For 2010’s halfway point: Whitman, “Year That Trembled and Reel’d Beneath Me”:

Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?

Professor David Dunning, interviewed in Errol Morris’s “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma”:

People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce.”

The pleasant grimness of this answer all aside, I have to say I admire the phrase solve the calorie problem. I need to use that in small talk. “Hey, Scott, how’s it going?” “Oh, fine, you know, the usual, just another day of solving the calorie problem. You?”

Just over four years ago: My passing encounter with the old woman who asks me, assuming I hear her correctly, what cemetery I’m from. (I am unable to answer.)

The old woman’s question comes back to me again last week when I see the following lines from “In That Great River: A Notebook” by Anna Kamienska:

Our homes overgrown with junk, papers, knickknacks. Shelves piled with the clothing of the dead and of the children who have grown, and so are also dead.

Desks full of mementos and faded letters. To live in such a domestic graveyard. That’s how I live.

Time flies, and sleep opens ever greater chasms in time. Time becomes a second graveyard, a graveyard in the depths of consciousness.

To throw it all out would mean to die. So now a third graveyard, the one that waits.

I live in three cemeteries.

And:

Hence to a new cemetery. It took you such long, hard work, such commitment, to build this one.

Above: Photo by Laura, 2006.

Said the Budgie to the Pigeon:
       “You seem plagued by indecidgeon.”
Said the Pigeon to the Budgie:
       “How’d this statue get so sludgy?”

Said the Puffin to the Penguin:
       “Your complexion’s quite exsenguine.”
Said the Penguin to the Puffin:
       “Fuckin freezin; fanks for nuffin.”

Said the Auk to Mr. Dodo:
       “You looked thinner in your photo.”
Mr. Dodo to the Auk:
       “This extinction gig’s a crock.”

Said the nugget to the frittata:
       “Why I oughta … !”
Said the frittata to the nugget:
       “Fuggit.”

Earlier today: Earthquake on my lunch break. They do happen in Canada, apparently. This one is a 5.0 whose epicenter is near Ottawa, but we get a piece of it down here in Hamilton. I am working at home and don’t notice anything until the windows have been rattling for like ten seconds. They rattle vigorously enough that at first I assume it’s started raining or maybe hailing, that something out there is pelting the glass. I do manage to feel some actual floor-trembling before the thing stops a few seconds later. Then I hit Twitter and of course everyone in Ontario is earthquake-tweeting and everyone everywhere else is making fun of us. (Cole Porter: Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?)

Nine and a half months here at the Hotel Fantod and it is only today that I get around to venturing up to the rooftop patio. We have a rooftop patio! It is our ninth floor. Granted, downtown Hamilton was nowhere near this cheerful-looking (yes, these photos are cheerful-loooking) through most of those past months, i.e. the fall, winter, and spring. But it is now mid-June and we are in the region’s meteorological sweet spot. The days are warm-but-cool and breezy-but-calm and very long and very clear. Banks of lushly swaying urban trees surround our home to the east, west, and south, and there is an occasionally-beautiful-blue Great Lake about a mile to the north. Also lots of flame-spitting chemical-vapor-spewing factory smokestacks, but when the wind is right you’d never know you are breathing industrial toxins.

It occurs to me that in this age of Google Earth I am potentially giving away our location by posting these photos. Dear readers: Please do not stalk us. If you materialize on our doorstep uninvited I will have you roughed up, spoken sternly to, duct-taped into immobility, and then bored to death. I promise! Unless you bring snacks.

Above: “County Chairman” brand bourbon. Circa no idea. I did not drink this. It is an old empty pint bottle that I find in an antique store in the pleasantly-named town of Sweetwater, Tennessee last November, on the return drive home from Florida. Another reminder that trash plus time equals “antique”. I appreciate the humor of a bourbon named for a government official, even a low-level one. The bespectacled county chairman pictured off-centeredly on the label seems to be wearing 1920s silent-film-star makeup, and grinning wickedly down at something near his general lap area. And what’s with the random lamp on the left?

The other thing I get at this antique store is a book of Old English poetry. I am somewhat at a loss to explain this purchase. I pick the book up from the bookshelf and open to a page and the thing begins murmuring to me. The strange, distant, ancient alliterative verse, even translated into modern English, is unsettling for me — it feels like hearing ghostly clanking sounds way down in some sort of inner language subbasement. Long-dead long-buried Anglo-Saxon lines digging for miles up through the soil. I find it 100% spooky. “In mound dragon bideth /” whispers the book, “Old guarder of gold.    Fish in water / Must spawn its kind.    King in the hall / Must hand out rings.    Bear on the heath / Roams old and fierce.    River from hills / Flows down flood-gray.” — I remember that something about Flows down flood-gray makes my blood slow to a creep. (That phrase in Old English: flodgræg feran.)

The book continues quietly reciting up at me, very patiently: “Woods of the world / Must bud with blossoms.    Hills of earth / Must gleam with green.    God in heaven / Is judge of deeds.    Door in the hall / Is mouth of the building.” And so on. My skin is crawling. The antique shop has dimmed and disappeared. The name of the piece I am reading is the Cotton Maxims. The translator is a Charles W. Kennedy, Professor Emeritus from Princeton. I have to have the book. I feel like an idiot and a flake at the cash register, buying an Old English poetry anthology and an empty of obscure hobo bourbon. Not that the Sweetwaterian cashier bats an eye in the slightest.

James Richardson: The despair of the blank page: it is so full.

Ibid.: The road you do not take you will have to cross.

Ibid.: Each year gets late earlier.

Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to exit the donut.

1. Two small things I particularly appreciated about Iron Man 2:

   1. The sublime soundtrack choice of the Beastie Boys’ “Groove Holmes” playing over the scene in which a hungover Tony Stark is chilling and chowing down inside the giant donut sign at Randy’s Donuts.
   2. The part where Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer says his company’s smart bomb is so smart it could write “a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon.” (A James Joyce reference in a blockbuster Hollywood action flick. Will wonders never cease.)

2. When the news hit last week that Guillermo del Toro had bowed out of directing the Hobbit movies (due to delays and studio money problems), the first thing I thought of was this interview exchange from 2007, before he had signed on to direct:

   MISSY SCHWARTZ    The idea of you and Peter Jackson working together is enough to make every geek’s head explode.

   GUILLERMO DEL TORO    It would make my head explode!

   So I guess it’s a good thing he quit.

3. I am interested in seeing the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, due out in 2011, for one reason: Ian McShane is playing Blackbeard. I can only hope that at least one of the several hundred screenwriter hacks who will be hauled in to hash up the script will give him some decent lines to say. Not expecting any Deadwoodian monologues or Mellis-and-Scinto slang-showers — somehow I doubt the Disney suits would allow that many f-bombs and c-bombs — but just some good old-fashioned villainous scenery-chewing would be nice, assuming any scenery remains left unchewed by Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush.

Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”:

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need … We can stage our own act on the planet — build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils — but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them — whoever they are.

This passage has been stuck in my mind for years, and seems to come back to me all the time during the warm months, whenever I hear birds chirping outside our windows or see robins hopping around on downtown lawns. Why don’t we eat them?

Above: Knives Chau vs. Ramona Flowers, from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim Volume 2.

Department of Late-To-The-Party: A few weeks ago I read books one through five of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books, which Laura bought a while ago. Scott Pilgrim fever is gearing up, of course, as the sixth and final book is due out on 20 July, and Edgar Wright’s film version is due out on 13 August.

A good line from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’s screenwriter Michael Bacall: “[Wright] described it once to me as … in a musical when the emotion builds to a point that people can’t express themselves in normal dialogue so they break into song, whereas in the Scott Pilgrim universe they break into fights.”

Anyway, O’Malley’s books are pretty brilliant, Wright’s movie looks like it’s going to be awesome, and, I have to admit, I’m really hoping the movie becomes a hit and restores some respectability to the name Scott. Many of us Scotts never really got over the stigma attached to our names by Seth Green’s Scott Evil from the Austin Powers pictures. (Damn you, Mike Myers, and your perceptive but cruel grasp of how inherently laughable and suburban-white-bread the name Scott sounds. We know!)