Hey! Buddy! Want some HAPPINESS??? Here, go ahead, CRAM IT!

(Is this true?) Scott Huler, Defining the Wind:

Learning to copyedit before becoming a writer is like being a mechanic before learning to drive a race car. The understanding of the secret processes behind the magic can only help, especially when the handling gets rough.

(What about this?) Sven Birkerts, Reading Life:

For any devoted reader the act is deeply, complexly bound up with inwardness — with consciousness, sensibility, with whatever noun we choose to designate the murmur of awareness that accompanies us — and carries us — from first waking to sleep again … we use our own imaginative energy to bring the words to life and then project their content — their stuff — onto the interior screen. There the world we’ve generated from the written signals glows vividly, or flickers faintly, or moves in and out of resolution, depending on who we are, what we are reading, and the wattage of our moods.

(Or this?) James Richardson, Vectors:

That the bookstores divide into romance and mystery suggests the two most powerful fantasies are someone to love and someone to blame.

With the primary mouse-clicking finger out of commission, the middle finger is assuming the left mouse button duties temporarily, so now every time I click a link, it’s kind of like saying Fuck You to the internet. Zing! — Happy Marmoreal Day Weekend, fellow Yanks. The word marmoreal does not make me think of marble; it makes me think of Marmite, marmots, and schoolmarms. — A few weeks ago Laura has The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin checked out of the library, and I keep thinking the front cover reads The Early Diary of An Assassin. Related: A Google search turns up that many people have indeed thought of the joke name Anaïs Ninja. — Out to dinner earlier this week, I have a glass of white wine that absolutely tastes like yogurt … and the waiter confirms that it is supposed to! So cosmopolitan! — It is a tragedy, a travesty, and an old-fashioned low down dirty crying shame that the domain bookface.com is owned by a domain squatter. — Forget when it is that I finally notice that my initials appear on the backs of most DVD cases, being an acronym for Subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of hearing. — The new Indy movie hoopla makes me think of a couple of Indiana Jones parodies I read as a kid: in Mad magazine he was called Inbanana Jones, while Bananas magazine went for the more subtle approach and called him Idiotic Jones. — Great math joke in Last Crusade: “Sallah, I said no camels. That’s five camels! Can’t you count?” — Similar zero-theory humor from Douglas Adams:‘Ford,’ he said, ‘how many escape capsules are there?’ ¶ ‘None,’ said Ford. ¶ Zaphod gibbered. ¶ ‘Did you count them?’ he yelled. ¶ ‘Twice,’ said Ford.

Another ignominious moment for the self-injury file: Tonight at the laundromat, pulling clothes out of the dryer, I manage to bloodily rip off half of my right index fingernail on one of our laundry duffel bag’s clip-closure rings. Welcome to my life. Paraphrasing Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men: Even in the contest between man and laundry, the issue is not certain. (Laundry bit my finger?)

Headline seen on the front page of the Spec today, regarding a push for police to crack down on public profanity: Watch your mouth in city core, or taste justice.

The oral-fixation-ish wording is a nice touch, but I appreciate more the perhaps unintentional channeling of The Tick — Evildoers, eat my justice!

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz:

A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish.

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams:

In this world in which a human life spans but a single day, people heed time like cats straining to hear sounds in the attic.

Wendy Cope, “A Nursery Rhyme, as it might have been written by T.S. Eliot”:

Because time will not run backwards
Because time
Because time will not run
Hickory dickory

In the last minute of the first hour
I saw the mouse ascend the ancient timepiece,
Claws whispering like wind in dry hyacinths.

One o’clock,
The street lamp said,
‘Remark the mouse that races toward the carpet.’

And the unstilled wheel still turning
Hickory dickory
Hickory dickory
dock

This quote is not from Twain’s Following the Equator. I made it up.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

So Iron Man is awesome and everything, but what’s also great about it is that, thanks to serendipitous casting, it causes Wonder Boys to retroactively offer a pretty good superhero crossover — Iron Man in bed with Spider-Man! How slashy!

Tony Stark plus Peter Parker equals … STARKERS?

Though I grant that they’re not quite as good as Wonder Boys’s other extranarrative superhero mash-up: Margie Gunderson in bed with Jack Trustworthy Colton.

OK, Grady Tripp, write us out of this one.

(Note: The film also includes a brief scene where Zed from Men in Black sort of flirts with Rachel Dawes from Batman Begins, but this does not qualify.)

We see the IMAX version of Speed Racer. Thumbs up. The huge, stupefying blitzkriegs of color, light, and motion very entertainingly erase our brains, for which we will be forever grateful. Below, an accurate representation of how we and our fellow audience members look through more or less the entire movie:

(Click to animate)

Speaking of blue water and blinking: At the Y yesterday morning, one of the regulars warns me that the pool water seems to have been spiked with some sort of unusually stiff chlorine cocktail. At first glance, the water appears clear and normal. After half a lap, I detect that I am indeed paddling through an evil-tasting vat of Axis Chemical yuck. Glutton for punishment, I swim my usual distance, grateful to my goggles for saving my eyeballs from stinging irritation or outright Toht-in-Raiders-style liquefaction. Once finished, I get out and take a great big deep-down-body-thirst hit off the poolside water fountain, trying to cleanse the überchlorine taste from my mouth — it is like having just gargled with Raid. Showering, I note that my hair has assumed the texture of Koosh Ball fibers dipped in nail polish, and my skin feels like a movie-theater floor. Under a proper hot shower at home, the rubber hair gets Pantened to within an inch of its life and then larded up with this frou-frou Hair Healer potion from the back of the cabinet, a concoction something like runny custard perfumed with dishwater, which softens my chlorinated coif down to the level of Schnauzer whiskers. Neither moisturizing soap nor shower gel seems to fully detoxify my skin, despite much aggressive scrubbing, but they at least manage to bring it up to something somewhere between diner-seat Naugahyde and the Bonneville Salt Flats. (Attention Mom: This has all been silly exaggeration, as always! Please stop reaching for that WebMD bookmark!) Today the pool is temporarily closed, the sign says, due to a chemical imbalance. Captain Obvious, you are relieved of command.

Seeing the march of news reports about the aftermaths of Myanmar’s cyclone and China’s earthquake, and the ever-mounting death toll figures, awful yet abstract in their largeness (currently: Myanmar: 32,000; China: 10,000), I keep hearing Annie Dillard’s grim challenge from For the Time Being: “Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? … Did your anguish last days or weeks?”

The astounding, heartbreaking news she refers to is the cyclone whose waves drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi people on Tuesday, 30 April 1991. The essayistic narrative of For the Time Being returns a number of times to this figure, this unvisualizable 138,000:

At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

“No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

Later in the book, Dillard writes: “Anyone’s close world of family and friends comprises a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, an invisible group at whose loss the world will not blink.” She reels off a few of recent history’s death toll statistics: the many football stadiums’ worth of deaths caused in a year by Joseph Stalin, by Pol Pot, by the 1917-1918 flu epidemic, by measles even today. “Do we blink?”

The paleontologist suffered, he said, the sense of being “an atom lost in the universe.” Individuals blur. Journalists use the term “compassion fatigue.” What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue. Do you suffer this? At what number do other individuals blur for me? Vanish? Our tolerances, I think, vary not only with culture but with age; children rarely grieve for strangers — “lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

Am accosted by TV news as I’m loading groceries into the car on Wednesday. Some shiny-teethed suit brandishing the fat foam-topped mic, his burly camera goon in tow. Trolling supermarket parking lots at lunch hour for Man-On-The-Street interviews — very practical. They jump out from behind the next car and hail me: Excuse me sir, [unintelligible]-TV news, could we ask you a few questions? — No! Get the fuck away from me, you goddamn jackals! I am a smug anti-television snob who scorns your condescending invitation to blab momentarily on some bush-league eleven o’clock news circus! — Of course I merely mutter: Uh … no thanks, sorry. (Don’t want to be on TV. Would compromise my Witness Protection hiding-in-Canada cover.) Suit and goon about-face without a word — don’t know whether this minor rudeness is because they’re not used to being refused, or because they get it a lot and don’t see the point of post-refusal pleasantries — but within seconds I see them snare a nearby blond minivan chickie. She looks starstruck and enthusiastic as they approach. (Possibly they are getting citizen reactions to high gas prices? Currently averaging $1.20 per liter around here, which converts to $4.54 per gallon. Glad neither of us drives to work.)

Atlanta footnote: Sunday afternoon we eat dinner with my parents at a restaurant that has been invaded by fruit flies. We spend our entire meal swatting them away. One of them succeeds in diving into my dad’s glass of red wine, where it instantly expires. My dad exhales dark clouds of displeasure. I trade glasses with him and pluck out the marinated mite and finish off the remaining wine, drosophilan contamination be damned. Later I realize that the Wind in the Willows quote from last Thursday has proven unexpectedly prophetic, what with that swallow’s rhapsodizing about flying south and enjoying the taste of my first fat insect. I detect earthy undertones.