise gift last week. It is the beginning of the end.

A Spotlight search on my hard drive for “Chupacabra” the other day turns up a forgotten text file of abandoned erasing.org drafts from 2005. Ah, memories.

What did I do on my summer vacation?

• I watched most of a cello section spectacularly fail to keep a straight face throughout the entirety of the Lord Of The Rings Symphony.
• I got my car’s steering mechanism’s groaning ball links fixed by a soccer/karate-champ-turned-mechanic named Odysseus.
• I was given by my grandmother a slightly horrifying music box shaped like a sad fat drunken stovepipe-hatted creepy hobo clown.
• I consumed a Chocolate Corvette in Toronto.
• I ate eel and liked it.
• I observed the Grim Reaper checking bus schedules on a Saturday night in the GO station.
• I heard a little girl in the Castle building at Fort Niagara lecture me about ghosts of soldiers up on the third floor.
• I planted a disembodied seagull leg foot-side-up in the sand off Lake Ontario.
• I spent just exactly the right amount of time sitting in front of the god damn computer.

The bit with Odysseus the auto mechanic is expanded upon in a separate fragment:

All summer my car had been making low, ominous, agonized, expensive-sounding groaning and creaking noises whenever I turned the steering wheel. Like the exaggerated creaking of a ship at sea in a movie about ships at sea. Eventually I gave in and took it to a shop, where it was fixed on the nearly-cheap by a man named Odysseus. (Actually it was spelled Odysseas, but I will take mnemonic license and remember it as -eus, as I like the idea of having had my car’s steering mechanism’s ball links fixed by a figure of mythical antiquity.)

He was named Odysseus but apparently he went by Ody, pronounced Odie. This puts me in mind of the twin brothers I was acquainted with about ten years ago, whose names were Themistocles and Aristotle, but went by Themi and Ari. I appreciate the cutesifying of such powerful names, and would not mind referring to Plato as Platey, Socrates as Socky, Aeschylus as Skyly, etc.

Note: I mistakenly believed that Aeschylus was pronounced uh-SKY-lus; hence Skyly. Since he’s actually ESS-kil-us, I would now amend the nickname to: Esky.

A burrito bar has just opened in Hamilton — will wonders never cease. It is called Che Burrito and Lounge. (You have to feel bad for the ghost of Che Guevara. As if being posthumously immortalized as a trendy t-shirt design wasn’t tacky enough, now his name’s been co-opted to sell burritos and booze to Canadians.) The bar’s interior is duly festooned with red flags and star-emblazoned bric-a-brac and printed posters militantly advancing la revolución in between the Corona beer promos. At least patronizing a communist-themed dive makes me feel I’m doing penance for that horrible Ayn Rand phase I went through between ages eighteen and nineteen.

Actually it is not so much a burrito bar as much as it’s simply a bar that specializes in burritos. This catches us off guard as we walk in. It’s not like the normal short-order burrito-joint sort of thing, where you stand at the counter and follow your burrito-in-progress down the line as one or two muttering cooks pile your choice of fixins onto the tortilla in front of you. Here you sit down at a bar table, you check off your burrito options on a paper menu that doubles as an order slip, and then the bartender comes over and takes it away to some unseen creature back in the kitchen who conjures up your burrito behind closed doors — always a bit suspicious.

But we concede that the burritos aren’t bad. Large (roughly the size of the average athletic shoe), cocooned in foil, by all indications fresh, unscrimpingly well-stuffed with stuff. Perhaps a bit weirdly crunchy, from having been grilled in a panini press for a few minutes. But we must make do; other than this place, if we want quality non-homemade burritos, we must leave the city (and/or the country) to find them.

Next on our culinary wish list: a local place that does barbecued Memphis pulled pork. (At present, the only place we know of is Fat Bob’s over in Buffalo.)

Quoth Quentin:

Violence is one of the most cinematic things you can do with film. It’s almost as if Edison and the Lumière brothers invented the camera for filming violence.

A character in Douglas Coupland’s JPod:

Look at nature. Nature is one great big woodchipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

In another book I learn that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent? … What percentage of the world’s species that are not insects are parasitic? Could it be, counting bacteria and viruses, that we live in a world in which half the creatures are running from — or limping from — the other half?

The New York Times’s A.O. Scott: “300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid.” True enough. But stupidity in action movies is not inherently a bad thing. It’s only good or bad in light of the movie’s aspirations. Apocalypto is plenty stupid, but the reason I hate it is that it has pretensions of profundity and seriousness. It tries to be some kind of sweeping epic, dandied up in subtitles and exotic settings, but under its puffed-up exterior it turns out to be just idiotic action-flick garbage. 300 may be more stupid, but it is honest. It never pretends to be anything other than a lean, mean battle-scene showreel, an economical two hours of stylized CG ass-kicking for effects-movie fanboys, comic-book geeks, and muscleheaded morons alike to get high off of. (I think I fall into the first group, with vestiges of the second.)

I’m reminded of something Paul Ford wrote about The Phantom Menace in 1999: “If I was ten this movie would be like mainlining superpure heroin in my eye veins.” That, I’m afraid, is an accurate description of the effect 300 has on me. And certainly on all the other fanboys, geeks, and morons who make the movie break box-office records last weekend. (Plus anyone who actually was ten years old when The Phantom Menace came out is now seventeen or eighteen — the perfect ages to see this thing.)

It’s been snowing since about half past two. Snow on a Friday afternoon in mid-March is, I submit, an unutterably soul-wearying thing to see.

When one grows up in southeastern Pennsylvania, one gets used to hearing on an annual basis the ancient seasonal cliché that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. This is not a common expression in Canada. Up here, March is 100% lion.

Ours is one of those households that will watch anything Eddie Izzard is in, even if he’s not in makeup. We humor his valiant attempts at “serious” acting. This week we tune in to the pilot episode of his new FX comedy/drama series The Riches, and it’s not bad. It’s no laugh riot, nor is it intended to be, but nonetheless every so often a bit of Izzardian randomness springs up out of nowhere. From a speech that his character, con man Wayne Malloy, extemporizes in front of a class reunion:

We are America, Wildcats. We’re its highs, and its lows! Its misfits, its beauty queens, its brain, and its brawn, its master, its blaster, its soul, and its gluteus maximus!

The whole scene is pretty amusing, but it’s when he says “its master, its blaster” that I really lose it. Whether it’s just an ad-libbed nonsense rhyme or an actual reference to the classic NES game Blaster Master, I’m sure I’ll never know.

On Sunday we go out to a dessert joint where I think I make myself ill trying to eat an overchocolatey ice cream concoction called a Tongue Depressor. “In almost every commercial food-making process,” writes David Bodanis in The Secret House (a science book that deeply unsettles me when I read it as a kid), “a batch that gets spoilt will be flavored with chocolate to get it through.” With scarcely contained glee, he writes of how ice cream’s delectable gooeyness and smoothness come from the injection of glues boiled down from the noses, udders, and asses of pigs and cows; elsewhere, he describes the fat-toughening steps of ice cream manufacturing as

an unpleasant process to observe, taking place as it does in cold rooms where the layers of freshly forming fat-bubble sludge are continually being scraped off the freezer wall and taken to another cold room to package. There are stories of the newly nascent ice cream falling to the floor as it’s being scraped off; this is later collected and, as might be expected, flavored and sold as chocolate to mask the taste it picks up lying for hours on top of the metal floor grid, and under the workers’ trudging boots.

I have faith in my immune system.

Friday: Laura is out of the country for a couple of days. I absorb many cups of coffee and glasses of wine and stay up all night watching awful rented DVDs. I have never before fully appreciated what comparative masterpieces the Matrix movies are until having suffered through the appalling knockoffs Equilibrium and Ultraviolet; having now seen them, I am a great many IQ points stupider. I attempt to salvage my night via Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, about whose quality I am the more deceived — I recall the New York Times compared its photography to the films of Stan Brakhage, which has me tapping my foot waiting for the Art to arrive — and but the only enjoyment I get out of it is the disgusted laugh I emit at Colin Farrell uttering through his grotesque proto-Village-People mustache the apparently famously horrible line I’m a fiend for mojitos. My brain by this point is already mostly liquefied and halfway drained out through my Eustachians. I pass out in bed at 5am loathing all cinema.

Billy Wilder on his trouble learning English: I couldn’t rearrange the furniture in my mouth. (A fine counterpart to this trio.)

A little over two years ago, in February 2005, just as the damn iPod shuffle poem is getting linked everywhere and bringing hordes of easily-amused websurfers from all corners of the globe thundering down on my poor website, I get the following email:

Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 13:44:28 +0100
Subject: would you agree to let me translate your texts in french ?

Hello,

I’m just starting a publishing activity, here in Paris – I used to be a
journalist, but want to move over – and I came accross your website this
morning : your texts are amazing. I think they could really catch a french
audience who can’t read english, as a testimonial of an american sensitive
guy. What do you think ? Would you like to discuss further more about this ?
Let me tell you at once that i couldn’t afford you any retribution at this
far, being completely volunteer in this kind of “love-activity” myself !
But i could find some money to publish 500 copies, send you 100 and get some
publicity for you here, in Paris, as i know lot of journalists. Of course, i
could share with you the sellings benefits of 300 others copies (100 free
for press, word-of-mouth advertising…), saving only the print costs for
me. Would it be fair ? Would you be interested ?
Let me know.

Bests,

[Name]

Fluent English it ain’t. (Though it’s not much worse than the emails my co-workers write.) But I Google the name of the woman who the email’s from, and she appears to be a well-known French fashion-mag editor and journalist. I Google a few phrases from the email to see if it’s some spammy form letter, and it seems to be a unique message. And my web stats show that a visitor with the sender’s IP address, traceable to a French ISP, has been looking through my Sensitive American archives.

Now, I would love to sit here and tell you that I, Mr. Savvy, instantly dismiss her offer as absurd and improbable — some sort of fly-by-night pay-to-publish scam — and with a droll world-weary chuckle delete the email without a second thought.

However, I must confess that I bite the hook. I send a cautious reply thanking her for the gracious compliments, and saying Yes I Suppose I Am Interested, provided that I get to write about the whole experience on the website (a hedge against shadiness). She emails me back and cheerfully outlines her plan, an indie-publishing venture aimed at bringing unknown internet writers to the attention of wider readerships, which venture she intends to promote through her myriad publishing connections.

In response to my cautiousness towards this “love-activity” of hers, she assures me that she needs no money or bookselling efforts from me, and that I’ll retain all rights to my work in both French and English. She proposes to select a series of erasing.org pieces — this is back when I used to write long-form journal entries — and translate them into French with the aid of some colleagues, have a limited-run monograph book printed by July, and get it in the magazines by October. I skeptically agree to everything, as if I have any idea what I’m doing, as if I’m capable of making decisions like this without an agent’s advice. She tells me that she’ll “dive in” to my website to choose an initial set of texts, and that she’ll get back to me in a few days.

I must now confess further that over the course of those following few days, my overactive imagination teams up with my deluded ego and I actually spend time seriously thinking that I might have a shot at being a literary celebrity in translation — a testimonial of an American Sensitive Guy! — and with starry eyes I speculate that this woman and her network of publishing people could actually be a ticket to some sort of overseas writing career. I’m embarrassed to say that I fantasize about doing readings in front of audiences of adoring hip young English-speaking Parisians. I imagine learning French, moving to Europe with Laura, doing the fabled literary American-expat-in-Paris thing. I even fret for a bit over whether the translators will be able to come up with a suitable French rendering of the word Laundroid.

Anyway, she must’ve found out I was moving to Canada, because I never hear from her again. A Pseudo-Canadian Sensitive Guy — not even the French would buy that.

I go through phases with a David Fincher movie. All David Fincher movies. The first time I see it, I think it’s pretty awesome. After the second or third viewing, doubt and disillusionment sets in, and I start to think that it’s not really that great after all — impressive without being engaging, a surfeit of creative effort and ingenious technical bravado expended on misguided or inexplicable ends. (A certain Macbeth quote comes to mind.) Still, something keeps me coming back to the movie, and after I continue watching it again and again on DVD, over the course of perhaps a few years, it starts to grow on me again, and I get more and more out of it the more I see it, until I find that my estimation of it surpasses my initial impression of mere awesomeness. It becomes post-awesome. It becomes a bonafide Favorite Film, one that I don’t ever get sick of seeing, that I appreciate despite its faults, that is not necessarily a good movie, but is nonetheless 100% my kind of movie. It then seems unthinkable to me that I could have found it disappointing after seeing it only a few times. (Never mind the many people who dismiss it after the first and only time.)

I’ve now seen Fincher’s Zodiac twice — an opening night show on Friday, and a matinee on Saturday — and, as predicted, I’m still at the pretty awesome phase, with hints of the doubt and disillusionment on the horizon. (We’ll see whether the pattern continues. I predict some sort of ridiculously comprehensive multi-disc DVD completist’s set.) The movie is stylistically un-Fincheresque, as I’d heard it was, lacking the level of cinematic panache of his other films: it’s mostly straightforwardly staged and shot, very little in the way of conspicuous camerawork or effects — the sort of thing that’ll result in reviewers calling it a mature film. But, very much like his other films, there’s this pervasive sense of sinister, meticulous arrangement, of the plot being a great puzzle that the characters have to somehow solve their way out of.

Also: Norm Gunderson and Roger Rabbit, bad guys.