All for One and None for All (Julja)

Dear Julja,

° What a joy to be done with Dumas, the last few hundred pages wore me down something fierce, I couldn't wait for the Musketeers one by one, Napoleon, Monte Cristo, the whole lot to expire.

° Not that Dumas père didn't end the way he had begun, as the most skillful narrator I ever encountered--from word one to word fine, just a neverflagging sweep of engaging action. And the man himself knew the charms of selfdeprecation to a T.

° But he wore me down, so much blood so much guts so much field of honour. So entirely unaware--as if he were some ArbustDynasty Principe--of any means of settling a dispute, unless by bloodshed.

° Reading him was like a protracted bad marriage, a perpetually haemorrhaging pustule of fundamentally unreconciled differences.

§

° I reckon you read about it, or saw it on tv, the big Peace Rally in Overton. I didn't know one thing about it till I turned onto the Trace and beheld walltowall peopleage as far as the eye could see. I pulled over, parked partway in the street (for there was but a single parallel space), and joined the edge of the masses, there must've been thousands. Folks around me were chanting, "Hell no! We won't go!" Just like Viet Nam. They were also chanting, "Satan! Bush! Satan! Bush!" As if--. Bimeby I found myself with the Rainbow Coalition under a streaming banner proclaiming, "Stay Out Them Bushes!"

° Jesseé, said I to myself drawlingly.

° Then the crowd began to flow fitfully and sluggishly, without any visible leadership; we seemed to be headed downtown. The weather, you remember, was unusually cool, and really the walk was a lot of fun. "We Shall Overcome," "Go Down, Moyses," "Strange Fruit"--just one oldtimey anthem after another. From thirdfloor dormitory windows University girls were throwing their panties down, I expect it was a reference to Lysistrata. Victoria's Secret mostly, but a few Hanes.

° About half an hour later we of the Jacksonian Wing became aware that forward progress had stopped, in fact there seemed to be some sort of whirlpooling backwash. (What had happened, we later learned, was that the front of the rally had come to D--------- Street, found the bridge out--and really, don't you reckon the organisers might could've checked that out in advance?--and started milling around like the water beneath a dam. We still pressed forward, singing all the while.

° Of course, when the backward flow became too insistent, there was naturally some trampling, and that accounted for the first of the casualties, we didn't even know about it way in the back of the bus as we were, so to speak. But apparently when the scent of blood--Dumas!--hit the air G. Gordon Liddy's "jackbooted thugs," aka the paterollers, charged on their foamymouthed steeds and all hell just broke loose, they were beating folks upside the head and running them over with their mounts and just generally expressing a militant turn of mind.

° As soon as word reached us to explain the shrieks and screams we were hearing echoing off the limestone depot walls, my group just panicked, helterskelter, devil take the hindmost. I was lucky to get shoved off the cliff into the gulch--I fell onto a liceridden mattress that was the al fresco bedroom for some brownteethed homeless folk--and me and a few others dashed across the tracks and up the other side and took refuge underneath the controversial new Nine Big Brassed Naked Dancers sculpture in the piazzale, where we were safe as safe could be, 'cause the paterollers, unacquainted with Vice, were askeert to behold a giant nekkid--

§

° Well okay, actually there were between 25 and 50 at the rally, depending on whether you counted the overweight ones twice. They stood on two corners there where the Borough catercorners the University. A fiftysomething guy with a long white ponytail was beating a tomtom. Some fortysomething plump females held up a poster of "The Emperor Has No Clothes," and indeed he did not, but he could've either used some or else a personal trainer. The twentysomething boy was handing out leaflets advocating the transmutation of the gunmonies into buttermonies, truly Reagan is dead.

° I chatted with the twentysomething girl, reminisced about "America, Love It or Leave It," watched a couple of immaculately groomed matrons lower their car windows and spit out most unseemly epithets, then toddled away, still right squishy from Jean Petit's bloody mary, to the movie. The Saddest Music in the World.

° When I returned to daylight, there wasn't a sign that there'd ever been a rally, not even a littered leaflet.

§§§§§

° In the good old days, when War threatened, nice boys had "hunting accidents," a carefully placed shot through the foot, no permanent deformity, and no careerending execution by the Viet Cong or by Friendly Fire. (In those same good old days, when nice girls grew suddenly plump about the middle, they went up North for a month's vacation, and came back all thin and rested and smallbreasted.)

° In the bad old days, when War threatened, nice Roman boys used to have a thumb surgically removed--all right, they just chopped it off--to avoid conscription without in any significant way interfering with a life of leisured debauchery.

° Peace had some value, gangrene can be smelly.

° But in these best of days, the cost of War ($151,000,000,000) is not one dime more than the cost of Peace ($151,000,000,000perannum, did you get through all 54 pages of the ips wishlist?), while the aesthetic cost of War in terms of stigmatised feet and graspless hands has actually gone down to nothing, thanks to the sleightofhand of a volunteer Army.

° No wonder the Peace Movement is dead as dead can be.

° Peace just doesn't pay.

° Placidly, Giac.

Lachrymosa (Piers)

Dear Piers,

° No, not the most famous chorus Mozart never wrote.

° No, not the plaintive orcan cry of a ridden whale.

° No, not even the effect of autumn clematis pollen on my eyes, not to speak of the Cat's.

§

° Quiz: What's the common thread in these four flicks?

Whale Rider

De-Lovely

The Saddest Music in the World

The Story of the Weeping Camel

Yes, little Pup, they're four movies I've seen, but let's just click on Advanced Search and run it through our brains one more time, miao!

° Yes, you have it: all the musick in 'em is sad.

° Why wouldn't the little Maori be sad, whether because her genius had been sexistly stifled so many years, or in the end because her triumph had put her for ever outside, even if for ever above?

° Why wouldn't Isabella Rossellini be sad, with a leading man left over from Kids in the Hall?

° Why wouldn't Dude be sad, with Ugna stealing every scene? And the camels--no wonder JudaeoChristianIslamists are archetypically so hangdog, such moans you never heard, worse than the Mongolian mistral itself.

° Why wouldn't Let's Misbehave be weeping its little eyes out, trapped in such a conventional, uptight, nearflop as it is?

§

° There's another thread common to the four.

° No karaoke. ((Susyn Reeve--vide infra Susyn Reeve in Silence (Coz)--or just ask him as he slowly hands you your wakeup brew next Sunday--innocently advises simple singing as a technique for Present contentment. Her worthy interviewer at once remembers that karaoke machine she bought and never used. Susyn smiles, and I bite my tongue.)) That is, Musick is for real, it's not a dragqueen moviefake liveBritneyshow joke.

° De-Lovely commemorates my mother's music, for she was brought up to play showtunes--think Red Sails in the Sunset, think Merry Widow--and galops de salon around the homefires, for a shallow but genuinely appreciative audience.

° The Saddest Music in the World doesn't just make a pretty penny off competitive musickation, it actually does contain (from the hands of the Armenian cellist) the saddest music in the world, the music of the bereft Swan.

° Whale Rider gives us music that humans have imitated from that profounder race, Musick as spell and language.

° And The Weeping Camel gives us--

° --Simplified Anglican Chant, in Mongolese.

° You have to hear it to believe it.

§

° A white camel colt, born in difficult presentation to its heifer mother, who, not unlike human mothers perhaps, rejects the baby that threatened her own death.

° I figure I was the only one in the audience, in any of its urban arthouse audiences, who had had firsthand experience with the problem. I speak of cattle, not of my own nearmurderous or of my brother's protracted breech birth. If a cow doesn't happen to smell and recognise her calf within a crucially short period, she'll kick him off when he comes to suck. Must be bottlefed, weaned as quickly as possible to Purina calfration, there's nothing else to do. If it's a heifer's first failure, she gets to live again till next season. Otherwise, whack--!

° Ugna's mother uses a leathernippled horn for the bottlefeeding. But she is dealing with some piece of camelflesh in little Albo. Something must be done.

° And what do they do?

° They search out a violinist--it's really a twostring cellino--to help them perform the Ritual of Reconciliation, don't bother looking it up in the Prayerbook.

° The instrument, tricked out in Buddhablue silk, is hung on the mother's front hump (these are Bactrians), where its strings vibrate sympathetically with her dissatisfied sobs, and with the everpresent wind. Then, taking that as the tonic, Ugna's mother begins to stroke the side of the Mother and to cantillate on a threenote up, fournote down melody, over and over. At times the violin joins, at times it proceeds alone. And yes, it's exactly like your accompaniments of the Simplified Chant, one feels the six or seven notes as home notes, one hears an arabesque garniture of ornamenting portamenti.

° Success. Reconciliation.

° I don't, as one of our tenantwomen used to say, know how that would be. But why not? Why shouldn't Orpheus still make stones sentient, Eurydices respirant?

° Afterwards, there's a singalong in the giant drum of a leatherskinned tent whose interior is all handwoven rugs, chinesered painted ceiling beams, brocade silk, hard rock candy, and milk served in a hundred cunning disguises. Camel milk, goat milk, sheep milk, yak milk, mare milk, floods and oceans of milk. Only a plastic potty lid, a pair of eyeglasses to jar the ageold scene.

§

° Ah yes, the Prayerbook.

° Their religion? The grandmother sacrifices spoonfuls of milk to the Cardinal Points. The entire family tie Buddhablue silk to a Postintheground and sacrifice a dish of milk in thanksgiving for a successful calving season.

° No yammering sermon.

° Just spilt milk and blue silk.

° And plain chant.

§§§§§

° I'm fixing to revisit Città Universitaria, come with?

° l'artist-ino.blogluogo.su. Just click on the ruddybrown--o Coz, who will deliver me from my utter linklessness?

° "I'm actually playing more since I quit lessons. My dad gave me two books of Haydn, the Bach keyboard transcriptions . . . ."

° What will he study? What will his life be? What organic place will music retain in his life?

° Or will he be seduced by the corner karaoke bar and wind up singing True Love, as mournful as a dromedary, as woebegone as Ashley Judd?

§

° Rob Brezsny nailed Pisces this Summer (just ask Nathan about Mrs. Watling, vamoosed to Santa Barbara to become Fortuna's favourite; you don't hear even me whining). Rob Brezsny nailed Virgo this Summer (you should see what Sandy's achieved in revamping my mother's house).

° Rob Brezsny will've nailed Libra this Summer, and any day now I expect astoundingly good news from you. ((Holy Cross was on the rim of my coffee cup this morning, perhaps that's meant for you?))

° In full confidence that you will soon have your own magnificent whale to ride, or at least a spellbound white camel colt, I remain ever,

° Woofing, Giac.

Susyn Reeve in Silence (Coz)

Dear Coz,

° So you are flipping through the world atlas in search of The Village of Bally Shangri L'Hai.

§

° Sometimes I notice that I no longer live on Via Mario de' Fiori, sometimes I parrot Lady Carla Mae Carlisle's, "Why did I ever leave Paris?" Sometimes I mentally juggle Spring arrivi e Fall partenze on the QEII. Sometimes I just long for the ratty apartment my friends escaped to senior year at University, and I calculate the exact annual cost of my own escape to happiness.

° But not this time.

§

° What an operatic weather change, her daddy couldn't've stabbed Gilda against a more thrilling backdrop! High winds without rain, tailwinds from somebody's hurricane, was it the Gulf or the Atlantic? Dog Days temperatures dropping all afternoon and clear through the night. Crisp October sleeping, the windows up, the covers drawn tight to the neck, the cat between the legs.

° I was awakened just after dawn by the honking of several dozens of chevron'd geese. Most mornings a pair or trio fly over from one lake to another, from my valley to your hollow, but the weather must've triggered an endofseason clotting in the whole tribe.

° Played ball with Asia, drank Mexican milkcoffee, sang Cantico, walked out into the still chilly morning. On the porch a slightly torn spiderweb, one wedge iridescing a ladder in the Sun. On the paths no webs at all, was the wind too high for weaving, was it too cold for the hunt? The mixed sugary perfumes of nicotiana, of crepe myrtle, of autumn clematis, of bull bay. Blue dayflower intermingling white spiderflower. Cerise mirabilis, frank yellow sylphium. In the Ellipse the first of the Heavenly Blue morningglories, undirtied by chillinduced violet, on the only vine that survived the foraging of the rabbits. A single Blue Star, so delicately etched with powder blue it seemed a moonflower that a child had set in coloured water at the instance of some Mr. Science or other to demonstrate "Capillary Action in Plants." A bluebird--our native one, with the redbreast, not the splendid metallicblue interloper that's immigrated into these parts.

° A grassgreenbacked hummingbird testing the salmon sage.

° Sundaymorning quiet. A distant murmur from the bypass masked by birdsong and birdchallenge. The electric drone of bumblebees working the buckbushes. A hoarse spitty curse and visual hoofthunder from one of Bamber's shier kin.

° Steam on the breath. And then--

° --and then near the Bell a globule of ruddy brown not quite concealed by figleaves, the first ripe fruit of the second crop, the first one the birds hadn't already gutted. Not syrupy yet, but intact, sticky white blood oozing from the snapped stem, sweet and strangely fleshlike interior, moist and warm to the eye, redolent of Paestum, of Corcyra, of the whole throbbing World I sometimes think I've left.

§§§§§

° It wasn't just the fig, or the colours, or the steamy breath.

° It was Susyn Reeve ((just click on this convenient mauve link, okay, no link. You explained it all to me, Coz, you wrote out the code, you took me step by step through the linking process twice. And it went in one ear and out the other, and met no resistance on the way)), interviewed on Alternative Radio last week, repeating a lesson that no one used to need to learn.

° "Start the day in silence." I thought of Aunt Ocia rising at dawn to write letters while the oats were gloppily simmering, before it was time even to work the lard into flour crumbs for the breakfast biscuits.

° "Learn to draw yourself into the Present, learn to leave out the Story." The jab of the corn on my left sole, the sapour of the fig, both draw me into the Present.

° I'll forget the lesson pretty soon; I'll again imagine that there was a Past that led to the Present morning, that there will be a Future that proceeds from it, that my Stories are not just artifacts of memory, fantastic, apelike avoidances.

° But you, gentle Coz, in your darkened room, doors closed, cat at hand, you know already what you didn't have to learn . . . .

° Your cousin, Giac

Kiel and Barnaby (Lad)

Dear Lad,

° I was sitting there in the side room at Café Chanel, my mind as empty as the derelict building that was backdrop for Natalie Wood's downward spiral in This Property Is Condemned. A little earlier I had been wondering why you resist my cogent reasoning when I assert that Chanel serves espresso martinis, the cups dipped into vinegar instead of vermouth, else what could explain the sourness? Bitter coffee can happen to anyone, but sour must be intentional. A little after that I had been gazing at my dried coffee scum where there was nothing to be seen but a set of outstanding eyes. I naturally supposed they were meant to be cat eyes, but they certainly weren't Asia's. Maybe some Persian was to cross my path today. Persian cat.

° My mind was empty and my eyes ready for his entrance, Kiel's. He strode into the crossvineroofed pergola, all blond as he was, surveyed the crowd, then threw up his hands in delight and scurried over to a table where he embraced a very handsome and wellgroomed exfootballernowbankertype male and kissed him on the neck. At least I reckon it was his neck, the urn of speckled coleus was partly in the line of sight. The exnowtype male pulled back, reddened, neck and all. The postcoedal woman across the table from him had a look of sudden Whatthe! on her features. After a monologue and some solo laughter, Kiel dashed up the steps and approached the bar. Exnowtype and his wifeorgirlfriend began to gesticulate, she mostly with her Dietrichwaxed eyebrows, and pretty soon she flounced out the front of the pergola, he following with his tail dragging behind him.

° Naturally I have no idea what they were discussing, miao!

§

° Kiel joked with the multipierced, streakybluehaired barista, ordered nothing, then came into the side room, where he sat under the No Smoking sign and lit up. "You don't mind," he stated flatly.

° "Not in the least," I replied the way I would. For one used to inhale more secondhand smoke in a doctor's waitingroom than now one will encounter in a workingclass sportsbar in a score of years.

° "Kiel."

° "Giac."

° He then commenced to come on to me. Or, if you prefer, to flirt with me. I do not say this out of vanity--though it was rather gratifying--for I was almost entirely dispensable. If I hadn't been there he'd've been flirting with the female barista; and if she'd left the room he'd've romanced the faucet in the sink. I hardly know if aggressive is the word, simply permanently "on." Reminded me of Tallulah, only with more copious testosterone. His hair, young as he was, was thinning at the temples, his legs and arms were freshly depilated; his shorts were weekendy, his 1950's boy's pullover shirt, raffish with magenta piping, had brownish stains along the waistline that I hoped were tobaccospit. Slender, wellfavoured. Just finishing last night's hangover, looking to start tonight's. Just furious with last night's trick, looking--.

° Tallulah.

° "Look, your friends are leaving."

° "Friend." He snuffed the first cigarette and lit the next. "Honestly, Giac, I just don't get this bi stuff."

° I didn't think he was asking me to enlighten him.

§

° Pretty soon he was tired of flirting at me, went to the bathroom, joked with the barista, looked out the window at the mixedsex pickings under the pergola, returned, resumed flirting at me.

° It was about then that the Eyes appeared. Barnaby.

° "O look, here's Barnaby, fresh from Church." That might well be, for his polo shirt was clean.

° "Not Anglican, I deduce. Unsuited."

° "Apostolic Church of God."

° "Do tell," I replied in amazement.

° Barnaby had the largest, brownvelvet eyes you ever did see off a Bamber or a chocolate lab. Not especially handsome, older than Kiel, brunet. But yes, Eyes. I silently congratulated my coffee scum. Mischief accomplished.

° Not a word.

° "Barnaby, this is Giac." To me, "We live together." Not a word. "Barnaby's fortytwo."

° "No," I said loyally.

° "Show him your driver's license." And he did, I could've recorded his number had I been wearing a miniature mysteryshoppertype camera. If it had been working. And if I'd had the faintest desire to.

° Not a word.

° He did glimpse up at the No Smoking sign, but not a word.

° None needed, Kiel was at once on the defenseattack, "O for crying out loud, what a goody goody." He snuffed the second and lit the third.

° I was beginning to feel a little near groundzero, I could hardly wait.

§

° Bimeby the barista, emptying the trash in the hallway, smiled a request whether Kiel or Barnaby wanted coffee?

° "God, all I want's a bloody Mary. And Gomer here doesn't drink coffee."

° "Not drink coffee? How ever does he practise divination then?" I didn't say this, but I thought it.

° "Or smoke either. Do you think you could just say something?"

° "You obviously don't want to hear anything I have to say." O boy, here it was!

° "Well not if you're going to be all drablike and everything. Christ! Sad in the morning sad at noon sad at night, God it gets old."

° Barnaby's eyes began to well up with tearfluid. Well not really, his eyes were too large for his tear glands to flood. He did, however, look as if his feelings were hurt.

° "O well that's just f------ it then, hell I'm out of smokes. Could you see me one, Giac?"

° "Sorry, I don't smoke."

° So off he went.

° I was sorry I don't smoke, 'cause if I could've supplied him with fresh fags, no telling how the drama would've developed.

§

° "So, y'all live together?" For in the absence of coffee scum, there's no alternative but straightforward prying.

° "'Live together'? He moved in with me a year ago, and now he won't leave."

° I pondered that. I'm still pondering that. When they were casting the new Alexander (the Great) flick, no one thought of me for the lead: I often bewail my own infirmity of purpose. Yet I can dominate any dog and accommodate any cat. And I can't help but think that sometime in that year of misfitification--.

° I found myself humming, mumbling the lyrics:

"When I get home I'm gonna change my lock and key;

When you get home you'll find an awful change in me."

Yes, on what occasion in life does Bessie Smith fail us?

° And then he just let it all out, every Nietzschean resentment, every callous and corn, every--all he left out was what had drawn them together in the first place.

° "Yes," said I, "I can see that somebody like Kiel, who, as it were, takes charge consummately, would be very refreshing for you, for you are somewhat laid back. You have beautiful eyes," I added by way of taradiddle.

° "Yes, smoker and nonsmoker, drinker and nondrinker (not even coffee!), outgoing and introverted, yes, one can see the attraction.

° "But, Barnaby, mightn't it have been enough for you, as a nonswimmer, just to dive off the high board into the deepend of the pool; did you really need to fly to Acapulco and hurl yourself off the cliffs? Well just look at the time, brunch will be over before you know it. So pleased to meet you. Say goodbye to Kiel for me. Such beautiful eyes!"

§§§§§

° So here you are, my little Lad, Tallulah and Zasu Pitts; or, since you don't have the faintest idea who Zasu was, Scarlett and Frank Kennedy, for he was, in her own words, "una zitella." (For "old maid" is a term enlightened males have abandoned. In English.)

° Or at least Hammer and Nail, only that overestimates the invulnerability of the Hammer.

§

° What makes a Man a coquette? What makes a Man an old maid? What makes a Senator in his whitecollared wedgewoodblue dress shirts prissy? What makes a President snarly and bitchy? What made the celluloid Cowboy lisp?

° As long as you focus on the Woman inside the Man, you'll find you know the answer.

° But if you imagine that Women are from Venus, and Men Are Not, you're just asking to be fooled.

° Affectionately, Giac

Xak and Cherie (Lad)

Dear Lad,

° Of all the movies I've seen lately, it's De-Lovely I'll never forget. And the reason why is because it was advertised in print and in ether for 10:05, and postponed to 10:50 by a curt message on the locked plateglass doors. Folks were sputtering, and yanking the doorhandles, for it was in the Octave of Bastille Day. Half an hour later, when the doors opened, sturdy sorts lined up for the manager, just to give her a hiding.

° Yes, her. For Xak was hiding out behind one of those multiple doors labelled "Private;" it was pure chance--Destiny, let us call it religiously, since it was Domenica--that put me in a position to sight him at all as he rushed across the hall to a new lair. It was worth the luck. Xak, you know, looks exactly like Piers. Or at least the way Piers would look if he lacked those waifboy eyes that make you want to shelter the child in him from all harm. And at least the way Piers would look if he looked like he'd just now recollected that the Sun was up and that, come high noon, Saturday night would definitely be over. And at least the way Piers would look if instead of having someone who knew what she was doing highlight his hair he'd taken a Home Depot fivefortwobucks paintbrush and painted six blond stripes across his head. Even the suit, spotless and wrinklefree, looked wallowed in.

° Xak looks like a peach mushyripe, attained and attainable, I never saw a more attractive male in my whole life. That's just me.

° If I'd been angry over the delay, I'd've pursued and tonguelashed him, I kindof think he'd like it . . . .

° But I wasn't, angry, 'cause I'd spent the wait chatting up Cinema Guy, who was no Xak, but--he wasn't bad for a safetyguy of a certain age. Mad, cinemamad, even compared with me. For he intended to skip brunch for a 1:30 of Before Sunset which would allow for translocation in time for the 3:00 of Lost Boys of the Sudan. He knew all the dope on Dogville, but I flummoxed him all the same, 'cause I got Grace's point: "Some things you just have to do yourself." The Antipassion of the Christess. (That afternoon he stroked my arm in the lobby of the Art House, so he'd forgiven my passionate von Trierism.)

° Inside he sat under a potlight and read the New York Times till dark fell--and resumed during the ten minutes while the broken film was repairing.

° How well insulated he was from any incursion into his environment, only a cell phone could've rendered him deafer, more withdrawn from his present . . . .

° Well I wouldn't skip a meal to see Michelangelo paint penes on the reredos of the Sistine Chapel. Trattoria Coloreproibito brunch, buttermilk pancakes so highlyrisen the cook must have a degree in analytical chemistry. The coffee, the richest I've found in Overton, gone bitter; my fault; no, Xak's fault; no, the typographer's fault; no, nobody's fault, 'cause the culprit most likely is dyslexic, and that's not his fault . . . .

° Cherie waited table. Talk about friendly. Talk about a bare midriff. The night before, a customer had insisted she was a transvestite, "You certainly don't look like a woman." That's cold. In fact, scrawny and breastless as she is, she looks very womanly indeed, the curves are understated, but they're genuine.

° "You sure don't look like a woman." Yes, that's very cold. It's worse than when I answer the phone and the sex of my tenor voice is mistaken, there I can just play the part. But Cherie, in person . . . .

° She sat down with me bimeby, I told her how disappointing De-Lovely was--she had no more idea who Cole Porter was than a fleatale, made me think of the review that identified him as an early twentiethcentury pop singer--she told me of her fave movie (a Gibson flick, but definitely not Gospel), of her marriage and divorce and continued amicability, of her chocolate lab, of her work history, of her future plans, of--well about then another table required attention, isn't it always the way!

° A table of six twentysomethings. Immediately upon being seated, I had categorised and ranked the guys according to looks, just for practise. A blond, open faced, with attractively receding hairline. A scruffy Bad Boy, offering and asking for it. A loquacious and invisible Fatman. A remarkably handsome Iranian, well dressed, trimbearded. A brunet, who looked better from behind.

° And the one who looked like you. That is, as much like you as Xak looks like Piers.

° They talked of pop music and popular music and contemporary music. They went to the bathroom by ones and ones.

° The middleaged threesome at the next table talked of real estate and zoning regulations.

° The elderly male couple at the next table talked of--well they'd been together so long there wasn't much left to say.

° If a single hand was held, a single glance exchanged--it was like being back in the convent in Trastevere.

° (Yet I take your point, it was all very relaxing somehow. Sex checked at the door, at least till Happy Hour, and maybe even then. These guys seem so confident that in Overton Supply equals Demand, that they have the leisure to be friends first. In Pope no wonder guys get desperate. And think of small towns, and out in the country.

° Though surely by two a.m. the Xaks still become tutto cazzo, I somehow hope so.)

° And yes, he smiled and spoke as I was leaving. The ultramale manager, blond hair freshly shortened, muscles bulging against a by no means tight shirt.

§§

° You understand, of course, about the table of six. The order of ranking . . . .

° See the genuine you as soon as possible . . . .

° Affectionately, Giac

The Fool and his Fruit (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,

° How many years ago did I replant the old apple orchard to fireblight resistant dwarf Moonglow pears? More than 20.

° How many pears have I eaten off those trees? Less than 20. Perfectly timed blossomblackening frosts Spring after Spring followed by wet Mays, moderate Junes, droughty Julys, scarcely any fruit set, scarcely any matured.

° But this year, no frost, heavy set, extremely ample rain. Bushels and bushels of pears. They were just at that stage in which the stem snaps when bent, therefore capable of ripening to sweet mellow softness indoors, yet each fruit was still growing noticeably plumper from day to day--.

° And then the windstorm the other evening.

° Next morning, as I walked and sang through the garden, I noticed the ground and grass in the Orchard trampled and gored.

° Then I looked up.

° Naked as jaybirds, hardly three pears left on the trees. The ground equally gleaned, only a couple of halfgnawed hardasrock fruits.

° Bamber! He'd eaten Idon'tknowhowmany bushels during the night. I thought of Julja and her Frenchthrift after the chicken and guineahen massacre. I thought of my own Scottish ancestors (their thrift no doubt descended from the French sojourn of Mary Stuart), I thought how many months the family must've gone without pear conserve in those days before supermarkets, all because the gardener wasn't content with the girth of his fruit.

° I thought of 20odd years' wait.

° But mostly I thought of poor Bamber. What must've been the consequences of so much green fruit? Bellyache? Malignant scours? Cellulite?

° No, just sleek as a fattening pig this very morning; he stood there under the chestnuts, as he'd stood beneath the hazelnuts, as he'd stood beneath the pears, and listened spellbound to 'Casta Diva,' and waited for the spiky green husks to lighten, burst, and spill mealy white mast into his gullet.

§§

° Was it my greatgreatgrandparents who invented the Atkins Diet? Did it come into their FrancoScots minds that it mattered not whether they consumed all those bushels of pears as carbohydrate or as savoury, smoking fatandflesh?

° Giac

"Oc" or No "Oc"? (Lad)

Dear Lad,

° Have I gone stone deaf? Did that woman say "cultist," or did she say "occultist"? "I'm no (oc)cultist." As if to imply that you and I are one or the other.

° I heard "cultist;" that's why I rebuked her with my impression of Professor Trelawney ticking off shrivelhearted oldmaidish Hermione. For though I don't deny that business at the Shrine of Death Most Holy, and you yourself had no scruples about the potions, surely the only devotion we practise religiously is the Unending Quest of Tastiness--weren't those dried "sweetened, unsulphured" piecherries from Avena Selvaggia addictive?

° But if she said "occultist," I just absolutely apologise for my aggressive defensiveness. For if a little coffeescum divination, a little Mayan drawing spell or two, a scientific curiosity as to the lagday tracking accuracy of freewillastrology.com and labuonastella.it--and by the way, just this morning the Scorpion was attacking your Bunny and your Bull in the bottom of my coffee cup, will your troubles never cease?

° Res ipsa loquitur.

° Affectionately, Giac