Friday afternoon send-off: Today I open the extra copy of Tom Jones from the book sale and am happy to discover that right at the beginning of Book VII Chapter X is the parenthetical phrase “(a thing not very unusual)”. Oh yeah!

Hope everyone got a nice laugh out of the spectacle of me chastising myself for being nauseatingly book-nerdy the other day. As if I am not nauseatingly book-nerdy every day of the week. Not to mention the fact that you have to be nauseatingly book-nerdy in the first place to even be reading this site. No hard feelings.

Last Thursday William Gibson stops in Hamilton on his Spook Country book tour. We go to see him. I am surprised and impressed by the man. His demeanor is that of a dazed, languorous, half-awake mad scientist, sauced with low-amplitude slow-motion jitters and a distracted look of faint existential amusement that never seems to vanish. He does most of his book-signing before the reading begins, quietly sitting alone out in the audience; people filter into the room past him and then drift over one by one with books in hand as realization dawns. He signs my ancient Ace paperback of Neuromancer and observes to me that the book is the strange story of a future with no cellphones — a good line, but one that he’s sort of already said to an interviewer or two. I like that he makes no attempt to hide his discomfort and boredom with the whole author-reading routine — or perhaps it is just discomfort and boredom with Hamilton (understandable either way). When asked What are you working on next? during the Q&A, he replies with a polite weariness that all that’s next for now is trying to survive the remainder of the tour. Later I’m pretty sure I hear him say that, once the tour is over, where he really belongs is: in a basement somewhere.

I stop by the library today and it turns out that this week is the library’s annual book sale. I note that the book sale’s pricing scale is a bit of a microcosm of today’s publishing industry at large: all nonfiction $2.00; all fiction $1.00; all poetry $.50.

One dollar buys me a slightly thrashed hardcover of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I haven’t read the book, but for years it has held an enigmatic allure for me in light of a three-word recommendation by DFW in Salon: “Don’t even ask.”

I also buy a paperback copy of Fielding’s Tom Jones, forgetting that we already own it. Kill me now. I figured at some point in my life it was unavoidable that I would get around to committing such a nauseatingly book-nerdy act as accidentally buying a second copy of something, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon.

Charles Bernstein, “Further Color Notes”. Client design changes as avant-garde poetry. Fellow designers will appreciate.

Strangely heartened, in a misery-loves-company sort of way, to find that Malcolm Lowry was also no stranger to the financial headache of a rising Canadian dollar. From a 1950 letter to his brother, writing from Dollarton, British Columbia:

The pound falls further yet — or rather does so, in effect for us, because the Canadian dollar goes up to equilibrate the American, this it does on a free market and in a state of disequilibrium, fluctuating, in which it not only overtakes but threatens to go still higher than the American, with the result that my monthly income is now little more than $90 — that has the purchasing power of little more than a fiver in the old days, and I am not exaggerating.

From later in the same letter, an epigram for Canadian literature:

It may interest you to know that there is a long broadcast tonight or tomorrow night on the subject of Malcolm Lowry, Canada’s greatest most successful writer, which we can’t listen to because our radio has run down and we can’t afford to replenish the battery.

Apologies for the light postings this week, as I am spending my workday hours glued to the foreign exchange markets in fascination, watching the plucky Canadian dollar blast into orbit while the miserable U.S. dollar plummets toward pesoville. In forex lingo, the two currencies are, respectively, the loonie and the greenback. Let’s not go into the impact the loonie’s rise and the greenback’s fall have had on my USD paychecks over the past year. The Globe and Mail’s headline sounds funny if read aloud: LOONIE FLIRTS WITH PARITY. As I write, parity is indeed happening: the loonie/greenback exchange rate is hitting one-to-one, which I’m informed hasn’t happened since 25 November 1976. I remember the day well. Being five weeks old.

Lately reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co., written in the form of a narrator’s diaristic notes — “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text” — on a subject of growing interest to me: writers who do not write. Whose attitude toward writing is that of Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener: they would prefer not to. “We all know the Bartlebys,” writes the narrator, “they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world.” Some of these writers write for a while and then stop. Some choose to stop writing; others simply cannot continue. Some never write at all. Some attempt to provide reasons for not writing, and some don’t bother. Suicides don’t count, the narrator stipulates, though he allows a few exceptions. Most of the writers he includes are real (Salinger, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Joubert); a few aren’t. He refers to these writers’ works, and their lack of works, as the literature of the No.

Oh, I don’t know how important it is that I say this or something else. Saying is inventing. Be it false or certain. We invent nothing, we think we are inventing when in fact all we are doing is stammering out the lesson, the remains of some homework learnt and forgotten, life without tears, just as we weep over it. And to hell with it.

I order one pound of Poet-Warrior green tea from the Eastern Shore Tea Company. The name refers to a supposed custom of the samurai, who evidently made it a habit to jot down a poem or two before heading out to disembowel foes. One pound of loose tea seems like an abstraction when I place the order. Once I am hefting the actual parcel — a foil-wrapped pillar measuring roughly 11" × 3.5" × 2.5" — it starts to sink in just how much tea I have saddled myself with. A three-ounce package of Eastern Shore’s loose tea claims to yield fifty to sixty cups. Thus (check my math) one pound should yield somewhere in the neighborhood of 267 to 320 cups. I can only hope that I get around to cup #267 before the bottommost tea leaves completely wither to dust or decay into skunky garden peat. I forget exactly how and when I pick up drinking green tea every morning but I seem to have settled into the ritual for the long term. Green tea, as you know, prevents or cures every ailment known to man. It also adds years to one’s life, but one must take the bad with the good.

Monday night we get home from a long weekend in Florida. We are on the plane from four until eight. Not really all that long, but once we hit the ground I am uncharacteristically jetlagged and woozy, and I stay that way all evening and then also all day today, including right now. Walking around with this kind of weird perceptual wobble, as if some inner gyroscope has been lightly knocked out of whack. I assume it is jetlag. I hope it is jetlag. I think of a line from the old George Plimpton essay about his boxing match with Archie Moore: Your head is now a concert hall where Chinese music will never stop playing. — Also thinking of a strange jetlaggish line from Neuromancer (which I reread on the planes over the weekend), from the bit where Case is on the shuttle from Earth up to Freeside: Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.

Seven months and not one screwed-up fried egg. My cast-iron egg-fu is gradually getting formidable. The omelette-fu still needs work.

I haven’t seen The Bourne Ultimatum, but I’ve become aware of a nit-picky yet glaring languagey issue regarding the movie: apparently there is no actual ultimatum in it. The title is taken from the late Robert Ludlum’s book of the same name; does this titular ultimatum occur in the book? Why leave it out of the movie, if you’re contractually stuck with the title? The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw suggests that since it’s a franchise picture, the exact title doesn’t matter:

There is no “ultimatum” in the story, incidentally. It’s just there in the title to differentiate this film from the others, an alternative to sequel numbering. It might as well be called The Bourne Conundrum or The Bourne Spirograph or The Bourne Cornflake.

It strikes me as unlikely that a studio would release a sequel called, say, The Bourne Secret, that doesn’t have a secret anywhere in it. Audiences would be confused or let down, right? Yet The Bourne Ultimatum has done over $185 million domestic in twenty-four days, so it can’t’ve confused too many people. I guess the obvious answer here is that the title confuses people the right way: the studio must have banked on the [perhaps correct] assumption that the vast majority of moviegoers don’t really know what the word ultimatum means. That they’ll think the title means “The Ultimate Bourne” or something, appropriately one-upping the previous two movies, with a vaguely powerful and final-chapter-ish ring to it.

Related: Kenneth, this is the penultimate cheesecake.

From the Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together Department: Malcolm Lowry wrote a story set in Deadwood?! It is a four-pager called “Kristbjorg’s Story” that I find in The Voyage That Never Ends, the just-released book of Lowry’s unpublished and out-of-print stories, poems, letters, and other literary fragments lately shaken from his poor dead bones. The story’s opening lines: The German lived in the Black Hills and he drank himself to death. Apparently he wished to obliterate something.