From the Department of Celestial Coincidence: Last night I try to go see a late showing of Moon, but I get stuck in a creeping traffic backup that turns out to be the exit rush from a downtown performance by Cirque du Soleil. The delay is ridiculous and I decide not to bother, I just turn around and go home. Will try again another night. — Above: Attractive concert poster that has nothing whatsoever to do with this.

Noël Coward, “I Went to a Marvellous Party” (audio here, if you can keep up):

I went to a marvellous party
       With Nounou and Nada and Nell,
              It was in the fresh air
              And we went as we were
              And we stayed as we were
        Which was Hell.

Poor Grace started singing at midnight
       And she didn’t stop singing till four;
              We knew the excitement was bound to begin
              When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin
              And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin,
        I couldn’t have liked it more.

Above: Laura, pinhole camera self-portrait, 2006. — Below: Laura does comedy, Laura does tragedy, 2009.

Happy birthday!

— to my least foolable reader, my favorite tweeter,
and the Varriet Hane to my poor Pimsey Wheater.
Damn you Pimsey! DAMN YOOOUUU!!! [throws omelette]
(Tune in next week for more Inside Joke Theatre.)

Speaking of ringtones, for the past year or so I’ve had the default ringtone on my cell be the opening of Steve Reich’s “Drumming Part III”. Intellectually I try to think of this as a tribute to Reich and minimalist music and contemporary classical works. Non-intellectually, I know I really just use it because, of all the music I have, this one is the piece that most sounds like a ringing phone.

You want it for your phone too, you say? Download it here. (Note: This mp3 is just the first 2:05. Constitutes thirteen percent of the total track time.)

Recently I’ve begun using my cell as an alarm clock. (Yes, it has come to this.) Now I wake up to these opening bars of “Drumming Part III” every morning Monday through Friday. Consequently I often hear the piece in my head when it’s not actually playing. All those chiming overtones and repetitive beats. I hear it in other music, in street sounds, in supermarkets. Is my cell ringing? Am I waking up?

While swimming this morning I hear someone’s ringtone go off while I’m underwater. It’s coming from somewhere in the pool, conducting eerily through the water, the sound perfectly clear but locationless, everywhere. I see a guy over in the next lane stop and paddle to the wall and presumably take the call. I note I’ve been swimming at the Y for three years now and somehow this is the first cellphone I’ve heard in the pool. Have I just not been paying attention? (I feel sorry for the guy, having to interrupt his swim to take out his cell. He should really get a hands-free.)

The strange sound of a ringtone melody carrying through pool water makes me think of the bizarre, otherworldly, ambient Antarctic underwater seal calls recorded from beneath the ice in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, which I watched on Sunday. The scientist describing the seal calls: “They sound like, I don’t know, Pink Floyd or something.”

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms:

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull. It took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth.

I understand a surprise comet just struck Jupiter this week and left behind what the press keeps darkly calling an Earth-sized hole. An evocative phrase. Very pleasant to contemplate. Kind of reminds me of another evocative image suggested by one of David Rees’s early Get Your War On comics: “Can’t we just build a fucking bomb the size of the earth and cut a hole out of the middle in the shape of the United States? Drop the motherfucker around us and take care of business once and for all?”

I confess to being disproportionately amused by the Onion’s reductio-ad-absurdum abuse of news-headline grammar, in particular the ones that combine brevity, a pronoun subject, and a tormented excision of the state-of-being verb, e.g.:

• “It Fish Time!”
• “It Only Tuesday”
• “You Worth It”

(I’m sure there must be more, but how does one search the archives for an absence?)

Also: I know this is old, but I would be remiss if I failed to join in with the internet-wide legion of geeks who laughed and wept at the heartbreaking purity of last month’s “Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles”.

Laura and I have recently come around to the ritual of whiling away Sundays reading the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. Just over the past several weeks. I go out at like nine in the morning (in my old age I have apparently become immune to Sleeping In) and pick up the paper and some fruit and some supposedly-fresh Montreal bagels at the Fortinos bakery and bring them home and we drink coffee and maybe eat an egg and pore over the paper. We are latecomers to this thing. We are only just now understanding the appeal.

A passage that cracked me up this past Sunday: Carlo Rotella in the Times Magazine, in a profile of the science fiction author Jack Vance:

As I climbed the steep driveway on a gray afternoon last winter, a large dog barking at my approach, I tried to banish the irrational expectation that Vance and I would exchange Vancian dialogue. Me: “Why did you persist in writing hurlothrumbo romances of the footling sort favored by mooncalfs?” Him: “The question is nuncupatory. I grow weary of your importunities. Begone.”

This silliness alone is enough to make me want to try out Vance’s books …

Conrad Aiken, “Time In the Rock”:

As weight and as water as space within space
this huddle of thought which has lifted a face —
too simple this ending the bird has been seen
the word has been stripped to what words cannot mean —

[15:53] Dave: first came the telephone, then the answering machine, then the email, then the instant message, then the text message, now the twitter feed

[15:53] Scott: pretty soon we will only communicate in emoticons

[15:54] Scott: or perhaps just ones and zeroes.

[15:55] Dave: we will revert to a system of grunts and gestures

[15:55] Scott: you can’t grunt and gesture on an iphone! get real!

[15:55] Scott: well, never mind — Apple does have “mouse gestures”

[15:55] Dave: there’s an app for that!

[15:55] Scott: I suppose “mouse grunts” are not far behind

[15:56] Scott: I won’t be satisfied until we are all locked into Stephen Hawking robot-chairs, communicating with blinks.

[15:56] Dave: at least he’s got that speak-n-spell machine

[15:57] Scott: that’s true

[15:57] Scott: I kind of figured him for a Speak-n-Math kind of guy…

[15:57] Dave: you’re thinking of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly guy

[15:57] Scott: good old Speak-n-Spell!

[15:57] Scott: they should’ve teamed up with Steak n’ Shake for some clever cross-promotion

[15:58] Scott: Steak n’ Spell!

[15:58] Dave: Speak n’ Steak?

[15:58] Scott: Speak n’ Shake!

[15:58] Dave: speak first, have steak later

[16:00] Scott: “Speak!” “Your dog wants steak”

[16:02] Dave: Bark n’ Spell

[16:03] Scott: Bark n’ Smell

[16:03] Scott: actually, “Speak n’ Shake” combines two classic dog commands

[16:03] Scott: followed, of course, by “Sit n’ Stay”

[16:04] Dave: and “Heel n’ Roll”

[16:05] Scott: “Sic n’ Maul”

[16:06] Dave: Jump n’ Bite

[16:06] Scott: Poop n’ Drool