“I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!”

Dear erasing.org readers: Happy new year!!! — and in 2009 may you catch whatever it is you’re chasing. (And then know what to do with it.)

Fast-melting roof snow gets inside the building walls a week ago, causing a wall-and-ceiling leak in our apartment. Our inuksuk stays dry but is temporarily exploded.

Thomas Bernhard, Frost:

He listened to everything I had to say, without a single interruption, even up and down the many detours and byways I took, where there was talk of security and being together and being alone, of lack of self-confidence, of trust, and rebellion and distinctions, of suddenly stopping and going back, of fear and reproach, of love and torment, of deception and self-evidence, where clouds rose up, and heavy snowfalls darkened town and country, where people continually renewed each other, where there was grief after days of exuberance and rivers dragged their courses, where you gradually forgot how to live and found again what had been lost, where silence alternated with excitement, stimulating modesty here and brutality there — things that didn’t resolve themselves, how people walked past each other, not recognizing themselves, fell into silence, and the sayings of sadness, where nights were uselessly waked through and a thousand important days were slept away.

For the new year: Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven”:

The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Not sure what to think about Benjamin Button. It seems to be a non-bad Oscar-bait movie-movie, directed by someone posing as David Fincher, screenwritten by a watery gumbo of Gumpian clichés channeled through Eric Roth (based on the merest atom of the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald), and starring Brad Pitt in the triple role of Corny Nawlins Voice-Over, Unintentionally Funny CG Homunculus, and Non-Acting Slab Of Well-Lit Scenery. I expect the picture will improve upon repeat viewings, as per my usual cycle of Fincher phases. For now, I guess I hope it wins Fincher his Oscar.

One lit-geek thing to note: The Shakespeare that Tizzy recites to young Benjamin (in the scene shown above) is an interesting choice for the film: It’s the opening of Edmund Mortimer’s speech from Henry VI Part I, in which the elderly Mortimer, who has been locked up in the Tower of London for many years, gestures toward death:

Kind keepers of my weak decaying age,
Let dying Mortimer here rest himself.
Even like a man new-halèd from the rack.
So fare my limbs with long imprisonment;
And these gray locks, the pursuivants of death,
Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer …

Those are the lines Tizzy speaks in the film (performed with panache by the excellently-named Mahershalalhashbaz Ali). In the play, the speech continues:

… Nestor-like agèd in an age of care.
These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent,
Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent;
Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief,
And pithless arms, like to a withered vine
That droops his sapless branches to the ground.
Yet are these feet — whose strengthless stay is numb,
Unable to support this lump of clay —
Swift-wingèd with desire to get a grave,
As witting I no other comfort have.

Credit where credit is due, I appreciate that Roth went with a lesser-known moment in Shakespeare, and that even just those first six lines strike pretty nicely at the film’s aging/weakness/mortality concerns, while tapping a bit on the image of imprisonment that the film returns to a few times. (Including Fincher’s use of the Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is a Cage” for one of the TV trailers.)

Another thing I appreciate: In the screenplay, Roth uses the original Folio version of the Shakespeare speech, in which the “Nestor-like agèd” line comes before the “Argue the end” line — making Tizzy’s recitation a seven-line quote — but in the actual filmed scene Tizzy performs the Oxford Shakespeare editors’ emended version, with the “Argue” line first. Who made that decision? Could it be that Fincher applied his cinematic obsessiveness to Shakespearean textual variants? I wish! (Maybe Brad just didn’t want any references to Nestor, as it might remind audiences of Troy.)

You can see the Shakespeare speech from Benjamin at the end of the “Working With David” video posted on the Apple trailer website. (The video is a short featurette in which the lead cast members sit around a table with Fincher and nervously try to say nice things about him — attempting to put positive spins on his control-freak habit of Kubrickishly tormenting actors by demanding endless retakes.)

Finally: I remain convinced that Brad’s digitally-rendered “old” Benjamin face was modeled at least a little bit off of latter-day Tom Waits:

Belgium cookies, Pocky, Pastéis de Nata, and a Canadian gourmet-ish coffee whose brand name sounds like a 1950s jazz musician phrase for getting off heroin.

Edward Gorey, The Iron Tonic:

The way the others wish to go
Has been obscured by drifted snow.

The careful stroller should beware
Of objects falling from the air.

Working in the other room today and yesterday, because of the better sun. I am fording the Y’s annual two-week pool closure, when they drain the bastard dry and laser-floss the waterjets and scoop all the dead elderlies out of the deep end intakes, then give the slimy walls a quick Brillo scrubba and then (and then) fill the thing back up with bottom-shelf eggnog Jello and bounce around in it during the staff after-hours holiday hootenanny until everyone is ass-faced with alcohol poisoning, so goes the Y’s slinking locker-room pervs’ bug-eyed hearsay. So no swimming until the new year. Same thing as this same week in Decembers ’07 and ’06. Without that morning aquatic mile, my higher cognition faculties have once again coagulated into subthermic space yogurt, leaving the old basement-level lizard-brain hydraulics in charge. The weekend snows seem to have odd extrasensory effects on me as well. I have a vague sense of Xmas in slow motion. I have been outside. Outside everything is high-pitch and fast-forward, the climactic writhings of mass holiday psychosis. Xmas spaz week. Xmas-Eve Eve. That highest bough gets higher by the minute. Postal workers are trapped beneath ziggurats of mail-order boxes in transit, they are cut to ribbons by hails of Xmas-card envelopes, they are falling into ice crevasses while out on delivery, they are wrestled to post-office floors and mitten-pummeled into figgy pudding by non-jolly customers at the termini of their ropes. Work is done, the better sun is long gone, it is snowing yet again, tomorrow rise another thousand revolting crud-colored Matterhorns of plowed snow, we are never going to get that car out.

Emily Dickinson’s solstice lines:

These are the days that Reindeer love
And pranks the Northern star —
This is the Sun’s objective,
And Finland of the Year.

Wow. OK, the Longfellow may not have been not the right choice. What I have been watching out my window all morning is no serene, meditative, Romantically wistful snowfall, all floaty fairytale wonderland flakes that stir elegiac poetic reflection. It is not Silent, and soft, and slow. It is not the poem of the air. This thing is dense and violent and howlingly high-speed. It is the Scandinavian death-metal opera of the air. El Blizzardo doesn’t quite cover it. Maybe Das Blizzardämmerung. Nonstop frenzied winds brutally hammering immense curtains of snow in all directions, looking like high-pressure billows of exploded-boiler steam. Visibility of skim milk. Trees and traffic lights rocking and rolling. Thunder and lightning! (Just once.) An hour ago my desk window has turned opaque, wind-slammed snow pasted to it from top to bottom; then the wind changes its mind and erases it all in a blink. The roads are deeply blanketed despite the processions of plows and salt trucks. Unable to gauge ground accumulation — maybe eight inches in the past six hours? I did venture out into the weather earlier this morning, walking to and from the Y, and I did get a dose of snow to the brain, but the storm hadn’t gotten ugly yet. It is very, very ugly now …

For the big bad Friday winter storm we’ll supposedly be waking up to in the morning: Longfellow’s 1858 “Snow-flakes”:

Out of the bosom of the Air,
      Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
      Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
            Silent, and soft, and slow
            Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
      Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
      In the white countenance confession,
            The troubled sky reveals
            The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
      Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
      Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
            Now whispered and revealed
            To wood and field.

More robotness: As a kid I had this children’s book about robots, with one part devoted to robots in movies. (The book seemed outdated even then, I think only going up to the 1970s.) One of the pages depicted the robot from Logan’s Run, the creepy, crazy, mellifluously-voiced food-supply droid that resembles an assemblage of cheap furnace ducts on wheels, and whose name, awesomely, is Box. I mention this because it has stuck in my mind for years that the author’s kiddie-language description of Box concludes with the appealing lines: Will Box give them some food? Probably not!

Hamlet as robot: The only instance of the word machine in all of Shakespeare appears in the “Doubt thou the stars are fire” love letter from Hamlet to Ophelia. He signs it: Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet. Using the word to refer to his own body. From the same letter: I am ill at these numbers.

OK! A few inches of quiet spooky snow last night. Then a two-day breather. Then El Blizzardo hits on Friday. It will begin at dawn. We’ll be there with bells on.