Day is dun: Got absent-minded on the train and missed my subtle transitions from the A to the G from the F, absorbed in the arrival of the Dardanians in Latium and thereby missing a ßleepy call from Darkbloom, with whom, however, an informative conversation earlier in the day. Nice rainy evening meeting with the tutee, getting through Aeneas' unwillingness to take the advice of Priam, the ghost of Hector, Venus, and the self-sacrificing Crëusa and get himself motivated to sail to Hesperia. I finally discovered the source of a song that has been haunting me for months, I thought it was on the soundtrack to "Amor es Perros" but wasn't. It was by Celia Cruz: "Melao de Caña." I had always thought the chorus went "El amor engaña ..." ("Love deceives ..."), but it really goes "El amor es caña / Fuerte su dulzura" ("Love is sugarcane / it's powerful sweet ..."). Hmm, portentous of a personal paradigm shift? "We shall see," says Darkbloom, wisely. My USB SmartCard reader for my digicam's on the fritz, and the Monkey Woman moaning, "If I only had a cute picture I could get a boooyfriend ..." Her braces hurting her is propelling her back in time into a second adolescence? I get myself a nice bottle of McClellan's and settle into the duck feathers (which cling to my São Paulo peacoat, making me a figure of fun) with the Igmonster for a bit of a read and snooze. Progress on the Enron front, thanks to a PR Newswire query.

What if it turns out you suck? This is the excellent question posed in the writers' forum at the WELL. I avoid reading it altogether. Well, I have a little peek:

Are you happy making the work? Are you driven by some desire (other than fame and fortune) to make the work? Would you feel incomplete as a person if you stopped making the work? Are you willing to give up the potential creature comforts that working in some other job will safely provide? Can you somehow make your life possible (via trust fund, part time job, full time job, mooching off your friends, or welfare scam) and continue doing your work?

Happy to see the Times bestowing an official moniker on a experience I share with many frustrated commuters at least once or twice a week: the "G-train sprint." I am now Southeast Asian Emma Bovary's official advisor in the remedia amoris after she went chasing off, tragically, after Mr. Wrong. There's something compelling about tragedy—until you find yourself eating your children and sticking needles in your eyes, that is. I try to convince her that now that she is a New Yorker, getting a shrink is de rigueur: chic, even. The Prince of the art department at Penton still working on getting me into the fantasy baseball league. Sim City Sam is kicking butt with a starting rotation that includes Pedro Martinez. I miss another transatlantic phone call from Darkbloom! The old folks at home report they are jumping in their Winnebago and cruising to Seattle and loading up at the IKEA—"yes, squandering your inheritance." Heh heh! "Get out on the highway ... heavy metal thunder ... BORN TO BE WILD!" Back to work.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? Big-time financial bailout arrives in the mail today, I can pay my rent, get my cellphone samba-ing again, and take a few days off to think. Napped in the afternoon and early evening and, sadly, missed a Darkbloom call from Berlin in so doing, which would certainly have lifted my spirits even more than having recourse to sweet unconsciousness. I propose we attend a matinee performance of Handel's Agrippina at the New York City Opera next Saturday. Merm, my native informant, writes in with useful notes on Drida. I suppose I will now order pork chops and finish off this editing job. The Tutee gets grilled on prosody tomorrow, I am looking for particularly evil examples of hiatus (elision interruptus). I also have my Aquent profile to do and some Enron contacts to initiate. Monkey Woman phones in to describe a method for roasting beets with star anise. No rest for the wicked.

Charles Bukowski National Laundry Day: To hell with it, I am burned out and starting to snarlingly assault my own ass, ever tantalizingly out of reach, the way Iggy sometimes does. I am doing laundry all afternoon, and no work whatsoever. Well, maybe some. I do owe my client a précis of those Latin manuscripts ... and this Salon story, I should not pass up that opportunity ... and freaking taxes, download the forms ... Good old Monkey Woman actually deigns to show up in Brooklyn yesterday to have her photo snapped for her online dating profile on Nerve and feed me at Zaytoon's in exchange. Her friends kept doing these sort of cutesy fashion model shots, and her brother bungled the whole thing as well, so I offered to capture the grungy-girlie inner simian contradiction which, after all, I know so well. After all, MW stood by me in my darkest hours and is possibly the most loyal (if annoying) friends I have ever had, never mind that whole brief awkward boyfriend-girlfriend phase at the beginning. This often crops up between men and women: Hey, we are, after all, hets of different genders, I guess we should, you know, engage in traditional mating behavior and form a nuclear family ... A few seasons in the gutter-void described so well by Beckett can teach us otherwise. I imagine a Tom Lehrer song on the subject which might rhyme "gender roles" with "square pegs in round holes," naughtily. Now, however, I have to try to get my USB hub working properly so I can run my USB-Ethernet connection through it at the same time I am using my USB film reader. This could lead to hours and hours of Yosemite Sam–style cussing.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.

Bloggage Blockage: A man wakes up from troubled dreams and a yen to procrastinate. He wants, in short, to blog. Is that too much to ask? But Blogger is behaving odd: It seems to beam my Vulchur post on the novels of Saddam Hussein into the void, for example, but then they show up later in my Future folder. Eh? I wrote kindly-indignantly to the Pyra folks about updating their status site in a little more detail a little more often. Not that I am not a fervid fan. Here is an epic simile I wrote to the Enig on the astonishing development of her translingual diary:

An epic simile: as rats given the choice between a button that dispenses food and a button that injects cocaine directly into the pleasure centers of the brain will starve to death with their little paws still pressing the button whence flows the Bolivian marching powder, so did the amens Enigmerm, the liminal being, half starvéd StarKist tuna and votary of Vesta in the dark depths of Merlandia, half cheap beer and steaming terrestrial flesh at the Porcão churrasqueria over by the freeway near the O Diabo love-motel by the dried up so-called "river," abandon all her lucrative interpreting contracts and bulldozer manuals for the sake of blogging, blogging, endlessly night and day ...

Our Correspondent's a Broad: Operatic Emma in a horrible quandary, again, again. Kajagoogle, aka hereinafter Sim City Sam, we discover, was born amid the heat, hot rods, and steaming fertilizer fields of Modesto, California, scene of American Grafitti. This explains so much, and there goes the entire Lon Gisland hypothesis. You think you know someone ... Uglylovely finds happiness? Darkbloom among the Lutherans. Got to get on the horn to Abraxas. Hilst translations to various venues. G-T the Austrian Empress likes one and recommends for Corpse. I hesitate over whether to publish one here. I think I will. Do not read on if you think you will be offended by (from my cover letter to a finalized submission) " sacanagem or puteria of extraordinary and sometimes daunting erotic frankness and satirical power." This is just a preliminary prose sketch of a satire on a traditional poetic form.

Drida, the cold and kinky witch

She hovered over the houses, shitting rats. She walked through the streets, scattering cockroaches. That’s just the way she was: Drida, the cold and kinky witch. Every day she scribbled in her diary. Here on the very first page you read: "Hanged old Jerome with my braided hair. There he hangs with a hanged man’s hard-on. Made old Ignacia sit her skinny ass down on same. You want to know why? Because they ate my dry hag-cunt. Also licked old No-No’s asshole, you know, that stupid half-breed who wipes snot off the noses of the little pig-girls? You ask me why I ate her ass? Well, there’s more than one thing you can do with an asshole if you use it the other way round, but No-No didn’t know this, the fucking conformist! I sucked off the King’s dog, too. He’s a faggot, you know, and used to bark very handsomely until he buggered the neighbor’s duck. I plucked that duck. You want to know why? He shit in my yard. And now I am off to scatter farts in the path of the Magi. With my sword of straw and my turds so dry, I’m off on the pilgrimage to Santiago."

The moral of the story: If you ever meet a witch (and you’re better off running onto a knifeblade than into her)? Fuck her in the ass!

Very Siglo de Oro—Quevedo. And now, to work:

Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field; eat of the grain
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.

Saturday in the Park with Pius Aeneas and Underwearless Angus: I go to meet my poor student and suggest we go to the Scala Café to translate lines. There is some kind of wildass Scottish parade passing by as we settle in upstairs to read of Aeneas' dream of Hector and the curse of Priam upon the head of Pyrrhus. Foedo, foedare, foedatus sum, ancestor of PT foder and SP joder (I learned all about that bilabial-to-unvoiced aspirate Iberian consonant shift quondam). Aeneas' meeting with Helen, Tydarida, Tydareus' daughter, we do not get to. "My brain hurts!" says the brave student after two hours of freaking hendiadys. Huge dudes in kilts with bagpipes and kilts and sporrans and some with massive calves all with Celtic tattooage marching up and down, some even mooning the crowd á la Braveheart, what a scene. It seemed appropriate to the subject at hand, for some reason. Savages invading the heart of civilization, not that the savages in this case were not perfectly well-behaved (as they often are in real life). Vergil, I am convinced, should not be taught to fragile young people, especially that whole rape-themed Book II. Yikes! Maximin wants to go out to that party at the Onion tonight, but I plead that "defessus sum tantis laboribus." Emma writes to report that her amatory advances to Savile Row were answered with the crudest of propositions, a crushing blow. Romance, pfui. Have I already quoted Gertrude Stein? "Adventure is making the distant grow near. But romance is having what is where it is, which is not where you are, stay where it is." Darkbloom may grasp this. In my inbox, to a personals ad built rhetorically around this very sentiment, a reply from a nice Russian lady, who writes

Hi. My name is Olga. I am from Russia. I am not married, I have no children. I don't smoke or drink. My height is 176, my weight is 65 kg. I'm pretty purposeful, sociable. I've got many friends. I would describe myself as a cheerful, loving, kind lady. The perfect romantic evening to me is an evening spent with my beloved person somewhere at a nice restaurant in the light of candles and in romantic music. I take care of myself. I go to the swimming pool regularly to keep myself in a good shape. I stick to the point that relations between a husband and a wife should be open and sincere. I do want to create a solid family, to love my husband, live in the atmosphere of respect and understanding.

E-mail robot boilerplate, sad. Use Mailwasher to block all messages from the mailru.com domain ("HotBox!"). But let me not speak ill of the Russians. Just ask Werewolf sometime, he has plenty to say on the subject. And now what? Laundry! Still waiting on that check and that delivery from Livraria Cultura.

I, Colin Edward Brayton = REDACT IN LOW, BAD IRONY: The Gorillatrixes did me a bad this week, arriving late, on very short notice after lengthy promises to the contrary, in a state of unpreparedness and amentia. "That's nonprofit work for you." Hmpf. Professional courtesy goes out the window when there's no profit to be had? Please to hear our cover design won us an extra $1000 from the Stonewall Foundation, however. See, I still say us, I must be a true believer. Or a masochist. Worked at CW again yesterday for a graphic designer pulling together a dynamic document project. He had a picture of himself with Lucille Ball. "I used to be in show biz." I also said hello to Walter Cronkite in the lobby!

Traumbedeutunggeschictezusammenfassung: I dreamt last night I moved to a kind of university-madhouse-commune in California, where I was waiting for food to arrive that had to be translated from one language to another. The person commissioning the job kept changing the schedule and the terms of the contract, plus the location of the telephone kept moving so that I had to wander around these labyrinthine hallways to find it, where everywhere intense women were hunched over desks, writing like mad in red ink. My roommates (everyone there was a woman, except for Zippy, who plays a key role later) kept bickering about the proper use of the space I was living and working in, insisting they had the right to sleep on my floor if they wanted to. It was some kind of political philosophy that I disagreed with. Finally, I went outside onto the grounds to find a pool to swim in. The place was built on a hill (like the temple of Minerva at Troy?), with many pools pouring down into lower pools. I found a very lovely pool to swim in and dived in, but a sloppy, grumpy, dirty groundskeeper came along and said that this was for holy drinking water only, which I had profaned, only he did not want to report the incident because of all the paperwork it involved. He took me back to his workshop and drew me a map of permissible pools with this remarkable pen that he had. He was so excited by the map he drew that he rushed out to try to sell it to an art gallery. When I returned to my room, a grinning Zippy was there and had painted the whole place lavender, which for some reason had driven away the schnorrers and made me really happy. Still, I told him, "I want to move back to New York fucking City!" To do so, however, I had to complete the translation job, which arrived with only 3 hours to spare on the deadline: an impossible feat to perform!

Dueling intercontinental ballistic poems: A popular feature of this best-selling blog, the oblique literary correspondence. Mlle. Darkbloom writes from a German farmhouse of being papered over with Easter Bunny stickers by a three-year-old niece and offers the following:

Ich habe zu Hause ein blaues Klavier
Und kenne doch keine Note.

Es steht im Dunkel der Kellertür,
Seitdem die Welt verrohte.

Es spielten Sternenhände vier
—Die Mondfrau sang im Boote—
Nun tanzen die Ratten im Geklirr.

Zerbrochen ist die Klaviatür ...
Ich beweine die blaue Tote.

Ach liebe Engel öffnet mir
—Ich aß vom bitteren Brote—
Mir lebend schon die Himmelstür—
Auch wider dem Verbote.

"I have a blue piano in my house, but cannot play a note. It stands in the shadow of the cellar door, and has since the world's decay. Four star-hands play harmony—'The moon-maiden sang in her boat ...'—and the rats dance clanking. The keyboard is broken. I moan for the blue dead. Ah, dear angel, open for me (What bitter bread I ate), even against the law's decree, in life, heaven's gate.

Good one! I mostly cribbed that translation from somewhere else. And I reply with a song from Chico Buarque called Futuros Amantes:

Não se afobe, não
Que nada é pra já
O amor não tem pressa
Ele pode esperar em silêncio
Num fundo de armário
Na posta-restante
Milênios, milênios
No ar

E quem sabe, então
O Rio será
Alguma cidade submersa
Os escafandristas virão
Explorar sua casa
Seu quarto, suas coisas
Sua alma, desvãos

Sábios em vão
Tentarão decifrar
O eco de antigas palavras
Fragmentos de cartas, poemas
Mentiras, retratos
Vestígios de estranha civilização

Não se afobe, não
Que nada é pra já
Amores serão sempre amáveis
Futuros amantes, quiçá
Se amarão sem saber
Com o amor que eu um dia
Deixei pra você

"Don't be dismayed because there's nothing now. Love's not in a hurry, it can lurk silently in the back of the closet, in the dead-letter office, for millennia and millennia in the air. Who knows? By then, Rio may be a drowned city, the deep-sea divers will come to explore your house, your room, your belongings, your soul, your hiding places. Scholars will try in vain to decipher the echo of ancient words, fragments of poems, letters, lies, portraits, the scraps of an alien civilization. Don't be dismayed that there's nothing for now. Lovers will always be loving. Future lovers may love one another without ever knowing of the love I left behind one day for you to find."

More Midtown Madness for Not Much Money: I get a booty call at 9:15 from that crummy agency to go over and work at the Black Rock building, an Eero Saarinen creation and brooding, Orcish home of the CBS corporate suits, in whose boardroom legend has it Abbie Hoffman once brokered a truce between warring street gangs (the Latin Kings and Westies?), schlepping graphics for an enormous real estate management firm. So what the hell, I do it. I'm a whore [click this one, you'll like it]. Got to go back in the morning, too. Tonight, finishing up my editing project for the poor Ph.D. candidate roundly scolded by her committee for editorial lapses. These rules about about avoiding biased language are somewhat Byzantine, but one shudders to think of someone practicing psychotherapy without understanding why it is important not to equate the person with the illness. We are scheduled to speak by phone in an hour. Abraxas man is scrabbling for inside poop for my Enron Energy Services story for Salon, to be done by next week. Must write the editor and try to wangle my way past Kurtzman's publicist.

Mid-Term Sentimental Education Notes: The big-hearted schlemiel, pater Kajagoogle, on the art of blogging:

It is both pompous look-at-me posturing, and pathetic pleas for help. It is a travelogue through my day (or the recorded moments of it); and it is the torn out pages of a diary, that have been scattered at random. It is a one-way mirror, like on all those gritty cop shows where the thug gets roughed up as the sarge looks from the other room; and it is door No. 2, where the contestant has no idea what he’s going to find on the other side—it could be the grand prize, but more likely it is the booby prize.

The lady? Or the tiger? That window on the guy getting roughed up metaphor, hmmm, we had better ply this man with liquor soon and lend an ear. (Old Mel Brooks gag: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! [Severed ears rain down upon the dais] That's disgusting!") I like KJG's hyperlink gloss on the word angry. I have glossae and glossaries on the brain, of course, not to mention glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. My correspondence with Mlle. Darkbloom feels a bit glossolalic on my end, but she actually seems to comprehend, and sends along a passage from Pnin that reminds me of my usual drunken disquisition on how the English word "nice" is descended from the Latin word for "idiot."
.

Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when she was a child, she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish-blue tint; whereupon Professor Pnin remarked that, primo, he would like everybody to say if contents were as good as container, and, secundo, that Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur—vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizily, columbine, shade, from columba, latin for "pigeon", as somebody here well knows—so you see, Mrs. Fire, you were, in general, correct.

I wonder, though, what it is? Here is someone maybe I can talk to, rather than at, or even with, who knows? Or rather, there she is: Berlin and Hamburg, hopefully soon to return with the proper visa rubber-stamped, paper alles in ordnung. Manhattan should simply secede from the Union and become an international pirate city, which it already is de facto, if not de re, I say. The Pratt girl is sitting hooded on the steps this morning, moaning the hangover blues. Tonight the thump-thump of the Velvet Underground doing "What Goes On" filters through the floorboards. From this I infer she is alone at last. We segue now into "Some Kinds of Love" ("... the absurd courts the vulgah"). The young Muslim real estate broker who showed me the place the week after you know what placed great emphasis on the fact that my upstairs neighbor is inclined to air-dry her underpants in the window. And with that Nabokovian thought, back to work. Work, work, always with the work. Arbeit, they say, macht frei. Pfui!

Check your mirror before merging. My California driver's license expired today. Is that cause for celebration? Weird day. Kicked out of the library at 6, so my tutee and I retire to the Scala Café and run through the lines describing the horrendous death of the good priest Läocoon (acc. Läocoonta, I helpfully impart). She asks good questions: How to translate laevus in the line

Et, si fata deum, si mens non laeva fuisset,
impulerat ferro Argolicas foedare latebras

And were the gods' decrees and the minds of men not accursed [I propose]
He would have persuaded them to rape [I propose] the Greek hiding places with steel

I may hear about that one from the philologists. It's the influence of Christopher Logue. My new transatlantic global citizen acquaintance, heretofore dubbed Ilsa (properly rejected on grounds of sappy tragic mojo and association with phallocentric propaganda of feminine self-sacrifice) and hereby provisionally redesignated Vivian (as in Darkbloom)—unless a character from Brecht is found more suitable—and I have quite a bit to discuss, I hope, just so long as her reading of The Secret Life of a Blind Tangerine does not convince her that I am utterly bonkers, or worse. What the heck, anyway? as a character in Giles Goat-Boy is fond of saying. I'm all right. In the age of open source, why should my life not be an open book? Or maybe I should find myself a Pepys? Or become a Pepys myself. I am like the Enig: I need an intern, not to mention a secretary, an agent, and an office manager. Monsoon Wedding was a joyful, rocking affair with lots of echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both my thumbs up, including the one afflicted with the fake yuppie disease. A few beers with MM after which I found melancholy and reassuring both. Things evolve, and people are of various sorts, things find their proper level, yada yada yada. That d.b.a. is an excellent bar, by the way, which everyone else in New York already knew except for me. Okay, to finish up this APA project, make some progress on the Latin MS, and do some legwork tomorrow on that story Salon is interested in (the editor turns out to be Maximin frére, which I won't mention until business is concluded). It's the midnight oil for me, my boys.

Sprung: Do I have to work? Bruce Andrews: "All labor is slavery, so we should just party all of the time — that's my labor theory of value." That's kind of the Maximin theory as well, I think, with whom Monsoon Wedding this evening at the new Sunshine Theater (a former Yiddish vaudeville house) on Houston. Good riddance to the drafty freaking nasty Kafkaesque Angelika. Kinko calls up for more existential counseling and to deliver a long encomium on Century 21, still in operation despite being located across the street from that smoking pit downtown. Had a bit of a toot last evening at our favorite dive bar, the Holiday. Good old PP over at IW (now in an industrial park in Darien, Connecticut) says he thinks he might still be able to get me into the fantasy baseball league. Kajagoogle gripes about cubicle life. What else can you do? But scores a free java on somebody else's corporate card. The Merm weighs in with some weird blogging adventures that take me off from São Paulo to Japan. Watch out, boys, the rest of the Pacific Rim is ganging up on us. Good old G-T, our telecommuting nudist copy editor, writes in for a brief scholarly disquisition on the abbreviation q.v., which I provide. I can always tell when the Pratt student upstairs has a new boyfriend: the musical genre changes. Last week: serious electric Miles Davis. This week: Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Thank god the 1970s punk boy is gone. Ilsa writes in from Germany, we will talk by phone later.
Thoughts for the Day: I am thoroughly engrossed in H.J. Jackson's Marginalia, about which more subsequently. I promised myself an hour of reading at Tillie's, away from the infernal machine and this maddening APA editorial job, and I shall keep my promise. The Fleet Science Center bops me a press release on what ought to be my first thought, however: To liberate myself from mental slavery to the Evil Empire of Tobacco.

Acrostic Tombstone Blues: It's like a word game from Scholastic magazine: Read the first letter of each line in the tombstone inscription at right to discover what John's friends really feel about him. The week ahead involves getting a start on those pesky taxes (no accountant to do them this year), staying on call for Bank of America, finishing up my edit of the psychologist's submissions, peering at the Latin manuscripts until I go blind, and perhaps trying to advance a couple of stories I have been working on. ConEd needs another pound of flesh or it will leave me in the dark. Where are the checks from those invoices I sent out? Zip off some zoomays to some Times classifieds. Drink with the Kink this evening.

Emma's new suitor, the Saville-Row Limey arbitrageur, is having his chef prepare a Filipino lunch for the dear lady today. Let it not be said I did not forewarn, unless one enjoys that sort of thing, perversely. The Merm pops up and begins to bolster my morale and cross-examine me on my keine Deutsche correspondent. Good to have a council of advisors on such matters. Thumbs up all around so far. Fishmulher offers me a Trados crack and we begin to argue about the merits and demerits of the open-source ForeignDesk, which I have yet to take for a test-drive. Merm suggests the nom de blog Blitzkrieg, which is mean mean mean. I hereby dub the person in question: Ilsa.

Christ is risen, I am floored. An afternoon snooze and a cancellation of the calendared drink with my little sister, the grunge-Pakistani cinema-hipster Kink, with her flexible morality and her three-hour haircut. Monkey Woman is in mourning: a childhood friend, whom I also knew slightly, died of a brain aneurysm suddenly, at 36 years of age. Holy moly. No work lined up for the week, so I think I will go nocturnal for a day or so. Let's get some pizza up in the joint and get up out from under all this paperwork and brainwork, shall we? I got Abraxas boy off his column, at least, at last. Conference call with editing client tomorrow evening pushes that deadline back, and the Gotham Gazette one has simply fallen by the wayside. Well, maybe I can get that done tonight. There's $100 in it for me if I do.

After that wonderful speech, I think we should all give him the clap. The enigmatic mahi-mahi mãe (pronounced "my, my, my," a very obscure Portuglish pun, carrying a ukele) is always copy-catting me: The foregoing interpretation error is a sample of the delights to be found at her new Translation Geek Web log. Relatedly, I am writing to a German friend I have just met online and say, "Sorry, keine Deutsche." She says, "You know, that could be translated as, Sorry, no German chicks." She is a former teacher of DAF (= ESL, only auf Deutsch or whatever. Zippy?). Says I, says I, "No, what I meant was, I regret that I currently lack a German woman." I am a smooth operator, am I not? Heh heh. I embellished that story to make it funnier, to be honest. Embarassing all around. Suddenly, I no longer know how to spell "embarrassing" so I paste it into Word and spellcheck it: Clippy offers "embracing" as a possible alternative.

Saturnia's Day: "Although Bellerphon was able to defeat the female tribe of Amazons, he was in turn defeated by the Xanthian women, who lifted their skirts and used the apotropaic power of their genitals to drive him away from their city." Why do I identify with this hero's destiny? Amori plus debet scena quam vita. I am reading Centaurs and Amazons on my way home from midtown. In classics mode when I need to be in column and editing and translation mode, all simultaneously. But I should be forgiven, and here is my excuse: I felt like shit all morning and my ulnar nerve is twinging something fierce. JAFCJR writes to say, " It has been good and heartwarming to read in the BT: 'I am enjoying my life and times, feeling stronger and more secure than ever for having weathered the last mile or so of slippery horseshit and land mines along the old road of life.' As for me, I grow too soon oldt und too late Schmart! Then there is also the phenomenon referred to in 2 Cor.4:16 (yeah, go look it up!) to which I can only say, Boy I sure hope so!! Sompin's got to get better." I nearly have to write back to say that I am taking it all back. Unwarranted optimism.

But running lines of Latin hexameter with my student picked up my spirits. She is a smart one and cranked out 100 lines for me no problem. Very sad to see the self-inflicted wounds on her arm, but I she will be one of those young folks who will have a bout of depression early in life and does not ever relapse. But this most noble creature, heu tristis, & lachrymosa commutatio, o pitiful change! is fallen from that he was ...

Hercule! Drinks with the Kink and delivery of a gift to the Monkey Woman tomorrow. Okay, back to work.

Trembling Before Hum-nity: Kinko the Kopycat and I sit AIMing aimlessly while the Holy Land burns down, glad we are secular humanists. I keep joking about this because events there are too terrible to contemplate otherwise. I got tons too much to do, especially after I fell to snoozing through the sunlit afternoon. A box arrives with the remainder of my grandfolks' personal effects after the sale of the house and auction of its movables. Great studio portrait of a foxy Aunt Sue in her redheaded Barbara Stanwyck lookalike prime, that woman knew how to have a good time. Otherwise it is a Pandora's box, no time for it now. I got roped into an American League—only fantasy baseball league, how did that happen? Web conference call tomorrow a.m. for the draft.

DNB [Do Not Blog]: We predict this acronym will make the dictionary by 2004. I propose "confidentiality prophylaxis," but the thing is just not catchy, people just say "huh?" But oh, if you only knew. My friends are terrible degenerates, hopeless romantics, and copyright infringers, every one, though scrupulous about copyleft. Just ask Kinko the Kopykat.

Four-letter word: Speaking of why "love is totally obtuse," Match.com's Venusmail turns up "I have a pilot's license, a master's degree, and competed in national figure skating competitions." She also sings opera, needlepoints in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, and works now and then as a body double for Uma Thurman. She is Buckaroo Banzai's sister, Billy Rose. Laugh while you can, monkey boy. Hmmm. Aw, hell, I'm in enough trouble already.

In the sky when you die. It's Passover and Easter in the two-for-one monotheisms (the first installment, some say, was better with the original cast and before dubbing, but who can resist a miniseries?), with Eid al-Adha a few weeks gone now. Lamb, ram, or matzoh, please, God, Iuppiter omnipotens, bearded thunderer, tetragrammaton, eat anybody else but me. Accept all substitutes. Have I insulted everyone equally? I admit it, I snuck out for ashes ("know that ye are dust and to dust ye shall return") and even offered to accompany Emma to Mass. She seems very interested in the pro forma group confession plan ("We did naughty things, yada yada yada, why bore You with the details, You've got a universe to run!") and blanket absolution we offer over in the Anglican fold. Fifty percent less guilt, but with all the great organ music you remember. And everybody can have sex! Join today! Do I get a bounty if I bring one in?

Devo ter dormido com o cu virado para a lua, or, adnuit coeptis: Feeling pretty lucky at the moment. All the F trains got axed because of some mysterious "smoke incident" at Union Square, so I walked over to 50th and took the 2 to Atlantic Avenue, emerging on Pacific Street and crossing Flatbush to dine on superspecial multi-meat Cambodian noodle soup ($6.50) at the eponymous Cambodian Cuisine. Walking home in the dark, the Twin Towers memorial beaming all the way up to the orbiting Enterprise, white blossoms busting out on barren ornamental fruit trees even though the other trees are still leafless, so meshugginah are these inbred monsters to get this spring thing rolling, oy, like a fallen angel with a brand new tubal ligation. Worked my cu off today. Mike Cohn called from 250 Park Avenue South to report from the scene of the last days of Internet World in the fashionable precincts of the city. I note that the Webmaster over there has placed the editorial staff biographies in a folder called "miscellaneous." That about sums it up. I left my father's prayer bell there, stuffed away in some drawer, apparently. I will use it to pray to Santo Expedito, who always has a glass of whiskey to keep him kindly disposed to my well-being. You have to work to keep your luck, and propitiate the vast, obtuse, capricious, and irrational forces all around you. And then there is the dilemma of Emma and her Ursula Buendia of an overshadowing matriarch. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

My Christopher Logue books arrive. I am crawling into bed with them now. Column to file in the morning, interview at Aquent.

What the kat dragged in: "The Underpants" was a lot of fun, a clever farce and a classic New York people-watching event. A curtain made of underpants surrounds the stage, and drops suddenly to the ground to reveal a man yelling at his wife because her underpants fell down around her ankles just as the Kaiser was passing in parade. My review will focus on the significance of fake mustaches to the dramatic action. If you sit stage left at the Classic you get a disconcerting view of the fine spray of spit and pathogens cannoning out of the actors' mouths as they project their lines to the back of the house. A pair of warranty-expired Andy Warhol factory products in the audience were especially notable, the woman so surgically altered she looked like someone famous who died 30 years ago—Doris Duke?—and could barely walk, the man bald and middle-aged and dressed all hip-hop, resembling Michel Foucault as sleazy crack-addicted gigolo, both looking like they needed artificial life support. Knocking down a big steak and Laphroaig after Laphroaig at the Fanelli Café with Maximin, who is 99-percent cocoa, and with whom détente seems possible, no suicide bombers or tanks necessary. Cannot reach XDrive this morning, and would not know what to do with the files I found there if I could until I get a lot more coffee in me.

Taking care of biz: Stranger and stranger, behinder and behinder. I am enjoying my life, feeling stronger and more secure than ever for having weathered the last mile or so of slippery horseshit and land mines along the old road of life. A phone call comes in from another floor asking for my help translating a Spanish Excel spreadsheet. I say sure, just make sure you forward my résumé to the Bowne Translation Borg collective. Got to run. I am ready to be assimilated.

Shout out to Kajagoogle: Iggy wishes to extend his thanks to Uncle Kajagoogle for kindly allowing the zhlub who feeds him to pay him Tuesday for some cat food today. We have, of course, forgotten our Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic today. My editor at the Gotham Gazette fails to advise me in advance of his editorial calendar and only writes to tell me I am over deadline. It's always something. Work expands to fill the time allotted here, so there are many interstitial blocks of time to double-bill, the way those fancy lawyers do, you know, like in The Firm with Tom Cruise.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth: Hanging around midtown last night after a first meeting with my student, a slim, intense, ethereal Korean girl in sidewalk-dusting bell-bottoms, a streak of purple in her jet-black hair. I assigned her lines 469-519 of Book I of the Aeneid (the ekphrasis of the temple of Dido) as a diagnostic exercise and made arrangements to speak with her AP Latin instructor to coordinate pedagogical aims and methods. This I will enjoy. Waiting for Emma's social calendar to clear, I hang around in the café at the Times Square Virgin Megastore after some nice meatloaf at the Applejack Diner at 55th and Broadway (the old Broadway Diner across the street is shut down). Let's see, I have some notes on the megastore experience, but they are too disjointed. The megastore is too disjointed. Tejano blares over the PA while videos of heavy-metal hairbands assault you from all sides, just for starters. Whiskies and whispers followed with Mme. E. Abraxas the Energy Gnostic is clamoring for his column, so I will have to make that a priority for my stolen moments this morning. Engineer of the month: Andre Tritarenko: "Modern civilization is impossible without wealth of energy, but it is uneasy on the environment." Delivered unto my psychologist her stern lecture about proper bibliographic citation, successfully parrying her attempt to get me to do the work for her. Tonight: Underpants [do a Google search on "classic New York stage underpants"]. Over and out.

As above, SO[be]LO9W57: I am an idiot, I left Outlook Express downloading e-mail to my machine at home every 15 seconds and so have no mobile commerce with the universe today from my remote location. If you must reach me, there is always Hotmail. I am hitting up a pal for $50 at lunch, how sleazy can you get? When are these bozos going to pay me? Staffsheets says my timesheets are approved, so show me the money, honey. I have an appointment with an editorial placement agency on Friday, so I may not have to be doing this junk much longer. Slept beautifully, had a weird dreams. Must be that phone conversation with Emma on the edge of sleep. Meeting my Latin student this evening at the Donnell Library Center for a first session, then perhaps a late supper with my new Antipodean friend from the south and east, some TV (my cable is still out, dang it). Working like a dog on editing project and column-writing I swear, in the interstices between the make-work that comes into my inbox here. Boondoggle city, dude!

It is my duty to report: That Jolielaide subsidized my evening at the Vanguard yesterday. Having consolidated my checking and savings account balances online in order to be able to extract a twenty from the ATM, I prevailed upon the eminent explicatrix and HTML hand-coding paranoiac ("HMTL e-mail is a nightmare from hell, what, are you kidding? I use PINE!") to split the difference between her student discount and my full-fare admission. She received a $4 drink credit, which afforded her a $19 value for $15, while I received a full $10 drink credit with my $25 cover + drink full fare, of which she paid $5, taking pity on my decrepitude and demonstrating saintly generosity, asking only that the matter be blogged in detail. Thus, I got two free Budweisers, while she had to fork over another $1 for her glass of house white. Great seats with a view of the chanteuse between two big-haired Jersey girls sharing a bottle of the fanciest champagne on the house. Fun, fun, fun.

Economic indicators: are on the rise as I receive two inquiries about gigs that actually sound good. One is an invite to submit an orçamento on the translation of a weird Brazilian sci-fi novel of 125,000 words, a month's work. Any hints from the Antipodean translatrices about competitive pricing, and must I really bid in terms of arrobas and reais? The other is an editing contract with one of those Big 5 consulting firms on the Avenue of the Americas, though the guy I am negotiating with is a complete hard-ass (a joke: it's one of those nepotism things I have always wanted to benefit from).

Détente with the PRM and other foreign policy matters: Possible détente with the People's Republic of Maximin: got free tix to see Underpants at the Classic Stage Company on Wednesday. Saw "Naked" by Pirandello there with Mira Sorvino last year, you know, from The Mighty Aphrodite, I liked it. Mira has the loveliest feet. A civilized occasion for subtle diplomacy and negotiation of borders. Let there be peace on earth. Poor Emma, meanwhile, is sad and blue. Stressful life, that swell and witty lady. We send intermittent inspirational e-mails to her cell phone [fancy, no? I want e-mail on my cell phone!] throughout the day.

Daily FUBAR: The elevators here at SOLO9W57 are in funky shape, it's too frightening to describe. There are sloppily dressed union dudes here putting up little plaques about "inconvenience" and "state-of-the-art upgrades" and drinking a lot of coffee. Oy vey gevalt. New York freaking City.

Anonymous non-English article or chapter in an edited book, title translated into English, multiple editors of multivolume series: Quick, the APA citation format. Quick, quick!

Dueling Similes: I admit that I have slept most of the day, now scraping pennies together for my return to the Vanguard with JL, who is in some kind of fettle today as we exchange dueling spring-themed lyrics. My opening sally is a song by Alan and Marilyn Bergman called "You Must Believe in Spring," transcribed from a performance by the diva in question.

You Must Believe in Spring

When lonely feelings chill the meadows of your mind
Just think, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Beneath the deepest snows
The secret of a rose
Is merely that it knows
You must believe in spring

Just as a tree is sure its leaves will reappear
It knows its emptiness is just a time of year
The frozen mountain dreams
Of April’s melting streams
How crystal clear it seems:
You must believe in spring

You must believe in love and trust it’s on its way
Just as the sleeping rose awaits the kiss of May
So in a world of snow
Of things that come and go
Where what you think you know
You can’t be certain of

You must believe in spring ... and love

This, writes Jolielaide, is "primavernal optimism" which she is "loathe not to counter with withering cynicism, I respond with the seasonal inverse." There follows a snarky memo from The Copy Desk about whether it is not perhaps "loath" that's meant, countered by the usual attitude from the Department of Close Reading (formerly Explications de Texte 'R' Us), who think they are above the rules, regulations, and routine paperwork. Beside the point. Ms. too-smart-for-her-own-good transcribes the riposte from memory, which I would not believe if I had not heard it for myself, cranking out reams of verse while walking down Second Avenue. Edna St. Vincent Millay:

What lips my lips have kissed and where and why
I have forgotten. And what arms have lain
Under my head till morning. But the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply.
And in my heart there stir a quiet pain
For unremembered lads who not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
As in the winter stands the lonely tree
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one
Yet knows it[s?] boughs more silent than before,
I cannot say what loves have come and gone.
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that sings in me no more.

Very apposite! Notice, says JL, the dialectic of memory ("I have forgotten,"unremembered lads") and knowledge ("Nor knows ... yet knows") brought together in the concluding couplet ("I cannot say ... I only know"). I think she devotes insufficent attention to the melancholy undertones of the reiterated "must believe" in my entry. You need to hear the diva delivering it, perhaps. Mid-term exam: compare the personification of trees in each poem in relation to themes of knowledge, memory, and faith, with reference to Saint Augustine and C.S. Peirce's critique of the Cartesian tradition in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." You have 30 minutes, pick up your pencils and begin. Yes, Bart, spelling counts.

Blogger FUBAR: I could not get my posts for Saturday out of draft mode and onto Blogspot for some reason [no explanation forthcoming from Pyra], so I repost them now. As if you can't miss a single moment of my existence, my millions of readers ...

The UPS guy rocks, for once: He drops by late last evening to deliver the following: Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, The Footnote: A Curious History, The Dictionary of the Future—I think I can get a lot of Kulchur Vulchur mileage out of that one, a lexicon of marketese—and Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. Just when I was thinking I would have to schlep to the regional distribution center in Maspeth, wherever that is. Zippy would enjoy the footnotes book, a history of the genre in historical research—another technology honed to exquisite precision by those pesky Germans he's always on about, and grandfather to the hyperlink. Global business depends so much on the local factor in the great value-chain of agoraphobic e-consumerism.

Must I go out? I must, I discovered I do not own a copy of the Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association after all and must bus it over to Park Slope to pick one up being held for me at the local branch of the plastic fantastic superchain. Meanwhile, I am walking my translation client through the process of getting access to my XDrive shared folders so they can upload some digital images for me to inspect. It used to be free to register. What a PITA. I have to wait until two for my tutee to phone and to finish up with my translatee. Hopefully Emma will phone up, too, and we can wander the yuppified blocks of 7th Avenue. There is actually a good flea market there, come to think of it. JAFCJR is puzzled by the state of contemporary poetry as embodied by the works of Joseph Doyle [the "quasi-Welsh" ode to the letter e will be in the archives tomorrow] as explicated by his brother Brian.

SELAMAT DATANG DI HEPTUNE: "Heptune's purpose is humor and information, preferably both at the same time!" The best Web site ever posted from Guam I discover in a quest for jazz lyrics at one in the morning. Get jazzy and traditional baby names, browse fart FAQs, and learn about the cuttlefish, "the sentient cephalopod." Thinking about moving to Guam? "Read here about our typhoons, our climate, geography and other basic but fun information, with lots of pictures of typhoon devastation!" And much, much more. Magaera is a Polynesian polymath, and the woman I am going to marry. In the image above, "we see (from left to right) Anguirus, Data, Dr. Smith, Akhenaten and Cab Calloway playing poker for rotifers. Betty Boop is the rotifer girl, providing rotifers (in the little jars) as needed."

Friday Nite Twilite, Sipping on a Bee-Yah: Both hard-drive search engines (desktop and laptop) are grinding away in search of the word "contos," because I know that I did a translation of a passage from one of Hilda Hilst's Contos d'Escarnio—yes, I already know about that Word file of Contos Fluminenses by Machado d'Assis, poor choice of criterion—that I was particularly fond of, but those I thought I sent it to say they have not archived it on their own drives. Yada yada, the whole schtick about memory and engines that search your drives and like that.

But To Be Brief: Emma, creatively blocked doing design drawings for tomorrow's meeting, phones up and sings "That's All" to me and then rings off. This pretty much wipes out my lingering resentments and terrors concerning all the evils unto which the day was sufficient, or actually it's vice versa, the day unto which the evils were sufficient. I finished a five-hour job in one hour by composing a recursive Photoshop 5.5. action [I ♥ macros and HTML 4.0 character entity references] that zapped 35 TIF files into JPGs embedded in PDF for rapid assembly in Acrobat, just like presto change-o. Commuting mojo less potent today [see below], but still only had to wait two minutes for a G train home, which always puts a song in my heart, and this morning not one of those funny, smartass schoolkids cut in line at the bodega when I was trying to buy my coffee. Beer and lightbulbs on the way home. In fact, come to think of it, I was resigned to being late this morning and was astonished when I totally mojofied the entire G-A-F experience to show up at security at 9:01. It's like that Twilight Zone where the guy throws a quarter in a cigar box and it lands on its edge, upon which he has the power to I think it is read minds.

JA Writes: to invite me on a male-bonding camping trip in September—"No Robert Bly ... We will walk in the hot sun for 2 to 5 miles with backpacks and a donkey and a horse or two ... A couple of you will get bitten by rattlesnakes, and one of you will get kicked by the donkey and one other will fall off a cliff. The rest of us will spend the days caring for the injured and disposing of the dead and pretending we don't know anything about it ... You might see bears, mountain lions, wild pigs, rattlesnakes and other dangerous creatures, and flies that bite, mosquitos and bugs that crawl on you in the night ... Most of you won't know most of the people being invited. That is ok. Basically they are a mixture of energy engineers, permaculture dudes, musician, artists, and a few other strange dudes that I have met and liked here and there." I wished he had mentioned peeing on logs, that's the best thing about Nature, just peeing any old place. This invite also cheers me.

Flames, Fames, Tomes, Guides to Style, and the Mysterious Return of the Dookmeister: I get a sort of mysterious sample text to translate for a literary project of 125,000 words through my ProZ mail. Do not see such a bid in my bid list. Huh? The Dook actually mails me up today after ousting me from his circle of philosopher-winos months ago, and brusquely, too. No explanation for the change of heart. Wanted to know if I remembered a woman from our Ethics and Morals seminar of two decades past. I actually did. As I recall, she was really into that whole univeralizability problem surrounding the Categorical Imperative, which is, of course, a propos of the flame-fest that broke out here today on an earlier post. Yikes! I will now: work up an intake questionnaire for my tutee, polish up the Latin transcription, and search for the goldarn APA stylebook, which I know I had Amazoned to me in the past few months. Let's see, ACS, FT, NYT, Folio (a bootleg copy), Einsohn, Chicago, AMA, WIT ... because I have a $300 editing project due Monday, not to mention a column, and JL got psyched to do the Vanguard on Sunday night to worship at the altar of jazz divahood, and ... and ...

Do You Know I Care, or Don't You Care to Know? In an unusually entertaining and un-infuriating column, William Safire writes in the Sunday magazine that "the sophisticated innuendo of the 30s and 40s is being newly appreciated by a generation not then born," though I like to think I have been hip to sophisticated innuendo all along. Amen to that, anyway. Carol Sloane's set at the Vanguard last night reprised a new album on the very theme of time passing, absent friends, still finding the energy to get the mojo working. It was fantastic. Must find the tune she introduced as the first song she ever sang at the 'Guard, opening for Oscar Petersen in 1961, which makes her ... the beneficiary of a pact with the Devil? Something naughty (and more verbally Pagliaccian than the deffest rhyme by Dre or Dogg, even) by Ben Webster about the rabbit sneaking into the carrot patch to feed his "carrot jones." This stout little old lady ("Beautiful set, thanks so much," says I, lamely—"Yeah, thanks, dearie," says she—can really, really cut the mustard. Really. Really really. Gee whillikers. Of course, I remember seeing Ella in the mid-80s and she could also still pull a lot of tisket from her tasket. There were weird Japanese hipsters there writing down the set list, which I actually kick myself for not doing. I am going back this weekend, if I can.

In like a lion, out like a lamb. The temp dropped 40 degrees in the space of a subway ride from Times Square to Christopher Street. It was the first day of spring. Holy cow! More juxtaposition of extremes from the universe. Surely some revelation is at hand? Emma and I had to duck into this weird Russian bar across the street, the nearest shelter, where the nice barmaid let us hang out after hours, smoking and drinking Coronas, listening to Joãao, Astrid, and Stan, keeping an eye on this klatch of tough-looking teenage Russian girls partying in the corner, who thought we were pretty amusing too.

Notes on the Death of Civility: Just a brief note on a controversy I got involved in through my conversations with Nona recently, who was embroiled in a massive flame war on a foodie BBS ("I hate acronyms," says Nona, who has a long list of specific grudges) called Chowhound. Lacking time to treat the subject fully, interesting as it is, let me just say that it was fascinating, and horrifying, to witness the way the responses to a couple of West Coast girls inquiring about proper dress at fancy New York joints ("Should we wear hose with dresses?"—to which the sensible answer is, of course, "yes, unless you want to freeze your ass off") evolved into a discussion on the decline of standards in comtemporary society, which then itself devolved into a slanging match on the meaning of civility that was itself notable for a blatant lack of the subject under discussion. Comparing someone who expresses annoyance with those who wear jeans to a fine establishment to the Taliban is a bit over the top. Who are these people, and why don't they get a life? On the other hand, as I kept trying to get the word in edgewise, the whole subject is pretty much a tempest in a teapot, given the clubbing of baby seals, the rain of smart bombs, and all that sort of jazz. Food, for crying out loud: it's just a way to get energy to apply to work, sex, and reading books.

Blog Smog? Do the Dog!Congrats to JB for jumping on the bandwagon with the rest of use belated cultural trend-chasers with the cleverly titled My Simultaneous Self. We will have to tutorial him on the technical nuances and the virtues of pithiness, of course. Editors, and especially copy editors: Nag, nag, nag. By the way, I had another miraculous commute today. Even the freaking G train arrived in a timely fashion. How long before this karmic bubble bursts? I write in haste. Yada yada yada.

Cartography and the Vanguard: As consolation and reward for having to work on stupid maps all day long, I am going to go see Carol Sloane tonight at the Village Vanguard with Emma. The woman has pipes. In fact, so does Emma, who crooned a few lines of "Imagination" last night on the phone. Icy fingers up and down my spine. I have agreed, sighing, to another week of labor on 57th Street, meaning I will actually make my rent on time this month for the first time in some deal of a while, and will be busy, since I am starting tutoring next week as well. All this to the detriment of quality writing time, dag nab it. So happy that D2 clicked to comment (see below)! Everybody should, even random weirdos wandering in from out of the blue. What else? Got a couple of bids in at ProZ, as always. Lovely day in the Apple, I can see the grand edifices of Central Park West from here.

Mondo Jazzmo New York Funkadelia: Sometimes you download more information more than you can possibly process given the clock-speed of your brain. Such was my conversation last evening with Nona the diamond-dealing force of nature, who boiled a lobster alive while on the phone with me last night ("c'mon, m****f*****r, are you ready to DIE?") and insisted that I tell her why Monkey Woman likes to call me Lobster Boy. I sincerely do not know. Revenge? There is something really hedonistic about two persons with DSL talking on the phone and researching one another's conversational allusions in the background while simultaneously playing MP3s into the telephone receiver. We might as well just set up a Groove conference. It is very cyberpunk, of course. When we all have Personal Area Networks, we will walk around in a cloud of background data and our autonomous software agents will seek out and filter all pertinent facts. "I'd love to meet you for coffee, were it not for that felony conviction for cannibalism, so sorry." At any rate, one product of the conversation was this item:

Anna Russell: "Jolly Old Sigmund Freud," from Backwards with the Folk Song

I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed
To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my husband’s eyes.
He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find,
And here is what he dredgéd up from my subconscious mind:

R: Hey, libido,
Bats in the belfry! [x 3]
Jolly old Sigmund Freud!

When I was one, my mommie hid my dolly in a trunk,
And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk.
When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day,
And that is why I suffer now from klepto-ma-ni-a. [R]

At three, I had the feeling of ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follows naturally I poison all my lovers.
But I am happy now I’ve learned the lesson this has taught:
That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault. [R]

[Repeat R two more times]
This was a useful addition to my cultural repetoire. Emma, meanwhile, is mad to hit all the jazz clubs. Let the money start rolling in, please, I want to live. [Thanks to Pombo and Mme. Vocabulando for recommending me for that musuem catalogue translation, in that regard.] My Latin client turns out to be kind of an overenthusiastic amateur. I can say no more, but it does look like I will be paid. I will end today's post with another item from the multimedia gabfest, from Professor Tom Lehrer (ibid). Do you see a disturbing subtext emerging here? Lobster Boy-ling, et cetera? (I think Emma and Nona may be the embodiment of the yin and the yang, respectively, of yesterday's immaculate cast of the Ka-Ching, and the horns of my dilemma.)

I ache for the touch of your lips, Dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, Dear.
You can raise welts like nobody else,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

Let our love be a flame, not an ember,
Say it's me that you want to dismember.
Blacken my eye, set fire to my tie,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

At your command, before you here I stand,
My heart is in my hand (yecch!)
It's here that I must be.
My heart entreats,
Just hear those savage beats,
And go put on your cleats
And come and trample me.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony.

My soul is on fire,
It's aflame with desire,
Which is why I perspire
When we tango.

You caught my nose
In your left castanet, Love,
I can feel the pain yet, Love,
Every time I hear drums.
And I envy the rose
That you held in your teeth, Love,
With the thorns underneath, Love,
Sticking into your gums.

Your eyes cast a spell that bewitches.
The last time I needed twenty stitches
To sew up the gash that you made with your lash,
As we danced to the Masochism Tango.

Bash in my brain,
And make me scream with pain,
Then kick me once again,
And say we'll never part.
I know too well I'm underneath your spell,
So, Darling, if you smell
Something burning, it's my heart.
Excuse me!

Take your cigarette from its holder,
And burn your initials in my shoulder.
Fracture my spine, and swear that you're mine,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

The War on Terror continues, meanwhile, but the death of irony has been greatly exaggerated.

Shampoo, Cat Food, My Commute, and the Alienation Effect of the Means of Mechanical [Re:]production: Thinking on the way home that if I were to make a regular thing of going back to the nine-to-five that I should dedicate a Web log to my commuting experience each day. A premise for a postmodern novel. Today's was miraculous: The F pulled into 57th Street as I descended the stairs, and there was actually a seat. A miracle. I sat next to a sullen Nuyorican teenager on my left and a corpulent dowdy lady on my right. I was only elbowed in the head twice. At Jay Street–Borough Hall, the A train was waiting right across the platform, and one stop later (mirabile dictu) a G train was waiting with open doors to carry me two stops to Clinton-Washington. Seamless, fateful, mojo-ridden transit connections like this are a rarity, like casting the I Ching and getting Hexagram 2 [The Receptive] with six moving lines, morphing into Hexagram 1 [The Creative], which I did this morning. I have it on my personal digital assistant. It portends violent contrasts and catastrophic change, yes? "É favorável encontrar amigos a oeste e ao sul, evitar amigos a leste e ao norte." Avoid people from the west and north, seek out people from the east and south. Does this mean I should go to Florida? Emma is from Southeast Asia, but why assume everything has to do with one's social life? Because one is a yang-brain, I guess.

Back to Our Story: No, but I actually remembered to buy cat food and shampoo—I neglect such trivial yet essential (especially to Iggy) details sometimes for days on end, my thoughts in Laputa, Island in the Sky—and felt much better after an Earl Grey at Tillie's. My bank account was empty, but fortunately two checks had arrived last night and I had remembered to tuck them last night in my jot book in the lefthand pocket of the coat I actually remembered was the one I intended to wear today. I was in the groove, I'm telling you. We were working on a huge series of maps all days, maps of the "footprints" of various media empires—I think I can say that without breaching my nondisclosure responsiblities. Quite dull but hectic. Work, work, work. And now for beer and noodles. The Merm heeded my design advice, by the way. Yea, even the high and mighty translatrices of the Antipodes heed my humble but groovy counsel now.

Two's Day and All is, Well, Hell: Back at the Banc of America HQ at SOLO9W57. Why with the "c"? Do not tell a soul, but I have attempting to get through the proxy server to achieve instant messaging capability, but to no avail. Sorry, Kajagoogle, Ninawug, Moqui, and all the rest. You will just have to e-mail my sorry a-s. Neither can I FTP through the mutha. Dang. I am reading in the Economist about the latest political scandal in Brazil ("Sarney's Stash"). Tsk tsk. It's like their soap operas: fast-moving, overwrought, sexy, and vastly superior to ours. João, pater sirenae aenigmaticae Sanctipaulensi, once told me the following joke:

An American mayor meets a Brazilian mayor at a conference, and invites him to visit his city. The Brazilian mayor is picked up by a limo at the airport and whisked away to a lovely mansion.

"My," says the brasileiro, "You live well for a public servant. What is your secret?"

"Well," drawls the American, "do you see that highway overpass over there?" "Sure," says the antipodean alcalde. The American pats his pocket and says, "Ten percent. You see that hospital over there?" He pats his pocket: "Ten percent."

"I see," says the man from down South America way. "Well, this has certainly opened my eyes. And now you must come and visit me."

Arriving in Brazil, the American mayor is picked up by a military helicopter and whisked to a 50,000 acre ranch with a faithful reproduction of the palace at Versailles in the middle of it. "My god!" he exclaims. "You live like a king! What is your secret?"

"You see that highway over there?"

The gringo looks around at the blasted landscape and peasants riding donkeys over it and says, "Um, actually, no."

"Exactly," says the Brazilian, patting his pocket. "One hundred percent."

Apologies to those who have heard the joke before. I repeat myself because I am a Turing robot.

I have a student, I am happy to report. A young lady from an Upper East Side high school has fallen behind in AP Latin and needs intensive tutoring on the Aeneid. I will, of course, compel her to buy Bill Anderson's excellent The Art of the Aeneid, which the main New York Public Library does not have, alas: It would fall in between the Art of the Admiral and the Art of the African Negro. Bill wrote recently to congratulate on my return to labores latinitatae. He's the dude, and I will have to read his essay on Virgil's re-imagining of the Iliad, since I just ordered all of Christopher Logue's Iliad series recently from Amazon. Of course, what the poor girl is more likely to need is a handle on that pesky locative, that nasty hendiadys, and that special ablative of things having to do with wearing togas.

FUBAR: That Enigmatic Mermaid is outblogging my sorry gringão behind like a house afire. Dang it, now I have to buy The Dictionary of the Future just to keep up with the latest memes. My project list now includes: Latin AP tutoring via Tutor.com; the Maximilian-Heinrich translation project; the American Psychological Association stylebook editing project; my weekly energy column; and the graphics stuff, not to mention the three items in the queue for Kulchur Vulchur. My diamond merchant friend smokes cigars. Emma and I will see a movie later this week, maybe. I am listening to Femi Kuti and the postjazz Dietrich-as-faux-cowgirl stylings of Norah Jones. I am reading ... what am I reading now? Maximum Minnie crawls out of the silence. What do I do? Strip down to underwear, stick a cat on my feet, and retire under the duvet to fall to snoring with a book open on my chest.

I Don't Like Mondays: First 9-to-5 M-to-F working week in ever so long and I am already pissing and moaning. In the words of Blind Willy Johnson—or was it Muddy Waters? or Chester Arthur "Howling Wolf" Burnett?—"I can't be satisfied." Verbo Volant says, "L’important n’est pas d’avoir mille idées, mais d’en vivre une." I am gazing out the 22nd-story window at the HVAC plant squatting atop the green-patina copperwork on the roof that majestic pile of stone, the Plaza. Plumes of steam obscure Old Glory from view. The scene resembles one of the sets for Battlefield Earth.

Sunday Evening Random Conversation: My friend said she was getting obsessive about preparing for her interview last night and went incommunicado, so I wound up having a couple of scotches at a restaurant near Carnegie Hall—how did I get there? I practiced—with ... let us call her Emma, as in Bovary, not Goldman. A remarkable person, a very enjoyable conversation. I continue with my mission to commune with my fellow beings more often. The workings of karma are peculiar, however, just as the likelihood of catastrophe is perpetual.

Rather Switch Than Fight: I can't read the New York Times anymore, except to glance at it online. I am resolved to take up the Wall Street Journal as a regular habit instead, balanced by the Nation. Better writing and reporting, less freaking elitist attitude, and more pertinent to the beats I am trying to develop. An excellent story about Bosnian Muslims today in the lefthand column, and an interesting take on how global free trade has affected New Zealand, which the writer characterizes as "the victim of hypocritical international trade policy on the part of the world's biggest countries." Sounds like the rhetoric of Porto Alegre, almost. I know, sorry, boring. I am always making banal resolutions and taking them very seriously for about fifteen minutes. I am also working my way through the Library of Posthumanity. Time for a smoke break. More coffee! That smoky scotch last night pretty dang well zonked me good.

From Reuters | Breaking News from Around the Globe, some comforting news for a gentleman just celebrating his tenth Winter Olympiad:

Older Men Make Better Lovers, Psychologist Says

LONDON (Reuters) - Older men are better lovers and have fewer impotence problems than their younger counterparts, with the "male menopause" a myth pedaled by drug companies to sell their products, according to a British psychologist.

Dr. Lorraine Boule, from Sheffield University in northern England, told the British Psychological Society conference that men became more skilled sexually as they get older, British newspapers reported on Saturday.

"Older men sustain erections for longer, are longer coming to orgasm, and satisfy women better. Sexual activity does diminish with age, but the quality should get better," she was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Boule's conclusions were based on a survey of 185 married professional men aged 30 to 60. While 22 percent of men under 46 suffered erectile problems, only 16 percent of those over 46 did.

She dismissed as nonsense the idea that men needed testosterone as a hormone replacement therapy in the same way that some women take estrogen to ease the effects of menopause.

The male menopause was a myth spread by drug firms to boost the multimillion dollar market for impotence treatments, she said.

"Life should really begin at 40 for those who have the right mindset," the Times quoted her as saying.

Weekend Sports Wrap: My friend CR, formerly of the G+J empire, gives me a tip on a gig at Martha Stewart Omnimedia she says she will recommend me for. Mostly I have been doing the bequests of Max-Heinrich all day. Amazing how all the random squiggles begin to resolve into meaning if you stare at them hard enough. Blew off writing, discouraged. Maybe tomorrow, that review, line up stuff for the week, pitches. Talk with a new acquaintance, RL, who starts recommending so many good Web sites that I have to ask her to stop. I will mention only ZeFrank, genius of the age. So me and R are gonna have a drink tomorrow. My cotillion dance card actually has a signature on it, reserving the minuet. Of course, R has this URL, so I must be circumspect about shouting "yippee!" That problem of audience again. Sent Moms a Playmail today, which I also recommend as a funky timewaster. The head of Dubya reads the message aloud in a synthesized female voice. You can also select talking orangutans, Linux penguins, and cats. The age of Snowcrash and The Hacker and the Ants is upon us. Missing out on a groovy Greenpoint party tonight, listening to downloaded Billy Preston and Sly and the Family Stone ("Many things on my mind / Words got in the way ...") and now hitting the hay.

Simian Person: Just talking on the phone with Monkey Womyn, who has been offered a chance to bid on the craft services contract for a "feminist erotica" film being made in Williamsburg. She has promised me an exclusive story if she gets the gig. She is bumming out about her online dating on Nerve, so we brainstorm up a good name for her new profile. It boils down to two Barbara Stanwyck (née Ruby Stevens, Brooklyn, 1907) characters: Dixie Daisy of "Lady of Burlesque" aka "The G-String Murders"—you will want to read that plot summary—and Sugarpuss O'Shea from "Ball of Fire," the best comedy ever. A minor character in the former named Lolita La Verne (" a stuck-up diva") was also considered, but O'Shea won the day.

In the Vicinity of the Crown Jewel of Fifth Avenue: Working across the street from the Plaza Hotel today and next week with some goofy people. It is, narcotic is the word, to go whooshing around in elevators and padding around in air-conditioned corridors of cubicled hierarchy after so long. The hours and days and weeks fly by, money comes in, you sink into a dream-state.

Briseis, with breasts so beautiful they envy one another: I tried mightily all day to get someone to accompany me to "War Music" tonight after Luxie crapped out on me, bummed and foetal after a shouting match with the principal at the school where she teaches part-time, but I bucked up and had a glass of wine at a nice café on Christopher Street and worked on eking out my Latin manuscript. I had forgotten what a rewarding process it is, manuscript study. It's a puzzle and a mystery and a dig for dinosaur bones. You cross-reference memes and semes from all different spheres of knowledge to start patching it together. I am really consumed with it. I found out that a German professor had compiled Capelli's treatise on Latin abbreviationes into a Macintosh 68K database that you can run from inside a shell on Windows, and also developed a version for the Pocket PC, so I wrote to him about whether is runs on the latest version of Windows CE. I compiled a bunch of things from here and there (mainly the Catholic Encylopedia and the list of sigla for the Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae into a little Access database of my own, based on the one I developed for collecting translation memory for ProZ. Then I went to see the play, in the basement of a run-down community center in a dicey part of the West Village. Wow. But I ramble on. Took the 2 down to Atlantic Avenue and walked home, stopping off for lamb shank at Chez Oskar, the best way to meet your meat, visibly a hunk of creature hacked off. If you read Kulchur Vulchur, you know of my encounter recently with some very well-organized PETA propaganda. Images of that hog butchery footage was running through my mind as the three women in the cast mimed and declaimed the carnage in Books 16–19 of the Iliad. Now, sleep. Come on now, Igmonster, warm my lonesome feet.

The Missouri Land: I receive a letter from a certain E. Tom Kuefler, Jr. of Iron County, Missouri, about 10.31 acres of undeveloped land purchased by my grandfather some years ago. He would always threaten to run off and go camp on it when he got disgusted with city life, squat by a campfire, eat beans, raise pigs. The tragic refrain of Colonel Sellers in Twain's The Gilded Age—"The Tennessee land, my boy, the Tennessee land"— always reminded me of that nostalgic look in his eyes. It became very important to him as he felt the Alzheimer's eating away at him. Mr. Kuefler, now, has bought up all the adjoining lots:

The land in question is a long way from the nearest public road over very rough, rocky terrain and there is no vehicular or utility access to it, legal or otherwise. [... "or otherwise"?] The only way to obtain legal vehicular or utility access to it would be through my property and would involve a very costly legal process which would very likely amount to no more than the actual land is worth, not to mention the actual cost of constructing a road over the rough terrain! [I like the structures of repetition in this paragraph ...] Also, the boundaries of this tract in common with my land have never been surveyed. In fact, given these and other circumstances, I believe that I have already been in possession of this tract for a number of years.

Something something "squatters rights (adverse possession) ... avoiding the expense and complication of communication through attorneys ..." A sharp Ozarkian, this Kuefler. It will be fun to write him back. Meanwhile, the facsimile of the Latin manuscript arrives. It appears to be a bequest of property ("littera fundationis") to the Church, involving one Maximillianus Henericus, archbishop, by the grace of God and the holy mother Church, of Cologne. ("MAXIMILIAN HEINRICH (1650-1688)" ... was archbishop of Cologne ...") It is going to take me some time to make out these facsimiles, do a proper diplomatic edition. While I am poring through Capelli's monograph on scribal abbreviations in cartae and codices (the essential reference still after all this time), I will have a peek at Jan Tschichold's treatise on the invention of the ampersand. What a weird task, under the circumstances. Working 9-5 at Banc of America for the next six days at an insultingly low rate of pay. Miss Miss Maximin a little.

Dark Night of the Sole: Up late banging away at things neglected, such as signing up with the agency in France that wants to use me regularly, a small triumph, and thank G-d for those. Check out their funky Flash dossier. Invoicing, finally, and shoveling out the cat box, finally, and chatting up on Trillian a very interesting person—let's call her Nona—in the diamond business on 47th Street. Now there is a New York story to dig into a bit. The postman is supposed to bring me my 18th-century Latin manuscript to translate today, so I had better catch some ZZZZZs and be up by 10:00 a.m.

Quotes of the day: "Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is." Gertrude Stein said that. And this from Thomas Szasz: "The modern erotic ideal: man and woman in loving sexual embrace experiencing simultaneous orgasm through genital intercourse. This is a psychiatric-sexual myth useful for fostering feelings of sexual inadequacy and personal inferiority. It is also a rich source of 'psychiatric patients.'"

And with the bleaker point of view: Andrea Dworkin: "The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it." Oh, man. Oh, man, oh, man.

Blogomania: The Merm actually shows up on AIM this afternoon, having once declared instant messaging to be "the work of the devil." She commands me to download a multichannel IM system called Trillian. Do thou likewise. I recently read a pretty decent article on the subject in the much-reviled YIL. She reports a huge spike in traffic to her blog after renaming the thing "Enigmatic Mermaid Does the Web." My site traffic: zeros across the board. If you were watching my dorm cam today, meanwhile, you saw that I retired to bed midafternoon and nodded off over John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and am only now bestirring myself to sluice out the stables. I am acclimating myself to a night-skewed activity schedule in anticipation of working four to midnight shifts starting soon. DjJWerewolf submits the following, which I place on the record as an exhibit for my upcoming testimony before the Interstate Commerce Commission on why the Internet should be dismantled immediately. In the same category is this submission from a certain man of God of my acquaintance who should desire to remain anonymous when shooting such vile nonsense around the Internet. I mean, a certain decorum, if you please, et cetera. Meanwhile, if you have a writerly bent, or know someone who does, please invite them to participate in Kulchur Vulchur: 400 words or less, with surprising coherences outweighing relevance in the editorial selection process. Finally, the Donnas are God, subject of an upcoming Vulchur essaylet.

Adieux, Maximum Minnie: A shocking and inexplicable development of the past couple of weeks. Mystified. But we move on. Luxie suggests I start hanging out at the Kitsch Inn, which has a pretty interesting list of patrons, if you check the link. Me and Lux went to a lecture last evening at the Studio School by her old mentor, Jake Berthot. I fell asleep in the middle, serious oxygen debt (they turned the freaking ventilation off so the talk could be recorded without the noisy whirring of fans), but the gist of it was that the man does amazing work, is engaged in a deeply felt creative process that extends over decades, and has absolutely nothing coherent to say about it. I find that kind of comforting. You can get stuff done without being able to explain exactly how you do it. We discussed this over dinner at this comfy Italian joint, where I slurped down some sinfully good carbonara on top of an antipasto of frutti di mare. I wangled a pair of tickets to a press preview of Verse Theater Manhattan's production of Christopher Logue's "War Music," a verse adaptation of the Iliad. "Initially booked in September of last year, this dazzling all-female production was cut short by the 9/11 terror attacks." All-female cast. Intriguing as hell, possibly inspirational. Unforeseen stimulation for no $$$ down. You can't beat that. I have been thinking of doing a piece of creative writing that follows the form of the classical rhetorical progymnasmata. Maybe a Maximin post-mortem, who knows? Or memories of the 1970s. That was a very weird decade.

Gross Tumult Signifiying Change Without End: That's a line from a poem by David Gascoyne. It fits the day so far and the vicissitudes thereof, but at least work is coming in: flat $400 bid accepted on a Latin project, and the BofA graphics work slated to start "soon," though the agency is a bit of a flaky outfit. We will see. Got to make sure I call up my other agencies and let them know I am in demand. They have such a high turnover of callow reps that they have no institutional memory of my graphics genius and hyperefficiency. Got a good reception on my pitch for a story on the engineers in the trenches at Enron Energy Services, have a feeling I could actually sell this. I recently made fun of the book Radical E: From GE to Enron—Lessons on How to Rule the Web, and maybe justly so, but there were a lot of really smart, talented people executing those projects and they have a missionary zeal that makes for good quote and controversy, in light of the lambasting the Enron subsidiary is getting over the appointment of its CEO as Secretary of the Army (the Army was a subscriber to one of EES's risk-management plans, which offered fixed-rate wholesale energy, the profit lying in the company's faith in the ability of cutting-edge energy management and efficiency programs to overcome price volatility). I am actually starting to learn someting about all this energy stuff, and I love being able to use the word "arbitrage" in a sentence, as you know. Other than that, only the SOS to report: laundry to do, invoices to send, blah blah blah. I saw the ephemeral Twin Towers memorial for the first time last night, which looks nothing like this: twin searchlight beams ascending into the low-lying haze like a movie premiere. Underwhelming and sad. Iggy, the world's largest cat, since you asked, is fine. We're putting him on a diet and kicking his fat butt out into the back yard more regularly now that things are warming up. Bring me a squirrel, you bum! We'll have Granny Clampett whip up some vittles.

Sunday in Monday, No Fun Day: Hey, look at me! Maximin thinks this whole blog thing is a bit "masturbatory," and I suppose it is a bit much for those who actually get to meet my meat-self on a regular basis. I hope my far-flung friends and family enjoy it, though, and think of me more often because of it. Got to run out and finish that training this afternoon before the seminar at Media Bistro tonight. I may actually have a live, cool story to pitch. Juano put me in touch with a manager at Enron Energy Services (a risk management manager, in fact) willing to talk straight talk about the other side of the issue: if their business plan had worked, it might have done more for energy efficiency than government regulation ever would. Hey, I'm no knee-jerk liberal. Edify me. Anyhow, I'm off, but I am climbing back on. Off to visit my friend Victor at OBE to print out the handouts for tonight's seminar. Don't forget to check Kulchur Vulchur. I am inviting some writers I like and admire to participate. You can too! It would be cool to have a submission from the veteran homilectician JAFCJR, for example.

Saturday in the Dark: Friday was more or less a wasted day, sitting through perfunctory training at the Graybar Building that sits atop Grand Central Station for that graphics job at Banc America Securities. Oh, well, what ya gonna do? Pucker up and make sure they know where to send the freaking checks. I have a new editing client, a psychology doctoral candidate who needs six 30-page items prepared for publication according to the APA style book, at $2.00 per page: one day's work, I hope, perhaps a long day. Supposed to write a pitch to a business section for a thoroughly reported business-trend article for Monday. I am drawing a blank. I did some research on human resources automation that might make a good story. I guess I could retool my current instructional design piece, slanting it towards "professions you've never heard of." Whatever. Sufficient unto the day is the shit that needs doing, including catching up on and faxing out my invoices.

JL was a little alarmed that I called her my "fiercest critic" in a recent post, but was soon reassured—she's someone who lets you know how things are as she sees them, a very bad quality in a postmodern academic but a valuable one in a friend who is an actual human being. So we patrol the aisles at the CVS pharmacy near 14th and First, after pot au feu and mussels at Léon, discussing all the weaknesses the flesh are heir to and choosing me a more satisfactory wrist-bondage thingie. The following gets spewed out of the Cybernetic Poet Creator on my desktop, in the style of John Donne:

Love might make us like a woman, true, and so

Drown'd the bishop

Discuss. Monkey Woman and I are in a furious dispute about whether it is physically possible to eat the outsides of an Oreo first, saving the cream for last. People and their theories. Maximum Minnie maintains that the natural progression of a Beatles crush in women of our generation goes Paul-Ringo-John. I protest the exclusion of George, but to no avail. At least one other woman I know reports going straight for Ringo, "but only because I felt sorry for him."

Our friend CM got the ax from Internet World. Doubly awful because of the promises with which they wooed her there from a much more reputable outfit. Would it be contrary to my nondisparagement clause to opine that those people are scum? If so, I will forebear from saying it.