on christmas we visit julie's grandmother, her sight failing deep into her ninety-first year. 'i haven't read a book since march,' she says, 'but it doesn't make me cry anymore.' her father had been a printmaker and she has been around books her whole life. her basement, as i remember from my own youth, is a landscape of boxed-up, over-read science fiction. the refrigerator in the kitchen where these visits always take place is still plastered with yellowed index cards upon which handwritten quotations from her favourites have been imprinted since long before i was born. 'the earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in,' said robert heinlein; says the card.

'how can you get used to that?' my sister asks.

'you can get used to anything,' she replies. 'you get used to hanging if you hang long enough.'

'hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. i look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way of powdery splendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of stars and planets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armed apparition of orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable space, gleaming overhead; and the familiar constellation of the plough dipping down into the west; and i think when i go in again that there is one christmas the less between me and my grave.'

-- alexander smith, 'christmas' (ft. christian imperialism interlude), 1863.

you'll understand that parenthetical bit if/when you read it, but it's still quite good, imbued with meditative seasonal consciousness and a well-developed sense of memory. also: milton.

'no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong-- you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depths we are about to fall into.'

-- john updike, rabbit remembered

okay, so this was amazing and easily the best international incident involving footwear since they ousted fucking khrushchev.




(the more you know)

'in just such a gehenna of links, i forged my vocation.'

-- samuel beckett, more pricks than kicks

the last few nights and all the rest of this week and next week i have been and am going out at night to deliver course evaluations to evening graduate courses at the college. this is giving me some perspective on facilities and times of day, because by the time these things begin at 4:30, this time of year, it is darkening or dark. by 7:30 or eight, when the business is concluded, it is universally dark and cold like the winter it is already becoming. there are still people in these places at that time of night, and not only students. i keep lingering a second or two too often to see if i can find anyone i know at one of the tables in those forlorn about-to-close pseudo-cafes, just to say hello and sit down and talk, bringing the unexpected to the night for both of us. it hasn't been possible yet.

but there are these places, well-lit and with available computes and wide staircases and food. they serve some of our essential needs and are invitingly coloured, artificially homey without looking anything like home. an illusion, but a concrete one; one to get behind when you need a place to sit for a while, waiting for a ride or reading a book. aren't these places wonderful in their way? we give so much of our conscious lives to this institution by spending any time here, and come to almost live in whatever nooks we carve out for ourselves between our responsibilities in its halls.

probably the worst part about it is the resounding artifice of it, always lurking one thought away from your thin rationalised comfort. we find ourselves at the northern frontier of this american boswash megalopolis, on the sea at the top of the northeast corridor. does anyone think of this from the perspective of first things, determining whether it could even remotely be considered natural or sustainable to live the way we do? such a critique is unwelcome. we talk of sprawling city after city along the coast, the development and people drawn together by what? modern construction eliminates meaningful differences in geography, and the people have nothing in common besides a trapped instinct, a sensation that in some way, somewhere someplace sometime it isn't like this-- there's something wrong with this life and always has been.

in the winter the darkness takes over the evening hours of contemplation before we have a chance to use them, because all of our better instincts drive us out of boxes we live in to other boxes or outside places providing perspective and distance. there's something to be said about being on the north of the urban on-and-on, something about driving right up to the placid cove on the way home, something about being able to at least claim with some legitimacy that you're looking in the other direction. then there's a more important something about paralysis-- you won't go down to the waterfront because the darkness could hide danger, a perfectly capable, rape-able situation, just like any other place you want to go when the night is dark and thoughts are long, long thoughts. so you're driven home, or to endless destination-free driving, burning fossil fuels and wasting effort. we revolve in the darkness of our own minds, going nowhere physically or mentally as the whole mess of it hums along. for now. it's a wonder that we're afraid of those other people that may harm us more than what we do to ourselves, or at least it seems to be on nights like this.