I’m re-buying all my favorite books on Blu-ray. Author-approved transfers, remastered from the original negatives. The words look stunning in high definition. All their meanings are more meaningful. Sentences are crisper, bolder, more grammatically textured, with lusher rhythms, newly vivid syntax, subtler vocabularic tones, bringing out unprecedented levels of humanity and heart, representing the authors’ original vision in breathtaking detail. I am catching syllables and punctuation I’ve never even noticed before. The luminous prose is even more luminous. Characters are truer, narratives braver, achingly beautiful descriptions even achier. Through meticulous digital restoration, our most deeply felt stories have finally been rendered even deeper, and more felty. — OK, this is kind of a lame joke, am I really making this joke, running with it? Hasn’t someone already done this, and better? Stop now.

Robert Musil: Somewhere a clock began placidly talking to itself.

Last night we go to the fourth annual Hamilton Foodie-Drinkie Fest at the convention center downtown. The Festival With Taste!, the logo says. A bold claim. We wrestle through crowds of fellow epicurean suckers in search of fancy samplings that we pray will not trigger embarfment. You pay to get in and then you buy sample tickets to exchange for booth food, tiny dollops of which are doled out by weary-looking local restaurateurs and/or wait-staff dragooned into booth duty instead of raking in their Friday-night tips back at the restaurant. We fork morsels of hottish eats off dainty cocktail plates. We clutch our drink-sample glasses with care and toss back area wineries’ and breweries’ concoctions. All very good, or so it seems. After a while my palate is a little confused. Nothing goes together. It is schizophrenic tapas. Different cuisines bump violently up against each other, now sweet, now spicy, now savory, now skunky. Red wines, white wines, from full-bodied to Flockhartian. I swallow many samples but remain largely unintoxicated. We eat standing at little bar tables that we must share with attractive strangers young and old, who occupy varying points on the continuum between yuppie snootitude and bourgeois swinishness. (We of course personify both.) There are no kids in the room: only drinking-age (nineteen) and up. The restaurants all seem to be serving shrimp. Why? The little local wineries seem at once desperate and condescending. They accept your sample glass and recite toddler-level tasting notes while trying to ignore the fact that your face is saying, in the international language of oenophilia, Just fucking pour it, asshole. I try to keep my eyes peeled for pithy and amusing details to recount afterward but unfortunately the most specific memory I take away is the sound of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” being butchered by an electric violinist up on the hall’s makeshift stage, doing both Axl’s and Slash’s parts against a basement-grade karaoke track, causing me to all but gag on my dishlet of sambuca cream shrimp and penne, or spicy shrimp sautéed in butter and house pimento reduction, or chicken-and-shrimp rotini in jalapeño tomato cream sauce, or whatever in god’s name it was I was pigging out on at the time.

Above: Photo by Laura, 2005. — Below: Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Jinny speaking.

‘I have sat before a looking-glass as you sit writing, adding up figures at desks. So, before the looking-glass in the temple of my bedroom, I have judged my nose and my chin; my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. I have looked. I have noted. I have chosen what yellow or white, what shine or dullness, what loop or straightness suits. I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold. I have run violently like a whip flung out to the extreme end of my tether. His shirt front, there in the corner, has been white; then purple; smoke and flame have wrapped us about; after a furious conflagration — yet we scarcely raised our voices, sitting on the hearth-rug, as we murmured all the secrets of our hearts as into shells so that nobody might hear in the sleeping-house, but I heard the cook stir once, and once we thought the ticking of the clock was a footfall — we have sunk to ashes, leaving no relics, no unburnt bones, no wisps of hair to be kept in lockets such as your intimacies leave behind them. Now I turn grey; now I turn gaunt; but I look at my face at midday sitting in front of the looking-glass in broad daylight, and note precisely my nose, my chin, my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. But I am not afraid.’

Karen Elizabeth Gordon:

ARRIVAL FOR FOUR VOICES:

I think we’re in the wrong place.
I’m just glad we found it.
I hope we never leave.
Maybe we could take it with us.

“ERROR: Error: An error occurred loading the first error.”

“Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace: A Primer for Kicking Ass” by James Tanner, which Jason posted last week, is pretty great — funny and smart and done with a real affection for DFW’s writing, and for the craft of writing in general.

It reminds me of something William T. Vollmann told the Paris Review in 2000:

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they’d kind of be like popcorn kernels popping … all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.

Jason wrote on Friday that it’d been a popular post. This of course means that it was enjoyed both by: 1) the [x] % of readers and bloggers for whom the Primer was a playful, enthusiastic art-of-writing piece that reminded them of why they like DFW’s work; as well as 2) the [100-x] % of readers and bloggers for whom the Primer was a nice mocking takedown of DFW’s writing that reminded them of why they can’t stand his work — for whom every step after Step Zero is show-offy. Something for everyone.

From the same Vollmann interview:

Our society’s materialist quietism has long since decreed the following: literary craftsmanship is a nuisance that gets in the way of the message. As for the message itself, who cares?

S. Pegg, Spaced, Episode 1:

You’re scared of mice and spiders, but oh so much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs, in order to steal cheese.

We have officially had a 100% mouse-free winter here at the apartment. Amazing.

I knew I could tie some literature to the leg: This hobbling around with a gimpy calf reminds me in a double way of staggering bob from Ulysses — “might possibly find gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob”, etc. — which Joyce’s narrator helpfully explains is lower-class slang for veal from a newborn calf, i.e. slaughtered before it can stand up. (Could Joyce’s use of gastric in a line about a calf and its still-wobbly legs be a wordplayish allusion to the gastrocnemius? I would not put it past him.) An Innocent Collation of Staggering Scott — the title of my memoir?

I did something to my left calf muscle while swimming and so I am on Injured Reserve for a little while. I learn that the calf’s anatomical name is the gastrocnemius, in which the gastro part of the word is from the Latin for belly, and refers to the muscle’s round, belly-like shape. A body part named for its resemblance to another body part. Is this the case with any other parts? Seems a bit medieval-medicine-ish …

Seamus Heaney:

After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

At last I can get some sleep. Thank you to the astute erasing.org reader who wrote in and solved the “i ate” mystery from Monday: The searches were almost certainly prompted by this Google auto-complete screenshot that was posted on KuvatON.com last week. Please note: The image is probably NSFG (Not Safe For Grape-eaters).

Another quick Googular digression: I’ve been mystified as to why, starting last Wednesday, erasing.org has been getting a lot of clickthroughs from people Googling, simply, “i ate” — for which the iPod poem has the honor of being the #2 result (second only to a diet-food blog called I Ate A Pie). Google Trends confirms the spike in “i ate” searches here, though they offer no insight into what might be behind it. Something on TV? But what? I need answers. Surely it is something obvious that I will be plunged into disgrace for not being in on. Viral marketing for the new smaller and even-more-edible iPod Shuffle, released last week, right? Or some oblique campaign for the Samsung i8 camera? Perhaps the I Ate A Pie people drummed it up, say, as a tribute to Pi Day, which was this past Saturday. I do not know. The absence of a direct object is what gets me. Why would people suddenly be inspired to Google “i ate” with no direct object? What did you fuckers eat?

Stupid-weird: A week and a half ago I get Mexican takeout for lunch and the TV behind the counter is playing The Italian Job; earlier tonight we get Italian takeout for dinner and the TV in the restaurant is playing Nacho Libre. Tastes like symmetry.