Opening sentence from “Canada’s a ‘Hottie’!”, the number four story in Environment Canada’s Top Ten Weather Stories for 2010: If you were to stick a thermometer into Canada at any time this year, it was sure to say “well done”.

Cross-posted from erasing.tumblr.com for Xmas Eve: Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday.

Above: Recently-purchased (and more-recently consumed) ales:
Traditional (Calgary), Winter (Toronto), and Kentucky Bourbon Barrel (Lexington).

Very old proverb from either England or Ireland:

He that buys land buys many stones,
He that buys flesh buys many bones.
He that buys eggs buys many shells,
But he that buys good ale buys nothing else.

(Except maybe many bottles and bottlecaps.)

Our “Archer”, larger, sharper, louder: 853×480 Quicktime, 341 MB, zipped.

W.S. Merwin, the “Sagittarius” stanza from “Runes for a Round Table”:

All quarry flees. The arrow
Drawn always to my ear I still
Have not let fly, and yet they fall.

Above: Have mercy, Archer.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready — for what?

Two unbelievable things I see this afternoon: 1) the just-released trailer for Terrence Malick’s forthcoming The Tree of Life (crammed with dreamlike cinematographic catnip from Emmanuel Lubezki, as well as esoteric visual-effects shots of celestial bodies and assortments of cosmic vapor); and 2) “Malick” as a global Twitter trending topic! — will wonders never cease. The film opens 27 May 2011, if Malick can ever be coaxed out of the editing bay. He is one of my favorite filmmakers, though he seems to be insane. I am surprised and pleased to see such early and ardent marketing buzz for this picture, and to see so many people online geeking out rapturously over the trailer. Could Malick actually end up with a box-office hit? (Probably not.) Or an Oscar? (Doubtful, though Lubezki will be in the running for Most Cinematography.) The film also apparently has dinosaurs in it. Arthouse dinosaurs, not action-movie dinosaurs — some sort of origins-of-life sequence, which the trailer’s images hint at. No word yet as to whether the dinosaurs do any Malickian voice-overs.

Above: Persimmons, ripening. Fuyu at left, Hachiya at right.

Cold out. Currently in the high Coolidges, with wind chill in the mid-Wilsons. December is doing its December thing, reacquainting us with the High Minuses and the cement-grey skies and the bare tree branches and the familiar stinging slap of below-freezing air against our stupid wimpy faces. There has been weather to the east and weather to the west — Lake Huron’s Lake Effect snow has been burying Western Ontario alive this week, and Lake Erie’s Lake Effect snow ate Buffalo last week. Here in Hamilton, there is no weather. Just cold. Nothing has fallen from the sky except a puff or two of tiny flurries, plus the usual pollution. Possibly the flurries are also pollution. December here is in no hurry. December is just laying down the miles of track for real winter to eventually chug through upon. December here is totally fine with hanging back and calling in January and February to be winter’s muscle, the ones who step on our house and destroy our car and freeze-dry our souls and turn our bodies to bottom-shelf lutefisk. Our car remains parked outside, begging for weather to come down and abuse it. The construction goons still lurk underground in our closed-off parking garage every weekday, gnawing and burrowing and jackhammering and violently clanking every possible combination of construction materials together in an array of interesting rhythms. They will not be finished in December, as the board of weasels assured us. They will never be finished. They are our downstairs neighbors now. December is our upstairs neighbor. For three and a half more weeks we must live underneath it. To speed the time along we may need to yet again invoke Anthony Burgess’s calendar for alcoholics and refer to the month as: DESCENDBEER.

Above: December Saturday evening at the Hotel Fantod: Yours truly expressively playing a flea market ukulele that I purchase in Bowling Green, Kentucky, during the Yanksgiving drive to Florida; and Laura brutally beating egg whites for a righteous batch of homemade eggnog, which eggnog gets powered up with the worst bourbon locally available (Jim Beam) and still tastes transcendent. And I hate eggnog!

A Thanksgiving ritual in our family: The savage beating of a can of jellied cranberry sauce until its contents fall out in a perfect can-shaped cylinder, eliciting hearty amusement and vague disgust in all present. The above video shows Dave and me performing this task on Thanksgiving Thursday last week, while Laura operates the camera, Kat opens more champagne, and my parents look on and wonder where they went wrong. In past years, Dave has had to really whale away on the top of the cranberry can for a while, but this year the sauce goes easy.

We have been away again. We are just back home from our annual Yanksgiving road trip to southwest Florida — about three thousand miles round trip, Saturday to Saturday, three eight-hour driving days southbound, two twelve-hour driving days northbound, with something like a vacation somewhere in between.

Above: The serene and pastel-toned early-morning view out our hotel room window in Punta Gorda, looking northwest, a view of palm branches and parking lots, of long shadows stretching left and thin bridges over Charlotte Harbor stretching right.

On blogging: Conrad Aiken, from “Preludes for Memnon”, 1931:

Poor fool, deluded toy, brief anthropomorph,
You who depend at centre of your web,
Thinking the web projected from yourself,
With all its silver spokes and drops of dew,
Its antic flies and frantic wings, and such, —
Consider now if you yourself are not
Created by the web. The spokes and dewdrops,
The flies and wings, gigantic web of the world:
This whirling wheel, concentring on itself:
Produced and sought you; you yourself, poor spider,
Dreamed of by chaos and of chaos born.

Poor fool, sad anthropomorph, give up this notion
Centrifugal; perpend awhile, instead,
The world centripetal, and see yourself
As the last comer in this world of shapes.
You dream the world? Alas, the world dreamed you.
And you but give it back, distorted much
By the poor brain-digestion, which you call
Intelligence, or vision, or the truth.

Above: Ocean rock and city fog. Sonoma Coast, late October; and our roof, tonight.