High-mileage bookmarks both, one for big books, one for small.

James Richardson: The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.

Three lines from the the opening pages of Cáo Xuěqín’s The Dream of the Red Chamber, in H. Bencraft Joly’s 1891 translation:

• Reader, can you suggest whence the story begins?
• The narration may border on the limits of incoherency and triviality, but it possesses considerable zest.
• The stone listened with intense delight.

Last week, Laura alerts me to a rather unexpected cameo appearance that she happens upon near the beginning of Proust’s The Guermantes Way:

Look, let me just go and find my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,’ he added, while I turned away to hide my tears.

Whoa! A few pages later:

… the agreeable impression of warmth conveyed by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman in this comfortable room which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill …

And finally:

— And how come you know that, pal? Through that bloody corps of ours?’ asked the young graduate, pedantically flaunting the new grammatical forms he had only recently acquired and proud to let them adorn his conversation.

‘How come I know? From his batman, who else d’you think?

The icing here is that these passages jog my memory back to a Reuters news article from July 2001, about a U.S. Air Force F-16 that crashes in the mountains of western Turkey. The pilot ejects and parachutes to safety near the Turkish city of Batman (baht-MAHN), and, to provide geographical context, the Reuters wire reporter helpfully adds a single-sentence paragraph that unwittingly captures the attention and imaginations of snickering MetaFilter readers (self included): Batman is 80 miles from the Iraqi border. ← AWESOME!!!

It seems like I’m always getting this Douglas Adams line floating through my brain whenever I’m in an airport, last week included:

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.

Being the opening sentence of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Sometimes it’s followed by the book’s second and third sentences, which form a little mantra:

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly.

I do not, in general, think airports are ugly. Most of the airports that I’ve been in, in my limited experience, look as though they’ve been built or redesigned within the past decade, and to me seem reasonably nice-looking — ostentatiously sleek and Disneyland-futuristic, like overgrown mall gallerias: vast glass atria flooded with natural light, soaring organic wall and ceiling contours, pleasing geometries of shiny sci-fi girders and struts, shit like that. Nothing too offensive. Ugly’s not the word. (I will grant that airports with carpeting consistently have hideously ugly carpeting.)

But Adams’s jokey airport-ugliness observations are so embedded in my mind, from my having read them at early and impressionable ages, that I keep feeling like an abject philistine (moreso than usual) for not finding all airports as ugly as Adams seems to have found them in his day (that is, up until 1988, when Tea-Time came out) — and surely he saw more airports than I’ll ever see. Presumably airport design has come a long way since 1988, but the idea of inherent airport ugliness has stayed with me. I’ll be admiring some spacious, airy, skylit terminal concourse that I’m walking through, and then the Adams quotes float by, at which point I’m left thinking I’m not supposed to find this place pretty, am I? This is actually ugly, right? Very ugly?

No country for young men.

While convalescing over the weekend, we take in two classics of cinema set in the desert: Casablanca on Saturday night, and Raising Arizona on Sunday. I’m surprised to just now learn that Nicolas Cage was only twenty-two when Raising Arizona was filmed in 1986 — that redneck ’stache and haggard electric-shock hairdo easily add ten high-mileage years to his face. Less surprising but still interesting to me: T.J. Kuhn, the baby cast as Nathan Junior, is listed as having been born in 1985, and thus should be twenty-two now. What’s he up to these days, I wonder?

Home again. We have a pleasant Thanksgimme, and we fly home on Buy Nothing Day. We meet with no airline delays or traffic jams or bad weather or annihilated luggage or what have you, to my great amazement, and we get back in time to hit our beloved Fat Bob’s at dinnertime proper before the drive back to Hamilton. However, holiday-travel karma doesn’t let us off that easy: We have developed Floridian colds, and the colds accompany us home. Even Fat Bob cannot cure us. It’s now Sunday and we’re both still sick. I have spent all weekend coughing, sneezing, shivering, sniffling, and relentlessly Kleenexing my nose down to near-Voldemort levels. This is particularly annoying to me because I always only get sick once a year, and I already put in my one day back in February. At least this means that 2008 will undoubtedly be 366 straight days of apple-cheeked health and vigor.

Sunday afternoon, on the plane: I learn the word prosit from a cryptic crossword puzzle. It is an Austrian beer-drinking expression meaning “good health” or “cheers”, said while toasting. The cryptic clue is: Drunk tips or cheers (6). Never heard the word before in my life. I manage to hack out the right answer because “tips or” can only be anagrammed in so many ways that fit into the grid. (Proist? Priots? Pritos? No.) — Sunday night: Having dinner with my parents, as we raise our glasses, my dad quite coincidentally declares Prosit! … and is then left to wonder why I’m fixing him with a look of crazed vocabularic shock. (I hadn’t mentioned the word or the puzzle to him.) — Addendum fun fact: The Dutch equivalent of the word is: proost.

Back in SW Florida for the week, for Yanksgiving with the American fam. A brief last sample of Uncanadian environs — alabaster sunshine, bathwater breezes, the ubiquitous hypnosis of gently-inclining palm tree leaves, loud weird birds — before we are obliged to slink back home to the Great Off-White North and strap ourselves in to be buried beneath winter. We fly here in relative painlessness on Sunday, somehow avoiding the epic air-travel snarls and stupefactions the news tells us to expect; karma will ensure that our flight home on Black Friday will deliver us our due.

Odd: Richard Brautigan’s 1968 book In Watermelon Sugar takes place in and around a commune named iDEATH. Of course, today that word and its peculiar lowercase i can’t help but suggest something else. (To say nothing of Pods, Phones, Tunes, etc., despite being slightly off on the titular fruit.) One wonders whether Steve Jobs has been in touch with Brautigan’s estate for talks on the rights to the word, hedging on existential product development for the future. Shuffle off this mortal coil?

Bonus: Characters in the book keep talking about tigers. “The tigers were the true meaning of iDEATH.” Time to upgrade.

I just got my hair flat-ironed. I feel pretty!

Third thing in the mail: Alessandra Lynch’s Sails the Wind Left Behind. (Apropos perhaps of ships’ disoriented figureheads, and of sailing up upside-down rivers.) A line from “You are Not the Wolf in My Room” (the ’Wulf?), first read online earlier in the year, has stuck in my mind for months: Erase you, erase you not.

The Consul in UTV: an Untergeher nonpareil. Even has Under in the damn book title. Certainly one who goes under. One who loses, loses things, loses people.

Also in the mail today: Under the Volcano. The DVD I’ve been anticipating and dreading for much of this year. Verdict: Not bad at all. A fine variation on the Lowry novel, very much its own thing. And Albert Finney magnificently devours the picture. All is well.