I

A.
Days Without:

• Alcohol: 18
• Ice Cream: 18
• Finishing a book: 1
• Finishing a comic: 0
• ...?

You might think the booze would be the greater temptation, but no, it's the smooth, creamy, sweet bliss of good ice cream.

B.
My personal barista informed me the other day of the new season of Torchwood, which I've not yet had a chance to view. I haven't yet gotten around to watching BSG: Razor, or the most recent Doctor Who specials. Since last Friday I've watched next to nothing. And there are oh-so-many movies (good and bad and other) to view.

I—alas—didn't have a chance to finish a book today (I'm at the beginning of too many), but I read parts of several, so it wasn't a waste (see: III.B).

Marvel's Ultimate line was supposed to do several things: unclutter continuity by starting over fresh, from scratch, modernize characters, and allow authors to tell stories that were at once a bit more cinematic as well as mature (though not necessarily "adult" as in the MAX line). For a while a number of Ultimate titles were selling as well or better than their regular Marvel universe doppelgängers, and for a long while Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-Man, for example, were truly great comics to read. Not "deep" or "meaninful," but well-written with good art. Ultimate Fantastic Four lacks the character drama of the original because the characters are so much younger; it's a generic team comic with Fantastic Four villains retrofitted for the Ultimate universe. But The Ultimates, the Ultimate Universe version of the Avengers, was a great deal of fun. Glossy art, generally well-told, epic stories. But you know, everything else about the Ultimate universe is just ... as weak as whatever else Marvel is trying to sell this or some other month. The mini-series are, mostly, disposable at best. Most could be told in the regular Marvel universe, and currently the only difference between non-(X-Men, FF, Spider-Man) Ultimate titles and their regular counterparts is that the Ultimate versions are more crass and cynical. The writers mistake cynicism for characterization, and we get stories like Ultimate Human, which gives us a sniveling Bruce Banner who is more verbose than his regular counterpart but several times more annoying, and a Tony Stark who has been reduced, or rather distilled, to the worst of his regular Marvel attributes: alcoholic and arrogant.

This isn't a story: it's an exercise in citing old characters by placing them in new contexts. You feel as if there is a there there because you recognize the names from old plots and you fill in the blanks, but the story is only blanks. Over in WWH Aftersmash: Warbound we get the return of The Leader; in this story we get the Leader, too, but it's a mutated Pete Wisdom. Who, to misquote The Incredibles, monologs for pages and pages. The last time this was novel or interesting was with the parody of The Defenders in The Ultimates Vol. 2; here it's, alas, just vapid.

But it's better told than The Ultimates Vol. 3, which is, at least, something.

II

A.
The purple panties are gone.

Yesterday's brief snow and wind storm must have relocated them; may they be comfortable wherever they are. Either that or some poor soul walked up or down the stairs, looked at the railing around which they were wrapped, and thought to him or herself, "Hey, I need a pair of used, abandoned fading (violet toward lilac) undergarments." Perhaps they're magical.

You remember the underwear in question, do you not? From early December until yesterday it had closely hugged a rail to a metal bannister along a brief cement stairway leading from a main street through a garden and up to the math building and the main administrative center of campus.

B.
I was alone—again—in the office, but today the only sign of company or interruption was when the blonde who tends to work evenings (if/when at all) down the hall (which is to say, at the end of the hall) stopped by her office to check something, pick up something, or just open the door, greet her office, pat it on the head, and lock it away in the dark again before leaving it for the weekend. $DEMIURGE must still be ill; she hadn't even emailed, and didn't bother calling, which for this communication-happy office is a drastic situation.

The solitude at least gave me opportunity to work without interruption upon one of our manuscripts.

Oh how I hate MS Word.

A reviewer reviewed—as reviewers tend to do—a book on an obscure Mongolian language, a grammar in fact, and had to use a glottal stop throughout a major section of the review. Said reviewer downloaded and used the STEDT (Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus) font from Berkeley and informed the book review editor of this. The book review editor, for whom the glottal stops only displayed as division signs (single dots above and below a dash), noted this and made me aware of it, so I could take care when putting together the larger book reviews MS.

And I included a note stating this to the copy editor, who is getting both a Word document and a PDF file, the latter merely as a visual reference. But first I needed to get the glottal stops back. They're easier to write for a webpage (ʔ—ʔ) than use in a word processor. I downloaded the STEDT font and installed it, but Word refused to recognize it. Copying and pasting glottal stops from webpages and the like into the document resulted only division signs, and I wasn't about to try all several hundred installed fonts to see which one had a glottal stop. Instead I just launched TextEdit.app, changed the font to STEDT and typed one, and from there copied and pasted to Word, at which point I had a glottal stop ... in Monaco.

?!

Or: ʔ!

So the copy editor is getting a generally Times New Roman document with a dozen Monaco glottal stops, and we'll let the compositors and their friends sort it out, since that's their job. And this is why I like LaTeX.

C.
I made my afternoon trek to the coffee shop once work was completed to my satisfaction, and I was eager today to leave the building, which had a ghostly lethargy and melancholy about it. The semester begins next week, but today this main administration building felt not so much empty as evacuated or deserted.

Outside I succumbed to the impulse to snap a few photos; were the weather not so uninviting I would have stood around longer to capture more.

At the library I dropped off one book and on a whim decided to look for one or two others. This led me to a couple others, even though, in general, I did not pick up the first ones after which I searched. Or just perused. There are simply too many books available in the library, but even if I had a brain shunt to shuttle bits and bytes directly from a next generation Adobe² DRMed PDF (Version 47.314) to my frontal and temporal lobes I'd hesitate, for while I'd revel in the instant access—and perhaps in a Feed-like manner the experience of mal-ing itself would be an experience—, I'd miss the synthetic and component experience of reading and all the context tied to when and why and how I let my eyes wander over the ink and fingers shuffle through the brittle, rough, bent, and torn palimpsests.

I still picked up three books that were more-or-less new to me.

III

A.
As I stood before the mirror, razor in hand, I heard a distant click and on hunch judged it wise to shut the bathroom door, suspecting that the flatmate had returned from Swissia.

One I was dressed and presentable he—I wasn't expecting him until later in the day, not long before noon—and I shared some bacon and discussed His Dark Materials, I am Legend and other Matheson tales, and other books and films. We avoided dissertation talk, but perhaps only because we both had to head to town. He's the near-perfect roommate, except that he's never around, for even if we're not emotionally close we're intellectually quite compatible.

B.
My library, such as it is, is composed mostly of German and English books; I have a few Hungarian, Croatian, and Italian volumes, but I do not read them anymore. Thus my access to other European literatures tends to be filtered through either Germany or English.

Community members, faculty, passers-through often donate books they've read or collected or ... who knows. Old people die and their heirs inherit libraries they can't comprehend, can't connect to, or can't manage, so they donate these to department. I've picked up some good books this way, and a couple nearly astounding volumes. And some trash.

A year or so before I went to Berlin someone discarded the German translation of La verità sul caso D, known in English as The D. Case: The Truth about the Mystery of Edwin Drood, a meta-mystery of sorts, a work of fiction focusing on Dickens' fragment, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, upon which he was working when he died. I got a couple chapters in but was interrupted and I gave the book away. At least I think I did.

Something else I was recently reading reminded me of Drood (I don't think it was the LoEG), and so when I visited the library I spent time in front of one of the computers attempting to recall the title of the book, and some time later I found myself off in the PQ section (4866 R8 V413 1992, where Italian literature lives) of floor 4M South. Other thoughts crossed my mind and I sought out some Avram Davidson.

Last fall I was perusing new fiction at the university bookstore when I came across a "new" collection by Davidson, who died in 1993. Adventures in Unhistory (with a preface by Peter Beagle, which is what originally drew my attention) seemed intriguing, but at $25.95 (cloth) it was out of my normal range, and when I returned to the store a week later the only copy was gone. I've not seen it since at normal bookstores, either. Amazon has a few copies; the library has none. I'd never read any of Davidson's tories, so today I took the stairs to 2 North and navigated the greenish aisles—all very submarine-ish, if you ask me) to PS 3554 (A924 A6 1998 to be precise), where I found the delightful anthology The Avram Davidson Treasury (edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis [Davidson's ex-wife]), which contains not only dozens of stories spanning Davidson's entire career but also an introduction to each story by one of his peers. So far, so good, though I've only read the first couple tales.

And then I moved a bit to the left, to PS 3554 A86, which didn't require much of a shift, really, it didn't. I didn't over exert myself at all. I was for some reason attracted to a big blue bound volume entitled Geography of the Imagination, so I took the volume down from between many other books by the same author, and discovered that at some point heavy water damage had warped the entire mass of paper. I didn't need another book, either in my bag or at home on a shelf or table, and I didn't need a warped water damaged book, but I flipped to the table of contents. And like an idiot ...

... I had to get it. It was too precious. I'd never heard of the author but suddenly felt as if I should have, as if my education had been too narrow and I'd just missed this guy, but surely everybody else had picked up his books years ago. Geography of the Imagination is a collection of essays by Guy Davenport (1927–2005), and soon as I skipped to page 331 to read the one on Wittgenstein I knew I had to have the book, so it, too, accompanied me from the library today.