Above: Light tests with neodymium full-spectrum light bulb, freshly burned out. I buy this particular bulb almost nine years ago (“No, surely not, no! No one was alive then!”), circa November or December 2000. An incandescent light bulb that works for nine years — have you ever in all your life heard of such lunacy.

Mark Strand, “The Room”:

I shall lay my words on the table
as if they were gloves,
as if nothing had happened.

[And:]

I hear the wind
and I wonder what are
the blessings
born of enclosure.
The need to get away?
The desire to arrive?

[And:]

I am so far away
I seem to be in the room’s past
and so much here
the room is beginning
to vanish around me.

Above: The cheerful scenery outside our door. Quote-unquote “industrial chic”. (Or the Hotel Fantod.)

William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties:

Rydell couldn’t figure out a way to skip the approach segment, which was monolithic, vaguely Egyptian, and reminded him of what his buddy Sublett, a film buff, had called “corridor metaphysics.”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:

Here she was directed by the great Gerhardt von Göll through dozens of vaguely pornographic horror movies … Von Göll had dreamed of making a film about Ludwig II. It nearly got him blacklisted. The rage then was all for Frederick. It was considered unpatriotic to say that a German ruler could also be a madman. But the gold, the mirrors, the miles of Baroque ornament drove von Göll himself a little daft. Especially those long corridors. . . . “Corridor metaphysics,” is what the French call this condition. Oldtime corridor hepcats will chuckle fondly at descriptions of von Göll, long after running out of film, still dollying with a boobish smile on his face down the golden vistas. Even on orthochromatic stock, the warmth of it survived in black and white, though the film was never released, of course.

Related: Den of Geek’s In Praise of the Sci-Fi Corridor.

Holy motherfucker. This has got to be the greatest coin in the history of money. (I love that Queen Elizabeth is on the flip side: Rex vs. Regina!) Alas, it’s just a commemorative piece — a four-dollar coin that the Canadian Mint prices at CAD $42.95. How kick-ass would it be if it were an actual circulating coin here in Canada? We’ve already got the Loonie and the Toonie … I guess this would be the Bony?

Teri Garr, on getting her start in Elvis movies: You weren’t supposed to laugh at Elvis, or he’d kill you with a karate chop.

A sign that you’ve moved into a classy, hip condo community: someone in your building has a wireless network named Cock Gobblers. My my, so naughty! Are the proprietors of this network a) misogynistic homophobic guffawing fratboyish mooks, b) party-girl skanks, c) gluttonous poultrivores, or d) roosters who think they’re turkeys? We’ll never know. Something tells me, though, that whoever they are, they’re on one of the dreaded “renter floors”. That network name screams roomies.

(Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge and Valhalla are us. Dual-band at 5 and 2.4 GHz, respectively. Nothing objectionable, right? Unless you harbor a loathing for Nighthawks at the Diner or supernatural Scandinavians.)

Twain, “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture”:

He was at white heat with one of his splendid enthusiasms, and so I was carried away by it and believed it all. For I was only a young thing — callow, trustful, ignorant of the world — hardly 33 years old, and easily persuaded to my hurt by any person with plausible ways and an eloquent tongue — and he had these.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams:

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this mood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at Sherry Island were ready grist to his mill …

Winter weather is looming. A few days ago I take my winter coat to the dry cleaners, along with a wool scarf and some wool gloves. Maybe it’s silly to dry-clean a pair of gloves, I don’t know. Today I pick them up, and on my way out, in the parking lot, a Laurel-and-Hardy-ish pair of goon-type characters ask me if they can have one of my wire coat hangers. (The dry cleaners have given me three.) They have locked their keys in the car. Their car is the minivan I’ve parked next to. When I’d first arrived I’d noticed them peering into their windows and groaning f-bombs to each other.

“Sure,” I say, pulling one of the hangers (the one the gloves were quite pointlessly safety-pinned to) out of the garment baggie, but then cotton on to the prima facie sketchiness of the situation. I look at these dudes again. They are not hostile or anything, but they look suspicious. They would do well as extras on a cop drama. The large one looks like a goateed Alexei Sayle. The thin one looks like a rat. “Uh, this is your car, right?” I say. “I’m not like helping out with a crime here, am I?” No, no, insist Alexei and the rat. Their tough-guy accents are funny and scary. Look, says Alexei, pointing into the window, there are the keys, right there. The rat points as well. I look and there the keys are, in the ignition, as advertised. The front seats and floors are filthy with goon-type trash, which makes their case convincing.

Alexei actually then says that in any case they would never do something like that here. At least I think that’s what he says; the rat says something at the same time and I can’t exactly hear either of them. It seems true that you would have to have taken an excess of idiot pills to attempt grand theft auto in this spot, it being broad daylight, in a tiny crowded parking lot, in front of the windows of a bustling pizza joint during the lunch rush, at a downtown intersection thronged with passersby and traffic. A thousand witnesses around. But one never knows. Con artists specialize in making a crime look like something else; the brazenness of jimmying a car lock on a bright and busy street might make witnesses just think No one could be that stupid.

I hand over the hanger and dive into my car before the three of us get busted. As I’m backing the car out I see that Alexei has already torn the hanger open and fashioned the expected homemade Slim Jim out of it and is easing it down the passenger-side window crack like an old pro. The rat watches, or maybe stands guard. I drive off before I can see if they’re successful. What have I done? I am happy to have perhaps helped my fellow citizens in their hour of need. But it’s possible I’m a sucker and an Unwitting Accomplice. In court they will paint me as the mastermind.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, from “The Hangover”:

There are poems and songs about drinking, of course, but none to speak of about getting drunk, let alone having been drunk. Novelists go into the subject more deeply and extensively, but tend to straddle the target, either polishing off the hero’s hangover in a few sentences or, so to speak, making it the whole of the novel.

Photo by Laura.

We have been here in the new house a month and the sexy floors have altered my perceptions. They are polished concrete. They are quiet. Their silence has blown my mind. I am unused to walking with ninja stealth in my own home. I walk from one room to another in bare feet or socks and shake my head in wonderment at the absence of wood planks shrieking underfoot. Makes me think of the noiseless velcro from Garden State. For the past six years I have creaked and squeaked and groaned around on a succession of apartments’ stately, well-trod, hellaciously loud hardwood floors. Chez Tunis was the nicest apartment I’ve ever lived in, but there was not one floorboard in there that did not erupt into operatic melismas when stepped on.

Above: Google’s finest design yet. Screencapped for posterity, as it appears in Safari. Wish it was permanent, and not just for the seventh. (7 October 1952 being the barcode’s patent issue date.) Today we are all machine-readable…

Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, LXVI (translated by William O’Daly): En qué idioma cae la lluvia / sobre ciudades dolorosas? In which language does rain fall / over tormented cities?

And LXXIV: Verdad que parece esperar / el Otoño que pase algo? Is it true that autumn seems to wait / for something to happen?