Above: Very punch-in-the-face tasty, highly intoxicating, a bit expensive, nice name. Wish I had more of it. (Taken to Florida last week, brought back to Canada empty.)

Above: Monday morning breakfast in Savannah, Georgia. Third day of this year’s Yanksgiving road trip to Florida. Also the final day. Also the best day. We make good time. We eat three square meals. We hurtle at spaceship speed down Floridian highways in brain-zapping sunlight and pore-cleansingly warm weather, under magnificent clouds. Almost makes up for our trip’s first two days, which I may complain about at length later, or perhaps just try to forget as fast as possible.

Whoops.

Eye exam yesterday. Been over three years. I miss the old glaucoma air cannon. Getting poked in each eye with a ghostly finger of puffed air. Pssht! Ow. Pssht! OW! It was savage and medieval and quick. The alternative glaucoma test is gross. The optometrist irrigates both my eyes with a dropperful of sticky canary-yellow anaesthetic juicy-juice, then brandishes an incandescent electric-blue tonometer and molests my numbed corneas with it. This is to measure eye pressure. I weep vivid Mountain Dew tears into a sandpapery kleenex. The stickiness and yellowness vanish in ten minutes, but there is phantom gummy-eyelash all day. The other procedures are the usual classics. I recite the last row of letters. I follow the penlight. I peer through the massive mecha goggles tricked out with a full deck of weird lenses and say which looks clearer, A or B, one or two, this or that. I do not have glaucoma. I do not have anything. Just gradually worsening myopias and astigmatisms, so the corrective lenses have to get a little more correct. New glasses supposedly Friday, in time for the Yanksgiving road trip. Instead of a big dark blur, I see a big light blur.

Annie Dillard, The Living: “He was losing his sense of his own invulnerable charm, of his own limitless spirit, boundless resources, and unique reality. He was losing, curiously, his self, and seemingly finding the world a wider place without it.”

Today in the mail from Amazon.de: The exquisitely-designed 1547-page German-language hardcover edition of DFW’s Infinite Jest, just released, translated over the course of six years by Ulrich Blumenbach (translator of Stephen Fry’s books!) and published as Unendlicher Spaß. I can’t read German, of course, but I had to have this. (Was inspired by Matt Bucher.) The minimalist cover design has a somewhat sepulchral quality, drained of color, black type on otherwise blank matte white boards, black endpapers, the back cover a mirror image of the front. With a thoughtful touch: Sewn into the binding are two bookmark ribbons. (One for the main text, one for the 134 pages of endnotes.) Seems a shame to not be able to read it, but I shall just pretend it’s in English and consider it a special edition that stays on the shelf. Our four actual English-language copies of IJ should be able to take up the slack.

Kafka: A cage went in search of a bird.

We eat dinner at a restaurant decorated with dozens of bird cages hanging from the cathedral ceiling. The cages are empty and illuminated from inside, casting light up through the bars to the ceiling and returning an ambient glow down over the dimly-lit dining room. It is an attractive effect, but the sight of this profusion of birdless bird cages becomes unbearably funny poignant eerie after about five minutes and a cocktail. “Oh my god … all the birds have escaped!” “Shhh! They’re in the kitchen!” (Mine were served tastily in a lagoon of tamarind sauce with a side of sticky rice.)

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster divides the human life into five main facts: birth, food, sleep, love, and death.

To consider the two strangest first: birth and death; strange because they are at the same time experiences and not experiences. We only know of them by report. We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth; a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to our apparatus for reception.

So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

Via Jason and Wired UK: The German publisher Eichborn, as a marketing stunt, somehow attached little airplane-style banner ads to live flies, and set them loose at the Frankfurt Book Fair. (Referencing the fly in the Eichborn logo.) This YouTube clip shows the banner-burdened flies — Fliegenbanner! — flying clumsily around and landing on people, to much hilarity and Teutonic bewilderment. At twenty-eight seconds into the video, David Foster Wallace makes an appearance. Or a large, looming, slightly haunting photograph of him, in the background of the shot, centered momentarily as one of the flies makes a transit of his face and the camera operator attempts to follow it. A brilliant accidental touch. The idea of advertisers as literal pests, lower life forms that live on shit and garbage, brief-lifespanned scavengers, the actual ad content as the pestilence they carry — it sounds straight out of Wallace. Could fit into the satirical comedy of his early writing, or the bleaker dark humor of his later work. From right in the middle, Infinite Jest, in one of Don Gately’s hospital-bed flashbacks to childhood, a fine passage on fly torture:

What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he’d pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or like a leg, something important to the fly. He’d take the wing or leg over to the beige kitchen wastebasket and very deliberately hike the lid with the foot-pedal and deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.’d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he’d ignore and allow to scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there’d often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on the table, sometimes giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P. passed out, can’t mentally see him stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently.