Poker Dreams

Spike is learning to speak American.
The Admiral refrained from spilling news of his political interactions at East Bend.
TW brought gifts, tequila to be precise.
Frisco or Hurricane learned how to pass rather than bet.
JD continues to improve his homebrew.
PG blabbed on about the end of time, high school special ed classes, and movies.

1) I dreamed last night that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show was helping me deliver very heavy newspapers (with double inserts).  We were delivering on foot to a rural, but heavily populated, area. People were sleeping nearby, outside I guess.  At one place we were stuffing in papers, a man woke up and grabbed me by the throat, thinking we were intruders, I guess.  I happened to be holding a heavy hardbound book (suddenly, we were no longer distributing newspapers but something like school yearbooks that weighed 20 pounds -- my fortieth high school reunion is next year, maybe that's it).  I slammed the book into the head of the man choking me -- whap!  whap!  whap what whap! -- without feeling any emotion like fear or even concern.  He fell down and Jon Stewart and I took off down what had become a little pathway with tight corners.  It was similar to the narrow stairway from the basement behind the altar at East Bend Mennonite Church. It may no longer even exist, but it is the pathway one takes to wash feet after communion or to approach the altar to get married.  It is kind of a cold place, smelling of concrete or school glue.  Jon proceeded on, but I ducked into a closet.  The man I'd knocked down got up, chased past the closet, and pursued Stewart. He came back and looked for something just outside the closet.  I closed my eyes so he wouldn't see me. 

2) Some grouping of hippies in a rural area were living in the towns and villages and railways.  I took off on my own to explore.  I was riding a yellow motorcycle, going down alleys and following road signs and down roads being repaired by work crews.  I asked one of the workers if this chopped up asphalt resulted in a road, even a dirt road, down the way.  The boss, a skinny old man with a tie, came up to me and started to beat on me.  I just wanted to drive down the road.  I refused to be angry.  I said I would sue him and waited for the lawyer to come, right there.  She did, and shook her head at the antics of this guy -- who may have been the town mayor or a big corporation CEO -- and wished I'd just let it drop.  Next thing I knew, I had discovered an old abandoned castle in a corner of the town.  It was empty inside.  Johnny Brandon and two girls -- maybe Laurel and Nancy -- were there as well as a bunch of cool hippy friends.  Even the Grateful Dead were there.  It was a big castle.  I kept saying and doing the most embarrassing things, winning none of the cool hippy chicks, whereas Johnny knew all the ways to get the chicks.  I think I was trying to to be funny, but wasn't.  Johnny kept trying to tell me something.  Something was wrong with me, but I didn't care.  Something came flying through the air -- like a big football sized rubber bullet -- and hit me in the head.

So there you have it, I am a closeted violent socially inept misfit with a paper route and a little yellow motorcycle.

Now, as for poker, Frisco or Hurricane returned and lost even more money. Spike had a turn of fortune and zoomed from out of the red into third place.  Everybody is again in the black.  TW had the good sense to win with a straight flush only when PG had left the room. 

The same winning and losing hands kept manifesting themselves.  Although the composition of the players (and even the table) had changed, the hands were the same.  It was like a dream.  Next week, we may even know the cards we are being dealt before we get them.

Since PG and JD continue to debate the method of the anarchy round, perhaps it would help to state the three components of anarchy (according to Eric Anglada):

1) No domination of one over the other
2) Continual questioning of authority
3) Mutual aid

Maybe that didn't help after all.

Question (after contemplating Richard Powers' book The Echo Maker -- http://lastgoodname.blogspot.com/2006/12/is-there-echo-in-here.html):

Is all sense of identity an illusion?  You are the Man of the Year.
--
Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory. -- Richard Powers, THE ECHO MAKER

Is there an echo in here?

I finished reading THE ECHO MAKER last night, so I can get back to tackling Pynchon's AGAINST THE DAY.  It has been strange to have been tangled up in these personalities, having Richard Powers at our book group, seeing Powers discuss Pynchon at an academic discussion, hearing Powers laugh with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" about "the unreliable narrator," the flurry of national publicity, the seeming shift in personality taken on by Powers in promoting this National Book Award winning book, reading a critic compare Powers to Melville, naming my cats Melville, recently reading Melville's THE CONFIDENCE MAN...  But I digress.

It would be almost a joke to call Powers a "genius" at this point, given that the premise of the book is precisely an explosion of the fixity of personality or identity at all.  We are no more than birds, following ancient genetic maps.

(I think Powers looks like Stephen King, a similar horsey gaze, a gawky burden of walking in an oversize frame.  Certainly, they must be evil twins.)

I'm not sure I liked the book entirely.  It lacks a kind of sentimentality and closure that pleases me, like ATONEMENT or MIDDLESEX or even Powers' previous book, THE TIME OF OUR SINGING.  That had a nice Rosebud-style wrap-up.  This one?  Not so much.  The mystery story concludes all right, but I wouldn't say it does so neatly. The details of the mystery, the things the characters were trying to discover -- the car crash, its mysterious causes, the disturbing anonymous note, the allure of the attending nurse -- are all red herrings, in a way.  Powers is after a bigger mystery than one man's strange psychological breakdown. He's probing the mystery of identity itself and concluding that, as Jimi Hendrix so aptly sang, "Awwww, there's ain't no life nowhere."  Including that of the doctor.  Including that of the author.  Including that of the reader.  I liked the conceit of referring to an organizing principle in the universe, aka God, as The Tour Director.

Now I see, even as I'm writing this, below my typing, is the the phase I plucked out of the book to be a signature line on my email.  I believe it is well chosen, encapsulating the book, a book that rather defies that effort of encapsulation.

I can't say I envy Powers and his abilities.  I do wonder how it feels to cart all those ideas around in one's head.  Given that I face distractions and demands of family and friends on a constant basis, it is no wonder that Powers took a year off without speaking while he was living in Long Island.  And it is no wonder that I rely upon the wee hours of the morning and the solitude of rural driving -- dreading to receive calls on my cell phone -- in the afternoon.  Greta Garbo had it right.

It's rather fun to read about the Silver Bullet bar (where I promise I have never been), Mary Ann's diner, or the clack of red plastic hardbound magazines at the library, all items Powers lifted conveniently from his Urbana environment.  I had to wonder if he was choosing the names for fun or facility or a free pass to the Silver Bullet.  I'm not sure where he lives, but I think it's within blocks of where I do.  I wonder if he's listed in the UI directory.  Maybe I'll copy him this post.

Then, too, I had to think of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO -- with the main character named Marian Crane, the stuffed birds surrounding Norman Bates, the isolated landscape, the loss of identity, the psychological "expert" giving the theories of the day which now sound so archaic as to be laughable.  Will THE ECHO MAKER's science also be creaky in another fifty years?

Or Michaelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER, in which the conscious swapping of identity is the movie's premise and the conclusion is so much the same -- a man lying on a bed, a man no one recognizes, he may be dead or alive, he himself cannot say...

It is a shame to say Powers is a genius, although I do think the book is something of an inspiration for writers, because it seems as if he takes no credit for his work.  He can't, or at least he knows he shouldn't.  The work just comes through him, through research, through work, as everything always does, thanks to the Tour Director.  Which is why I sit here, year after year, watching my fingers move on the keyboard, waiting, a bird brain going through the motions, always surprised at what comes out.
--
Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory. -- Richard Powers, THE ECHO MAKER

Repentance is due

Wes, Royal, and Mike:

This is the fifth and final (I hope) preface to the book I have been writing, or undertaking to write, for the past year, It is 4:56 in the morning. It is dark and quiet and I am alone upstairs typing. I no sooner had typed the first sentence in this preface when I heard a car driving down Wood Street, tires making a slick sound on the wet pavement, and then the driver tossed out today's New York Times wrapped in a plastic bag. It plopped on our sidewalk and called to me.

I am going to have to resist the temptation to go downstairs and bring up that newspaper, resist reading the news and arts of the world while drinking my second cup of coffee, resist dissolving in fresh ideas and information as the dawn breaks.

That would be my pleasure and I will not resist long. I do this every day because I am addicted to the New York Times. I will give in soon because, even in relation to my addictions, I sinfully practice nonresistance.

You all play a part in this book, you are characters, your names will not be disguised and yet, the book will be a work of imagination. I can only imagine what and how you think and that has been the source of fascination and fury for me since the war began.

For the past several years, in letters and conversations, I have tried to unlock your thinking, particularly in regard to your religious beliefs, your firm dogma, and in regard to the war in Iraq. If you were members of any other mainstream Protestant denomination, your minds would have been easier to approach. But as you all confess to being Mennonite, the puzzle of your logic becomes unfathomable, inchoate, even mystical.

Somehow, you have managed to evolve into holding a schizophrenic relation to the world. When it suits you, as regards involvement with this tragic war, you claim to belong to a spiritual world, your hands spotless of Iraqi blood. Hiding behind the Mennonite pacifist tradition, you plead exemption and, worse, you prevent others from speaking out against the war and torture. Yet you support the political rule. You encouraged the continuation of your own privilege, your own comforts, your lack of sacrifice. To keep yourself exempt from involvement, you voted in favor of those who relished war.

Dad, who finally figured out (more or less) how to use email, wrote me yesterday the following:

Greg, you do an injustice to us when you imply that we approved of our going to war. ;also, you condemn yourself when you say the things about Royal that you do. The mark of a Christian is to love each other, and your attitude and commennts re: Royal certainly do not exhibit love. Nor do your newspaper articles. We rarely hear Limbaugh, nor do we hardly ever listin to the radio outside of programs on Great News radio. Enjoy Mark & Carrie in the morning,and MUSIC ON WGNJ . I CERTAINLY DON'T APPROVE OF THINGS THE BURNS' PROMOTE, BUT TRY TO GLEAN GOOD THAT IS AVAILABLE. I DON'T AGREE WITH THEIR MILITARY STAND, BUT NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEM TO THE POINT THAT I CANNOT GLEAN THE GOOD THEY HAVE, AFTER ALL, THE BIBLE MESSAGE. IS LOVE NOT ONLY AS REGARDS NON-RESISTANCE ETC, but in everyday living. I think much of the Mennonite church, particularly Goshen College, has gotten so carried away with their Anabaptist stand, ( which many other churches also are, without the Non-resistance stand), that they miss the total message of Christs LOVE a nd redemption. Enough for now. As you can see, I inadvertently hiot the capital button, when capitalization was'nt needede. Enough for now. Do LOVE you. Dad

I have read and re-read this letter many times. In truth, I don't understand why one can't discern the good in the New York Times, in Frank Rich (he’s Jewish, I know), in the news of the world, why one can't “glean good that is available” on National Public Radio and the BBC and not just what one sees and hears from Great News Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Pat Robertson.

I'm getting antsy to go downstairs and pick up that newspaper, so I'll stop. It's not that I don't understand your rationalization for support for George W. Bush (or your disdain for his predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton). I fear I understand all too well. You don't want to practice sacrifice or risk being criticized by others. You don't want to relinquish your material comfort. You pore over the Bible to find ways to sanctify your way of life, to see yourselves as righteous in your support of the decidedly unrighteous and greedily wealthy.

Dad wrote that love is key to Christ's message. But he misconstrues a key element, because Christ called for us to love our enemies, not just those of a like mind, not just those of the same race, or religion, or practices.

East Bend, like George W. Bush, like Rush Limbaugh, like Fox News, carefully chooses and defines enemies. You don't call them an "axis of evil" necessarily, but you create them and you fear them just the same. You may give lip service to loving Muslims and gay people and socialist democratic rulers and the poor and the addicted, but you think you must change them and convert them first, convert them into being like yourselves, to having your values, your comforts. You don't wash their feet. You don't invite them into open dialogue. You don't negotiate with your enemies. It would be too much work for you. You are too busy or old.

Some Mennonites do, though. Some Mennonites go out of their way to get into harm's way, without demanding allegiance to a dogma. When Goshen College opens dialogue with Muslims or gays, East Bend has condemned such action. East Bend strikes out with its self-righteous sword.

The newspaper is winning out. I'm going downstairs now. I'm making another pot of coffee. The dawn has not yet broken. Sometimes I think it never will.

If, however, you have changed your mind in recent months about the war and torture put forth by this President that God permitted to power, history will not be changed. An honest apology is in order, which is just another way of my saying to you, repentance is due.

The dance sequence in Clerks 2

Lord of the Rings in Clerks 2

Poker, December 7, 2006

It is all a blur of chocolate "chips" and Chinese peanut butter to me.  People sat in the wrong places and wore the wrong hats.  The Admiral dealt me three 6's during a hand of baseball, but I folded without revealing it.  Apocalypto. Spike had a good night.  TW did too, as he edged into second place.  It's 6:30 a.m.  I am uninspired.  I dreamed something forlorn about children growing up.  I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation since about 1972.  Yesterday, I sort of wished I'd been taught by the Maharishi himself, but then I remembered that I did indeed see the Maharishi at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a flower-strewn stage and he giggled a lot.  I think Timothy Leary was there, too.  Actually, I think may have gone to see Leary and got the Maharishi as a freebie.  I'm sure I have the details wrong but I'm not about to research it.  I do remember my hitchhiking trip to South America with some degree of detail, country by country, step by step, dialect by dialect.  The world has changed.  There is nothing left to discover, nothing left unspoiled, untainted by commercial enterprise, unplundered and virginal.  I do know that a game of Between the Sheets was played and that JD, taking the moral high ground against games of chance, stood it out.  The rest of the suckers, mostly me, fell into the vortex of carnival hopes and wagered their various chips.  Green ones were used.   We learned what "all in" means in betting.  Mary Cheney is pregnant.  The Bush twins are running naked in Argentina hotel hallways.  The Refusal to Invent.  The Definition of Anarchy: No Dominating Power, Mutual Aid, and the third thing... ?  Lee will know.  Tolstoy wrote his famous essay, The Kingdom of God is Within You.  You can look it up on Wikipedia.  It's 6:40 a.m.  My meditation will last 12-15 minutes.  Then I'll have another cup of coffee.  Although I am writing a very long and complicated book called "The Nineteenth Century," I may put the research and writing on pause for Christmas preparation. I haven't practiced Christmas in three years.  The book is about money.  The book is about East Bend.  I wish I could visit the Nineteenth Century.  You don't need money to get there.  It may be something yet unspoiled, untainted.  They didn't even have Coca Cola.  Time travel is possible.  The third rule of anarchy?  Might be love. Apocalypto starts today. 

Ernie Introduces Domino Rally (1995)

Thirty seconds blank intro.

I really shouldn't be doing this

I really shouldn't be doing this, given that today I start subbing again, in just a few hours -- with a middle school behavior disordered class, they were desperate -- and the other writing I have to do is again being shoved under the bed.  I swear, I am Jonah, seeking any excuse to do anything other than that which I am "supposed" to do.  But this Pynchon thing was too near to me, too close to home, too synchronicitous (no idea if that's a word) and felicitous and I had no choice.

The lecture/discussion combined all the elements and personalities that have preoccupied me for many months (plus the question of race), in particular the writing of 19th century authors Melville and Poe and the writing of Thomas Pynchon.  For the academics, seeking the true authorial voice was the quest.  Is everything we write autobiography?  Apparently so.  For myself, that's a part of it; I see the exercise of both writing and reading as a means of transcending one's self.  Of getting high by getting lost, to be blunt.  As Eminem sang, Lose yourself in the music in the moment.  Richard Powers explored questions of "ventriloquism" and "focal distance" (I lost count of the times he used that particular phrase) and Professor Gordon Hunter concluded that Pynchon's new book, in particular, achieved so many voices -- boyhood adventure novel, Raymond Chandler, James Bond, even the simulation of Pynchon's own "popular" literary voice -- that he actually eliminated himself, the writer's voice, from the book altogether, achieving an autobiography that consisted entirely of collections of other narratives and narrative styles, so like me, my life of film narratives and art, and my current writing project ("The Nineteenth Century") that I trembled a little bit.  The speaker's thought may have seemed profound at the time he said it to the assembled group of about thirty, except for the fact that one member of the audience pointed out that, in fact, hadn't it been the case for well over 100 years, that the unreliable narrator, the disappearing author, was already consciously part of literary effort well before modernism, easily visible in T.S. Eliot, and way before postmodernism.

Me, I just like making myself dizzy.

All those reclusive writers, I want to be like them, I want to turn down invitations to parties, although I want to be asked to parties and then apologize with my regrets, and I want to deny interviews to the News-Gazette when they come asking, and I do want them to ask.  Things I am doing instead of writing -- planning a free taxi service for local Latinos, legal or illegal, since they (or what is clearly just the tip of the platano) are always out there riding their bikes or walking in the wee hours to substandard working conditions in kitchens of cockroach infested restaurants.  I could speak Spanish with them and scrape away the English from my consciousness for a time, escape the understanding of my first language, the crossword puzzle multiplicity that forces a between the lines reading, it's all Freud's fault, or maybe it has something to do with body language, can one unlearn a language?, and I could again perhaps, or so I imagine, know the joy of the unvarnished word, where the streets have no name.  I also could avoid writing by substitute teaching, work that I can take or leave at my discretion, they can call me at dawn to offer me a classroom and I can say, Sorry, I have to write this morning, or rather, I have to procrastinate from my writing.

Is Thomas Pynchon paranoid?  I have fantasies of receiving a phone call from him.  I don't even bother to imagine why he might be calling.  Maybe just to ask me a question about computers.   I am so glad Against the Day is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century, so far at least, although I've only read about 100 pages (as much as had the one speaker at the lecture/discussion; the other two speakers clearly had not yet ordered their copies and were ashamed to admit so).  I don't know why that historical time is significant, but I sense it is. Sometimes I think it's all been downhill since the 19th century.  As Woody Allen says of Manhattan (in a sentiment that I entirely share about the city as well), "I have romanticized it all out of proportion."

I have to trick myself into writing.  I have to convince myself that I am not writing, that I'm only playing around, exercising, dreaming.  If I actually sit down to write the project planned, the subject at hand, something in me rebels and I choose to write a sonnet or haiku or a letter to the editor of the News-Gazette.  I procrastinate and flee, like Jonah.  Jonah, like Melville, ran away to sea.  I get the feeling of doing something, the feeling of writing, but not actually writing what I was supposed to be writing.  I am so anti-authoritarian that I even rebel against my own plans, my own self-imposed instructions.  This has been the state of things my entire life.

I would be more reclusive -- like Richard Powers or David Foster Wallace, both area boys, but neither in a league with Pynchon -- if it were possible, but I have family obligations, and church obligations, and "work" obligations.  This could become the third preface to the book I am writing.  All these little semi-retirement projects with which I fill my time placate (with simulation) my sense of creativity.  Having a vasectomy years ago also may have been a Jonah-like escape from the call to be a writer, because somewhere in my consciousness I recognized that it was the perfect excuse for failure.  How could I produce authentic work if I had been sterilized?  Didn't Norman Mailer make some claim to that effect?  (I have rationalized this away over the years by the fact that my body still manufactures sperm; it is only the delivery system that has been blocked.  Parallels between production and publication may be drawn at thee reader's whim.)

Where was I? 

Oh, yes.  The real thrill at the Pynchon lecture/discussion was when one of the speakers, I think it was the lecturer Luc Herman, a visiting professor from Belgium who gave the focal message on "Thomas Pynchon: Race and Unreliable Narrative," casually tossed out references to Benito Cereno and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (without naming authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe).  I'm not an academic by any means, but those two novels are so sly, so subversive about voice, about race, that even Pynchon really has nothing over them.  It's all recycled.  If I knew how to speak Academic and could have peppered my question with words like "extradiagetic" and "intradiagetic" and "homodiagetic," I'd have asked a question about The Confidence Man.  Where's the voice in that Melville boondoggle anyway?  Everybody's just trying to get high, by any verbal means necessary.

By the way, getting to the lecture/discussion was not easy.  First, I had to rush back to Urbana from delivering newspapers, leaving my sub on her first day to finish a third of the route on her own, hitting rush hour on campus in the rain, trying to find the unfamiliar building, parking three different places, putting my dwindling number of coins in the various meters and running up to see the numbers on the buildings, only to find out that I was blocks away, desperate to urinate from having been driving and drinking cold coffee for three hours while delivering bagged newspapers to rural farmhouses and watching the portable DVD player, The Wire, Season One, Disk Four, Episodes Ten and Eleven, fending off phone calls from Lee and Miles, who were squabbling over a fake ID Lee had found in the bedroom, trying to negotiate an anger-free resolution (which, in retrospect, turned out successfully), finally, taking out an old, empty generic V-8 plastic jar from the back seat to unzip myself and urinate into as I drove to the third and final parking place, traffic all around me, parking, worrying about whether I had put enough money in the meter or remembered to lock the car, so that somebody might steal the DVD player while I was in the lecture, and seeing that my sub tried to call just as I was leaving the car, but ignoring her, and so forth.

I don't think I was dressed properly for the lecture/discussion, since I was still wearing my delivery clothes, but no one seemed to mind.  There was no discernible dress code.  And I left before the discussion was entirely finished.  But I did enjoy it, especially the information about Pynchon's early writings, his references to race that reflected attitudes in 1957, the references to Kerouac and Norman Mailer's The White Negro, and then I came home, meditated, read a few pages, cancelled poker because of inclement weather, and scratched the heads of three kittens while watching Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy, Men in Trees, and -- at the same time -- watching the rest of the episode of The Wire on the portable DVD player on my lap during commercials and eating unearthly rich cookies that Lee made and the fresh-baked bread that I had baked upon arriving home from the lecture.  I had forgotten about the risen dough, but the loaf turned out perfectly regardless.  Lee knitted.

Miles It's Not True (1994)

Charla con Andres

6:15 AM  Andres: hola

6:16 AM  como estas

 me : hola, esta muy temprano aqui

  Andres: si.

  son las 7 am

 me: casi no he levantado

 Andres: pero aqui es medio dia.

  jajaja

  me: como estas?

  Andres: abanarse!!!!!

6:17 AM  bien gracias y tu q tal,?

  me: ja ja

  pues, estoy bien.

 Andres: yo feliz.

 me: no puedo pensar

6:18 AM Andres: pensar en q?

 me: si? que paso?

 Andres: hoy esta cumpliendo anos la senora.

 me: no se. la mente todavia no funciona esta manana

 Andres: y todos estan felises

 me: que bueno.

6:19 AM Andres: jajaja, como asi? aun tiene el cerebro dormido?

 me: zzzzzzz si

 Andres: jajajajaj eso quiere desir q esta sonambulo.

6:20 AM me: y no llevo ropa tampoco

 Andres: jajajjjaj, un buen bano lo arregla.

  jajjajajajjja

   como asi?

  q schow esta dando?

 me: como

  ?

   schow = ducha

  ?

6:21 AM pues no importa

  Andres: no.

  jajaj, quiero desir q.

  que clase de expectaculo esta dando?

6:22 AM q diran los besinos, oooooooooooo un hombre semi desnudo, anda rondando por ahy.

  jajajajaja

   nosera q por eso, antes tenias el ojo morado.?

  me: que verguenza.

6:23 AM  Andres: jajajajja si

   pero bueno, es algo fuera delo comun.

  y es bueno poner la diferencia.

6:24 AM me : todavia estas delgado, o es que la comida aleman te esta engordando

  Andres: jajaja

  ni una ni la otra.

  es toda esa ropa.

 me: por el calor

 Andres: tengo q utilizar sacos chaquetas y un poco mas.

 me: claro

6:25 AM Andres: jajaja, si es q aqui es muy caliente.

  jajaja

   pero aun sigo igual de delgado.

  y tu, como estas.

 me: major. yo desde que viene el frio del invierno, como mas comida, y otra vez gano mas peso .

 Andres : igual o con un poquito mas de kilitos?

  jajaja

6:26 AM eso es bueno.

 me: me llaman sancho panza

 Andres: jajajaja

  y donde esta don quijote?

6:27 AM  me: es mi esposa

   dona quixote

  Andres: jajaja

  parese q entodo se entienden.

 me: no se

6:28 AM hay nieve ya en alemania

 Andres: no aun no.

  porlomenos aqui donde yo vivo.

   pero esperamos tenerla muy pronto.

  me: aqui, un dia brevemente, no mas

  Andres: y alla?

6:29 AM  me: un dia

  Andres: aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

  ya entiendo,

 me: pero ayer fue mas o menos caliente

 Andres : pero tambien muy pronto, tambien empiesa.

  o

  tengo q irme.

 me: tienes la ropa necesaria

  esta bien.

  Andres: fue un placer hablar con tigo.

6:30 AM  si, por ahora si.

  la ropa de invierno,

 me: nos vemos. si, un placer para mi tambien. ahora hay que poner la mopa

  ropa

 Andres: aun falta comprar zapatos de invierno.

  si, aver si se viste.

   jajaja.

  me: ja ja

  Andres: bey

6:31 AM espero pronto hablar con tigo.

 me: chao amigo

 Andres: bey

  chao.

Confidence

From the back cover comments:

Herman Melville's "'The Confidence Man' survived the dismal reception it received in 1857 and now its reputation grows. Looking back to Swift and Sterne and forward to Nabokov and Pynchon, it remains one of Melville's most enigmatic and engaging novels."

Research for the Nineteenth Century

Gilded Paychecks

Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind

Robert and Denise Glassman with sons Jeremy, 8, at right, and Spencer, 5, at their home in Short Hills, N.J.

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Published: November 27, 2006

A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become "a well regarded physician-scientist," Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.

And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.

Such routes to great wealth were just opening up to physicians when Dr. Glassman was in school, graduating from Harvard College in 1983 and Harvard Medical School four years later. Hoping to achieve breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered his life.

Just how far he had come from a doctor's traditional upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would become a managing director of health care investment banking.

"There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people," Dr. Glassman recalled in a recent interview. "They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money."

The opportunity to become abundantly rich is a recent phenomenon not only in medicine, but in a growing number of other professions and occupations. In each case, the great majority still earn fairly uniform six-figure incomes, usually less than $400,000 a year, government data show. But starting in the 1990s, a significant number began to earn much more, creating a two-tier income stratum within such occupations.

The divide has emerged as people like Dr. Glassman, who is 45, latched onto opportunities within their fields that offered significantly higher incomes. Some lawyers and bankers, for example, collect much larger fees than others in their fields for their work on business deals and cases.

Others have moved to different, higher-paying fields — from academia to Wall Street, for example — and a growing number of entrepreneurs have seen windfalls tied largely to expanding financial markets, which draw on capital from around the world. The latter phenomenon has allowed, say, the owner of a small mail-order business to sell his enterprise for tens of millions instead of the hundreds of thousands that such a sale might have brought 15 years ago.

Three decades ago, compensation among occupations differed far less than it does today. That growing difference is diverting people from some critical fields, experts say. The American Bar Foundation, a research group, has found in its surveys, for instance, that fewer law school graduates are going into public-interest law or government jobs and filling all the openings is becoming harder.

Something similar is happening in academia, where newly minted Ph.D.'s migrate from teaching or research to more lucrative fields. Similarly, many business school graduates shun careers as experts in, say, manufacturing or consumer products for much higher pay on Wall Street.

And in medicine, where some specialties now pay far more than others, young doctors often bypass the lower-paying fields. The Medical Group Management Association, for example, says the nation lacks enough doctors in family practice, where the median income last year was $161,000.

"The bigger the prize, the greater the effort that people are making to get it," said Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth. "That effort is draining people away from more useful work."

What kind of work is most useful is a matter of opinion, of course, but there is no doubt that a new group of the very rich have risen today far above their merely affluent colleagues.

Turning to Philanthropy

One in every 825 households earned at least $2 million last year, nearly double the percentage in 1989, adjusted for inflation, Mr. Wolff found in an analysis of government data. When it comes to wealth, one in every 325 households had a net worth of $10 million or more in 2004, the latest year for which data is available, more than four times as many as in 1989.

As some have grown enormously rich, they are turning to philanthropy in a competition that is well beyond the means of their less wealthy peers. "The ones with $100 million are setting the standard for their own circles, but no longer for me," said Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist who described the early stages of the phenomenon in a 1995 book, "The Winner-Take-All Society," which he co-authored.

Fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa are favorite causes, and so is financing education, particularly at one's alma mater.

"It is astonishing how many gifts of $100 million have been made in the last year," said Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development at Yale University, which like other schools tracks the net worth of its alumni and assiduously pursues the richest among them.

Dr. Glassman hopes to enter this circle someday. At 35, he was making $150,000 in 1996 (about $190,000 in today's dollars) as a hematology-oncology specialist. That's when, recently married and with virtually no savings, he made the switch that brought him to management consulting.

He won't say just how much he earns now on Wall Street or his current net worth. But compensation experts, among them Johnson Associates, say the annual income of those in his position is easily in the seven figures and net worth often rises to more than $20 million.

"He is on his way," said Alan Johnson, managing director of the firm, speaking of people on career tracks similar to Dr. Glassman's. "He is destined to riches."

Indeed, doctors have become so interested in the business side of medicine that more than 40 medical schools have added, over the last 20 years, an optional fifth year of schooling for those who want to earn an M.B.A. degree as well as an M.D. Some go directly to Wall Street or into health care management without ever practicing medicine.

"It was not our goal to create masters of the universe," said James Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, whose joint program with the medical school started last year. "It was to train people to do useful work."

Dr. Glassman still makes hospital rounds two or three days a month, usually on free weekends. Treating patients, he said, is "a wonderful feeling." But he sees his present work as also a valuable aspect of medicine.

One of his tasks is to evaluate the numerous drugs that start-up companies, particularly in biotechnology, are developing. These companies often turn to firms like Merrill Lynch for an investment or to sponsor an initial public stock offering. Dr. Glassman is a critical gatekeeper in this process, evaluating, among other things, whether promising drugs live up to their claims.

What Dr. Glassman represents, along with other very rich people interviewed for this article, is the growing number of Americans who acknowledge that they have accumulated, or soon will, more than enough money to live comfortably, even luxuriously, and also enough so that their children, as adults, will then be free to pursue careers "they have a hunger for," as Dr. Glassman put it, "and not feel a need to do something just to pay the bills."

In an earlier Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie argued that talented managers who accumulate great wealth were morally obligated to redistribute their wealth through philanthropy. The estate tax and the progressive income tax later took over most of that function — imposing tax rates of more than 70 percent as recently as 1980 on incomes above a certain level.

Now, with this marginal rate at half that much and the estate tax fading in importance, many of the new rich engage in the conspicuous consumption that their wealth allows. Others, while certainly not stinting on comfort, are embracing philanthropy as an alternative to a life of professional accomplishment.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are held up as models, certainly by Dr. Glassman. "They are going to make much greater contributions by having made money and then giving it away than most, almost all, scientists," he said, adding that he is drawn to philanthropy as a means of achieving a meaningful legacy.

"It has to be easier than the chance of becoming a Nobel Prize winner," he said, explaining his decision to give up research, "and I think that goes through the minds of highly educated, high performing individuals."

As Bush administration officials see it — and conservative economists often agree — philanthropy is a better means of redistributing the nation's wealth than higher taxes on the rich. They argue that higher marginal tax rates would discourage entrepreneurship and risk-taking. But some among the newly rich have misgivings.

Mark M. Zandi is one. He was a founder of Economy.com, a forecasting and data gathering service in West Chester, Pa. His net worth vaulted into eight figures with the company's sale last year to Moody's Investor Service.

"Our tax policies should be redesigned through the prism that wealth is being increasingly skewed," Mr. Zandi said, arguing that higher taxes on the rich could help restore a sense of fairness to the system and blunt a backlash from a middle class that feels increasingly squeezed by the costs of health care, higher education, and a secure retirement. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, a principal government source of income and wealth data, does not single out the occupations and professions generating so much wealth today. But Forbes magazine offers a rough idea in its annual surveys of the richest Americans, those approaching and crossing the billion dollar mark.

Some routes are of long standing. Inheritance plays a role. So do the earnings of Wall Street investment bankers and the super incomes of sports stars and celebrities. All of these routes swell the ranks of the very rich, as they did in 1989.

But among new occupations, the winners include numerous partners in recently formed hedge funds and private equity firms that invest or acquire companies. Real estate developers and lawyers are more in evidence today among the very rich. So are dot-com entrepreneurs as well as scientists who start a company to market an invention or discovery, soon selling it for many millions. And from corporate America come many more chief executives than in the past.

Seventy-five percent of the chief executives in a sample of 100 publicly traded companies had a net worth in 2004 of more than $25 million mainly from stock and options in the companies they ran, according to a study by Carola Frydman, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. That was up from 31 percent for the same sample in 1989, adjusted for inflation.

Chief executives were not alone among corporate executives in rising to great wealth. There were similar or even greater increases in the percentage of lower-ranking executives — presidents, executive vice presidents, chief financial officers — also advancing into the $25 million-plus category.

The growing use of options as a form of pay helps to explain the sharp rise in the number of very wealthy households. But so does the gradual dismantling of the progressive income tax, Ms. Frydman concluded in a recent study.

"Our simulation results suggest that, had taxes been at their low 2000 level throughout the past 60 years, chief executive compensation would have been 35 percent higher during the 1950s and 1960s," she wrote.

Trying Not to Live Ostentatiously

Finally, the owners of a variety of ordinary businesses — a small chain of coffee shops or temporary help agencies, for example — manage to expand these family operations with the help of venture capital and private equity firms, eventually selling them or taking them public in a marketplace that rewards them with huge sums.

John J. Moon, a managing director of Metalmark Capital, a private equity firm, explains how this process works.

"Let's say we buy a small pizza parlor chain from an entrepreneur for $10 million," said Mr. Moon, who at 39, is already among the very rich. "We make it more efficient, we build it from 10 stores to 100 and we sell it to Domino's for $50 million."

As a result, not only the entrepreneur gets rich; so do Mr. Moon and his colleagues, who make money from putting together such deals and from managing the money they raise from wealthy investors who provide much of the capital.

By his own account, Mr. Moon, like Dr. Glassman, came reluctantly to the accumulation of wealth. Having earned a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard in 1994, he set out to be a professor of finance, landing a job at Dartmouth's Tuck Graduate School of Business, with a starting salary in the low six figures.

To this day, teaching tugs at Mr. Moon, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea. He steals enough time from Metalmark Capital to teach one course in finance each semester at Columbia University 's business school. "If Wall Street was not there as an alternative," Mr. Moon said, "I would have gone into academia."

Academia, of course, turned out to be no match for the job offers that came Mr. Moon's way from several Wall Street firms. He joined Goldman Sachs, moved on to Morgan Stanley 's private equity operation in 1998 and stayed on when the unit separated from Morgan Stanley in 2004 and became Metalmark Capital.

As his income and net worth grew, the Harvard alumni association made contact and he started to give money, not just to Harvard, but to various causes. His growing charitable activities have brought him a leadership role in Harvard alumni activities, including a seat on the graduate school alumni council.

Still, Mr. Moon tries to live unostentatiously. "The trick is not to want more as your income and wealth grow," he said. "You fly coach and then you fly first class and then it is fractional ownership of a jet and then owning a jet. I still struggle with first class. My partners make fun of me."

His reluctance to show his wealth has a basis in his religion. "My wife and I are committed Presbyterians," he said. "I would like to think that my faith informs my career decisions even more than financial considerations. That is not always easy because money is not unimportant."

It has a momentum of its own. Mr. Moon and his wife, Hee-Jung, who gave up law to raise their two sons, are renovating a newly purchased Park Avenue co-op. "On an absolute scale it is lavish," he said, "but on a relative scale, relative to my peers, it is small."

Behavior is gradually changing in the Glassman household, too. Not that the doctor and his wife, Denise, 41, seem to crave change. Nothing in his off-the-rack suits, or the cafes and nondescript restaurants that he prefers for interviews, or the family's comparatively modest four-bedroom home in suburban Short Hills, N.J., or their two cars (an Acura S.U.V. and a Honda Accord) suggests that wealth has altered the way the family lives.

But it is opening up "choices," as Mrs. Glassman put it. They enjoy annual ski vacations in Utah now. The Glassmans are shopping for a larger house — not as large as the family could afford, Mrs. Glassman said, but large enough to accommodate a wood-paneled study where her husband could put all his books and his diplomas and "feel that it is his own." Right now, a glassed-in porch, without book shelves, serves as a workplace for both of them.

Starting out, Dr. Glassman's $150,000 a year was a bit less than that of his wife, then a marketing executive with an M.B.A. from Northwestern. Their plan was for her to stop working once they had children. To build up their income, she encouraged him to set up or join a medical practice to treat patients. Dr. Glassman initially balked, but he was coming to realize that his devotion to research would not necessarily deliver a big scientific payoff.

"I wasn't sure that I was willing to take the risk of spending many years applying for grants and working long hours for the very slim chance of winning at the roulette table and making a significant contribution to the scientific literature," he said.

In this mood, he was drawn to the ad that McKinsey & Company, the giant consulting firm, had placed in the New England Journal of Medicine. McKinsey was increasingly working among biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and it needed more physicians on staff as consultants. Dr. Glassman, absorbed in the world of medicine, did not know what McKinsey was. His wife enlightened him. "The way she explained it, McKinsey was like a Massachusetts General Hospital for M.B.A.'s," he said. "It was really prestigious, which I liked, and I heard that it was very intellectually charged."

He soon joined as a consultant, earning a starting salary that was roughly the same as he was earning as a researcher — and soon $100,000 more. He stayed four years, traveling constantly and during that time the family made the move to Short Hills from rented quarters in Manhattan.

Dr. Glassman migrated to Merrill Lynch in 2001, first in private equity, which he found to be more at the forefront of innovation than consulting at McKinsey, and then gradually to investment banking, going full time there in 2004.

Linking Security to Income

Casey McCullar hopes to follow a similar circuit. Now 29, he joined the Marconi Corporation, a big telecommunications company, in 1999 right out of the University of Texas in Dallas, his hometown. Over the next six years he worked up to project manager at $42,000 a year, becoming quite skilled in electronic mapmaking.

A trip to India for his company introduced him to the wonders of outsourcing and the money he might make as an entrepreneur facilitating the process. As a first step, he applied to the Tuck business school at Dartmouth, got in and quit his Texas job, despite his mother's concern that he was giving up future promotions and very good health insurance, particularly Marconi's dental plan.

His life at Tuck soon sent him in still another direction. When he graduates next June he will probably go to work for Mercer Management Consulting, he says. Mercer recruited him at a starting salary of $150,000, including bonus. "If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be making three times my Marconi salary, I would not have believed you," Mr. McCullar said.

Nearly 70 percent of Tuck's graduates go directly to consulting firms or Wall Street investment houses. He may pursue finance later, Mr. McCullar says, always keeping in mind an entrepreneurial venture that could really leverage his talent.

"When my mom talks of Marconi's dental plan and a safe retirement," he said, "she really means lifestyle security based on job security."

But "for my generation," Mr. McCullar said, "lifestyle security comes from financial independence. I'm doing what I want to do and it just so happens that is where the money is."

Thanksgiving and a llama

The French Girls and the Library

Preface 2

November 13, 2006

I was writing this book, you see, whoever you are, based loosely on myself and my family. I say 'was' because I never found my voice and I gave up. I quit about one-quarter of the way. It wasn't the first time I had gone through this process of incompletion. I've been doing it for forty years. When I was in high school, I would write poems on thin calculator paper, a long spool, probably because of something I'd read about Kerouac in Life magazine. I wonder where those curled, skinny rolls of paper are now. This time, I had something like 17,000 words written and then it wasn't fun any more. I knew where the book was going, so it was already gone, it had arrived and was over. I had planted careful seeds of themes that would have flowered fully by the end and appear much more brilliantly and seemingly spontaneously than anyone could ever have predicted. It was all in my head, so beautifully, and because I was my own primary or even sole audience, one day, last night to be precise, while I was in between wakefulness and sleep, I realized there was no point in actually going through the motions of finishing the typing process. Now, I like typing as much as the next person, the fun of fingers flying over the keyboard, over my perfect, curved ergonomic keyboard, an extension of myself, more fun than masturbating and less messy, but it was time to take up another project, a new project, probably the one about the country church, East Bend, an actual intersection of the book I have abandoned. For a time, I thought the two books should be cojoined, one of those flippable books with two covers, like old Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, with one garish Pellucidar novel on one side, and flipped over, another adventure in the bowels of the earth. I wonder what happened to those books. Maybe they are in the basement. Maybe I threw them away.

Nevertheless, the narrative of the book I have given up writing wove its way from central Illinois, from a ramshackle house, where I still live to this day, and where I sit in my second floor office looking out onto the street, where it is raining and dawn has just interrupted my sightlines with details of the starting work day, and where squirrels leap from the evergreen tree to my window sill, and I'm always tempted to shoot them, but I don't have guns, an old house furnished and tended unintentionally on the style of disrepair in the mansion of Mrs. Havisham's cobweb-buried residence in GREAT EXPECTATIONS (with a tip of the hat to GREY GARDENS as well), to a road trip through Mexico with my son, Henry, as I sought to find myself during one of my periodic half-hearted nervous breakdowns. I liked to refer to this one as my Nineteenth Century Nervous Breakdown, because of my inexplicable affinity for the works of Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Melville, in particular Melville, and Poe, both of whose lives dissolved in bleakness and, in the case of Melville in particular, obscurity. Melville's obituary in the press was no more than a line or two, and he was misidentified at that. His name was misspelled. They called him Henry instead of Herman. I love that about him. He wrote these rambling, philosophical, bizarre, encyclopediac narratives, hardly what we consider narratives today at all. Recently, I read THE CONFIDENCE MAN in awe and semi-comprehension at the language and the inert lack of propulsion. It just doesn't go anywhere. Melville had this flurry of reknown in his day, embellishing his sea tales in the South Pacific to find fame, exaggerating his exploits, and then he became a dull desk clerk like his character BARTELBY and sank into obscurity, like one of his ships, like the lost Pequod. Poe's family woes are beyond recounting as he struggled in vain to have his own publishing company, trying to sell a story up to the last, when he wasn't drinking himself to death, which came to him at age 40. His own sea-faring novel, THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET, had to have been based on himself, his fear and awe of the mystery of race and the extremes of nature. (The name "Pym," of course, had to be identified with his own name, Poe.) I once owned a beautiful copy of that novel, but I haven't been able to track it down, not in the basement or anywhere. I probably threw it away in one of my thwarted forays into the simple life.

Melville's sense of wonderment at the human race, black and white, was less visible throughout Moby Dick than in his novella, BENITO CERENO, also set on a ship, when the slaves end up slyly running the show.

But I do nothing but digress. Can one digress during the process of dissolution? A fine question.

I wish I had lived in America of the Nineteenth Century. Sometimes I try to catch the molecules of being, the scent of those times, and experience the feeling and mind of the times. We know time is illusion. I don't know why more people don't make use of this reality, why they cannot see that they are indeed experiencing an earlier time, or a future time, or a parallel time. I do. Something catches my nose and I am a child in Puerto Rico, waiting in anticipation outside the bakery of Aibonito, buying penny candy, rotting my teeth on guavas. The world has become homogenized. Travel to some new corner of the world is nearly impossible, since corporate exploitation has reached every corner, with merchandisers, with tourism agents, with amenities that make it no better than watching a big screen travelogue and eating at an ethnic restaurant. There's no risk, unless one is deliberately foolish, trying to climb K-2 or some other equally ridiculously dangerous quest, a packaged adventure which also has become without purpose, without exploration, just a retracing of steps established by others, a simulation. All those postmodernists, they knew what they were talking about, back when they cared. I used to want to visit Machu Picchu, but if I can't have it to myself, I have lost interest.

I had wanted this book to be funny and yet philosophical, a narrative that hinted at the hero's possibility of suicide and his sacrifice, his refusal to Since the book was about a man who systematically

Wanted to reveal everything, explain the odd circumstances of having a very rich life -- travel, family, dining, theatre, art, pleasure, adventure -- and yet not having much money, ever. Being poor, probably in the lower

I know those previous sentences are unfinished. No need.

Things just came free to me somewhat, when I was younger. It was what I sought. Others wanted to work on Wall Street. I never understood that. Everything was a gift anyway, I thought. Free money, as Patti Smith sang. Free money. Abbie Hoffman, too, thought it was all free. He committed suicide, probably because the government persecuted him, toyed with his time and realities. And the Grateful Dead. They gave their stuff away, in a sense, even if it didn't always work properly. Music and drugs, they gave it away.

I never recovered properly from the Sixties. I couldn't help it. It was my time. I was a true believer. I never went after money. Alan Watts told me money wasn't wealth. I believed him.

I also wanted to end a book with the word mayonaisse, as Richard Brautigan had, before he committed suicide. I wanted -- perhaps at some point, long past -- to astonish people, to make them laugh, laugh at me if needs be, make words pop in their heads as they read about some new punk band or movie. I did that for years, getting all bloated by seeing my name in print, a critic just like Edgar Allen Poe. We were both addicted to being published. Then it all was discarded. It hurt to give it up. But at some point, I had no more interest in writing movie reviews of the latest remake of THE BAD NEWS BEARS or SAW and telling people whether it was worthwhile to see, giving a star rating. I never understood star ratings or how some movie might be worth money.

And yet somehow, despite the liberty of renouncing excessive possessions, all of reality always seemed to be about money, the lack of and my bizarre lack of wanting it. I remember in Mr. Takacs high school history class, I was drawing a flag while he lectured on the Civil War, because we never got much beyond the Civil War in history classes in school, drawing dollar signs instead of stars. Mr. Tacaks pretended to be expounding on the Confederacy, strolling down the aisles between the student desks, and he walked up behind me and suddenly ripped my nice drawing out of my hands and turned all red in the face, shouting at me. He supported the Vietnam war and I was just daring to realize that I need not do so. I'd never had a teacher be so angry and hateful, as though something I had dared to think had punctured his very soul. He died soon after I graduated. He wasn't very old. Certainly I was swayed by the times, the late 1960s.

Everything gets destroyed. It is entropy. It is natural. My favorite movie growing up was the adaptation of the play YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, the all-American anarchist family, brewing dynamite in the basement or feeding the pet snakes or composing a musical extravaganza, having fun, being creative. But the title was important, because money wasn't important. At a very early age, I determined that -- even though it was fun to make money, to be enterprising -- this was a false sense of creativity, and I renounced it. Right there in Mr. Tacaks class. Perhaps it was an epiphany.

But as you can see, I am swaying again, misleading myself into prolonging this suicide of a book, when, if I were completely honest, I would simply

There is that great rush, that thrill of throwing something away, something valuable, something you thought the world needed, something could hardly live without.

I'm having that sensation of liberation at this very moment, knowing full well that I am abandoning this book. It's not the first time. I once wrote a mythological, symbolic autobiography, its actual poetry was undeniable, it was good, and there were some very fine chapters, about my father's trip to Poland after the war, and about the time I spent on the farm with my family of the girl I thought I would marry, only to have her write me a Dear John letter during the time I spend in jail. I wonder where it all is at the moment. Where is that book? Probably stored on some computer disk format that has become obsolete, 5 1/4" floppy disks for an operating system I no longer use, no doubt. Gone. That book, just gone.

And then I fell in love with the writing style of Jose Saramago, the Nobel-prize winner, who is Portuguese, but lives in Spain, I believe, and I read his books in Spanish because it takes me so long and I savor and examine them, and he writes without quotation marks (or very many periods, either, for that matter), but he can do that. I had thought about calling this book, the one that I am now in the process of renouncing and abandoning, the one I am about to stop explaining before I go swimming, Vas a Morir Sin Embargo (You're Just Going to Die Anyway). That was going to be one of the subtitles. I think people might have enjoyed reading that book. Or maybe not. In the long run, no one will care that I stopped writing that book, no matter what it was called.

Nothing more to throw away this morning. Time to swim. I have written 2,058 words.

Poker haiku repor

Toledo Will rules.
The others make excuses.
What a stack of chips!

Spike gets inventive,
Makes up game after cards dealt.
Raises some hackles.

Admiral eats flesh,
But nothing with cloven hooves
He don't suck pigs' feets.

Coconut-Key Lime.
Looks like Florida sushi.
Fine for Admiral.

JD sports new hat,
Says UI has switched mascots.
PG drops his jaw.

Speak in many tongues.
All languages are now one.
Do we understand?

PG dreams of France.
African-Americans
Need to see the world.

Pelosi a witch?
Energy firm in Gibson?
The News-Gazette sucks.

Wild card is chosen,
Negotiates anarchy.
JD gets straight flush.

Tossed chips are flying.
How the mighty are falling...
Everybody wins.

JD deals best flush.
PG has a double flush.
He still doesn't win.

Deaf cat loses nuts.
Basic cable costs a bunch.
Much is left unsaid.

PG writes haiku.
In the morning's early hours.
What in life matters?

Used to be addiction

Addiction used to be the national plague.  Everybody was joining twelve steps this, twelve steps that.  Torture has become the new paradigm.  Suddenly, the IRS and IDES are both auditing me.  Everything is excruciating, minute, in depth, impossible.  Old FBI files surface.  Lies abound. 

Not Too Late (1993)

hora de nadar

Just delete this.

I'm almost finished reading Obama's new book.  The foreign policy chapter is the best.  Not very narrative or inspiring, but it does feel good.

Halfway through Melville's The Confidence Man.  Love crawling around in that strange century's mind.

Stack of plays here to read.  Might be a spoiler upcoming in this paragraph.  I guessed the secret audience-shattering ending of the new Neil LaBute play by reading reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times.  It's called "Wrecks" -- punning on the Greek classic play -- and it concerns a man (played by Ed Harris) at the funeral of his wife.  Apparently the ending is very shocking, but when John Lahr wrote that the woman had been fifteen years older than her husband, well, I am sure I just spoiled it for everyone now.  I'll still read it when it's in print.  That guy cranks them out.

Gave up on watching The Nine after two episodes.  Still staying with Lost, happily.  Haven't missed an episode of Ugly Betty yet -- what's not to love?  There's America Ferrera, for one thing.  Real women have curves.  But Studio 60 is what I especially like, it's smart, too smart for network TV so it probably won't last long, and it's about writers, TV writers but I guess that counts. I should write Mark Roberts, the producer of Two and a Half Men, now that he's talking to me again, and see if the show bears any relation to reality.

The new Lindsey Buckingham album is very good, especially the first song and the Stones cover, I Am Waiting.  I posted the lyrics to Not Too Late on The Last Good Name.  He could have been singing about me.

Watching old Mexican movies.  Criterion just released the first Alfonso Cuaron movie, Solo Con Tu Pareja, on DVD.  Also watching and rewatching L'Auberge Espagnole and the new sequel Russian Dolls, which follows the same batch of international students in their romantic quests.  Really love these movies.  I don't even know what language it's supposed to be in, there are so many.

Speaking of Russia, the music download site has gone through some changes.  Visa and Mastercard decided not to allow them to use their cards, so you can't buy songs any more.  To retaliate, AllofMP3 has decided to offer their catalog for free, if you download and play the music on their online player.  I still have about six bucks of credit on the site, so I'm still going to download some Incredible String Band and X-Ray Spex.  Basically, though, you can hear anything for free now. 

Snow just came in at the library, by Turkish Nobel novelist Orhan Pamuk.  It's too long.  Maybe I'll skim it.

They did Leonard Bernstein's Mass at Krannert over the weekend, with dance and everything.  I didn't go.  Maybe I'll download it.  The newspaper reviewer was ho-hum.  Dannie was anything but.  Sorry I missed it.  Anna Russell died.  And Jane Wyatt.  And the old guy on my route. I had just put up a new tube for him.

Chat con Andres

9:04 AM Andres : hola estas ally

9 minutes

9:13 AM  me: ahora si

9:16 AM pero ahora me voy

9:21 AM Andres: a

  luego hablamos.

 me: tengo un minuto todavia

 Andres: yo tambien tengo q irme-

 me: ok

  todo va bien?

  Andres: bueno,

9:22 AM  si pero estaba esperando a cate para hablar con ella y no se conecto.

  me: lastima

  y el estomago y la comida?

9:23 AM como he escrito en un email, puedes sacar unos $25 US de la cuenta.

  ciao.

 Andres: a gracias

9:24 AM pero dime de q banco lo puedo hacer.

   nose aqui de cual.

  me: yo no se tampoco, pero espero que cualquiera

  Andres: jajaja

  bueno yo haberiguo.

9:25 AM me : bien

 Andres : gracias de nuevo.

  saludes a tu familia.

 me: por nada. ojala que puedo hacer mas

  bien. llame por telefono a los martinez-kopp recentemente.

 Andres: yo estare conectandome denuevo mas tarde

9:26 AM hora de colombia 9 pm

 me: me gustaria llamar a su familia tambien. si hay algo que puedo decirles, digame

 Andres: espero poder hablar con tigo tambien

  si.

 me: ok, trato de conectarme entonces tambien

9:27 AM Andres: que yo les boy a embiar el paquete esta semana.

 me: muy bien

 Andres: y q a ellos les llega la proccima.

  gracias, y muchos saludos.

  me: esta bien. entiendo

  Andres: yo creo los estare llamando en unos 15 dias

  me: les llamo hoy o manana

9:28 AM  Andres: como tu quieras y sea mejor para ti.

  me: ok

  Andres: para mi es igual, pues yo embio el paquete manan

   y ellos aun no saben cuando.

  asi q esta bien manana

9:29 AM me: ok entonces. hasta luego, mi companero guarapero

 Andres : jajjaja

  te cuento q ahora aqui e probado muchas cerbesas

9:30 AM y aun me faltan muchas

  chao.

  me: claro. es alemania. cuidado. no seas un borracherito.

  Andres: tambien espero algun dia bolber a tomarme un guarapo con tigo.

   jajja

9:31 AM no au no soy un borrachito

 me: YO TAMBIEN. Guarapo contigo. es un sueno.

 Andres : si

  tu biajaras a colombia de nuevo?

  espero q para el procimo ano.

   para encontrarnos.

9:32 AM bueno site tienes q ir chao. y mucha suerte.

 me: pues, pienso en venir en el año 2009. espero que mas antes. te escribire mas sobre esto otro tiempo

  ciao

 Andres: chao