Above: A Soldier’s Guide to the Cold, a 137-page booklet evidently issued to members of the Canadian Forces back in the day. Recently found in a local antique store.

Below: A found poem compiling all the epigrammatic reminder tips printed in the page footers throughout the guide. They are given in the order in which they appear, duplicates and all. (I’ve repeated the first line as the last line.)

OK, so it snows all day today. Don’t care. Still the easiest winter ever. Still cake.

We’ve been living here at the Hotel Fantod for just under six months now. February is fast on its way out and so it appears that the worst of the winter is past. The worst, of course, of one of the easiest winters I think I’ve ever experienced. So far it’s been pretty much utter cake. The cold has remained notably un-biting, the snowfall has been minimal, and the usual creeping, compressing, mind-numbing sodden grayness that I’ve been conditioned to expect from the great and terrible January-February plunge — this protracted environmental misery somehow never materializes.

The old familiar gray weather is still out there, but it is cut with days of stunning blue-skied clarity nearly every other day, and so never really gets its claws in, never reduces us to shuddering blind cave fish like normal winters do. Small spates of flurries show up now and again but then move on and leave no trace. The bone-chilling rains stopped some time ago. My January snow envy phase withers and dies. We hear all about the cataclysmic snowstorms elsewhere on the continent and so by comparison our odd winter-long calm seems a little dull but not unwelcome. Possibly now March will deliver our due, bringing a late payload of city-wasting blizzards, solid weeks of screaming snowstorms burying all of Hamilton up to the mezzanines, prides of killer Yetis roaming freely through the snow tunnels, etc. Or perhaps March will see the gray cloud cover finally clamp down like it means business and dial itself up to emergency ugly and blind-cave-fishify us on express.

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage:

Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist’s girlfriend, naked, on the walls … In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business. The artist’s studio, though, is still what it has always been: an erotic space. For the writer the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress.

Glenn Gould, to the Toronto Telegram, 1967: “Canada’s a place to live comfortably, amicably, and with reasonable anonymity.”

Forgot to mention this: Back in November, I’m sitting in the customer area at a local auto garage, reading, waiting while my car gets an oil change. A customer guy who has been chatting with one of the teenage mechanics sits down on the waiting-area couch with me and starts looking through the magazines on the table in front of us.

“What’s with all the chick magazines?” he calls over to the mechanic. The magazines on the table do in fact seem to be nothing but glossy women’s titles.

The mechanic looks up and explains: “Most guys don’t read.” He adds: “And if we put out any good magazines, they take them.”

Vox populi. We’ll just file that one under the Department of Surprises No One. Though I do feel a little self-conscious that I’m sitting right there reading Lapham’s Quarterly. The two fellows are nice enough not to notice. (At least it was Medicine.)

W.H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”:

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
     Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
     And the salmon sing in the street.

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
     Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
     Like geese about the sky.

And:

‘O plunge your hands in water,
     Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
     And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
     The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
     A lane to the land of the dead.

Above: Scenes from yesterday’s premiere of the newly-restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Brandenburg Gate. These are screencaps from the live webcast of the event, which I tune in to during the afternoon (Friday night in Berlin). Something appealingly strange and time-travel-esque about seeing images of the future from 1927 shown in 2010 against an eighteenth-century Greek Revival backdrop.

James Richardson: By looking for the origins of things we deceive ourselves about their inevitability. Things that did not happen also have origins.

This is a 4:23 audio clip of me in eleventh grade playing randomish piano pop, accompanied by our high school jazz band’s twelfth-grade drummer. I think this must be early 1994, so I’d be seventeen. I am playing a baby grand on the stage of my Illinois high school auditorium, at night, but not an actual performance, just a kind of informal jammish sound check between me and the drummer, killing time while fellow jazz band musicians mill around prepping things for some event the next day — I don’t remember what the event was. The sound quality is kind of bad (cheap cassette in the auditorium soundboard), as is a lot of my playing (from memory or improvised), but it’s the only live piano recording of mine I have, so I’m stuck with it.

I finally get around to buying Conrad Aiken’s out-of-print 1970 Collected Poems. Former high school library copy, which is good, it means the book is still in superior shape, having been rarely opened. The “OFFICIALLY WITHDRAWN” stamp opposite Aiken’s melancholy portrait is a nice touch. As is his ellipsis-covered necktie.

That illness a couple weeks ago seems to have rewired my appetite circuits. Or perhaps the subsequent water-diet is what did it. Whatever the case, ever since that week I seem to have sort of lost my enthusiasm for drinking alcohol. I still have one occasionally, but most of the time now I’m just not in the mood. On the other hand, my long-dormant sweet tooth has reappeared. I’ve been pigging out on chocolate Kisses like a sugar-spazzed preschooler. What happened? Is this some weird metabolic-memory response? My body is so disgusted with itself from one night of puking that now I can’t abide intoxicants in my belly, and always have to stuff sugar in my mouth?