I am in the library. Floor two. I seem to have taken up residence next to the “A” shelf of General Fiction, not on purpose. I can make out The Fall of Troy (Ackroyd), Things Fall Apart (Achebe), Watership Down (Adams), Little Women (Alcott). I have abandoned the coffeeshop and the potted palm and the comfy crumby chair and migrated over here to see what the Wi-Fi situation is, on the off chance that the twenty-first century has arrived in this part of town. The library’s wireless network is dodgy and slow but serviceable, and workplace-wise the library is quieter and brighter and much warmer than the frigid, drafty, digit-numbing coffeeshop, though both venues are competitive in terms of clientele creepiness. (Self sometimes included, I should concede.) I will bet you one shiny Canadian dollar that the reason our cable internet at home is down is because the troglodytes upstairs have attempted a repeat of last year’s amateur cable-splitting scheme. Perhaps unlikely they’d venture out onto the roof in this cold, but that is my paranoiac hunch. On the knee-high table in front of me are an explosion of library magazines (“The Jeans No Man Should Ever Own” quoth Details; “Build Our Beautiful Shoreline Gazebo” quoth Cottage Lite; “Don’t Eat That: 12 Worst Things Cats Can Consume” quoth Cat Fancy) and a hardcover pulp mystery novel entitled, winningly, Murder-in-Law. All around me are banks of twelve-foot-tall picture windows looking out onto the winter weather. It’s been snowing lightly for hours. Should’ve worn boots today. Walking a dozen blocks home in inches of fresh slush does neither canvas sneakers nor the feet they contain any good. Four years ago in Virginia my mantra when walking outdoors in the winter was: Canada practice, Canada practice. I still recite this now, when walking. It has yet, in my experience, to make perfect.

Back in the coffeeshop, back in the comfy chair next to the potted palm. Green tea and a blueberry muffin as pseudo-payment for glomming off the place’s Wi-Fi. Our cable internet suspiciously turns off yesterday afternoon and has stayed off, so I must find other ways to be online. The potted palm looks a great deal unhealthier than it did last April, even though I’m not entirely sure it isn’t plastic. The comfy chair is adorned with a constellation of some previous patron’s pastry crumbs on it, as is the floor below it, but I can’t be particular. “With or Without You” is playing on a Toronto radio station on the house stereo; did I mention that last weekend we see U2 3D? I cannot claim to be the world’s most ardent U2 fan, but I am a sucker for the recent 3D movie racket. Polar Express a couple years ago, Nightmare Before Christmas and Beowulf last year. (No plans to see the 3D Hannah Montana picture. Must draw the line somewhere.) U2 3D is surprisingly cool, although one prolonged shot of Bono and his sci-fi Fly shades singing messianically as he extends one enormous hand out of the screen into my face has threatened to haunt my dreams. It is time to go to work. Tea’s getting lukewarm. Am gradually eroding the muffin. Laura has opined convincingly to me in the past that blueberry muffins are a ruse, that they are nothing but cake, an excuse to eat cake in the morning. Now the radio is, unbelievably, playing Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison.” Junior high flashback. It’s driving me out of my mind! That’s why it’s hard for me to find! — Now you know. Yo Slick: BLOW.

A Buffalo TV news anchor, accidentally audible for a few moments during the local Oscars telecast due to a newsroom tech glitch, summarizing No Country for Old Men for others in the room: A guy with no expression who keeps blowin’ up everything.

Related: Anton Chigurh throw pillow.

Saturday I replace the moribund PowerBook with a new Mac mini, because as a longtime Apple user I demand more punishment at their hands. After sifting through the backups I seem to be more or less back in business, Intel-powered and running the great buggy meh that is OS X Leopard. The name keeps reminding me, forebodingly, of the title “Leopardi”, the last poem in Mark Strand’s first Selected Poems.

While you sleep I have gone outside to pay my late respects
to the sky that seems so gentle
and to the world that is not and that says to me:
“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope.”
[ … ]
Things pass and leave no trace,
and tomorrow will come and the day after,
and whatever our ancestors knew time has taken away.

The slightly more obvious reference that comes to mind:

‘But look, you found the notice didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.’

Things broken beyond repair in our household in February (so far):

• One glass coffeemaker pitcher (cracked against something ceramic in dish drainer)
• One tempered glass cutting board (dropped onto kitchen floor)
• One drinking glass (knocked onto kitchen floor by large wooden cutting board that tipped over after being stood up on its edge, unwisely)
• One large wooden cutting board (hurled angrily to floor seconds after the aforementioned glass, also unwisely)
• Six mouse spinal columns (annihilated by mousetrap technology)
• One blind, crippled, long-dying, pitifully prehistoric circa-2004 PowerBook G4 (cause of death hardware hash-up or system software seppuku)

“Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.” Thus the maniacal monologuing prince in Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, lately improving my evenings.

“The cold is inside me,” the prince said. “Therefore it makes no difference where I go; the cold goes along with me inside me. I am freezing from within. But in the library this cold is most bearable. Nothing but brains printed to death,” the prince said. “With every book we discover to our horror a human being printed to death by the printers, a man published to death by the publishers, read to death by the readers.”

The Fincher/Believer connection I didn’t really realize until now I’ve been waiting for: David Fincher falls into ‘Black Hole’. My favorite Pitiless Purity Dude has apparently signed on to direct the Avary/Gaiman-scripted screen adaptation of the acclaimed disturbing comics series by Charles Burns (cartoonist, illustrator, graphic novelist, Believer cover artist). Coolness. Be nice if Burns gets italics and an exclamation point in the opening credits. Also be nice if Fincher actually gets around to making this picture before Burns Blvr cover #100. (January was #50.)

Lesson learned this morning: Kaikhosru Sorabji vanquishes loitering plumbers.

Above: Part of a screenshot from the No Country for Old Men website’s Flash intro. There is an invisible comma in the middle: Call it, Friend-o. As indicated by the Flash intro’s audio clip of Javier Bardem uttering this line with the profoundly chilling preternatural menace he exudes every second he’s on screen in the movie. Which line is actually a composite of two separate lines of dialogue: What business is it of yours where I’m from, Friend-o?, and then Call it a few minutes later in the scene.

I bring it up because, preternatural Bardemian menace notwithstanding, Friend-o will not stop reminding me of Friendy.

I go to see No Country for Old Men several weeks ago and kind of hate it. The ending blindsides me. How predictable. I hate it even more after I find out that basically every movie reviewer and film-geek blogger on the planet has declared in self-congratulatory raptures how surpassingly awesome the ending is and that the poor bourgeois saps who don’t like the ending obviously just don’t get it. I also hate the movie on general principle for having its ending be something that must be talked about coyly, without revealing what the ending actually is. What bullshit!

But last week I feel compelled to go see the movie again, partly to see how it holds up sans blindsiding, and lo and behold it improves tremendously on second viewing. So I must concede that I do not in fact hate it. I like it, a lot. Maybe those breathless rave reviews bandwagonishly changed my oft-malleable mind, what do I know. (Perhaps all those reviewers and bloggers saw it twice, or read the McCarthy novel beforehand, and thus never faced the blindsiding problem?) I still maintain that the ending is not good, that it is something of a willfully-difficult stunt, but I don’t find it a deal-breaker for the whole picture like the first time around.

Last week, as the credits start to roll, I overhear a girl behind me saying to her date, The Coen Brothers are screwed in the head. Who can disagree?

Two bits of dialogue from the movie that don’t quite qualify as quotable, but which for some reason won’t leave me alone:

1. —Where’d you get the pistol?
   —At the gettin’ place.
2. —La puerta … Hay lobos …
   —Ain’t no lobos.

More fun with wildlife: Friday night, an hour before we’re set to leave for a dinner date, a tiny mouse materializes in our living room. We manage to capture it under a clear plastic storage container. We then watch in amazement as the mouse starts to repeatedly hop up and whack its head against the plastic ceiling above it, springing into the air like a cartoon jumping bean or a popping popcorn kernel. A few moments of this acrobatic show are preserved via digital video in the above looped animated GIF, which I trust you will find as hypnotic as I do. The extended edition, with on-set sound effects, can be seen on YouTube right here.

Pity soon gets the best of us and we carry the container outside and set the mouse free up near some neighboring buildings’ back yards, and we leave for dinner with more-or-less clear consciences. It is anyone’s guess whether it just followed us right back inside, or is now living large in some other abode, or is now a tiny ice cube.

For purely personal reasons, I like that Nabokov’s unfinished novel, which he requested be destroyed after his death (but which still hasn’t been, yet, thirty-one years later), is entitled The Original of Laura. Also appealing: the Times Online’s Stefanie Marsh, describing what’s known of the story, writes that what the novel’s main character goes through is: A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

Apropos: Nabokov, writing in 1956 about an early version of Lolita (in which version the title character was named Juanita Dark … a counterpart to John Shade?):

Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.

Non-storm snow most of the day yesterday, and into last night. What Archibald MacLeish, in “The Woman on the Stair”, calls the white unable wandering of the air.

An hour ago: Gruesome yet strangely satisfying: Hearing a mousetrap snap in the kitchen twenty feet away while in the middle of reading Melville’s account of a burial at sea. (Followed by a quick break to double-bag the mangled varmint and pitch it into the trash. We commit this body to the deep!) Melville, of the dead and sunken sailor:

Shenly was dead and gone; and what was Shenly’s epitaph?

— “D. D.” —

opposite his name in the Purser’s books, in “Black’s best Writing Fluid” — funereal name and funereal hue — meaning “Discharged, Dead.”