Month: January 2011

“Very well, I’ll pause for thirty seconds while you cook up your alibis.”

I had a pretty nice day. I spent a good deal of it reading, finishing both Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, a couple of recent graphic novels I picked up at the local library this morning. I enjoyed them both, although I think I’m perhaps a little glad that Spiegelman’s (nevertheless wonderfully drawn) book about fall of the Twin Towers feels just slightly dated. And I did some writing — or maybe I should more accurately call it transcribing, piecing together a story I found in an old notebook, which I’d given up, at least temporarily, for lost. I’m not sure exactly why it stalled out on me the first time — my natural proclivity to let stories stall out on me, perhaps — but I like it, and I think I’d like to see where it’s headed.

After dinner this evening, I watched Green for Danger, a delightful British murder mystery from 1946 set in a World War II hospital. Honestly, how can you not like a movie with exchanges like this?

Barnes: I gave nitrous oxide at first, to get him under.

Cockrill: Oh yes, stuff the dentist gives you, hmmm — commonly known as “laughing gas.”

Barnes: Used to be — actually the impurities cause the laughs.

Cockrill: Oh, just the same as in our music halls.

Please don’t beat the Dutch.

It snowed again last night, though not enough to really cause much trouble with my morning commute. I was in at work by the not unreasonable hour of 8:30 a.m. And the day went by fairly quickly, especially right near the end, when all the steps involved in processing a countersigned book contract somehow made a couple of hours vanish right out from under me.

The bit of Forgotten English on my desk calendar today is “beats the Dutch,” meaning “something extraordinary.” The calendar goes on to inform me that “‘That beats the Dutch and the Dutch beats the Devil’ is the superlative.”

Today was really a Dutch-beating kind of day, but, amazingly enough, it’s the weekend again, so that’s nice.