On Wednesday Gizmodo posts about the virus that’s infected the laptops on the ISS (!), kindly including a before-the-jump link to my astronaut-movies entry, sending over an avalanche of geeks and gamers who presumably get great joy (as do I) out of seeing that NASA seems to have employed illegal movie rips back in the day.
On Thursday I’m surprised to see that the francophone edition of Gizmodo (which I didn’t even know existed), also links to my entry from the translated version of the ISS post, sending over an avalanche of French geeks and gamers. (Perhaps they will be interested in the testimonial of an American Sensitive Guy ?) (No.)
Seeing Gizmodo geekery in colloquial French starts me investigating French net/texting slang a little. MDR = mort de rire = die laughing (more or less the French LOL). Pk = pourquoi = why. Mci bcp = merci beaucoup. Jtm = je t’aime (not to mention jtl = je te love). From there, I am ashamed to say, it is only a short stumble for me into the world of lolkats.fr — lolcats en français. Dsl ! ( = désolé = sorry)
Above: A lolkat starring Laura’s family’s cat, who, as it happens, has a French name: Mouchoir Noir. Sounds adorable, doesn’t it? It means: Black Tissue.
(Between the preceding, the French everywhere on the Montreal trip [though not out of our mouths, alas], the fantastic shifting Spanish-to-English-to-Spanish dialogue scenes between J. Bardem and P. Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, buying and rewatching Ratatouille [trying to accept that it takes place in a linguistically confused Paris in which some people speak American English, others speak English with exaggerated French accents, and everyone throws actual French words in here and there — PK ?!?!], and a recent bit of Latin [David Ferry’s and Sidney Alexander’s translations of Horace, via the library], this August has proven for me to be an unusually strong month for the Romance languages…)
Another summer is probably history; the swelters and flooding rains have stopped, the temperatures have turned cool, jackets emerge from closet estivation. In the car I hear a Toronto radio announcer, introducing Vivaldi’s Autumn concerto, reflect wistfully that this sort of annual pre-fall coolness is a reminder to Southern Ontarians that we live in a Nordic climate. He says Nordic but surely means simply northern. Nordic means Scandinavian. Or perhaps he really does mean Scandinavian?
Melville, Moby-Dick:
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”:
In his struggle to reach the captain and the boat, he reflected that when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for some moments had been horror of the temporary agony.
David Markson, Reader’s Block:
When John Stuart Mill’s maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution, Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.
Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death:
“This is my hi-fi,” Rat said. “I’ll bet you guys have never seen anything like this. My Uncle Flipping put this together about thirty years ago. In those days, they really knew something about sound. My father helped me fix up this soundproof room when Uncle Flipping gave me all this equipment. Behind the drapes there’s twelve inches of fiberglass batting, and the walls and floor are floating on rubber mountings. There’s an electric fan that goes on with the lights to change the air, or it would get plenty stuffy in here.”
“Is that the speaker?” I asked.
“That is the Klugwallah 850-ohm Sound Reproducing System,” Rat said, “and this is a custom-built amplifier. Don’t stand too near it when I turn it on; it can electrocute you at a distance of a foot on a humid night. This, here,” Rat said, indicating another giant piece of wooden furniture, “is a free-standing Fluchtzbesser turntable. Inside that wooden cabinet is an eleven-hundred-pound piece of granite. Yes, sir, this is about the finest hi-fi ever assembled in the city of Baconburg.”
“And it only has the one speaker?” Winston Bongo asked.
Rat gave Winston a sideways look. “Stereo is for sissies,” she said.
Martin Amis, The Information:
For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled … In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.
Good old E. Shackleton makes an unexpected appearance in Entertainment Weekly’s Tropic Thunder interview with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey, Jr.:
Last question: What’s Tropic Thunder 2 going to be?
BLACK: [Pauses, then stabs a finger in the air] Arctic Lightning! It’s the opposite of “tropic”: arctic. You twist it. You flip it.
STILLER: [Laughs] What, like the guys get sent up to the North Pole to do a Thing type of movie?
Or to make a movie of the Ernest Shackleton story, maybe.
STILLER: Yeah, the Shackleton story!
BLACK: Oh my God, that’s a great idea.
DOWNEY: Would I actually be playing an Arctic animal then? Like, a narwhal?
(Sir Ernest was trying for the South Pole, but close enough…)
Ah yes, America. The land next door. It seems so familiar sometimes. I hear rumblings of some sort of electoral contest coming up soonish, yes? And much ado about some posthuman Yank Olympian swimmer breezily nuking rivals out of the Beijingian pools? All very interesting, I’m sure. We sneak into the States on Saturday for some downturn-busting consumer-pig mall shopping, then make a beeline for Bob’s. For the superior species of Smoked Meat; a little more southerly of origin this time. And hallelujah: We bring back two bottles of Wild Turkey — a liter of the regular 80 proof and a 750 of the 101 proof — and so our house is once again a home. Canadian Turkey crisis be damned! (We couldn’t even find it in Quebec! Is NAFTA to blame?) As a thousand corny t-shirts preach: The liver is evil. It must be punished.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, on Chicago’s Division Street Russian Bath: Down in the cellar men moaned on the steam-softened planks while they were massaged abrasively with oak-leaf besoms lathered in pickle buckets. (This book kills me.)
A brief walkthrough of Chez Tunis’s foyer. Bats not shown. Doorhinge-squeaks, floorboard-creaks, and lamp-buzzings omitted. (I believe this is take three. On take two I neglect to have my keys out; on take one I trip over a staircase step.)
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, late 1600s: Some people are like popular songs that you only sing for a short time.
In Montreal I temporarily suspend my no-red-meat policy in order to try the famous Montreal smoked meat deli sandwiches. While researching Montreal restaurants beforehand, I am initially confused by the term smoked meat. I figure it means it’s a certain sandwich for which I get to choose the type of meat — smoked turkey, smoked ham, smoked beef, etc. But no. Smoked meat, I learn, is in fact beef. A particular delicatessan preparation of beef. Sort of the Montreal version of pastrami, or smoked corned beef, or cured beef brisket, whatever you want to call it. But they just call it smoked meat. The nonspecificity of the name is hilarious to me, akin to the dreaded Mystery Meat of school cafeterias, or the generic cans labeled “FOOD” that Emilio Estevez eats from in Repo Man. — I eat smoked meat sandwiches from two different delis, and they’re not bad! Not bad at all. (Example.) They cannot compare with the heavenly Philadelphia corned beef sandwiches of my childhood, but what can?
At one of those two deli restaurants Laura and I also split an aorta-plugger of an appetizer of Smoked Meat Poutine. (Pictured here.) A double-whammy of Montreal low cuisine. Poutine being the Quebecois dish of French fries drowned in hot brown gravy and topped with a mucoid splat of melted cheese curds. Or, depending on your perspective or your recipe, it might be fries drowned in cheese curds and topped with gravy. But you get the idea. (Douglas Coupland points out that “poutine’s rich content of starch, sugar, oil, fat and salt are ideal for larding it up for a dark Quebec winter.”) The smoked meat enters the picture by being shredded into a righteous hash and dumped over top of the poutine proper until the dish resembles an ectoplasmic bog of mud, barf, snot, and recently exploded road kill. It is also not bad.
Othello: I would have him nine years a-killing! Happy ninth to erasing.org, as of yesterday. What a way to spend my and your time.
Last Friday’s total solar eclipse, as seen from northwestern China. AP Photo/Xinhua, Han Chuanhao. Via.
But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky. Annie Dillard, in her essay “Total Eclipse”, writes about witnessing an eclipse in Washington’s Yakima valley in 1979. In her description the experience is apocalyptic and ghastly. As it begins, she sees colors change strangely: the sky opposite the sun turns a bizarre saturated indigo; the landscape and the people around her turn a chilly platinum hue. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. As it nears totality, things get bad:
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down.
She later writes that most terrifying part, the thing she believes makes her and the other watchers on the hillsides really start screaming, is a second sight that occurs at the moment of totality:
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed — 1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight — you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anaesthetic shoot up your arm … We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?
As the eclipse ends:
We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth’s face.
