Theo Schell-Lambert, in the Believer, on e-readers:

Dig around in the online reviews that trail [the Kindle and the iPad], and you’ll notice they are sometimes rendered without the hyphen: ereader. The term instantly trumps all Amazon’s spilled faux-ink about genuine pagelike pages. To eread: to read, and also to erase.

Cross-posted from Twitter: It’s dawning on me that sooner or later I must do at least two of the following: 1) Buy an iPhone, 2) Join Facebook, 3) Get out of web design.

Our toddler-aged nephew is young Alexander.
When carried in arms, he’s a biceps expander.

Our eldermost niece is the wee baby Isabel.
Her character flaws are completely invisibel.

Our new younger nephew’s an infant named Ethan.
He doesn’t say much, since he hasn’t yet teeth in.

His tiny twin sis, our new niece, is Moriah.
She’s roughly the size of a mountain papaya.

*

These nieces and nephews and tadpoles and twins!
These bundles of baby! These nextest-of-kins!

I yearn for a word that compactly expresses
Both nephew and niece: “Have you met our four nesses?”

As Laura’s now auntish and I’m now avuncular,
When niephews are near, we avoid getting drunkular.

(But when relatives, craving new babies to coddle,
Start looking at us … we go back to the bottle.)

*

In sum: We possess the most pleasant two nephews.
Opine otherwise and we’ll answer with EFF-YOUs.

We also, of course, have the nicest two nieces.
Declare it ain’t so and we’ll dash you to pieces.

One month ago today we are on a Lake Huron beach, suntanning. This is a different Great Lake suntanning session than the previously-mentioned one, the one on Lake Erie over Labor Day weekend. Lake Erie is nice. Lake Huron is kind of nicer. The two suntanning sessions are basically the same except that on Lake Huron we sit facing facing west instead of south (thus getting a more even afternoon tan), and we are there a little longer, and also there are sandwiches. The sandwiches are homemade and fresh and accompany us in a small cooler. We wolf them down mere moments after sitting down on our beach towels, which are bath towels. At the Lake Erie beach we feel keenly the absence of sandwiches. It is a mistake we will not make again. Cold sandwiches on the beach are the best. Lake Huron is also bluer of sky and water than Erie, and louder of surf — a pleasant lacustrine low roar keeping aural pace with the more upper-register low roar of beachgoers’ voices. A lulling white noise conducive to reading and sunning. It seems a world away from the green-grey and waveless Lake Huron we stare into two springs ago. This beach is one of several beaches in Pinery Provincial Park. Cape Coddish long-grassed sand dunes wall off the beachfront from Pinery’s namesake forests. The name Huron, as in both the Great Lake and the Iroquois peoples formerly living near it, derives from a French word meaning rough hair of the head, presumably from seventeenth-century French explorers’ and fur-traders’ insulting description of the tribespeople they met. We chase our sandwiches with cans of Coke that despite the cooler’s coolness have been long approaching lukewarmth and emerge from the cooler exuding beaded films of condensatory science. It has been about a three-hour drive west across southern Ontario to Pinery. Ever look at a map of Ontario? It is staggeringly immense, most of it uninhabited. Southern Ontario is like a tiny appendage of Ontario’s total Ontariority and this tiny appendage still takes three hours to drive across, Lake to Lake, unless of course you’re a road-trip spoilsport and you take the multilane arterial highways instead of the scenic rural roads. We vegetate in the Lake Huron sun until evening and then hit Grand Bend for a sunset dinner out and then drive a multilane arterial highway home in the dark, chewing coffee beans with chocolate chips and screaming along with ghastly Beatles tribute-band tracks to keep from nodding off. Below: That day’s Great Lake late-summer sundown.

John Steinbeck, in The Sea of Cortez, writes that the human animal “in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival.” (His phrase progression toward extinction is a mournful stand-in for qualities of goodness: tolerance, generosity, kindliness, humility.) He continues:

Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.

I have to post Oliver Wendell Holmes’s terribly funny poem “Æstivation”, a bit of brilliant and oft-anthologized light verse to which my earlier Holmes quotation was part of the introduction.

In that part of Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), a character drops a Latin phrase on the narrator — Optime dictum (“Excellently said”) — which sends the narrator off on another tangent. “Your talking Latin, — said I, — reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it.” (Spilled the banks of English?)

He then recites the following:

Feed-readers: You’re on your own. Everyone else: Mouse over the poem to see glosses of the Latinate words. (Also a few non-Latinate ones that Holmes threw in.) I do not actually know Latin — the online OED was my etymological hook-up.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.), from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858:

The old man had a great deal to say about “æstivation,” as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation. Intramural æstivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September.

Above: Swaying swing-stage ropes and cables on our building, two weekends ago, as viewed while leaning backward out a window and looking up. (Just kidding. Actually looking down.)

Hello. I am drinking a cup of four-year-old Poet-Warrior green tea. Remember the Poet-Warrior? From that ridiculous one-pound bulk package of it I bought in September 2007? Way too much tea to buy at one time. A blend of Japanese Sencha and Chinese Gunpowder teas, prepared via mysterious methods by either monks or machines. I store this pound of tea in a metal canister and brew cups of it regularly for several months and then at some point lose interest and switch to less-fancy supermarket green teas. The remaining three-quarters (or so) of the Poet-Warrior has been slumbering in its time capsule in our cupboards for years, writing no poems and fighting no wars. Now it is back. Rediscovered last night and hauled out and pried open and tested for non-rottenness and drinkability. Whether or not it passes may be a matter of opinion. You’re not supposed to keep loose tea for four years. You’re not even supposed to keep it for longer than a few months. Everyone knows this. It deteriorates. It goes stale. It turns to dust. It turns to dirt. This cup of dirt I’m drinking tastes OK.

Yesterday morning I walk to the Y as usual and there’s a notice on the front desk saying that something has gone weird with the pool room boiler and so the pool water’s temperature is abnormally high. The notice adds that the temperature “may make swimming uncomfortable”. Once I’m in the pool room the lifeguard also warns me about the water. She says the temperature is now up to 92 degrees F, and that I should be careful.

I get in and swim and the water is indeed very warm — it’s almost hot-tub-hot in the shallow end, then cools down to bathwater-warm halfway to the deep end — but it seems absolutely comfortable; the warmth renders one’s arms and legs instantly limber, unlike the downtown Y’s typically room-temperature-ish (i.e. cold-feeling if not truly cold) water contracting one’s muscles for the first few laps. The deep end feels about the same temperature as the pool up at the Hamilton Mountain Y, the way they keep it every day. This is abnormal? This is broken?

I swim for half an hour, a standard easy weekday regimen, feeling fine, then get out and go home. For the rest of the morning, I feel overheated. I’m working indoors at a computer in shaded rooms, mid-70s F, but I’m sweltering. Is this like 0.001%-level heatstroke or something? The body unable to regulate its temperature correctly, much like the Y’s bad boiler? I have no idea. I drink some glasses of water and set up a tabletop fan a few feet away and get back to work. All is restored to normal in a few hours. (I should probably also mention that I’d been uncharacteristically swimming with a hangover, which can’t have helped anything.)

That night, Laura and I go out for dinner after work and then stop at a bookstore, and while browsing the shelves I pass an outward-facing copy of Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Why didn’t I buy it?!

Yesterday: Mid-air goons on a swing-stage scaffold, floating past our windows.

Above: Lake Erie, Long Point Provincial Park, end of the day. Photo by Laura.

Last Saturday, Long Point, looking south over Lake Erie’s pond-ripple surf and alien horizon-haze, I sit with Laura in the sun, toes in freshwater sand, suntanning our faces, suntanning our limbs, suntanning our backs and bellies, perspiring in unison, beach books in hand, she reading about magicians, me reading about John Steinbeck putting small sea animals in jars, basically filling up at the last minute on whatever light and heat and outdoor oxygen is left of this summer because I can see the future and I know what the weather is dying to do.

Here is my bad, blurry photo of downtown Toronto as seen from the top of the CN Tower. We are looking west-southwest through reflection-riddled observation-deck glass. This is a few weeks ago, Monday 22 August 2011. A few days later I learn that Train and Maroon 5 were that very night co-headlining a show in Toronto at the Molson Amphitheatre, which venue is distantly visible in the photo. Great ghost of Gary Benchley! The mind reels at the thought of such a concentration of suckiness under one roof, open-air or not. I suspect this nearby singularity of soccer-mom rock somehow hosed my camera’s electronics, and/or wreaked havoc with my inner-ear balance. The Amphitheatre is, I believe, the Orion’s Belt–like trio of lights in the upper quarter of the shot, just left of center. From this vantage point high above the Earth, if you look carefully, you can actually see the bending of space-time caused by the ravening, cosmos-crushing vortex of corporate-pop awfulness generated by this concert. (Note: I confess that the girl-crazifying sounds of Maroon 5′s machine-stamped polyurethane supermarket-funk can often be heard in our car, and occasionally inside our house. They, and we, suck.)

Jonathan Swift:

When somebody was telling a certain great minister that people were discontented, “Poh,” said he, “half a dozen fools are prating in a coffeehouse, and presently think their own noise about their ears is made by the world.”