This Just In: JAFCJR, a.k.a "The Rev," reports that the mailing list is functioning again: "I was outside with Maggie Mae, watching her anus expand and contract, but nothing emerged. I bethought me that I have not seen Blind Tangerine for some while (any connection between Maggie Mae's output and yours was pure unconscious—until I sat down and started writing)." Maggie Mae is a dog, by the way: This is not a scurrilous tale from the 120 Days of Sodom. The gig from PwC seems to be coming through, says Aquent on the phone this morning, leaving me double-booked for the next two weeks. Good to get some bucks flowing into the coffers, but where is there time to write in all of this? Will be taking up the Aeneid again with my tutee as well.

Pseudorandom Pandemonium: Research on energy market deregulation is eating my brain, what with ISOs, RTOs, ESCOs, FERC, M&A, derivatives, greenwashing, GAAP, OASIS, TLRs, day-ahead spot markets ... read all about it in my Abraxas column.

Can it be coincidence that, amid sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church, two books on Brazil's current fiction bestseller list are about errant priests? “Diario do Farol” (Lighthouse Diary), by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, a much-read Brazilian writer, revels in the unrepentant confessions of a priest with a past, while P.D. James's “Morte no Seminario” (published in English as “Death in Holy Orders”) lifts the lid on all manner of ungodly goings-on in a monastery in present-day Britain. Come to think of it, the number-one book—:short stories about lying men—:is also à propos. On Brazil's non-fiction list, the range of interest looks as capacious as life itself: science, mythology, sex, jokes, music, office work and punishment.

Ribeiro is, of course, the author of the found-manuscript confessions of an aging sacana, A Casa dos Budas Ditosos. Harry Potter is also huge down there in the Antipodes. Meanwhile, the Voice weighs in on the online OED this week. Recommendation: shell out the $550 subscription price and save some bookshelf space:

Here's a sampling from the recent quarter's updates to the OED—words that are now officially a part of the English language, according, at least, to the OED, which usually has the final word, so to speak, on such things:

Mile High Club This has been added to the usages of mile, and it says that such a club is "an imaginary association of people who have had sexual intercourse while travelling in an aircraft." I like the use of the word aircraft, which is very OED: The definitions have a voice.

Mind-fuck and mindfucker came into the language in the '60s with the loosening of morals and the advent of psychedelic drugs.

Minoxidil A different kind of drug, which I could use for myself; and the money I save on it will go to buying the OED for myself.

Boff I would have thought this would have made the cut sooner; but the OED has been known to be prudish. It was first used in a sexual connotation in 1937. The OED says that the British use of the word is more euphemistic than the American, that for the Brits it's on par with bonk. Essentially, they take boffing less seriously.

Borscht Belt Let's hear it for Jewish comedians and the Catskills, they're now part of the lexicon! Talk about assimilation, though a little late—the Borscht Belt is better known for yoga retreats these days.

Breast implant Earliest recorded usage was in a 1958 medical journal.

Feminazi was first popularized, according to the OED, by Rush Limbaugh in 1992.

Party animal First recorded use in 1978 on Saturday Night Live, in reference to Bill Murray.

The tortoise-like deliberation underlying the delay in issuing these acceptions is typical Limey highbrow, of course, with tea at three. I wonder if they will ever get around to "skank" (q.v.)? As for me, four hours to manage efficiently before jetting off to a social event with the Fleur Obscure. Juggling as fast as I can: Some balls are bound to fall.

Blues Vaccine: Moqui the jazz singer phones up when she hears that I am beset with a case of bad blues and sings one of her trademark numbers, "Devil May Care." This always has a strong mood-elevating effect on me. The diminutive diva really knows her way around a standard. This makes me smile.. All in all not the most productive day, but what the f—k, anyhow. ... I wonder about far-flung compañeros/-as and catch up on some reading, including the charming, if glib, memoir of the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, writing from exile in Brazil in 1940. Also wondering why the e-mail posting thingamajig at Blogger ain't working. Damn it, my international audience has a right to know that my bowels are moving regularly and that I have freshly clipped toenails. And now for the bad news, from the fons origo of all bad news, the New York Times:

A co-op board on the West Side of Manhattan has forbidden new buyers to smoke in their apartments, a restriction that real estate experts called the first of its kind in the nation.

The board of 180 West End Avenue, a 452-unit building near Lincoln Center, is also requiring the buyers to declare whether they are smokers, an admission that could lead to the rejection of their applications.

Smoking = short life span = unit comes on the market sooner. What's the problem?

Warholian Juan: Dear old JP, teaching partner and all-around belovéd camarado from Berserkeley days, sends the self-portrait at right, but no words. Perhaps the poor guy is simply languaged out after all those annual trips to the Modern Language Association. I keep suggesting that he retool for a career in ontology. The semantic Web, the old dream of Berners-Lee. Ah, Berserkeley daze, Berserkeley daze, reading Ovid at the Cafe Depresso all afternoon over a $1.50 bowl of minnestrone, I hear little if anything from the old motley crüe, except for the recent nuptials of Afrodesia McCannon, who is, I discover, at Queens College now and doing a stint as a Fullbright lecturer in Tunisia before joining Rowan University in the fall.

Currently a Fulbright scholar teaching and researching in Tunisia, Dr. McCannon earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley Her dissertation is "Reading Subversion in the Vie de saint Louis."

A comparative literature specialist, Dr. McCannon will teach British Literature to Romanticism, world literature courses and seminars.

Tunisia needs Afrodesia. Does New York City need me? It seems willing to go on feeding me table scraps for the time being, at least, and affording me the odd glimpse past the stone-faced bouncer into the backroom orgy of its opulent dolce vita. Darkbloom and I will attend a soirée at the National Academy of Design—another Hungarian-themed event—tomorrow evening.

Hidden Agenda: Atop the to-do list for today is Latin translation and ESCO research, followed closely by backlogged paperwork churn and random resumé zapping. Cross-cultural communication slated for the evening hours. Nappy-bye time might well be indicated midafternoon in preparation for the late work schedule that starts in a coule of days. Iggy, of course, does nothing, as usual, but fart and make the occasional hairball noise, the lucky stiff. In general, the goal of the day is to make sense of things:

The term "sense-making" is a label for a coherent set of concepts and methods used in a now 8-year programmatic effort to study how people construct sense of their worlds and, in particular, how they construct information needs and uses for information in the process of sense-making. Since sense-making is central to all communicating situations, whether they be intra-personal, interpersonal, mass, cross-cultural, societal, or inter-national, the sense-making approach is seen as having wide applicability.

In the most general sense [no pun intended, I'm sure], sense-making (that which is the focus of study in the Sense-Making approach) is defined as behavior, both internal (i.e. cognitive) and external (i.e. procedural) which allows the individual to construct and design his or her movement through time-space. Sense-making behavior, thus, is communicating behavior. Information seeking and use is central to sense-making (as it similarly is seen as central to all communicating) but what is meant by these terms is radically different than what is typically meant in the positivistic tradition.

Sense-Making starts at bedrock with an assumption that reality is neither complete nor constant but rather filled with fundamental and pervasive discontinuities or gaps. Resting heavily at this point on the work of Carter, Sense-Making assumes that the discontinuity or gap condition is generalizeable both because all things in reality are not connected and because things are constantly changing.

Amen to that.

Evening and Unevening: Amazing how much energy you can expend and yet accomplish so little. I spend an inordinate amount of time working on my Aquent profile, only to have all of it disappear when I hit post and get some kind of SQL error in reply. I do land a long-term temp spot working a four-day weekend schedulte of 10-hour days at N.M. Rothschild & Sons today, so what the hey what the heck, starvation, at least, of the body, at least, is fended off for the time being.

It was during the Age of Enlightenment when Europe was changing rapidly, creating opportunities for men of imagination, that one of the five Rothschild brothers, Nathan Mayer Rothschild left his father's trading house in Frankfurt to seek a stage more suited to his energy and ambitions. In 1799, he set up in Manchester as a textile and general merchant but swiftly moved into finance, dealing in bills of exchange and arranging foreign loans. As the banking activity came to dominate his growing business, he moved to London and acquired the premises at New Court on St Swithin's Lane which remain the headquarters of N M Rothschild & Sons today.

I understand it is quite the civilized and swanky joint, right off the old F train and just up the street from Sim City Sam if he ever gets the OK from the bean-counters to throw something my way. I therefore now feel justified in goofing off for the rest of the week, just waiting for the Steves to call. I went to a party in New Jersey with Darkbloom on Saturday night and met Henry, an awkward engineer with a certain resemblance to that other Henry who hears little fat-cheeked women singing in the radiator, and with whom I nearly had a lengthy conversation about ESCOs and the like, were it not for the fact, and this I found odd, that the gentleman was a gently spurned suitor, in fact, of the Fleur Obscure who had decided to accept the invitation, proferred some time ago, nevertheless. He seemed mightily unhappy. Might take another Media Bistro workshop to keep the writing front and center, VCR is hounding us to fork over some more green. What the hell. The writing is slowing to a trickle, but I still have the notes. I am hoping that my friend and fellow Cal Bear who runs an Islamic madrasa in Bensonhurst will help me to revive a back-burned project on American Muslims. And so on.

Garbage Spook and other Arty Facts: Found the Munch-like phantom of alienation at left by the curbside waiting for the garbageman and hung him on my living room wall. Have not forgotten my desire to write something based on the classical progymnasmata; that circulates in the back of my brain as well. Simian Sis says the new cinematic Sade doesn't suck, so I will go and see it soon, time permitting. I assigned Flora some heavy reading on KM at Brint. My knowledge could use some managing as well, obviously, not to mention my time. Item:

ROME (Reuters)—Pulses are set to race next month as X-rated former porn queen Ilona Staller, better known as "Cicciolina," makes a showy return to the never-dull world of Italian politics in a run for local elections.

Famed for a fondness for baring her breasts during a successful campaign for the national parliament in 1987, Cicciolina, or "Cuddles," is back and putting her assets to the test in a run for mayor of the northern city of Monza.

"Monza is going to be a more exciting city," she told Reuters on Monday, adding that her goals were to turn one of the city's landmarks into a casino and its park into a Disneyland.

"I'm going to put Monza on the world map. Everyone knows my name and so people will come to Monza to see me because I am famous and that will bring lots of money to the city," declared the blonde, Hungarian-born porn star.

Asked whether voters could expect a full-exposure campaign along the lines of 1987, the actress turned demur.

"I won't be getting my tits out because it's not about them this time, it's about more serious issues," she said.

That double alliteration is rendered doubly clumsy ["famed for her fondness for baring her breasts ..."] by the repetition of the prepositional phrase beginning with "for." Nested "for" loops. A surfeit of subordination. I would have gone coordinated or paratactic with that sentence. The story I cite principally for the Hungarian connection, however, and the nexus between politics and pornography, but also to point out that "demur" is an intranstive verb; "demure" is the adjective, but I suspect what the writer meant is that she "demurred."

Welcome to the Working Week: Back on the air after a brief banker's holiday for purposes of spiritual rejuvenation. It seems to have worked. Darkbloom and I chow amiably down on coffee and Cap'n Crunch before parting ways bright and early to conquer our respective sectors of the economy. Not much time for the daily press scan, but this does catch my eye, and gets some airplay on WNYC as well:

Here, Life Is Squalor and Chaos

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

A yearlong investigation by The New York Times of adult homes for the mentally ill found neglect, malfeasance and death. Second of three articles.

It was the fall of 2000 and state inspectors were due to arrive at Seaport Manor, an adult home for the mentally ill in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Upstairs, some of its 325 residents, bewildered and mumbling, shuffled along the dreary hallways. Downstairs, a handful of workers hastily doctored records, they said, to make it seem as if the home was providing proper care.

The workers said they concocted case notes for manic-depressives who holed up in their rooms for so long they became malnourished. They invented psychiatric evaluations for residents who went untreated and turned suicidal. They scrawled therapy plans for women who prostituted themselves in the stairwells for cigarette money and for men who shook down other residents for their $4-a-day allowance.

"We were told by the administrators at the home to be creative," said one worker, Toshua Courthan. "We were told we had to, or else we would lose our jobs. What the state wanted to see was that these people were being looked after, but they were not."

The story especially concerns me because my uncle, a paranoid schizophrenic, lives in a state-funded managed-care home in Rockaway Beach. I have written to him a few times since moving here, but have not been out to inspect the premises to ensure his comfort and security. Now that my father is dead and my grandmother disabled, the moral responsibility for the poor guy rests with me, I suppose, since by the terms of GM's will I will inherit the entire estate with the understanding that I will provide financial assistance to Uncle Dick should his government pension and disability allowance ever prove inadequate to his maintenance. It's an unbearably sad story of a man who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, owned his own art gallery in Manhattan for a number of years, and then was carried off to his own private hell where we works obsessively on a manuscript about UFOs and angelogy that he reports to have consumed almost 5,000 manuscript pages so far. It galls me to think of him being mistreated in his helplessness, and to see pathetically sick and disoriented persons living on the streets, as they have since the Gipper opened the doors of the asylums 20 years ago. It's a national freaking disgrace.

The Merm phones up at the crack of dawn to report in a panic that she has provided the URL of my little diary to the mucky-muck about whom I had commented wryly. She wangles my password out of me to remove the offending passages while I admonish her, sleepily, that my boring little personal notes are really not intended to circulate beyond a small circle of friends. Kulchur Vulchur, my public venue, I just have no time for these days. My ulterior motive, to be frank, is to bore everyone so thoroughly with my constant posting that they will do their utmost to get me out of the house and working hard enough that I will have to time for the constant yada yada yada. Hoping for a callback from VNU this week, but I expect there are enough overqualified folks on the market right now that they will have a surfeit of candidates with precisely the experience they are looking for, even though my qualifications are skills are pretty damned good and I would adapt to the slot position quickly. Anyhow, there're leads from Stuff, Seventeen, and some other fine publications to follow up on this week, and an APA gig to finish up applying to, some agency paperwork for translation work, the ongoing Latin project, some back-burner freelance pitches to move forward, Arabic translations to do. Sufficient unto the day is the to-do list thereof.

Fried Eggs and Ham Day: OK, we are still in the ball game, folks, as we move into the latter innings of our ability to keep on paying the rent. Not down to Ramiro Mendoza yet, still singing "America the Beautiful" and getting another bee-yah, but with a lot riding on the next trips to the plate of the power part of the batting order. It's like an extended baseball metaphor, OK? Upshot: not totally upgefukt ... yet. Agreed to meet with the Media Bistro gang in a week or so with a piece to read, so as to give myself some simulated deadline pressure. Browsing my jot books today for nuggets of brilliance like kernels in the creamed corn. Burning some Ahmed Jahmal onto my Hungarian CD. Yes, I am procrastinating a bit. Pretty Ugly in French with a Pun (PUIFWAP) and I commiserate on the subject, she with writing anxiety about the nonsense needing to be churned out to maintain that perpetual student discount. Hang in there, ma pauvre petite PUIFWAP à poivre.

Ham-Fisted Pastrami Lunch Report, on a Roll: Umberto Eco on brief forms of communication in the Guardian:

Now we have a book, edited by Isabella Pezzini, called Trailer, spot, clip, siti, banner: Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva [Trailers, Ads, Clips, Websites, Banners: The Short Forms of Audiovisual Communication]. From the title, it's clear what the book is about, although instead of using the wording "simple forms", she has chosen the phrase "short forms". I figure she did that to emphasise the difference between the traditional simple forms and the particular nature of the audiovisual items with which she is concerned. On the other hand, we see that she wants to make the case that just because a form is short (which is a measure of duration in time) does not necessarily mean that it is simple (which is a measure of semantic and aesthetic complexity).

In fact, we know full well that there are some commercials which are quite subtle, capable of poking fun at themselves as well as previous ads. There was a recent one in Italy, featuring a young man who's seen walking down the stairs in his home, saying, "Good evening!" He's still thinking about the beautiful woman he won over the night before, but now—a victim himself of the ad of which he is the protagonist—he finds himself face-to-face with a much less attractive woman. The viewing public is so taken by this type of ad that we have come to use the phrase "metatextual"—it doesn't involve pure and simple communication, but rather requires thought about the short form and about its history.

That's it! Obey your thirst.

Last notes at fade of day: Hey, cool, the Lomo arrives! My mode of vision is already transformed. I have decided to end the Hungarian party mix with Allen Ginsberg and Tom Waits doing "America." Begin hot—John Hiatt and Ry Cooder's "She Runs Hot for Me"—and then mellow steadily. Velma on the IM, bitching comme d'habitude: "My fluffy roomies all need a good hate fuck!" Ew. Reward self for not abandoning hope for another day with some nice bottles of cheap French merlot and cabernet sauvignon, a couple of Aussie shirazes back for personal consumption [Darkbloom finds them cloying or some such thing, or perhaps it is jejune?]. I lomo the vintage liquor store neon for my test roll. Del McCoury doing "Trainwreck of Emotion." Yes, DB is willing to descend from Upper East Side heaven to Fort Greene purgatory to keep my company. A few have dared to beard the old bear in his new lair, but only one has come back for a second visit. Wish I had TV. Sure am reading a lot more without it, but I got a serious South Park jones on, still. Very interesting paper from the Translation Journal: "Hyperformality, Politeness Markers, and Vulgarity" by Zsuzsanna Ardó:

How do you feel about saying four-letter words in public? When do you translate bastard as bastard and when do you replace it with a euphemism? Do you retain Your Honour on each and every occurance? Just how vulgar and how polite can you—or rather should you—strive to be while interpreting in a court of law? When does correct become hypercorrect, and how correct is hypercorrect? How do you deal with garbled and muddy questions and anwers? Do you have the courage to render muddy and garbled as such or you clean up the mess as you interpret? What is the difference between dismissal with prejudice and dismissal without prejudice, cross-claim and cross-examination, writ of habeas corpus and writ of mandamus? Who is Miranda and what has she got to do with the Miranda Warnings—and what are these warnings anyway?

My problem is how to render Germans speaking bad Portuguese about obscene matters as Germans speaking bad English about obscene matters. There's a philosophical treatise in that problem I believe, to be tackled after my novel (they will say it is a cheap Harry Crewes homage, and they will be right) about Werewolf in N'awluns. Thing stack up. Zsuzsu, by the way, is the author of How to be a European: Go Hungarian! and English for Practical Management. She has translated over 75 Hollywood feature films into Hungarian, including Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Octopussy, The Robe, White Christmas, and M*A*S*H.

Post meridiem yada yada: Various perplexities after returning from writing a hed and dek, fact-checkng, copyediting, cutting, and livening up a story for AdWeek over there at the spanking new VNU HQ near Astor Place. Impressive! Nicer, almost, than the Condé palace on Times Square, and a hell of a lot better lunch options and commute. Maybe a good career move to start in there, even for sh—it money.

From Crain's New York Business:

With Arthur Andersen LLP out of the running for Boston Properties' new Times Square tower, the real estate industry is buzzing about who will take space in the 1.2 million-square-foot building.

French media giant Vivendi Universal is considered a likely contender for the Class A office space, according to real estate sources. The company, which is buying USA Networks' entertainment assets, is looking to establish a major U.S. beachhead, and media-centric Times Square would be a logical place for it to set up shop. Vivendi currently has its corporate headquarters at the Seagram Building, at 375 Park Ave.—where its lease is due to expire in 2005--and other operations dispersed throughout the city. A spokeswoman says that the company is, in fact, evaluating office space options "as part of an ongoing review."

Another big accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, could step in to fill some of the space, say sources. Financial consulting firms are also interested. Reuters, Nasdaq and Ernst & Young have all snapped up space in the area in the last several years.

Vivendi has been in the news a lot lately over the antics of its controversial CEO and what the French fear is the impending relocation of its headquarters from sacred French soil to the gutters of New York. They just bought USA Network, though (which does the American version of La Femme Nikita, among other unpardonable perpetrations.. I figure it's a French cultural revenge plot, all the uproar part of a clever deception campaign.

From the Antipodes and Left Coast, and a Bluegrass Editorial: The Enigmanicotti reports traffic drastically down after renaming her blog from "Enigmatic Mermaid Does the Web." The usual jokes about varieties of sharp-witted linguists. She gets me to agree to edit an art review. D-Squared reports the death of her last mad Croatian brother, a silent, hard-drinking, ham-fisted man with a pickup truck and big hands I met once in the old lowlands of Berserkeley. Consolations to our friend from way out yonder. The following from Bill Monroe, king of the banjo:

Now I'm a fellow with a heart of gold
With the ways of a gentleman, I've been told
The kind of a guy that'd wouldn't even hurt a flea
But if me and a certain character ever met
The guy that invented the cigarette
I'd murder that son of a gun in the first degree

Well it ain't because I don't smoke myself
And I don't reckon they hinder your health
For I smoked pretty near half my life and I ain't dead yet
But nicotine slaves are all the same
At a petting party or a poker game
Everything's gotta stop while I have a cigarette

[CHORUS] Smoke smoke smoke that cigarette
Puff puff puff it if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the golden gate
That you hates to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette

In a game of chance the other night
Old Dame Fortune was doing me right
The kings and the queens they just kept coming round
I'd call a full and I'd bet em high
But my bluff wasn't working with this certain guy
Cause he just kept raising and laying that money down (phew!)

[CHORUS]

He'd raise me and I'd raise him
Sweat was pouring: "Hey, guy, sink or swim?"
And he finally called, but he didn't raise the bet
I said "Aces full, pal, how bout you?"
He said, "I'll pay you in a minute or two
But right now, I just GOT to have a cigarette"

[CHORUS]

The other night, then, I had a date
With the cutest gal, she sure did rate
She was a high-bred, uptown, fancy little thing
She said she loved me and it seemed to me
That things was just how they ought to be
So hand in hand we went walking right down Lover's Lane

She was oh so far from a chunk of ice
And our smooches were going reeeeal nice
That so help me, Michael, I mighta been there yet!
But I gave her a kiss and a little squeeze
And she said, "Bobby, excuse me please
But I just GOT to go and have a cigarette!" (ruined my vanity)

Back on the Chain Gang: "CARP stinks like bad fish," says the announcer on the bluegrass music stream out of Covington, KY, on a channel called INet Programming. They are bad-mouthing the RIAA every half-hour on the quarter hour and asking their artists to provide them with waivers of their copyright in order to continue to receive airplay—I mean, Netplay. I have, like, totally neglected the subject. Crap, now I have to research it.

Jesus. Dreams. I am living in a prison dormitory and taking some kind of compulsory classes in film studies, Schopenhauer and Schoenberg, literature, and air conditioning repair. Every one of my fellow inmates is very young, callow, and enthusiastic. They call me "die Alte" ["the old man"], like Adenauer. I wear a long blue overcoat and a porkpie hat or straw boater and never speak a word, just bumble around like Buster Keaton. My old high-school track rival, Thano Adamson, this Greek god of a guy, makes a bid to become the leader of a "Poetry Riot" against the cruel re-education program we political prisoners are being subjected to. He writes this very erudite poem and invites me to write a commentary. I take it and read it and think, "Yes, I will write a theme and variation in a Provençal verse form, such as the tenso." I do. But when the moment comes, in the dormitory, for me to read, and Thano says, "Ummm, Colin, you used to support the poetry cause, didn't you? Would you like to read us a masterwork?", I just roll over and utter a benign, enigmatic "no," after a pregnant pause. Gasps and mutters all around. I jump out of my bunk and get ready to go to the music class [the teacher is that woman from The Piano Teacher?] but somebody has stolen my tape recorder, so I wander around the dormitory until I find a nice fedora hat, and steal that as compensation. I find this all kind of fitting when I wake up and find a party invitation from the Kinky Minky in my inbox:

Yes—somehow, it has crept upon me... 30 years, folks. It seems like just yesterday I was only five—a wee lassie, creeping into Amy Grief's backyard after dusk, spouting four-letter words through their kitchen window while they sat in the living room, watching Carol Burnett. What can I say? I was a strange child. In rapid succession came body hair, geometry, and then, perhaps my finest hour—helping Andrew Finkel light his ass on fire in wood shop.

What's the point? There is none, folks. That's the savagery of it. Senility has arrived. Like an unwelcome apparition, he has dropped trou upon my doorstep.

It bears repeating: Youth is wasted on the young. I have already the geriatric Hungarian goulash and high technolgy festival to attend, Kinko, bitter regrets. I am even going to make a party mix from my AudioGalaxy gleanings. Never arrive at your first meeting of a dangerous new religious cult emptyhanded. Job interview this morning, 10:30 at VNU. Then to interview the man from E. Got to write back to the editor at S [who does not know I know his mad sister] and to the SL editors. OK, we actually have productive sh-t to do, including work on an ongoing übersetzung project. Rauschen, aber nicht rauchen. Easier sed than donne.

Bloggo Doggo: Have been lying doggo today, as they say in Strine, but awake from a nap to tide me over between oversleeping and going to bed early to find a couple of propitious messages: My man from the empire of E, and some garbled business English, very favorable in tone, from the manager of Mme. H, hors de combat with some "small cirugia, not to be unhaply," whose Cascos e Caricias and Cartas dum Sedutor arrive from Editora Globo is São Paulo. Darkbloom: "Zweig?" Tangiblelo: "Jawohl." Viv: "Brasil?" Ich: "É:" Repeat after me: I do not suck, I do not suck ...

Notes From All Over: LinguaBlog, Mme. Merm, editor in chief, reports a traffic accident in the same South American urban jungle with an armored car driven by one Dionisius Albino. I don't believe it. Fax me a driver's license, please. Use the Trystero system if you like. AOL Internet is in the tank, I read, by the way, largely because of the pink-belly belly flop made by AOL Latin America (AOLA.O). Ha ha! They don't like McDonald's either, except for the batidas. Viva o povo brasileiro.

You Got It, Boss:You start to thing about relocating elsewhere in the country at times, what with things sucking and all. Take a job as a desk editor at the Sheep Dip News-Courier and Rural Advertiser and live in a trailer and drink Old Grand-dad from plastic cups and write an unpublishably scatological and perverse novel before succumbing to cirrhosis in one's middle 50s. Or exile in an Antipodean paradise. Other times, you think, better a cardboard box on the steps of St. Pat's than a condo in Cucamonga. Take a stroll through Central Park in springtime and all that corny sh-t and you would feel the same. Ray Charles doing "Unchain My Heart" and a finger and a half of Scotch and I am ready to call it a day. It's a day.

Toenail Thumbnail Blues: What's with Blogger today? And I thought the lunch platters at the Five Spot were $7.50? And did I not order the bisque? And did the UPS dude ring my bell before leaving that delivery failure notice? No. And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic mills? It's a worldwide conspiracy to aggravate my ulcers, a conspiracy to WASTE my time. "It's all about you, isn't it?" Says Lux Interior. Yes. Yes, it is. Got to head for the subway soon, with something to read on the way. VCR phones me up from MB. What 4? Smoking like a chimney, yes, if you must know. Aggh!

About a Quarter to Three: Blogger eats one of my most inspired posts ever, insomnia-driven and yet strangely lucid and all about the price-fixing scheme at Sotheby's and the light sentence afforded Mr. Taubman the mall mogul. Slept another couple of hours and dreamed that I was at a press conference with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who was sharing the dais with Cardinal Egan of New York. He was announcing that he was the Messiah and that the Catholic Church had agreed to confirm his candidacy. It was obvious from Egan's face that he had been blackmailed into ratifying this claim, and everybody in the audience knew that it was a result of the sex scandal in the Church. I was burning to ask the hard question, but someone at my elbow kept hissing in my ear, "It's not worth it! They'll get you! Keep quiet!"

Lasciate tutti speranzi voi qui entra: Bloomberg cans schools chancellor Harold Levy, which is odd: they seem like two of a perfect pair, business wonks doing politics. "Levy is a lawyer, not a manager," said the Mayor's office. WYNC runs some analysis on the Vatican spokesperson, (I mean "spokeseunuch") Monsignor Clark, who made remarks in a homily about the sexual permissiveness of the American entertainment industry ("gratuitous sex every time you turn around") and its support for homosexual behavior ("a disorder") as a factor in priestly sexual abuse. Not that gay men are predisposed to criminal pedophilia, of course. Good G-d. It's the vow of celibacy, stupid. Please get some and call us in the morning.

Going Dutch. The Dutch government resigns because it feels that it was disgraced by the massacre at Srebenica in Bosnia, where Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to present a wholesale slaughter of civilians by Mladic. Should Kofi Annan follow suit? A Dutch correspondent reports a number of suicides among Dutch officers, whom, he says, with a helpful entertainment reference for American listeners, "were given a mission impossible." No wonder they lost their empire: Calvinist attacks of conscience makes them Realpolitik-impaired, unlike Condeleeza & Co.

The Big Easy Over and Out. Werewolf returns from Naw-leens with a list of bars visited, in shaky handwriting, on the back of a flyer for an iffy strip-joint called Dixie Chick-See, and weird pornographic doodles by another hand. An alter-ego? Amnesia was claimed. There's a novel in there somewhere. I am looking for my handrwritten notes on today's appointments, which may have been hosed into the recycle bin in an excess of spring-cleaning zeal. Blowing off AdWeek after discovering the precise figure they are willing to pay. I would be better off putting down the blue pencil and taking up the tight pants and hair gel of the society gigolo, as recently suggested by a waggish correspondent. Located my copy of German for Reading. Iraq moves missiles into the no-fly zone. Iggy sleeps.

Sudden Sodden Sunshine: A pal of mine applying for a joint in Frisco with his SO wants to know whether landlords doing credit checks have the right to ask for the numbers of credit card and banking accounts on their applications. Sounds nuts, even in "the land of fruits and nuts," as our old college president used to call the Sunshine State. A ray of brief Brooklyn sunshine busts through the bogginess of the day as Agnes (my imaginary girl Friday) and I end our office hours at a normal hour for a change. That Agnes is a swell dame, but some lieutenant j.g. from the Brooklyn Navy Yards has her keeping a little hip flask of something in the desk drawer lately, and weeping into her Underwood, which, like the Tin Man, needs oiling. Actually get the time of day from Lynne Palmer—LynnePalmer.com, of course, is a psychic network—which is an achievement to be entered in black ink in the day's balance sheet. Thanks, SSS, and for the virtual bubblewrap, too. Monkwo wants to see The Piano Teacher , in keeping with our BDSM theme for today, but is too busy cheffing for Bloomberg and others of the high and mighty at the moment. She reports that, in her experience, the rich are stingy: The evidence continues to mount. Barring any sudden summons to a cell meeting from the Fleur Obscure, I may just stroll over to BAM to see Monster's Ball, another cheery, upbeat saga of life-changing love in the panopticon, which everyone has seen but me, and have some of that $6.50 Cambodian supersoup. Was shocked to see Enigmatic Mermaid Does the Web (renamed LinguaBlog) load as a blank page earlier, but apparently there was a SNAFU or SNAFUBAR at Pyra. Stressed, man.

Rainy Days and Mondays: Hanging around, nothing to do but frown. Well, not entirely true: dinner with the mysterious Darkbloom at Chez Oskar last night, who turned a few heads. Appointment Saturday to be initiated into some kind of worldwide conspiracy of Hungarians. Apologies to the mighty Jah Rastafari if any sensitive data was "outed" to our millions of readers. The fact is that there are twelve, okay, and that's counting my Moms. A bunch of freaks and geeks, widely dispersed geographically. What is hanging me up this morning is this Enron piece, and Hilst, neither of them really economically viable as projects, but desirable for their prestige value. Thus stressed, I give in to temptation and suck a couple of butts, but I am holding off, shakily, on going to the corner for new ones. Plenty of ways and means to procrastinate. Waiting to hear back from Stuff magazine, where I did a couple of stints once that I really enjoyed. Check out the "Virtual Q&T&A" with Tera Patrick:

Tera, what you need is a porn name! Try taking your pet’s name for your first name, and the street you lived on as a kid for your last name.

McClavandish Peach. I call my dog ‘Mick,’ for short. Tera is actually from ‘Terra Firma.’ Patrick is just a good last name.

My porn name is actually ‘Bitchy Palms.’ A reader, G.C.L., wants you to comment on your ‘pantyhose-oriented’ films. Do you know what he’s talking about? Maybe we misunderstood what he said, what with that funny Canadian accent of his.

Early on in my career, I did a lot of bondage, a lot of foot and leg fetish. I really like being tied up. Maybe that’s what he’s referring to, though I don’t actually like wearing pantyhose at all. I prefer thigh-high black lace stockings, under my dresses and things.

I know, I know, but it's a job, for Pete's sake, beyond slogging through endless piles of APA material. The thing sells like hotcakes, and a very professional bunch of Fleet Street limeys they are. Back to work.

Why study German? Developments in Europe have always been closely associated with developments in Germany. Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s radically changed the face of Europe in the earlier part of the 20th century. The collapse of the GDR in 1989 was part of a wave of people's revolutions throughout Eastern Europe, the full implications of which are as yet unclear. Whenever the frontiers of Europe have been redrawn, Germany has always been at the centre of such changes. Wherever you look—whether you are interested in the Nazi state, the politics of reunification, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, the art of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, or the New German Cinema—the impact of German and Austrian culture on Europe has been phenomenal.

Six Degrees of Muck to Rake: The broom is for the macrofilth, the vacuum for the microflith, and the mop and sulfuric acid for the subatomic muck-plasma that has hardened into an adamantine veneer on rigid surfaces. You learn something new every day. I find the can opener in my file drawer and my passport filed with the pots and pans. And where is my feather duster? Iggy has a terrible love-hate complex about that thing. Should he attack it or make love to it, or just run for his life for one reason or the other, or both? Now Abraxas man wants me to add another item to my column. You really have to work for your equity share in these economic democracies. Heh heh. Just been to the 99¢ store for stuff. Did not buy smokes. Wish I had. Aaagh! Have only sucked two butts so far today. The nic gum, taking away the jones, actually helps you to experience the experience as it really is: stinky and nauseating. And yet, and yet, first thing in the morning, to purge one's dreams and drag one's flesh into the world of meat and motors, nothing like it. Or is there? Anyone propose a substitute? Altoids, yes, got those already, thanks. That's a neat site, by the way. I really have to get back to work on this column on commercial Web art I want to do ... Okay, I will give energy dude a little Ralph by way of comparative demagoguery:

Federal policy over the past century has largely failed to promote an energy system based on safe, secure, economically affordable, and environmentally benign energy sources. The tax code, budget appropriations, and regulatory processes overwhelmingly have been used to subsidize dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear power. The result: increased sickness and premature deaths, depleted family budgets, acid rain destruction of lakes, forests, and crops, oil spill contamination, polluted rivers and loss of aquatic species and the long-term peril of climate change and radioactive waste dumpsonot to mention a dependency on external energy supplies.

But embarking on that path requires overcoming the power of the oil, nuclear and other conventional fuel industries to which both the Republicans and Democrats are indentured. Under the thumb of the dirty fuel industries, Congress and the Executive branch have refused to adopt even the most modest, common sense measures. For example, when the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded in a 1997 report that doubling the Department of Energy's efficiency R&D funding would produce a 40 to 1 return on the investment for the nation, Congress responded by proposing deep cuts in the efficiency and renewables R&D budgets.

The Clinton-Gore administration's nod to increased energy efficiency relied largely on corporate welfare. Rather than push for an increase in auto fuel-efficiency standards, the Administration established the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV). PNGV is a $1.5 billion subsidy program for the Big Three auto companies that has done nothing to improve auto fuel efficiency but has served as a convenient smokescreen behind which the industry has been able to fend off new regulatory requirements for more efficient cars.

Our kind of demagogue: the equal-opportunity kind. Let's get Ralph to write about it, he hates everything.

Santo Expedito, socorra-nos: Pray for us now and at the hour when we have to hold our noses and empty the cat-box. That hour has come: SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2002 9:51 AM ET | New York Cloudy 50°—best to do it on a cool morning, with the windows open. I buy an LKA. Al Gore thunders back onto the national stage in the Op-Ed pages of the Times today with some skilfully heavy-handed and probably specious similes:

... Just as Enron executives were allowed to interview candidates for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — and to veto those they didn't think would approve of Enron's agenda — ExxonMobil has been allowed to veto the United States government's selection of who will head the prestigious scientific panel that monitors global warming ...

... Just as Enron needed auditors who wouldn't blow the whistle when the company lied about the magnitude of its future liabilities, the administration needs scientific reviews that won't sound the alarm on the destruction of the earth's climate balance ...

Excellent sophistry! Tar the rascals with same pseudological brush! Good man! Of course, Al ruins the rhythm of what might have made an excellent structural principle for the whole piece by interposing some of his trademark clunky prose, including a droning recitation of facts [who needs em?] in between the terms of the damning double analogy. There's some clunky attempts at anaphora and climax in there, too: "True leadership means ..." repeated ad nauseam and emptying at last into a swamp of stump-speech sloganeering:

On all these fronts, this administration has walked away from the tough choices [cliché] and has instead chosen to subsidize the solutions of the past [cliché, but points for an attempt at alliteration]. Instead of leading, it has attempted to mislead [Attempted to? How wishy-washy is that?]. Instead of sharing a vision with the people [cliché], the administration has given access to special interests[cliché].

We can return [here come anaphora] to the path of progress [cliché], on which we value economic growth that rewards innovation and productivity and meets the needs of our families and of national security. We can return to the days of record growth coupled with record improvement in the air we breathe. We can return to true leadership on the environment.

"Return to the path on which ..." There is something very wrong about that construction. I believe it is a mixed metaphor, since what do on a path is to walk, not to value things. And the isocolon of "sharing a vision" and "has given access" falls flat because the two elements are not grammatically parallel. Nor does "Has given access" ring with the passion of a true "j'accuse!", does it? Always prefer that concrete to the abstract, the active verb to the periphrastic construction, that's straight Strunk and White, dude. How about "Instead of sharing a vision with the people, it shares the reins of power with the plutocrats"? Al, Al, Al: It's the rhetoric, stupid! You're boring! I once shared a panel [my paper was on structural anaphora in Middle English dream-vision allegory] with a rhetorician who pointed out that even though President Kennedy actually said "I am a donut" in German ("ich bin ein Berliner"), the speech remains a triumph in rhetorical terms. He also pointed out that whereas Brutus' speech to the mob is logically sound, Marc Antony baffles em with rhetorical fireworks: "Friends. Romans. Countrymen. Lend me your ears." Count the syllables: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. Now that's a climax: He's just getting started and the stage is littered with severed ears. Compare that with the series "return to the path, ... the days, ... true leadership." Does that burn a lucid pattern into the retina of your ears or intellect? Marc Antony's opening has a conceptual pattern as well, an enthymeme of sorts: All those who are Romans and also my friends are my compatriots. It has a sinister edge of fascist threat to it.

In this world of ours, of course, fallen from greatness as it is, we have a president whom we gladly forgive for mangling his own native language because he takes a page from the playbook of the Great Communicator-Gipper and talks like the TV westerns of our youth: "Dead or alive, you're coming with me."

OK, OK, so Safire's job is safe. My excuse, as always: I write in haste.

Night Thoughts: My new Ryze strategy is to get to know everyone that Soyeye knows, such as Hackvan the psionic plumber. This predilection for odd persons may not further my career, but it certainly keeps me entertained in the absence of television, which, now that the account is paid off, is a matter of choice. If I can kick TV, I can kick the demon tobacco, though only modest success on that front so far. Speaking of which, my old comrade in work-avoidant smoking from 250 Park Avenue South, fellow techscribe Jah Rastafari the Reed College chemistry major, finally reappears out of the void and logs back onto the network, as our million subscribers will already know. I remember Jane getting Jah on the gum from now and again, and his woebegone look at such times, poor guy. Yes, it is vital to network, network, network, secret root structures groping for one another beneath the uniform surface of the paved and duly registered easements. I am browsing through the Anarchist Archives and reading Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution:

Self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted, established, and maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the substance of history.

That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions[, however,] seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be—whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it—we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time—always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire—even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life. Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally—in ideal, at least—to the whole of mankind. It was also refined at the same time. In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward"—of good for good and evil for evil—is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality—a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

Yes, your [higher] love gives me such a thrill, but [higher] love don't pay my bills, I need mo-ney (that's ... want I want) ... In the old days, even anarchists were boring, at least in translation. Just whiling away some time before the encryped call from Darkbloom rings through to conspire on ways of furthering the plot. Iggy arrives in from the back yard with a PLUNK on the window sill. The phone rings, I click "post and publish" ...

Hip Hip Hopping Happening Home: The neighbors having a hip hop hoedown on this pleasant evening. No repetitions of the 3 a.m. plastic fantastic boombastic of a month or so ago, against which the entire hood banded together, flooding the 88th Precinct with complaints. Spring flowers in the Clinton Avenue Historical District (r.). The Enigma proposes we rent a house in Argentina for the summer at $750 for 20 days. Capitalist globalist imperialist running dog Tangerine says, "750? Dollars? American? In a country with an ongoing currency crisis? Australian dollars, maybe." I renegotiate the deliverables successfully with the California translation clients, who are expecting a demand for nenegotiation of the fee, which I would not do. I am an honorable fellow. Finishing up my column and the APA job, I feel that I have earned maybe the right to see a movie, but have already turned down the Macaca-Mulher on account of I must hose down the bachelor pad against the arrival of Another Human Being, the first in months, in these musky and infernal precincts. In the meantime, I browse some new material from the Samizdata Illuminati, who apparently are quite serious about going heavily armed, their devotion to Ayn Rand, and their hatred of the European Union and indeed all forms of political organization (but not the "voluntary association" of the business enterprise) larger than choosing up sides for playground basketball.

The new corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement will increase business costs, reduce welfare and undermine the market economy, according to Professor David Henderson, former Head of Economics and Statistics at the OECD.

In his new IEA paper, Henderson says many advocates of CSR do not understand the rationale of a market economy and the role of profits. They want companies to embrace "corporate citizenship" and run their affairs in close collaboration with numerous "stakeholders," promoting "sustainable development" instead of concentrating on profitability and shareholder value. But "sustainable development" is ill-defined and the actions required to promote it are unclear.

The adoption of CSR by business is likely to increase costs and impair performance, as managers try to take account of a wide range of goals, consult stakeholders and set up new accounting and monitoring systems. Firms which do adopt CSR have a powerful incentive to ensure the same regime is imposed on their competitors, thus limiting competition throughout the economy and making people in general poorer.

The greatest potential for harm arises from government attempts to regulate the world as a whole in the name of CSR, imposing common international standards which would reduce the potential for trade and investment and hold back the development of poor countries.

Henderson concludes that many businesses which have endorsed CSR are trying to appease anti-business groups. They hope to make businesses more popular but they fail to realise that "the case for private business derives from its links with competition and economic freedom."

I think of Ben & Jerry forcing the multinational purchaser of their hippie ice-cream brand to fund civil disobedience training for antiglobalism demonstrators, that uneasy alliance of rich, over-educated, Kropotkin-reading college kids and protectionist industrial labor unions. It is a complicated world we live in.

Saturnine Day: Receive the above from my efficiency consultant and am working towards finalizing an implementation calendar with my divisional vice presidents. I get a miserable chortle out of the following:

Penton Media, Inc., one of the world's largest media companies, is looking for a highly motivated managing editor to contribute to the tremendous and ongoing growth of Internet World magazine, "Business Technology for Management," in our Darien, CT, location.

Emphasis supplied, with minor edits. I think punk rock boyfriend has moved in upstairs as a permanent fixture and has taken up nocturnal clog-dancing as well. The temperature drops 30 degrees after last night's awesome thunderstorm. I dawdle before diving into work: If I achieve five tasks today and five tasks tomorrow, I will only be five tasks behind by the time Monday's five tasks are added to the task list. Erica phones up from [inaudible] Consumer Research Group and gets about 17 words into her telemarketing script before I hang up on her. Enron COO and president McMahon steps down (WSJ):

He said, "I strongly believe that the best course for the Enron estate, its creditors and its employees is to use our core pipeline and electricity assets to create a new company apart from the litigation and diversions of bankruptcy. For that effort to have every chance of success, it became clear to me that outside leadership is required."

And a legal and linguistic note on American regional dialects from Reuters:

It may not be OK to be a skank but legally it is OK to be called one.

A California state appeals court has ruled it is not libel to call someone a "skank" or even a "big skank" on the radio—describing the word as "a derogatory slang term of recent vintage that has no generally recognized meaning."

The state's 1st Court of Appeals, ruling in a case stemming from the show "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire," found that participants in the program "voluntarily subjected themselves to inevitable scrutiny and potential ridicule by the public and the media."

"The terms local loser and chicken butt are not actionable because they are too vague to be capable of being proven true or false," the court said.

It said the same argument applied to the phrase "big skank."

In the Southern California dialect—bad-part-of-Pasadena subdivision of the nonsurfer semistoner Caucasian San Gabriel Valley subdialect—of my distant youth, "skank" is clearly what kids today call a "ho." Full stop. It means "a sexually incontinent young woman lacking both a regular program of hygiene and a degree of discernment in her choice of partners." No two ways about it. Someone's attorney was remiss in not bringing in a reputable sociolinguist on this one.

Bowling Alley of the Gods: It's like thunder (wah) lightning (wah) ... napped a bit through the afternoon's sweaty heat and spurned, as promised, a late shift in midtown in evil hour. No car service home? Thank you very much for biting me. I guess I should watch the attitude, cat food money is cat food money. Want me to work 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. next week, too. Besides, tho, all hell is breaking loose. I feel guilty about phoning the pizza delivery dude and making him schlep over here. First interview for a slot-man slash desk editor job at a pretty well-known weekly industry tabloid next week. Pay is crud, tho. What else? Accidental German tourists descend like donner und blitzen on Darkbloom. The Simian Femme? Doing good, we see maybe a flik this weekend. Sim City Sam, I remember, poor zhlub, is out moving this weekend; I bet he and the Sam clan are wet as mad hens right now, poor dude. Got to get together with Mike to pick up my Dad's prayer bell, left in the old cubicle farm all those months ago. The Enig is moving up in the world. Mostly, though I will be here busting my ass trying to understand the technical deficiencies of a regulated day-ahead spot market, deciphering Latin handwriting, and editing á la APA some more: A possible long-term contract. I am summoning my courage and hitting the send button on my long-delayed e-mail to the revered and scandalous HH. Over and out.

When litotes run wild in correlative clauses: Or, why "Horney not only disagreed with Freud" is preferable to "Horney not only did not agree with Freud." The following is likewise preferable for reasons of parallelism: "Horney not only not disagreed with Freud’s theory of penis envy but posited the antithetical notion of womb envy." Actually close to completing a standing project here, I do not suck, which is good, because the othe projects are circling the tower and running low on reserves. When I go to the kitchen to pour hot water on ramen noodles, however, I discover, eventually, that the kettle has been left in the living room under a tented Crain's New York Business. Explain that one without reference to the supernatural or the unconscious. Darkbloom writes in with a request for punning opportunities on the nickname of her German compatriot. We duly note that "Aja" in Portuguese is the imperative of the verb agir, and means "Go ahead!" It is also the name of a Steely Dan song from the 1970s: "Aja / When all my dime-dancing is through / I run to you ..." We pause only to note the following from the WSJ section on Enron titled "Questioning the Books" (the source document file is titled "Wholesale Destruction"):

Enron Corp. employees are quitting at an average clip of one per business hour, an attrition rate that could cost the beleaguered company nearly nine out of every 10 employees by year's end, Enron representatives said.

The employee exodus was described by company representatives in a federal bankruptcy-court hearing in Manhattan in an effort to win approval for a $140 million employee retention plan, which was approved by the court Tuesday night. Their testimony disclosed the extent to which key Enron employees are abandoning ship. Enron executives claimed that if the attrition isn't stemmed, the value that can be recovered for Enron's creditors could be harmed.

The Enron entities in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings "have an attrition rate equivalent to an almost unbelievable 87%," said Martin Bienenstock of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Enron's lead bankruptcy lawyer. "In other words, if we were to continue the way we're going today, we would have in a year, a little more than one in 10 employees."

The Securities and Exchange Commission, along with some Enron employees, creditors, and investors, had filed objections to the retention plan, pending demonstration by Enron of a business justification -- and also pending evidence that employees who caused the problems leading to Enron's collapse wouldn't benefit. Earlier, Enron was criticized for paying employees $100 million of retention bonuses immediately before its Dec. 2 bankruptcy filing, in exchange for promises to remain until Feb. 28.

It really does begin to appear to me, insofar as I have able to understand the situation so far, that Enron's corpse will richly fertilize an industry that continues down very much the same path as before, tabloid political scandals and the herd mentality of the American information consumer (as exhibited by another item from today's WSJ, below) aside.

The Enron Corp. scandal has tarred the entire American business community, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed.

The poll shows public esteem for business leaders and executives dropped significantly after disclosures that Enron executives enriched themselves while concealing financial problems from investors, and that Enron's accountant, Arthur Andersen LLP, shredded documents pertaining to those matters. Moreover, that drop is matched by support for more government regulation.

Some 57% of respondents said the standards and values of corporate leaders and executives have dropped in the past 20 years, compared with 38% who said standards and values are the same or higher. That is a stark reversal from four years ago, when Americans by a 53%-42% margin said business leaders' standards were the same or higher.

Yes, the business leaders of the 1970s and 1980s were paragons of corporate citizenship. Just think Michael Milken and The Bonfire of the Vanities and Bhopal and all. What sheep we all are.

My name is Jan Janßen, I come from Wisßconsin: Welcome to our one-millionth subscriber, the expatriate Berliner MBA Andrea Janßen. Those of our readers with access to the inner circles of the power digerati, please provide A Ja with a high-paying executive position, preferably with a car and driver and a penthouse apartment. I am late, late, for a very important date, and write in haste. On other fronts, let me just mention the importunate Darkbloom, Brasilian klezmer, and the following passage from Oedipus at Colonus:

OEDIPUS: Wag on,
Smart tongue! I never knew an honest man
Subtle in argument.

CREON: True, the ready talker
May talk such nonsense.

OEDIPUS: Meaning yourself as a pattern
Of pertinent brevity?

CREON: Not to your way of thinking.

I write in haste.

Report from Lerner; Armageddon in Jenin: Werewolf travels to the Big Easy to play sweaty journo on a junket. These freakers at the Bowne operation at B of A Securities, I am not working for them anymore, so unprofessional they are freaking antiprofessional, I can't imagine how they landed this contract. O caralho de quem tabam chupando? Wasting my freaking time, freak it, I freak, freak all the freaking ... Hell with it, Darkbloom says she will meet me at Eight-and-a-Half West 57th in 45 minutes for mojitos. It's the most excellent freakshow in town. Day, my son, is done, and the world is coming to an end. When stone-faced phlegmatic strongman Mubarak starts using apocalyptic language, you can bet the fecal matter is about to hit the rotating ventilation device. End dispatch.

Late Afternoon Yada Yada: I am seeing a lot more of the mass of humanity recently than I am accustomed to, and they are wearing me the heck out. Taking a car service from Fort Greene to across the street from the Plaza Hotel is like oscillating between reigning in hell and serving in heaven, which, as Mark Twain noted, is a place where nothing ever happens. Streets thronged as in high summer. Taking a moment, however, to pass along the following. In Hilst's Contos d'Escárnio, when Crassus' mistress is sent to the loony bin for accosting men on the street and commanding them to drop their pants (she is a painter doing a series on the human caralho), she returns with an unusual book of recipes, which includes the following:

If you plan to kill yourself because the nation is going to hell in a handbasket, and you as well, perhaps, take a little ball of camphor and a tin of caviar and place them beside the revolver. Next, place the ball of camphor beneath your tongue and gaze fixedly at the tin of caviar. Only then should you apostrophize the revolver. It is best to begin by speaking of fragrant and elegant memories. Note: Do not shoot yourself in the mouth, lest the ball of camphor be destroyed.

Buy one of these lovely, fat red hens—I can't remember what they're called. Teach your little boy (but only if he is younger than 8; lest he develop a poultry fetish) to grasp it (the chicken) beneath the armpits—Pardon me, I mean under the wings. Tie the beak (of the chicken) shut with a small rubber band (which should be red, so as not to give your son the wrong impression, unless, of course, he has sadistic tendencies), so that the chicken cannot turn suddenly and bite the boy's pee-pee. (Do not be alarmed: This will not occur, Madame, it is only an abundance of caution on the author's part). Teach your little boy where the chicken's fi-fi is and leave them alone at playtime. They will simply adore one another! You may then purchase various other kinds of chickens so that your little lad can have a range of choices. You might also encourage him to invite his little friends over so that the chickens, too, can have a range of choices. Good lord! They certainly are difficult to write, these damned instruction manuals!

Place two raw artichokes in a small vase with some cold water. Wait until the leaves have dropped off, meditating in the meantime on your condition as a mortal human being subject to decay. When all of the leaves are floating on the surface, take a bath, we beg you, since you will certainly have been waiting there for several days.

Take a turnip. Place two or three words inside it, such as: dick, money, abundance. Shake vigorously. You will hear no sound of any kind. This is normal. Now, kneel with the turnip in your hand and say: With the dick I was born with / With the gold that was stolen from me / And lacking an abundance / of ideas and facts / I hope to be reborn as a Brazilian and a poet." Anyone who overhears you will think you are out of your mind.

If you have a Ph.D., read the whole of the following. If not, skip these initial instructions. Fashion a small boat from human ears. This is quite a simple procedure: simple ask each of your close friends to contribute one of their two. Tell them it is for a noble cause. If they ask, What cause?—which should not be confused with the Caucasus, or caucuses, or the like—tell them you need to send the boat to your aged and much-esteemed English governess (from when you were 15, remember?), who practically ripped your ears off because you stubbornly refused to acknowledge for twelve straight hours that the opening of Marc Antony's speech to the mob was not, as you had translated it, "Let me borrow your ears." All your friends will agree to help you, believe me, and all the more so because everyone knows that "Lend me your ears" means exactly that.

Practice one of these daily during a break in the office routine, like ergonomic exercises for the avoidance of fake yuppie diseases. I accept no responsibility for injuries caused by errors in translation.

Diligence and Dereliction, or, When You Ain't Got Nothin' You Got Nothin' to Lose: At right, Flowering Youth, the daughter of Diligence and not Dereliction the Enigmatic Amphibian from practically a year ago. Forty minutes standing on the platform at Metropolitan-Lorimer with several hundred others, cursing softly, shifting from one leg to another, and cocking a hopeful ear up the obscure track for the telltale rumble, before the station announcer comes online as an afterthought with, "By the way, no G service at this time." To be stuck inside of B-burg with the Clinton Hill blues again. First read through the pages of the spanking-new New York Sun. Knee-jerk reaction: Nice design, utter tripe. Sim City Sam refers me to the hoity toity Lynne Palmer agency for an executive speechwriting gig, with the proviso that, if hired, I undertake the education of one of his branded offspring. Good Bread from Gorilla writes in with the production schedule for our fabulous book. The scurrilous staffing agency phones up with an ASAP at B of A, but I am waiting for some official correspondence from Texas and have to see the good doctor besides, later on. I owe TJ at Ryze ("it will be as big as Napster in two years, and we will have been there at the beginning," poor lad) the pics from last night's soiree at that Zanzibar bar, which sucks big-time—tight-assed yuppie preening barn—by the way. No fresh mint for the mojitos? Long, tipsy walk through Central Park where the blooms are dark. Oh, crap sh-t p-ss—how do you say that Deutchlichheitwise? Let's just say puta que o pariu—I hear myself saying on the telephone that I will do 8 to 10 hours at the graphics farrm, and then return home to hack hack hack at the infernal machine. Must fly: swipe the armpits and change the socks and phone up the boys at the car service. The guy next doors speaks Russian into his cellphone and bad Spanish to the guy working on his deck. Iggy flops on the floor, heatstoned.

From Harper's Magazine's Weekly Review: A man sued a hospital in Denmark because of injuries sustained as he was having a mole removed from his rear end. The surgeon was using an electric knife and when the patient broke wind a spark was ignited, which caused the man's genitals to catch fire. "It was an unfortunate accident," said Dr. Jorn Kristensen. Meanwhile, the United Nations announced that old people will soon outnumber young people for the first time in history, and astronomers announced the discovery of a small star, only seven miles in diameter, that they believed was composed of "strange quark matter."

The late afternoon latency lag: This is getting to be a regular thing with Earthlink, the "you may be experiencing some latency" lame excuse, which is to say, failure to commun'cate, around this time of day. This is disappointing. One is expecting important electronic dispatches about one's lucrative business undertakings and trying to connect to Pillow Fight Bloodbath—which don't try to connect to at work, Big Brother is watching. Lux Interior pops up on AIM to describe her afternoon of branding from home at $50 per hour: Thinking up names for cellular calling plans (something that makes the idea of Byzantine complexity and fine print designed to screw you at every turn appealing and fresh, like the "Friends and Puppydogs" plan or "Super Power Minutes") and something "proprietary, very hush-hush." Upstairs girl listens to a Cheap Trick album, albeit a good one, over and over and over. It's hot. Too hot.

Don't Call Me Surely, Curly. "I can’t go to work today. The voices told me to stay home and clean the guns," reads a bumperstick spotted in Colorado and culled from confidential sources. You know, frankly, my affect is trending toward the morose at this moment, with a standard deviation of googolplex. One does need regular work, one suddenly recalls, and does not really have it. One's feeble efforts are futile. Thus, one blogs. Luxie says to make some business cards to hand out at the shindig, but hell, only five people are going to be there. Christopher Hitchens, however, is rubbing his hands with glee—provided he can find an ashtray in which to deposit his smoldering butt—at the following from the Associated Press and submitted by me to the "sinister and heavily armed libertarian globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property" at Samizdata:

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has filed a request to British authorities to allow him to question former U.S Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in London next week over his alleged involvement in crimes committed during the military dictatorships that ruled several South American countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

Juan Garces, a lawyer involved in Mr. Garzon's investigation into former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's human-rights abuses in Chile, said Wednesday that the judge had filed the request via Interpol on Tuesday.

A National Court investigative magistrate, Mr. Garzon is known for his unrelenting pursuit of drug traffickers and terrorists in Spain and abroad. He attracted international attention on ordering the arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1998, kicking off an ultimately unsuccessful bid to have him extradited to Spain for trial on charges of human-rights violations.

Mr. Kissinger is expected to attend a convention April 24 at the Albert Hall in London. Mr. Kissinger served as late U.S. President Richard Nixon's assistant for National Security from 1969 to 1973 and secretary of state between 1973 and 1977 for Mr. Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford.

Mr. Garces said Mr. Garzon had asked U.K. authorities to confirm as soon as possible whether Mr. Kissinger will attend the London meeting and if he can question him.

Those names, Garces and Garzon, they sound like characters in Beckett. Hitchen points out in the Harper's article from last year—has it been that long? I went to the reading of the subsequent book with Zippy and Perrottta, whose name I still can't spell—that Japanese cabinet ministers were hanged after the war for lesser offenses than, say, plotting the Pinochet coup in Chile and engineering the secret bombing of our friends in Cambodia. How timely in so many ways.

Operation Ptarmigan: I could swear that the popuperati are punishing my computer for installing Pop-Up Killer. The struggle on my desktop echoes with gunshot .WAV events, volley'd and thunder'd. I start to notice, even to obsess over, all the nuances of sneaking BS before my consumeristic eyeballs while I am trying to build a spreadsheet or write a lucid paragraph. A Web site announcing the merger of Pop-Ups Must Die and Bannerkillers leads to a page that informs you that Bannerkillers is currently offline, for reasons that cannot be disclosed. Is the Mafia involved now? Anybody tried Webwasher? Mailwasher, on the other hand, works amazingly well, though it, too, requires a measure of trust. The Brits are shooting bullets in Afghanistan. The Venezuelans are doing God knows what under their democratically elected generalissimo and his Bolivar brigades of plainclothes brownshirts. This from the WSJ:

In the aftermath of last week's short-lived coup against President Hugo Chavez, the alleged favoritism of powerful Venezuelan news-media groups toward anti-Chavez forces is subjecting the media to wrath on the streets and scrutiny in Congress.

The troubled relationship between the leftist Mr. Chavez and the Venezuelan news media offers a window on how this deeply polarized country is struggling to pick up the pieces after a remarkable week in which Mr. Chavez was ousted in a coup on Friday, only to be reinstalled by military loyalists on Sunday.

In conciliatory remarks toward the opposition on Monday, Mr. Chavez made a public appeal for a halt to attacks on TV journalists, who had complained of being stoned and threatened by Mr. Chavez's supporters on the streets in recent days.

My daily life oscillates between viscous heaven and sweaty hell. Hilst's collected dramatic works arrived from Martabunda's regal city of SP. I write in haste.

I must not think bad thoughts. There's a freaking bee in my office, not just in my bonnet. I have a residual childhood phobia about bees and wasps. Ask me about it sometime! My psychologist client has hopelessly botched her paper on phenomenology. Like she needs a five-year seminar in German on Sein und Zeit before she can be allowed to do play-therapy with Junior and Moms, right, but still, she should be able to spell Husserl, at least, if not to distinguish noematic from noetic regions. I am wracking my brains for a way to tell her this and still get paid. It's 90 freaking degrees outside (Fahrenheit, I mean). I have had afternoon nappy time again. It's becoming a habit of the home work routine, though it always starts out as quiet recumbent reading time. I dream, with some interesting twists, about kindegarten nap time and the little goody two-shoes girl who was always getting designated the wake-up fairy and picking me last to go out and play. Upstairs, punk rock boyfriend is back in style. Time to go pick up the laundry. Must send off several pieces of official correspondence before heading off at 1900 hours for a conference with Darkbloom, who sends me a penetrating analysis of the Venezuelan situation from first-hand knowledge, how cool is that?

Iggy as Narcissus and Citibank as #*!&!@!: Proposed Google bomb: make Citibank the No. 1 search result for the word "unscrupulous." I am up at 0600 speaking icily to a call center drone at Citi about the curious accounting legerdemain that's been going on in my account since I deposited a large check one week ago. Funds listed as available and then delisted two days later, ten-business day holding periods melting into five on half and six on half, the amount of the resulting returned checks not credited to my bottom line, though the returned check fees were certainly debited faster than you can say predatory loan practices. More or less over it, though I am still going to have to call again to get this balance thing sorted out. At least I am liquid enough to buy coffee, cat food, and Nicorette. Iggy, meanwhile, worshipping his reflection in the commode, risks meeting the same fate as Danae. He lustrates the sacred crater thrice, counter-Coriolis, as it swirls into Erebus, and then retreats to his window sill to look before he leaps.

Masculinity is back in fashion, says the Independent Women's Forum. Of course, Time Out New York is also saying that Manhattan is the new Brooklyn. Can both be true at once? Can either be true at all? And this from the Wall Street Journal:

The Bush administration may prohibit or limit foreign students' study here of certain subjects that could give them knowledge of how to develop weapons of mass destruction.

An interagency working group that has been operating under the Office of Homeland Security during the past few months is considering this and other international student-visa issues that would bring more government control over foreign-student programs in the U.S.

Will this include knowledge of the English language, the lingua franca of global commerce, and how to operate a television remote? Werewolf will probably remember the Stephen Bury—a nom de plume of Neil Stephenson and his uncle—novel The Cobweb and chortle. Published shortly after the Gulf War, it concerns Iraqi agents posing as agricultural economics grad students manufacturing anthrax in a small town in Iowa, among other things, including wrestling.

Ah, the old embezzlement ploy, said Maxwell Smart: The e-mail reproduced in part below is the fifth such solitication I have received. Usually it comes from some Nigerian government ministry, one reads and knows firsthand, although I received an interesting variant on my ATT Global account while soaking up the rays in Rio last summer.

MY NAME IS MOSES EDEMA. NATIONALITY SIERRA LEONE. I AM 25 YEARS OLD, STUDIED MARKETING IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNIVERSITY. I LOST MY FATHER YEARS BACK. HE DIED DRURING THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN MY COUNTRY. MY LATE FATHER WAS ONE OF THE DIRECTORS UNDER TIJAN KABBAH GOVERNMENT. MY MOTHER IS AGED SHE IS 62 YEARS NOW AN OLD WOMAN. I HAVE FIVE YOUNGER ONES WE ARE ALL LEAVING IN COTE D'IVOIRE SINCE PAST SIX MONTH. IT IS MY DESIRE TO WRITE FROM MY HEART HOPING THAT YOU WILL NOT BETRAY US. MY FATHER DIVERTED SOME HUGE SOME OF MONEY WHICH HE DEPOSITED WITH ONE GOOD BANK CALLED BICICI WHEN HE WAS ALIFE, IN FACT IN A BRIFE INTRODUTION. ALL THE INFORMATION WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU WHEN I HEAR FROM YOU. THIS MONEY TOTALING US$12,000,000.00 ( TWELVE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS ) NOW WE ARE SEEKING FOR A TRUSTED PERSON WHO WILL RECEIVE THIS MONEY INTO HIS/HER ACCOUNT FOR ONWARD INVESTMENT.

[sic]. Taking Darkbloom to a Ryze function run by some weirdo who is into syncretism ("an old Greek philosophy that merges multiple creeds into one") at a bad bar on the West Side Wednesday. Best stick to the old Greek philosophies, the new ones are nothing to write home about. Upside: The Riz will be there. If ever a rever a Riz there was the Riz the Riz is one because because because because because becaaaaaaaaause .... I forget why.

Going on the gum; Googoo and the rumor mill; dangerous precedents; midday malingering: I am going out right now and buying a month's supply of Nicorette. I keep telling myself (and my therapist tells me) that quitting smoking will only add to my stress and should wait for a less tumultuous period of Ordem e Progresso. Yeah, right. The writing-smoking nexus will kill me a long time before that ever happens, according to the model I have constructed. Expect much raving, waffling, backpedaling, denial, rage, pleading, and general BS in the weeks to come, gentle readers. That is, even more than the usual.

BERLIN (Reuters) — A man who ran up a 3,000 euro ($2,600) bill in phone sex calls in a month cannot accuse his mobile phone provider of immorality and thus refuse to pay up, a German appeals court ruled Monday.

The man sued his mobile phone provider, arguing that phone sex is immoral and thus he should not have to pay for it, but the Munich court threw out his case.

"The contract for telephone use is not subject to immorality," the court said in a statement.

"It is contradictory to make expensive, immoral phone sex calls first and then refuse to pay the bill."

I believe that the American legal system could easily encompass this contradiction. Costliness is no excuse for immorality. In fact, the main selling point of immorality is that it's cheap. Applying the same logic to the regulation of Internet content, however, which some scholars have argued falls under the same legal definition of a "communications medium" ... No time to elaborate further, though. I'm late I'm late I'm late.

Pater Sim City Sam says Stef, the old ME from PM's IW, is going to American Salon. Another surreal career transition for the books. Best of well-deservéd luck to the most recently voted off the island (or rat from ship, except for the rat part). But I digress. Work expanding to overwhelm the time budgeted. SOS.

Yahoo! Your Dream Job daily update:

LOGIC EDITOR leading puzzle magazine publisher seeking logic-puzzle editor. Willing to train, creative individual with excellent writing & puzzle-solving skills & who can work well in a fun & fast-paced environment. Excellent entry-level position for a creative thinker. If interested please send resume with salary requirement to ...

That is definitely it, my dream job, my problems are solved.

Taxing Day Blues: My e-mail server dumps like 150 duplicate messages into my inbox. Some tinkering with the Webmail interface, I gather. As if this would fascinate you, gentle reader, but grrr. JAFCJR the Venerable (one of the senior-discount-entitled folks at home) writes to report his mileage and average speed for the run to Seattle and IKEA from Oregon. 10.9 mpg and 77 mph: The man always was a speed demon, comes from long-distance circuit-preaching Sundays in the biblical deserts of Utah once upon a time. Just keep an eye peeled for those Smokies, Rev.

Pensée sur le Robot d'Amour: When did I subscribe to something called the Alternative Love Guru, and why? Or did I? And why are they spamming me with the following testimonial?

Through your great service I've met the woman of my dreams! After only 3 contacts, I've met the woman I've been looking for! We have so much in common and share the same interests, goals and dreams! I have just returned from meeting her for the first time, and she's going to be coming to visit me in a couple of weeks! We've spent hours every night chatting online or on the phone since I responded to her ad, but it seems like we've known each other for a lot longer! I would definitely recommend your service to anyone truly interested in finding the partner of their dreams! Thanks again!

The poor, poor sap. PrettyUglyinFrenchWithaPun, the cynical advocata diaboli on my left shoulder in all such matters, was just saying, a propos of the L word, that when your lover says, "You are so much like me!" you should probably move immediately to an SRO near the bus station in the Lesser Tongan Archipelago and leave no forwarding address. Yes, PUIFWAP, this is a prime symptom of hermetic circle syndrome, a phallocognitional brain short-circuit event, or possibly even deep head-up-the-wazoo-itis aka Zweig's disease (cf. Marlon Brando's mumbled tirade in Last Tango in Paris immediately preceeding the line "Bring me the scissors!"). The game-theoretically rational response to all posited human Others is, as in the Turing Test, "Yes, I believe that I am sufficiently warranted in the belief that I have perceived significant patterns in your behavior to justify a hypothetical attribution of rational intentionality to your last n plays in our little game of n-Dimensional Prisoner's Dilemma; yet this analysis yields no useful information about n+1, unless you are a robot." The words you really want to hear are "You are a complete mystery to me, I am going to need a very long time to unravel you, and will probably never be done, but what the hell, this sure is fun, and educational, too!"

To work.

Day of rest my sweet ass: Unattended in my inbox, 47 ProZ queries—another auspicious omen, and related, interestingly, to communities of practice, a current idée fixe—some Ryze contacts; a forlorn note from my poor tutee (who does still have some options, I am happy to hear); advice and a reference or two from the Merm on publishing Hilst translations, for which I quid pro quo her a lovely snap of the seamonkey child at last summer's Festa Junina, only now retrieved from the digicam; stuff from execs at that company I am writing about that I nervously put off reading until I can get my background research done; weird conspiracy theories from the energy man for my column; a Long Island job lead; and the like. On the screen, a scientific paper on the Feldenkrais Method, a rather obscure topic, obscurely described so that it must be researched before it can be edited properly.

Big Freaking Dog: Now I understand why Iggy does not consistently want to go out and smell and roll in things in the yard (r.). Holy wolf-dog the size of a cow: that is a view over the back fence from my monk's cell, where I labor with duck feather dipped in candle-soot ink to copy over the ancient lore to be passed down to the next generation of ignorant, superstitious peasants and lacivious, sadistic, inbred feudal and ecclesiastical aristocrats. Whiskey on the night stand: Have a nice little relaxing two fingers of me! The Simpsons are on! Me: Shut the hell up, I am busy! Busy reading about the Chavez counter-countercoup in Venezuela and going, Yikes! I have to think of something intelligent to say about these developments. Not ready yet: I slept through Econ 101, as have probably mentioned before (I am rather boring and successfully put someone to sleep in the not too distant past just by droning on and on). I know that the Enig will be happy to see Venezuelans unhappy, but should the guys in my little industry I am trying to write for be happy about the following from the Wall Street Journal? Is this another one of those dealies where our government by, of, and for the people sticks by other peoples' military dictators in defense of holy American democracy, in this case to make OPEC happy so they will let us invade Iraq? Oh, wait, Chavez was elected and is some kind of Stanford B-School alum, right? Or what? Got to get my facts straight.

Global oil prices may be poised for gains in the wake of President Hugo Chavez's return to power in Venezuela.

Oil markets oscillated wildly in trading Friday after the Venezuelan military reported it had seized Mr. Chavez and placed him under arrest. Venezuela is the world's fourth largest exporter of oil, and is a chief supplier to the U.S.

The military claimed Mr. Chavez had resigned after street protests turned violent and left 25 people dead. Mr. Chavez's ouster ended a nationwide strike in support of oil workers, clearing the way for a resumption of petroleum exports to normal levels.

On the same day, Edgar Paredes, an executive director of state oil monopoly Petroleos de Venezuela SA, recommended the country reanalyze its alliance "with and participation within [the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries]."

The news drove the price of crude down as May crude fell $1.52 to close at $23.47 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Similarly in London, Brent crude from the North Sea plunged 75 cents to close at $24.29 a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange.

Deutsche-Amerikanische Freundschaft? A-OK, bitte schön. I receive the 1992 second edition of Hilst's Contos d'Escarnio from Berlin as a token of cordial international relations. This floors me. My jaw drops to the floor like Flakey Foont's. Logue's Husbands is my contribution to the cause of the entente cordial. The E-Ching, consulted on the subway, augurs as follows. The initial situation:

The developing situation:

Very propitious and symmetrical ("The image of the Joyous: Perversance is favorable. The superior man joins with his friends for discussion and practice"), if mysterious in parts ("A yellow lower garment brings supreme good fortune"). Next subject. Sunday afternoon and all the whole neighborhood turns out in their Sunday best for church services: Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, Anglican, Presybterian, Methodist, Orthodoxies of various Slavic nationalities, and the lively Église d'Expression Française. The same parade on Friday for mosque, of course, cute little guttersnipes you usually see tooling around in baggy-ass hip-hop pants all dolled up in go-to-meeting suits and ties and fidgeting visibly. Just try to get a table for brunch within one square mile of Vanderbilt and Myrtle (top, r.), just try. I have too much to do, anyhow, and have already brunched. Some interest from Scarlet Letters in the Hilst translation, which, however, involves getting permissions from the notoriously stingy Ezra Pound estate. This should be another learning experience among the many of late. Jayson the handsome and charming young Barbados handyman (thank you kindly for the New Year's rum, my friend) is showing the basement unit to some foxy black girls. Now to work!

True Crime! A well-organized, well-armed gang (machine guns and shotguns, think Dead Presidents) knocked off the check-cashing joint on the corner, the detective was just here. Wow. Got to leave a note for the neighbors. No casualties or shots fired. I write in haste. Leaping into the shower to preen and purify myself for obscure Moohist rituals. Bad lead graf of the week—there's real potential for pathos in that third graf:

HAZLETON, Pa. (Reuters) — Three overdue library books have helped turn Theresa Dawn Keller's life into a novel tale of crime and punishment. [ba dum pum]

The 24-year-old woman from the former coal mining community of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, was jailed this week after the local public library got fed up with waiting for $120 in late fees and decided to throw the book at her. [ba dum pum]

"I don't recall this ever happening before," Hazleton Public Library director James Reimiller said on Thursday. [He also doesn't recall what he had for lunch, so what?]

Keller, described by authorities as a drifter [I would adorn that term with quotes, unless it's now an official government-endorsed census category: "described by the local redneck sheriff as a 'drifter' ..."] who recently listed a halfway house as her residence, borrowed three books in September 2000, including a Star Trek novel [good riddance] and "The Fall of Freddie the Leaf," by self-help guru Leo Buscaglia. She never returned them.

The Morning Mud: The Venezuelan free-for-all and fall of Chavez is another shocker ripped from the headlines, and fodder for that column I have to get Abraxas man this weekend—whom don't let me forget to invoice this morning, while I am at it. Kind of hurt that the Media Bistro group didn't select my ballad of the porn-to-petrochemicals man for the upcoming reading. I can write circles around any of those guys! Actually, there were a couple of people I really admired in that group, the ones who keep it simple, stupid and have a canny sense of the markets they are writing for, which in the case of the folks I liked were heartland publications with a readership interested in the latest from Sin City but afraid to go there. Yes, the dark bloom took root on the East Side, schlepping 150 lbs. of contraband chocolate, European nihilist literature, and Moohish religious arcana up five flights of her Mad Ave, or whatever, walk-up. I happened, like an idiot, to mention the date and time of our rendezvous to Monkey Woman, who immediately used the information to extort from me a promise that I will get my digicam working today and get her her boyfriend-attracting online dating pics today if I don't want to look up and find her impersonating a bistro waitress at a crucial moment this evening: "Today's specials are a list of Colin's failings as a human being, starting with a complete catalogue raisonée of his snoring repetoire and moving on to an anthology of his infantile tirades and petty whinings ..." Conniving, hard-balling, corrupt, loving, sentimental, cock-eyed optimistic, autodidactic, absurdly cinemaphilic, nostalgic for the Some Girls seventies: a true New Yorker, that girl. She's sad from the memorial service for Jolie—the real-life woman and childhood friend of the whole mad clan, dead from an aneurysm last week, not our own pseudonymous Prettyugly pungrrrl correspondent and fellow literary theory survivor and seeker after joy.

The Day's Drudgery: Background research and setting up interviews; doing some exploratory writing; mailing off some forms to a translation agency in France; invoicing various folks, finally; getting my tax forms together and setting up the spreadsheet; checking in with my agent about that writing gig; and in general trying to get my feces coagulated. As if you gave a rat's ass.

The Prodigal Sun Sets: Ever heard this one? She: "But I thought we really had something going!" He: "Hey, baby, I never said I would marry you!" Sic talibus dictis pius Aeneas ad reginam amentem ("Thus said goodly Aeneas to Queen Dido"). May her curses on his head come true. Of course, I have read ahead. They do not. The gods, those sick bastards, do not listen to the prayers of women, they just nuke 'em even as they seek shelter in the Olympians' own temples. My poor tutee arrives very upset because her school, a very prestigious public high school—virtually a prep school run by the public school district—is making her repeat her junior year. Poor kid! I tell her that I graduated two and a half years late from college for very similar reasons and other lame comforting things, like how every Harvard grad I know either has a permanent stick up their ass and is living their entire life in the Harvard-like old boy's club of some investment bank or consulting firm, or else just partied their asses off the whole time they were there, in which case there are better places you can go, I imagine (Reed College, for example, or Bryn Mawr, or so I still like to imagine, an old fixation of mine). Then I tell her that the best advice anyone ever gave me was not to make any decisions while you are upset, depressed, or boiling mad. Better to get drunk and fall down (unless you are prone to alcohol addiction, in which case riding the subway or some equivalent, such as BART, aimlessly 10 hours a day will have a similar effect), sleep 20 hours a day for a month, get very, very interested in CourtTV, or play Tetris for 120 straight hours at a time, or any combination of these and other dilatory rituals, and wait until the fell Furies have withdrawn the clouds that obscure your vision. She has a good head on her shoulders, though, she is already working out the practical angles. And you know what she says. "I would like to continue Latin tutoring, just because it interests me so much." That just warms my freaking heart right down to the throbbing aorta. The kid will be okay, with that attitude. She's got the right stuff.

Countdown to Mystery: Yes, V: I know the whole obsessive subject is getting dull for you handful of (utterly fictional) faithful readers. Lufthansa should be landing the shadowy, troubadour-meistersingerly domna with the full-throated guffaw just about ... now. Figure with the freaking traffic on the freaking Lon Gisland Expressway she should be home by Monday at the earliest.

Sorting it all out. Me, I am spending my evening sorting socks and e-mail messages. Man, you pay $0.50 a pound to have your laundry done and you get neither blue paper nor sorted socks, twisted together in pairs? No wonder our national moral fiber is low and cholesterol high. Iggy [r.] has been out in the yard rolling in and smelling interesting stuff and is happy as ... hell, he is the comparandum to which other terms of the simile are referred, much as Homer Simpson's portrait appears in the dictionary to exemplify doltishness. Later, I will sort my journalistic e-mail take for the day—I am paradoxically afraid of good news, this means a lot to me—after a ProfNet search to see if I can find some macro- and microeconomists to lend bucketsful of gravitas to the whole proceeding. I am starting to get seriously interested in this stuff, despite having fallen asleep many times in Econ 101 in my gaudeamus igitur days. My agent writes in with a writing job op, too, for very bad pay, but who knows? Good to know that the much put-upon CM from IW days has wound up at Crain's, which seems like a good outfit: This the word via Ryze. In a word, spring has sprung in good old NYC, and Yahoo! is down 16.21% on Q1 earnings news. Do you, uh ... divest?

The Idiot Arises: Schleps to the bodega, where Farid is glued glumly to al-Jazeera, pours coffee and notes with sadness that the "I ♥ New York" cup has gone the way of the Greek-themed "It is our pleasure to serve you" cup, giving way to some bland brown simulacrum of the New York takeout cup of joe that once was. Another sign of the decay of civilization, though not as dire as tanks rolling through shantytowns and young girls girded with high explosives, and Dubya waffling. Let Colin Powell handle this. Retreat to 1967 lines, build a freaking Berlin Wall if you have to, and let the Palestinians develop a software industry, found a good university, and live for a change. Of course, the new state's Arab neighbors would have to pitch in for a change instead of playing these poor people for political pawns. And of course, the holy sites in Jerusalem are the flashpoint. Damn it, just make it an international holy city run by the UN, who got us in this mess in the first place, didn't they, with metal detectors at every point of entry, I don't know. One despairs. One just despairs and honestly doesn't know what the answer is. Maybe the answer is as reported by Kurzweil AI this morning:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, funded by the US Army, is setting up a $50 million research center known as the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) to develop the soldier of the future.

The center will develop futuristic cyborg technologies, such as devices that can heal soldiers, nearly invisible uniforms, clothing that can become a rigid cast when a soldier breaks a leg, shoes with built-in power packs to endow the soldier with super-strength and agility, lightweight chain mail and an exoskeleton to provide protection from bullets, transform into a medical cast and even activate an offensive weapon.

Et sequens. Or maybe not. Next, the schlemiel AIMS with Sim City Sam for a good twenty minutes, then fires off some more Enron queries. The story is shaping up, maybe. Iggy gets fed and the shitbox emptied, the last of the laundry to be schlepped out on the way to the G stop, the W-2s and 1099s stacked neatly on the lefthand (laeva manu) side, the morning's work to be done open on the screen. Birds chirp, Iggy prowls the yard, the bills are paid, Darkbloom boards Lufthansa, the nebbish bids on another Latin manuscript job (who would have thought that paleography and codicology seminar would actually pay for itself) and waits for a call from the client on the current one. This evening, the lamentable fate of poor Dido as she and Aeneas happen to run into the same cave for shelter during that "convenient" thundershower, as Juno and Venus cut a deal. Very sorry that the AP exam doesn't include the passage which describes how Amor (no bare-butt little baby he, but aligerus ("winged") and terrible in his power, in the Aeneid) wounds the proud queen. The dark bloom, meanwhile, wings its way operaward.

To hell with it, I'm getting mildly drunk. Verizon wants a $1,000 deposit for a new cellular phone account. I just paid off those freaking bastards at ATT Wireless today. To hell with it, I'm gonna get mildly drunk and eat a mess of tamales en mole poblano from Castro's, the best Mexican joint in the five boroughs. Definitely not inspired to work, though if I hit the hay soon I can get up at 5:30 a.m. again and finish off those APA journal articles for good and all, figure out some of this Salon mess, then get a haircut, then tutor, then maybe work a second shift at SOLO9W57 until midnight. I am the hardest working unemployed dude you have ever met. I have undertaken as my next recumbent reading project Tres Tristes Tigres, by Cabrera Infante, keeping to the Cuban theme: "Debe leerse de noche, porque el libro es una celebración de la noche" [This book should be read at night, because it is a celebration of the night].

El único villano es la traición, pero no el delito humano, comprendido y perdonado, sino este fatal crimen de esa literatura que es la traducción y el libro termina en realidad con una inscripción doblemente dantesca: la palabra tradittori escrita en el sueño.

The book's only villain is treason, though not the human crime, which is understood and forgiven, but rather the capital crime that is literary translation. The book ends with a double Dantesque inscription: the word tradditori written in a dream.

‡ Viva Viv Viva Voce ‡: Darkbloom cancels appointments with five or six guys named Frank to phone me, while stuffing her bags with bratwurst and subversive literature, to confirm her transatlantic itinerary. Yikes! Am I ready for this? I will have clean underwear and socks tomorrow morning, my rent is paid, the cat is fed, I still have all of my limbs and all but one of my teeth, yeah, hell, I'm ready for anything. Hot tip of the day: A certain pal of mine secretly makes fun of Germans on conference calls at work to me over AIM. "In Germany, we do not believe in motivation by incentive, but in intrinsic motivation ..." Hey, so do I, as long as there's free tickets in it for me somewhere. Going to the Handel opera, speaking of li cari Saxi, at Lincoln Center Saturday afternoon, then back on the austerity program. My tamales are here. You would not believe how good, steamed in their corn husks at $1.50 each. ¡Órale, buey!

Mermaid Mugged! Mayhem in Merlandia and Middle East! The Merm got mugged, but shrugs it off, no weapons displayed, two snot-nosed kids. What happened to those scruffy guys in the windbreakers that run those neighborhood protection rackets where you pay them one real and they look after your car? São freaking Paulo. I wake up early and start chasing down this Enron story. Darkbloom writes in to say she is winging her way back tomorrow, visa in hand: "nur noch zweimal schlafen." Need haircut. The WSJ reports a big cloture vote in the senate over Feinstein's efforts to "roll back the exemptions for over-the-counter metals and energy derivatives trading provided for in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000." Energy industry lobbyists reply that "expert financial regulators have stated that enactment of the amendment would be premature, given the lack of opportunity for full review of the amendment by the relevant committees of jurisdiction, its implications for energy and other derivatives activity, and the absence of a determination that energy derivatives played a role in the collapse of Enron or the California energy crisis." I have a lot of boning up today before interviewing that Enron VP. Sim City Sam gets me involved in Ryze, an online business network, where I feel like a fish out of water but meet and greet a lot of the old IW gang. Magazine ad pages down 17% year-on-year. Need a new racket, no one's hiring copy editors, chingada. Poem of the day, from "Prothalamion" by Delmore Schwartz:

This life is endless and my eyes are tired,
So that, again and again, I touch a chair,
Or go to the window, press my face
Against it, hoping with substantial touch,
Colorful sight, or turning things to gain once more
The look of actuality, the certainty
Of those who run down stairs and drive a car.
Then let us be each other's truth, let us
Affirm the other's self, and be
The other's audience, the other's state,
Each to the other his sonorous fame.

Now you will be afraid, when, waking up,
Before familiar morning, by my mute side
Wan and abandoned then, when, waking up,
You see the lion or lamb upon my face
Or see the daemon breathing heavily
His sense of ignorance, his wish to die,
For I am nothing because my circus self
Divides its love a million times.

I am the octopus in love with God,
For thus is my desire inconclusible,
Until my mind, deranged in swimming tubes,
Issues its own darkness, clutching seas
—O God of my perfect ignorance,
Bring the New Year to my only sister soon,
Take from me strength and power to bless her head,
Give her the magnitude of secular trust,
Until she turns to me in her troubled sleep,
Seeing me in my wish, free from self-wrongs.

Back to work, jork.

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."
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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.