Douglas Coupland, Microserfs:

Time time time. It’s such a current subject. It’s like money — if you don’t have it, you think about it too much.

Karla’s been thinking about time, too. Tonight during shiatsu training, with me flat on my stomach, my back and sides being poked and pummeled, her voice, disconnected from her body, informed me that in general, “One’s perception of time’s flow is directly linked to the number of connections one has to the outer world. Technology increases the number of connections, thus it alters the perception of having ‘experienced’ time.

“It’s a bell-curve relationship. There’s actually an optimum point at which the amount of technology one owns extends the amount of time one perceives or experiences.

“It’s as if your brain holds a tiny, cashew-shaped thalamus going tick-tick-tick while it meters out your time dosage for you. There’s a technological equilibrium point, after which, it’s all downhill.”

Antonio Porchia: When you seem to be listening to my words, they seem to be your words, with me listening.

Ibid.: Everything is becoming the same. And that is how everything ends: becoming the same.

Ibid.: A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.

I have a theory that each night the mind assembles a finite reel of all the upcoming day’s ditherings and distractions and fantasies and anxieties, this cacophony of brain noise, and usually in our waking hours this reel is supposed to roll by at a leisurely pace, a dull roar that takes all day to finish. But something about swimming laps in the mornings, for me, must make my own personal brain-noise reel ramp up to fast-forward mode, getting a whole day’s worth of mental garbage over with in thirty, forty minutes. When I swim, my mind won’t stop wandering and it won’t shut up. My body paddles and kicks and breathes and stares down at the pool floor, Zen as a motherfucker, utterly cucumber-cool; while up in the gray matter a hellacious swarmlet of caffeinated, cake-smeared kindergarteners tear-asses around under strobe lights clanging pots and pans and screeching like minks. Almost every time I swim I lose count of what lap I’m on — even simple counting is too much to focus on — and I end up having to repeatedly guess what number I’m up to. As a rule I try to err on the side of too low. I am likely in better shape than I should be thanks to all these extra laps I’ve unwittingly swum. Perhaps this theory of mine is only applicable to minds in the process of being misplaced. The upside to this nonsense is that it is probably pretty good fitness motivation: after a properly exhausting swim, all day everything inside and outside the old upstairs gets the volume turned way down.

All right! Subtropical Storm Laura is here! And she’s coming to Canada! Currently the storm is way out in the middle of the North Atlantic, menacing the shipping lanes and annihilating puffins. The Canadian Hurricane Centre forecasts that Laura is looking to come west and “brush” the southeastern Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, staying offshore but sending some mean northeasterly gales into the region tomorrow and the next day. Some hatch-battening will be happening in the Maritimes tonight, but nothing too epic. The Centre assures us: No significant impacts are expected over land. However, she could still develop into a bonafide tropical storm. Their afternoon analysis notes: Laura looks much more tropical than this morning.

The satellite imagery above is Laura as seen from GOES Atlantic Floater 2. Hot stuff from the NHC, describing Laura in their 11am Forecast Discussion: A pronounced convective band now curls about three quarters of the way around the east and north of the large circulation but the low-level center remains broad and ill-defined with several internal smaller swirls. With the improved convective signature, a case could be made that the cyclone is beginning to acquire more tropical characteristics. — A case could be made, baby. A case could be made. (I have no idea.)

Above: Not my house. We pass this Hess Village sports bar whenever we’re en route to Che Burrito. We have never been tempted to go in. I did call them once to ask if they sold t-shirts, but no luck. Slightly related: Scott Herman Fitness. (Not my website.)

Two notes on the Burgessian booze calendar:

1. Junip: Every source I can lay hands on has Burgess spelling the June month as JUINP, which makes not the remotest bit of English or punnish sense to me. I am going to go out on an editorial limb here and guess that it is an error for JUNIP, to which I’ve emended it. This fits way more consistently with the other months’ puns — it’s a closer sound to “June”, and it alludes to the juniper berry, a key ingredient in gin and other spirits. (A line in Burgess’s Devil of a State indicates he’s no stranger to the stuff: On her breath is no honey but the smell of strong drink, the potent mingling of barley and juniper in deadly ferment.) It also sort of suggests “D’you nip?”

But I may very well be mistaken. Can anyone come up with an explanation as to what sort of pun Burgess might’ve been going for with JUINP? Is it some obscure brand of whisky, some antiquarian garble of British pub slang? The best I can propose is that he may have begun with JUNIPER, hacked off the ER, then switched two letters so that it formed the French word for June (JUIN) … with a P stuck on the end for flavor.

2. Droolie: Pronounced DROOL EYE.

Burgess and Joyce, drawn by David Levine for the NYRB.

Anthony Burgess’s Joycean-pun calendar months for drunkards, from Joysprick:

9. Siptumbler
10. Actsober
11. Newwinebar
12. Descendbeer

Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell (the first part of his London trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky):

… the gas-lit walls and objects around him were heavy with his own depression — the depression of one who awakes from the excess in the late afternoon. Only at dawn should a man awake from excess — at dawn agleam with red and sorrowful resolve. The late, dark afternoon, with an evening’s toil ahead, affords no such palliation.

In the house below — “The Midnight Bell” — the silence was creepy. Creepy in a perfectly literal sense — the silence of things creeping. It was the silence of malignant things lurking in passages, and softly creeping up a little, and lurking again….

For some reason the aforementioned State Department guy’s Castro insult, and its terribly funny meanness, makes me think of an old Garfield comic strip:

This may be my favorite Garfield comic. I love that there is no real joke. It is nothing but a blunt, bare, almost haikulike distillation of the funniness of meanness. — That wasn’t very nice. — You’re right. That wasn’t very nice. But it was extremely funny. The simplicity of it kills me, makes me tremulous with mirth. Tremulous with mirth? Yes, tremulous with mirth. (Plus Garfield’s expression in the third panel, the very epitome of the shit-eating grin, could not be more sublime.)

That said, maybe it’s nothing so intellectual, since giving the strip the Silent Garfield remix treatment also makes me tremulous with mirth:

(See also: the Garfield Randomizer, Garfield Randomizer Examples, Garfield Minus Garfield, and Googly Eyes Garfield.)

The Shakespeare Suspect, skeevily describing his Cuban nightclub dancer girlfriend:

Heidy was dancing in a show at my hotel in Havana. I know they say communism is on its last legs, but then I saw Heidy’s legs and I thought “Viva Castro.”

Kill me now. Of course, lest we forget, Fidel Castro took a heinous on-camera fall in 2004, breaking his knee and arm, resulting in the following infamous bit of comedy from the U.S. State Department’s Richard Boucher during a press briefing:

JOURNALIST   Did you hear that Castro fell?

BOUCHER   We heard that Castro fell. There are, I think, various reports that he broke a leg, an arm, a foot, and other things, and I’d guess you’d have to check with the Cubans to find out what’s broken about Mr. Castro. We, obviously, have expressed our views about what’s broken in Cuba.

JOURNALIST   Do you wish him a speedy recovery?

BOUCHER   No.

I also now think of Hope Holiday creatively chatting up a galactically wasted Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, in that NYC bar on Christmas Eve (2:45 into this clip):

MARGIE   You like Castro? I mean — how do ya feel about Castro?

BAXTER   What is Castro.

MARGIE   You know, that big shot down in Cuba with the crazy beard.

BAXTER   What about him.

MARGIE   Because as far as I’m concerned, he’s a no-good fink. Two weeks ago I wrote him a letter — never even answered me.

BAXTER   That so.

MARGIE   All I wanted him to do was let Mickey out for Christmas.

BAXTER   Who’s Mickey.

MARGIE   My husband. He’s in Havana — in jail.

BAXTER   Mixed up in that revolution?

MARGIE   Mickey? He wouldn’t do nothing like that, he’s a jockey. They caught him dopin’ a horse.

BAXTER   Well, you can’t win ’em all.

This appreciation by Newsweek’s David Gates is by far the best David Foster Wallace memorial piece I’ve read all week. (And there has been a lot to read.) A great tribute. Seems to hit all the right notes. Shakespeare shows up. Plus a haunting, memento-mori-ish, very IJ-like recurrence of references to the skull and the head…

(Also, not only is Gates’s encomium illuminating and passionate and crystallinely articulate about DFW’s work, but it went up on Newsweek’s site around lunchtime EST on Sunday, well within twenty-four hours of the news of DFW’s death hitting the wires. [Though maybe it reached Newsweek’s news room earlier?] So it’s even more impressive to me that Gates turned out such a superior essay despite his having written it in a tremendous hurry, possibly on a Saturday all-nighter, all while perhaps being [considering how ecstatic his 1996 review of IJ was] at least somewhat upset.)

Some of my favorite lines:

“It will take a while for all these apparent ‘clues’ in Wallace’s work to stop pulsing like neon signs when we stumble on them. But that work will outlast the garish particulars of his death. In years to come, no one will be able to dismiss it as the symptomatic productions of a depressive head case: the dread to which he gave artistic shape is too real, too universal.”

“True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we’re all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and — that chillingly neutral word — information.”

“The title of Infinite Jest calls to mind the image of Hamlet holding up a skull — that of the jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest’ — and Wallace’s literary project was to get something of that infinity within us out where we could see and hear it.”

“[Infinite Jest] was both a splendid, generous outpouring and a frantic attempt to bail out the waters as they rose.”

“… even that exhilarating book seems grounded in dread and panic.”

“The novel’s exhilaration shades into hysteria: it’s a thousand-plus-page agon between the writer’s shaping impulse and the ‘terrible master’ of uncontrolled, unbounded, unsilenceable consciousness.”

“If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer … he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’; it’s a line that the author of Infinite Jest must have taken deeply to heart.”

“He sought to empty out the infinite within himself — a heroically hopeless enterprise.”

“‘The rest is silence,’ says the dying Hamlet — these are his last words to us. But Wallace was no quietist: in his writing, at least, he never stopped wrestling with the ‘terrible master’ in his own skull. Even beyond this life, he seems to have found silence unimaginable.”

Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, a few pages from the end: Inquire a little and I’ll tell you all. I was still explaining myself in full to people who couldn’t’ve cared less. Ouch?

HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel — white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

Steven Wright:

I went down to the store and bought some blank cassette tapes. When I got home I put one in my cassette deck and turned it up full blast. I was walking around my house when I heard a knock on my door. It was my neighbor complaining about the noise. He’s a mime.

Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, Die Hard With a Vengeance, off-roading through Central Park:

ZEUS   Watch it, watch it, watch it, watch it! Are you aiming for these people?

McCLANE   No. (pause) … Maybe that mime.

Timothy Findley, “Foxes”:

In the cellars at the ROM, there is a labyrinth of halls and passageways that leads, through various degrees of light and temperature, to various sequestered rooms where various treasures lie in wait for someone to come and give them back their meaning. Bits and pieces, shards and corners of time — numbered, catalogued, guessed at.