a loose collection of personality defects' Journal

4:05pm: Scandinavian travel plans
I posted back in April about signing up for a week's Finnish course for August, which was to be the kernel for a rail trip in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Well, I heard a few weeks ago that the course had been cancelled because not enough people had registered. This had always been a possibility, and while I'd have preferred to head into deepest Finland with some improved Finnish, I couldn't bear to miss out on the aspects of the trip that I'd already pencilled in.

Before the course was cancelled, I'd been thinking of spending two nights in Bruges on my way to Finland, getting to Finland by overnight ferry from Stockholm. But being freed from the schedule of the course meant I could look into the idea of spending some time in the Åland archipelago between Sweden and Finland, and by the beginning of last week I had my accommodation there safely booked (three nights on three islands that get steadily smaller and further east). By the end of last week I had my InterRail pass and fourteen seat/berth reservations booked and paid for (from two different agencies, requiring some very long phone calls), and I now have both packs of travel-documents in my hot little hands. I never did InterRailing as a student (have hardly travelled in Europe at all) and I find this all very exciting!

I'm trying to learn some Swedish, just a few phrases and vocabulary, to show willing and to add extra interest to my time in Sweden and Åland. I did food on Tuesday and will try numbers tonight. Things are starting to sink in, though when I tried my "Good morning" on a Swedish colleague last week he thought I was speaking Spanish. I can only get better, after that.

9:42pm: The World Naked Bike Ride
I think it was last year that I first saw the World Naked Bike Ride. I know I'd just been to see a film near Picadilly Circus and I was walking down Picadilly to the tube station cursing the crowds - and suddenly Picadilly was full of naked people on bicycles, and me without my camera! I could have sworn I posted about it at the time, but I can't now find any trace of a post.

Yesterday I suddenly thought, "I wonder when the bike ride is this year." My timing was perfect since it turned out that it was today, due to start from Hyde Park at 3.30. I'd been planning to be in the area this afternoon anyway to see the French thriller "Pour Elle" ("Anything for Her") (very good), so I filled in the spare hour with lunch at my favourite Korean restaurant in Soho and with a bit of reading while perched on the window-ledge outside the closed Iran Air offices in Picadilly (I'm on a David Foster Wallace binge at the moment, which has taken me through and beyond Infinite Jest, whose 1000+ pages I finished at 10.32 pm last Sunday). I had my camera ready, with fresh batteries, and I took far too many picture of naked people rolling down Picadilly. The ride is just wonderful and I'm glad to have the pictures, though I think I might go camera-less next year and experience it as nature intended.

8:10am: A busy weekend
We on the Jubilee line are plagued with weekend closures for engineering work which make it hard work to go out and do anything, so I'm very pleased and surprised these days when I have a productive weekend.

I had a haircut early on Saturday morning, and afterwards I went to see the "madness" exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, which were as amazing as crazycrone had said, especially the Bobby Brown Diary Drawings. Then to the Haymarket to see Is Anybody There? which was good and surely has the best "badger doing an impression of Michael Caine" that we will ever see. Then home, to read and potter and discover that my scanner was no longer working, so I was reduced to photographing my favourite Sylvia cartoon in order to show the source of my giraffe in heels.

In the evening I met jinty and tortipede post-Che at the BFI and we had dinner at the nearby Pain Quotidien. I'd been past it several times but never eaten there before, and it was every bit as good as Jinty had said.

On Sunday I went to see the Star Trek film, which I enjoyed, but which actually did less than Galaxy Quest did to help me understand why I was so much in love with Trek for so many years (between about 1974 and 1984, I would say). Then to Waitrose with the intention of buying a £60 standalone scanner that I'd checked out on the John Lewis website, but they didn't have any standalone scanners so I came home with an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier for £100, and to my surprise it did indeed talk to both the Mac and PC and turns out to be properly, independently wireless, so I don't even have to plug it in to my wireless hub. And the print quality is staggering. I remember the first printer I ever bought - in 1990? - cost £430 and was a basic black-and-white inkjet, and I was thrilled with it. I would not want to be in the hardware business, having a mere 20 years to figure out how to deliver a thousand times the functionality at a quarter of the cost.

10:20pm: A good work day after a few rough patches
There was the tense hour of a closeout meeting for the project that took up most of March and for which I was test manager. The project mostly went well (it's a nice team) but the project manager is notorious for leaving things until the last minute and as a team we let him get away with it again. And again we spend the last week stressed out and working long hours, and he shrugs it off as if there's no other way he could possibly have prioritised his time. We had all vented to each other in private over this, but in the closeout meeting I was the only one who seemed to feel the need to name names - though I did try to be tactful (by my standards) and to make all of my comments constructive. At the end he did apologise to the team and the mood was good, and I think we do have a good chance of handling things better next time.

I spent April doing testing on a project that was supposed to be released at the end of June. I was assigned to spend 40 hours establishing the stability of the software, which made me the first person to do any systematic testing on the thing. That was enough time for me to show the team that the software was as stable as a giraffe in six inch stilettos, so the release date has been postponed to September or later, giving priority to my current project, which I joined properly about a week ago. The development work on this project started many months ago (I was involved in a design meeting for it about a year ago), but again there had been no systematic testing. The project is being run using a new approach in which the development is organised in four-week "sprints" - with reviews and the chance to revise priorities and change focus between each sprint. I'm working on devising a new approach to the testing in which the test team designs and performs the tests for the new developments for a particular sprint during the four-week cycle for that sprint - which makes the process much more immediate and pacy, and involves working much more closely with the developers.

The first thing I did was come up with a method of presenting test designs in the form of a flowchart, to allow them to be reviewed easily. The detailed test scripts are typically in the form of a series of steps in a spreadsheet and they're very difficult to skim-read; you generally have to sit down and work through the script with the software in order to see what the test is doing, and I've always dreaded having to review other people's designs. After half a day's experimenting I worked out a method for drawing the flowcharts in a separate sheet of the test-script file, using pre-defined shapes and the spreadsheet structure to minimise the amount of faffing that the test-designer has to do to keep things aligned and in proportion. During this week I've drawn up test designs for two pieces of development and sent them to the developers for review - and they've both come back with lots of critical (but constructive) comments, with a particularly severe setback just before I went into the tense closeout meeting. But it only took me an hour or so after the meeting to digest the comments, revise the design, and send the new version off for the next review, so it wasn't a bad way to end the work week.

And the fact that I'm getting such useful comments does seem to show that the flowcharts are a good way of depicting the designs, and also - as I have long suspected - that discussing plans for testing is a very efficient way of revealing and correcting misunderstandings about the requirements for a particular development (and it never fails to astound me how many ways there are of misunderstanding software requirements). Having a tool for discussing test designs is good for communication with developers, and also between testers; I've designed about 95% of our current tests, and while I enjoy designing tests, I will have to spread the load if we're to get this software up to standard by the end of September, which means trying to figure out how to train test designers. I have a tickling feeling of panic - there is so much work to be done - but I think this new approach to testing is going to make the process much more fun (and effective), and is going to be the start of the formation of a proper test team. Which possibly means that I'm working on making myself redundant, but we will see.

9:03am: Photographs from London Open House 2008
I flew to New York on holiday the day after Open House weekend last September, and while I did post briefly about it once I got back home, I didn't follow through on the threat to give details.

Until now, since I have finally got around to uploading my photographs. I spent Saturday mostly along the river between Greenwich and Woolwich, and since it was a lovely day I got some pictures near the Thames Barrier that I'm very pleased with.

I tried cross-posting this yesterday from DW but it didn't work. I'll try again in a few days.

11:02am: Mood: accomplished
Thanks to wesleysgirl, I am now on Dreamwidth.

Norwegian friends from work came over for dinner on Wednesday, and on Tuesday evening I was getting the flat presentable when I discovered that my vacuum cleaner was no longer working. I had suction, but specks on the carpet were insisting on staying put. It turns out that suction isn't enough, and your beater bar (a rod with bristles on the underside of the machine) needs to be turning around at speed to whisk the specks off the carpet and into the zone of suction. With the help of the instruction manual and a screwdriver I discovered that one of the drive belts for the beater bar had snapped, and after about 20 minutes ferreting around the Panasonic website I discovered that they were still doing the full set of replacement parts for my machine. The parts arrived on Thursday and I installed the new belt last night (a fiddly task), and managed not to break or disconnect anything else in the process.

Wednesday's dinner was a success. I'd wondered about keeping my guests occupied while I was cooking, and had decided to would ask them to make a Mii avatar of each other, so that I would get to see them as I was doing my morning jog around Wiffity Island. They had fun with that and then insisted on doing a Mii of a Greek colleague who had been driving us bonkers on our last project about a month ago. All three Miis are instantly recognisable, and I wave to them as I pass them on the track.

12:52pm: I dreamed last night that I had taken up smoking. I don't think I have ever before imagined myself as a smoker and have no idea why I should do so now. Maybe it's the start of hayfever season and my respiratory tract wanting attention.

9:04am: Happy birthday, shewhomust!
I hope you have a great day (with better weather than we've got down here).

9:36pm: Summer holiday coming in to focus
I've just written a cheque for a deposit for a week's Finnish language course near Turku in the south-east of Finland, for the first week in August. I first heard about the course last June but couldn't do it last year before of jury service. I got an email a few weeks ago which mentioned it was running again this year, and today I decided that I would definitely do it. With any luck, I'll get to spend some time with tittakv too.

After I'd made the decision I wandered over to The Man in Seat 61, which is an amazing resource on flightless travel. I don't mind flying but I really like trains, and I've seen almost nothing of Europe. There are ways of getting to Finland by train and ferry but they're kind of complicated and expensive, and after an hour of dithering I decided it just wouldn't work. And then an hour later I somehow got the idea of avoiding the 12 hour ferry from Stockholm to Turku (or vice versa) by taking the train north to where Finland joins Sweden, and then getting the train down through Sweden. Which would take 3-4 days, with stops for sightseeing. And with this it makes sense to get an InterRail pass and things get simpler (for certain definitions of "simpler"). So the plan is to get the ferry from Stockholm to Turku on the way out, spend the weekend in Helsinki with tittakv, and then take the long way round on the way back (when my Finnish should be better). I could even head over to Norway on the way back.

Next purchase: the Thomas Cook Railway Timetable.

9:47am: My waterproof jacket is missing
I opened the cupboard this rainy morning and it wasn't there. I think I last wore it on Saturday and suspect I left it in the cinema when I went to see Race to Witch Mountain (quite entertaining and confirmed me as a Dwayne Johnson fan). I will call the cinema later and see if they have it.

I kind of hope they don't since it's not as waterproof as all that. Good enough for a half hour walk to work, but not for being seriously stuck out in the rain. I'd like to give another brand a try, and Rohan have some good prices at the moment.

2:06pm: On not being sure what 2666 is about
I said a couple of weeks ago that I thought it would take me two months to read 2666 but in fact I finished it on Friday. I made such quick progress because there was nothing else I wanted to do with my free time, and I can't remember feeling such regret over a book as the remaining pages dwindled. It's over 1100 pages long, and yet I wanted it to be longer. Part of that might be that I was hoping to be given the key (or set of keys) that would make the meaning of the book clear, and it felt as if that explanation would need at least another 300 pages. And yet the ending is completely satisfying, and though the book is full of digressions, they never for a second feel self-indulgent.

So... what might it be about? ( Read more... )

I'd said back in January that I suspected I'd never find out the significance of 2666 and I can tell you now that "2666" does not appear anywhere in the novel. That reference to the cemetery in Amuleto is probably the best we're going to get, and that seems entirely appropriate.

It took me several months to get my hands on a copy of the novel, since the Spanish edition has apparently been selling like crazy in London ever since the English translation came out. The first Spanish copy I ever saw was chained to a bunk bed in Tate Modern, as part of TH.2058 in the Turbine Hall. The bunk bed was one of many in a refugee centre in a post-apocalyptic or dystopian future, and each bed had a novel chained to it. There were hundreds of copies of Ballard's The Drowned World and of Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and 2666 was the only novel that only appeared once. I suspect it's also the only novel there that can be read as an entirely realist novel, with a realist approach to its mysticism. The artist must really have wanted it to be there, and, OK, it is the book I'd most want to be stuck with in a refugee centre.

I was discussing the Tate exhibition with Carlos when I was a mere 50 pages in. It turned out that he'd visited some time before I did, and at that time the books were not chained, and there were many more copies of 2666. Our two visits and the differences between them could have come straight out of the novel itself.

2:10pm: arcadas...
... is the Spanish for arches and arcades, and also for retching. They are a strange people.

Ginebra is the Spanish for both gin and Geneva. I wondered for a while if gin was named after Geneva, but in fact it's named after the French for juniper. Geneva isn't named after the French (or the anything) for juniper, and the Spanish for juniper is enebro.

I have learned these things from Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which is a book which is FULLY AWESOME! It is also fully long, at nearly 1200 pages in Spanish (900 pages in English translation). I am now on page 150 and expect it to take me at least two months to read, but so far it is a very enjoyable process.

4:28pm: Warmth
I think I've mentioned in passing that my central heating has been turned off for a while. A valve in a cupboard off my hallway developed a leak back in December - a leak bad enough that I was having to empty the bucket every six hours, which meant I couldn't go out for a full day's work. The council is responsible for the heating in the block and after about five calls to their repair line I finally got a visit on the 8th of December from two guys who said they couldn't fix it then and there but would have to order a new part, and in the meantime they would have to turn off my central heating in order to stop the leak. They took my numbers and said they'd call me when the part was in - sounding as if it would just be a couple of days - and that was the last I heard of them. And the valve was still leaking - though at a fraction of the previous rate so the bucket could safely be forgotten for days at a time.

Since then I must have made at least 15 calls to the council's repair line and was told six or seven times that the contractors would call me back within 48 hours to report the status. They never did.

Earlier this week I got my latest electricity bill and discovered that it was three times the normal amount thanks to three months' use of a fan heater. First thing yesterday morning I called the repair line again, and this time I insisted that a call to the contractor to find out the status would not be good enough, and that I wanted a visit from the contractor to be booked for the next day.

The guy turned up promptly around 10.30, and after assessing the situation said he didn't have any afternoon calls booked, so after he had done the rest of his morning calls he would go to the depot and see if they had the necessary part in stock, and if they did, then he'd call again in the afternoon to make the replacement. He came back around 3 and when he left at 4 my radiators were all radiating away and the bucket was unemployed. I'm happy and relieved but also... exasperated (with myself as much as with the council and the contractors) that I've spent so much time and electricity on something that turned out to be fixable in a matter of hours.

9:54am: Sprites
A while ago some friends lent me the Icelandic film Cold Fever, and I finally got around to watching it a couple of weeks ago. It's about a Japanese man who visits Iceland in the depths of winter and it is deeply peculiar. At one point he is rescued from car trouble by what appears to be an iceberg sprite in the shape of a young girl, and this reminded me of my favourite bit in the wonderful Alexei Sayle's Great Bus Journeys of the World. It's from a section on bus legends of the world:

NORWAY

The Hammerfest Tree Sprites

The people of Hammerfest in Northern Norway believe that bus conductors are Tree Sprites. The conductors encourage them in this belief. It means that, in general, passengers are more likely to embark and disembark in an orderly fashion and less likely to spit for fear of the terrible mischief that the Tree Sprites will visit upon them. The conductors are also from time to time given small votive offerings of seed cake and aquavit which, as they put it, don't come at all amiss on a cold Hammerfest morning.

We also have The Bleeding Bus of Lima, which features the Convent of the Little Sisters of Psychiatrically Dubious Self Denigration, and ends:

And thus it is that every year on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the 27b bleeds.
Some people think it might be brake fluid.

The book was co-written with David Stafford, who also co-wrote Train to Hell with Sayle and How to be a Genius with the cartoonist duo Biff. All very funny books, but if he's done any humour-writing on his own, I've never been able to find it. Someone did once mention to me that he'd done a column called "Staffordshire Bull" (or similar) and that it was excellent, but it has eluded me so far.

[The icon is an Expired Foodstuffs Sprite. I think I found it via Disturbing Auctions.]

4:36pm: I'm baking banana bread
Using a Riverford recipe, and bananas from my last Riverford box. It's my first attempt at banana bread and I have no idea what it will taste, look or feel like, but it's making the flat smell so good.

[This icon is my "happy domesticity" icon. The cat is French, apparently.]

5:23pm: The LRB personals return to form
They have been dull recently, which I'm inclined to attribute to the publication of the book, which I assume brought the section to the attention of people who mistakenly thought it was for trying to attract a mate, rather than for making people laugh. However, judging by the issue I've just read these people have now drifted away, and in a compact two columns we have:

Dear LRB, I have no money. Please run my advert for free. I want a woman who is 38. Let her know I'm really clever and good-looking. Thanks.

Everyone. My life is a mind-numbing cesspit of despair and self-loathing. Just fuck off. Or else write back and we'll make love. Gentleman, 37.

I make my own sexual lubricant. The secret ingredient is Bovril. Man, 56. Congleton.

I put the phrase 'five-header bisexual orgy' in this ad to increase my Google hits. Really I'm looking for someone who likes hearty soups and jigsaws of kittens. Woman, 62. Bury.

All of these ads and the events they describe bear a striking resemblance to me and my life. Select the bits you like, then reply to M (or F) at box no. x.

For this issue, the bottle of whisky is apparently being awarded to "the sender of the most normal advert". The winner was not one of those above.

8:37am: The start of the WiiFit regime
I've always been a morning WiiFitter, and have found that it's best if I get up at 6.40 if I'm to reach 30 minutes on the WiiFit total board (and have the balance board do its little dance), and have a comfortable amount of time for showering and breakfast and letting my hair dry. But I just haven't the willpower to do my 30 minutes when it's dark and miserable outside, so I decided to take a break over the winter. Last week the BBC weather site told me that sunrise would be at 6.40 today, so I decided that today would be the day when I would resume the daily WiiFitting. Fortunately it's also a lovely sunny morning, but I think I'm going to need more willpower later in the week when it's forecast to get gray again; it's not the 30+ minutes of exercise I struggle with, but the 5 seconds of getting out of my nice warm bed.

Somewhat related: I had a haircut on Saturday. Not one of the light trims I've been having over the past year or so, but a good 12 inches off, so my hair no longer reaches past my shoulder-blades and instead just grazes my shoulders. I've been plagued with frizz over the last few months and really haven't been able to wear my hair loose at all, and I decided it was time to rewind and try again. My hairdresser Sue said it's still basically in good condition and it's just that the top layer is crying out for moisture, so I bought the conditioner she recommended and we'll see how it goes. But I love my new shorter hair. It swings when I turn my head and brushes against my neck, and should frame my face nicely even when styled by clueless me, and it looks cute when tied back when the long version had been looking ever more severe. And it dries so much more quickly, which will help a lot with the morning routine.

There's no blush of green on the trees yet, but it feels as if spring has definitely arrived in Bermondsey.

12:38pm: Prison rules
I've been listening to a lot of BBC podcasts recently and a few days ago I got onto BBC World Service documentaries. The first one I listened to was a three-parter called "Fresh Start", about different approaches to the prison experience and their effects on rates of reoffending. The second part visited a Norwegian prison that takes up an entire small island south of Oslo and is run as a farm, with no bars or fences and with the prisoners running the island's ferry service.

The governor pointed out that that sea was the prison's fence and then said:

We have an agreement with the prisoners on this island that if some of them manage to escape, getting hold of a boat or something like that, when they get across to the mainland they are supposed to ring back to the security people in the prison saying, 'We are safe, and we are on the mainland. Escaping." [A small laugh] You may think this is a strange way of running a prison, but basically it's to avoid a big rescue operation and we have never had to do that. Of course we can count on one hand those who have escaped from this place.

He didn't actually say whether whose few who had escaped had made the phone call. Ah, no, I guess it's implied in the fact that they've never had to mount a rescue operation.

10:27pm: An anecdote of Jane
My Spanish homework this week was to write a one-page biography of someone, and I chose minitrog. It was a challenge and a pleasure trying to convey her importance in just a few paragraphs, and it was good to see Carlos laugh at the paragraph in which I said that I'd learned a lot about films from her, and that she'd even passed on to me her obsession with bad hairstyles, which had the capacity to throw her completely out of any story. I was watching some Dexter with a friend the other day and there was a scene in which we see a very young and shaggy-haired Dexter at work, and I said, "Of course this is made a thousand times more horrifying by that haircut." I would not have said that before Jane.

I'd alluded in my homework to the parts of her childhood that she'd spent in London's bohemian circles. My favourite story from that time is about a jet-set-rich Italian man who was visiting their squat in Brixton and who asked, in the course of making polite conversation, "So, where do you winter?" I can't remember if Jane ever told me how they answered, but I like to imagine that it was with "A few feet closer to the cooker".

6:37pm: Vicky Christina Barcelona
The first time I heard Emo Philips he was a guest on a round-table show on Radio 4. The topic of self-censorship came up (I think the tabloids were busy being scandalised by Grange Hill that week), and after a few people had said the expected sort of Radio 4 things, he said, in his slow, dreamy voice, "I like to think that a couple could come to see one of my shows and then turn to each other afterwards and say, 'Well. We got that over with.' " [The man is a genius. I would quote him fairly often to minitrog, and she always seemed a bit freaked out by the way I would slip into my Emo Philips voice - but how else would you tell one of his jokes?]

Anyway. The film. I assume it thinks it is making a profound statement about human nature and making it well but in this it is horribly deluded. And why hire a ton of excellent actors and then make them all turn in identical robotic performances? I don't insist on naturalism, I don't, but after Shadows and Fog someone really should have put out a restraining order on Allen from attempting this sort of tripe. I need to rewatch a few episodes of Gossip Girl to get the taste of this out of my head, and remind myself that there are people out there with genuinely interesting things to say about the choices people make and the dynamic ways in which they react to one another.

10:49pm: Bolt and passive-aggression
Mark Kermode had left me with the impression that Bolt wasn't worthy of the attention of an adult but the hamster looked fun in the trailer so I went to see it anyway. It's a wonderful film. Possibly even better than Kung Fu Panda. I laughed a lot, and at the end I cried a lot, and I was genuinely scared in the fire scene. The 3-D effects aren't about making things come out of the screen at you but about giving real depth to the landscape, and in the Incredible Journey sequence in which the three travel across the US, this is put to amazing effect. I will go to see it again.

Meanwhile, by a process I can't now remember, I have come across the Passive-Aggressive Notes (PAN) blog, and thus waved goodbye to a solid six hours of my life. It's a grim place to hang out in some ways (and this is a fandom_wank addict speaking here), but I found it compulsive reading. It feels as if 40% of the posts are about thefts from office fridges, and 30% are roommates locked in battles to the death over the washing up. It's repetitive but... I think it helped me get some perspective on defensive behaviour and on how any text can be misread (or, sometimes, read only too well). And it's made me so very glad that I will never be young again and that my flatmate years are well behind me. Though I was never in any truly toxic situations with flatmates, and, as it turns out, the flatshare in which lady_of_asheru and I did from time to time indulge in leaving passive-aggressive notes on the kitchen table was also the flatshare of which I have the fondest memories. But if the lessons of PAN are sometimes ambiguous, this is clear: never, ever put a hand-drawn smiley at the end of a passive-aggressive note; it will not magically make everyone friends.

8:50am: Zorros
I looked out of the bedroom window around 11 last night to check how the snow was doing (it was doing steadily and thoroughly), and was just in time to see two foxes legging it across the square. I've only ever seen lone foxes in London and they've always been tiptoeing around cautiously, but these two were almost dancing as they zipped across the snow and then headed off towards Southwark Park.

I have a training course this morning and I decided to set out early. When I opened the front door about a foot of snow fell in, and the doorsill is about eight inches above the walkway already. When I got to the tube station there were signs about the Jubilee Line being suspended north of Waterloo, which wasn't a problem for me, but when I was just a few paces past the ticket barrier an announcement came saying that they didn't know when the next train would be and that Waterloo had been closed because of overcrowding, and I decided to walk. The walk was anxiety-free, thanks to my Yaktraxs (which I first used in St. Petersburg, almost exactly four years ago), and there was the entertainment of watching Londoners have snowball fights.

5:19pm: Strange urban imagery in Hispanic fiction
A couple of months ago I read Roberto Bolaño's Amuleto, a very peculiar book set in the artistic circles of Mexico City in the late 60s and early 70s. While I was reading it, I also read a ecstatic review in Harpers of Bolaño's last novel, 2666, which I've bought in English (the translation has won awards) but won't start until I can also find it in Spanish.

At one point in Amuleto a small group of its poets is about to enter the Guerrero ("Warrior") district of the city to try to rescue a friend from the city's most notorious pimp:

At that hour of the night Guerrero looked above all like a cemetery, but not a cemetery from 1974, or a cemetery from 1968, or a cemetery from 1975, but a cemetery from the year 2666, a cemetery forgotten underneath a dead or unborn eyelid, the impartial wateriness of an eye that in wanting to forget something had ended up forgetting everything. [Infelicities of translation entirely mine.]

God knows what the "impartial wateriness" is about, but the "dead or unborn eyelid" gives me shivers, and the excessive forgetting. And I am agog to know what significance 2666 had for Bolaño (but suspect I will never find out).

About an hour ago I finished reading Amor, curiosidad, prozac y dudas by Lucía Etxebarria, which is a well-done piece of chicklit about three sisters and the different ways their lives had become derailed, starting with their father's desertion. It's sort of a Spanish Jennifer Weiner (especially In Her Shoes), but with much more sex and drugs and sheer despair. In the last scene two of the sisters are driving back to Madrid after visiting the oldest sister in hospital, and as the middle sister talks, the younger one realises that they are all tougher and more similar than she had realised. Standard (though satisfying) stuff. But then in the penultimate paragraph we have:

Madrid appeared in the distance, a monstruous concrete structure that was rising up threateningly, grey and huge on the horizon; and the car, on a line towards this disturbing mass, was like a small scout ship that was returning to its docking station after a quiet flight. Madrid, from a distance, looked like the Death Star. "Darth Vader," I thought, "your warriors are arriving. Open up the door." [Again, my crappy translation.]

We appear to have a chicklit narrator who is ending the story by identifying herself and her sister with Star Wars Stormtroopers. This is extraordinary (isn't it?), and appears to have come as much from nowhere as Bolaño's "2666".

1:26pm: My second ticket-stub terramundi
I go to see a lot of films thanks to my cineworld Unlimited card, and since November 2002 I've been saving the ticket stubs in a terramundi along with any coppers I get in change. The first terramundi got full up in June 2006, and when I broke it open I was sad-geek enough to use a spreadsheet to analyse my cinema-going over that time and then to post about it. Twice.

My second terramundi is now full, and today I broke it open and did the spreadsheet thing. I went to see 179 films (some films more than once), with an average of 4.6 films a month. The largest number I saw in a given month was 9, and there were three months in which I saw 9 films.

There were quite a lot of films that I'd completely forgotten having seen, but this time I did manage to identify all of them from the ticket stub (which sometimes only gives the first ten letters or so of the name), whereas the first time there were two that imdb and I just could not figure out.

Films I Hated

Miami Vice, Sunshine, Rush Hour 3, Sex and the City, The History Boys, The Golden Compass, Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Rush Hour 3 was mostly just "meh", which typically gets a film two stars from me, but it was the only film I walked out of this time around (I decided I'd rather be in Waitrose), so it makes the one-star list, which is normally for the films that made me want to hurt the people involved. Sunshine was exceptionally stupid with the science, the engineering and the metaphysics, but it was the presence of Cillian Murphy that made it memorably painful; without him I would probably just have walked out (and thus missed the very worst of the idiocy), but I stayed put and got my entertainment in trying to figure out exactly what it is about his face that makes it so very unnatural.

Films I Loved (or, at least, admired)

The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Little Miss Sunshine (saw twice), The Devil Wears Prada (saw twice), Marie Antoinette, The Prestige, The Painted Veil, No Country for Old Men, In Bruges, Flashbacks of a Fool, Man on Wire, Hunger, Waltz with Bashir, The Wrestler

Yes, I did love Marie Antoinette, OK? I've since seen it four or five times on DVD, and Kirsten Dunst remains the very definition of enchanting. I don't know anyone else who saw Flashbacks of a Fool and I gather it was not well received, but I thought it was an excellent treatment of the state of adolescence in general and of being an 1970s teenager in particular, and Daniel Craig has a couple of delicious line-deliveries (the lines in question are both "Fuck off", said to his sister, who has asked if he is wearing makeup).

The other films I saw more than once were Cars, Kung Fu Panda (which had so many moments I adored, but not quite enough to put it in the five-star list), The Simpsons Movie and Wall-E.

My average rating is apparently 3.3 (it was 3.1 the first time).

12:31pm: El Aleph and the literary gasometre
I first read Borges about five years ago, in a Penguin collection of translations entitled Labyrinths. About half of the stories were taken from the 1957 book El Aleph, which I spent most of last week reading (I am a slow reader in Spanish). There were a few stories that hadn't been in the Penguin collection, including the title story which had me laughing out loud with its description of possibly-the-worst-poem-in-the-world. The narrator in the story is Borges himself, and the poet is the cousin of a woman that the narrator-Borges had loved, who had died in 1929. The two men have little in common, but have been meeting every year on the anniversary of the woman's death, and on the 12th anniversary the narrator learns that the cousin has been working for many years on a poem entitled The Earth:

This work was intended to deal in verse with the entire planet; by 1941 he had already seen to a number of hectares of the state of Queensland, more than a kilometre of the coastline of Ob, a gasometre to the north of Veracruz, the main commercial buildings of the parish of La Concepción, [an apartment building in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires], and a Turkish bath not far from Brighton aquarium.

The cousin reads him a few verses from various sections, and with each verse explains at length exactly what makes it inspired and daring:

I realised that his work as a poet wasn't in writing the poem, it was in coming up with reasons why the poem was wonderful; naturally, this part of the work altered the poem for him, but not for anyone else.

And what did I think of that discovery of his: "heavenly-white"? The picturesque neologism suggests the sky, which is such an enormously important aspect of the Australian landscape. Without this touch the shades of the sketched images would be too sombre, and the reader would find himself compelled to close the book, wounded to the core of his being with the most black and incurable melancholy.

Borges manages to escape around midnight, but two weeks later the cousin calls him up and insists they meet in a bar. The cousin brings along some pages of the poem, which he was revised and made even worse, and after he's read them he rants about critics, but then starts praising preface-writers and the contribution they make in showing others where treasure can be found. Borges is terrified that the cousin is going to ask him to write a preface for the first volume of the poem, but it turns out that the cousin has someone else in mind (an Álvaro), and Borges agrees to tell Álvaro about the poem at next Thursday's meeting of their Writers' Club.

I weighed up the prospects that were in front of me: a) talk to Álvaro and tell him that this cousin [...] had come up with a poem which seemed to be expanding towards infinity the possibilities for cacophony and chaos; b) not talk to Álvaro. I saw clearly that my indifference would opt for b.

There are a few verses included in the story, but my Spanish isn't up to translating them, or even, really, appreciating how awful they are. There probably are some translations around. One day, I might go looking for them.