Louise Glück, “Education of the Poet”:

The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently.

Abracadabra and Alakazork.
Make me a sammich of Southern pulled pork.

Santo Versace and Count of Verdun.
Make it so sloppy it eats through the bun.

Kalamazooka and Wichity-taw.
Make it disgusting and top it with slaw.

Leo da Vinci and Johnny Vermeer.
Make it complete with some cornbread and beer.

L’ENVOI

Abracadabra and Zebra Cadenza.
Everyone’s dead of the piggyfluenza.

Abracadabra and Alakazot.
“Belly remembers what gullet forgot.”

James Richardson: I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

Antonio Porchia: Yes I am preoccupied with myself. But I have forgotten what that means.

Laura’s back. I pick her up at Toronto’s Pearson Airport this evening, and on the way home we stop for dinner-breakfast at a family restaurant in Mississauga. A rarity around here, an all-day breakfast place that is actually open all day, for all three meals, as opposed to closing at like 2 or 3pm. I order a combo called “The French Connection”, which sounds more badass than it is. Something about consuming eggs and bacon and French toast and coffee when it’s dark out makes me automatically feel like I’ve been awake for eighteen hours, and am eating in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived and full-body fatigued. Possibly I’ve just absorbed some of Laura’s transatlantic jetlag. Possibly it’s just that this food is unhealthy.

Laura is in Italy. For work. She is in Rome. Her first time in Europe. I can only assume she is following Christian Bök’s advice: When in Rome, do as the Ramones do.

While she is away, earlier today I go to Toronto and conquer the Art Gallery of Ontario. I do the whole thing. I get there at 11am, break for lunch at I think 3pm, then go back around 4-ish and leave sometime in the 5pm hour, shortly before closing. Lunch is a large, cheap, excellent chicken-and-rice dish at a Vietnamese dive on Queen Street West. The weather is beautifully warm and summerish and sunny. I take no photos. I encounter no man eating catapilers. I hotfoot it back to the car just in time to avoid getting drenched and/or lightning-fried by the apocalyptic ass-kicker of a thunderstorm that cracks opens the heavens as I drive down Bay to Queen West to Spadina and to the Gardiner to split for home. Apparently I may have driven past Douglas Coupland, who around this time tweets about the storm from Queen West.

The thunderstorm follows me home to Hamilton and has been persisting with some stamina for a few hours now. My legs ache. They ache probably not so much from all that walking, but more from all those slow-motion art-museum steps one takes while creeping contemplatively from painting to painting. My eyes ache from beholding such volumes of art, so many stirring landscapes and bewigged portraits and sexy figuratives and sexier abstracts and staggering Henry Moore sculptures and various unwatchable video-art installations (I apologize to any video artists who may be reading, I can never get into anything done in this form, I am sure the fault is mine). Also a great number of old and immense and elaborately scary Jesus pictures, as all art museums must have. My throat is still parched from hours of breathing four vast floors’ worth of severely climate-controlled gallery oxygen. My tongue is still tingling from having surreptitiously licked so many delicious priceless contemporary canvases. (Don’t worry, just the corners. Tasty impasto!) The lightning flashes outside are getting more intense so I am just going to stop here before the power goes out.

Serendipitous: I posted that Nabokov quote about “the rhyme is the line’s birthday” last night in total ignorance of the fact that today is Nabokov’s birthday. The internet informs me of it this morning. He would have been 110. From the same poem:

“Why do you speak of words
when all we want is knowledge crisply browned?”

Because all hangs together — shape and sound,
heather and honey, vessel and content.
Not only rainbows — every line is bent,
and skulls and seeds and all good worlds are round,
like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:
those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowers
that swallow whole a golden bumblebee,
those shells that hold a thimble and the sea.

Nabokov, “An Evening of Russian Poetry”:

The rhyme is the line’s birthday, as you know,
and there are certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.

Howard Moss, “Finding Them Lost”:

Thinking of words that would save him, slanting
Off in the air, some cracked, some bent;
Finding them lost, he started saying
Some other words he never meant.

No longer fiction: Today Gizmodo asks the sword-swallower girl from the Coney Island Circus Sideshow to try swallowing an iPod shuffle. (Thanks, Gordon.)

Uh-oh: man eating catapiler up in Toronto. Only a few days ago. And I’m supposed to be going to Toronto on Saturday. Suddenly the Boo Box doesn’t sound so bad …

Some more on death and boxes, by Tom Stoppard, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (from the printed play, all ellipses his):

ROSENCRANTZ   Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?

GUILDENSTERN   No.

ROSENCRANTZ   Nor do I, really … It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead … which should make a difference … shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air — you’d wake up dead, for a start and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box. That’s the bit I don’t like, frankly. That’s why I don’t think of it …

Guil stirs restlessly, pulling his cloak round him.

ROSENCRANTZ   Because you’d be helpless, wouldn’t you? Stuffed in a box like that, I mean you’d be in there for ever. Even taking into account the fact that you’re dead, really … ask yourself, if I asked you straight off — I’m going to stuff you in this box now, would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally, you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking — well, at least I’m not dead!

A few moments later in the same scene:

ROSENCRANTZ   Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering — stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Sweet Mother of Lepidoptera! The Bush administration’s CIA torture artists were some cold-blooded bastards. According to page 14 of one of the newly-declassified Justice Department interrogation memos, it seems these goons found inspiration in Spielberg’s Hook and proposed rigging up their own personal Boo-Boo Box. (EDIT: It is in fact just the Boo Box. One Boo only. Damn memory.) The twist: There would be no actual Boo in the Boo Box. Through cunning trickery, instead of the expected stinging insect, they would secretly use a caterpillar. (Hereafter of course to be referred to as a Freedom Larva.)

In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death.

[lines redacted]

so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box.

Via Levi: Dickens, Pickwick: There are very few moments in a man’s existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.

Very windy day today. Next time I will be sure to leave that hat at home.

G.K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat”:

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic — eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing — such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future.

Miller’s Crossing:

VERNA   You still up?

TOM   Yeah.

VERNA   What’re you chewin’ over?

TOM   Dream I had once. I was walking in the woods. I don’t know why. Wind came whippin’. Blew me hat off.

VERNA   And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, you finally caught up to it. And you picked it up, but it wasn’t a hat anymore. It had changed into something else … something wonderful.

TOM   No. It stayed a hat. And no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage:

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted.