I was reading in the collected Borges non-fiction the other day. He was writing about Dante and felt it important to note that everything Dante wrote was not so much the product of Dante, as it was the product of all the people who built up to Dante, to make it possible for him to write as he did. So we infer that Borges was also writing about himself and situating himself within a tradition to say with both pride and humility that he was standing on the shoulders of many and a conduit for their voices into that moment in time (I should note that he goes on to argue against the very notion of time, how do we know that the world wasn’t created a second ago with our memories of the past as a key feature of that instantaneous creation – all time is now). Ah Borges, he always returns to the eternal return.

I like the idea that the writer is an expression of this seeming contradiction, both the solitary scribe alone in the struggle for inspiration and at the same time, “themselves” a product written by the language – both via the way language structures consciousness and the way various consciousnesses have used language in the past. I watched Adaptation slowly this week. I watched it in three installments and finished it early Saturday morning. Kauffman has written himself into his screenplay, he is the snake swallowing his own tail. I must begin at the beginning of time – Finnegan begin again - I must say the last quarter of the film didn’t sell me. The chase, the drugs, the alligator attack all undermined the beauty of the first three quarters of the film. I think I need to watch it again a few times before I say anything else. It’s nice to find a film that will repay multiple viewings.



Karl briefly tries his hand at dialogue.

While trained as an academician some of the skills must translate mustn’t they?


While walking to the Loop last night along Delmar Blvd:

Paul, “Look at how many of these places are for sale.”

Karl, “Angela and I looked at that one the other day when they had an open house, they want 500,000.”

Paul pulls a photocopied fact sheet from the plastic box on the front lawn, “$450,000.”

Karl “I guess they dropped the price, it’s been on the market for awhile

Paul looks at the mansions across the street, “If these place are 500,000, what do you think those are going for?”

Beth, “That one? One million two at least.”

Paul, “Here I am with my professional degree and I can barley afford my life. Sure I’ll be making more as time goes on, but what will that mean with inflation? What will these houses cost then? What do these people do to afford them?”

Angela, “Most of them were born with it. St. Louis has a lot of old money.”

Karl, “The rape of third world countries is popular.”

A cop car from St. John’s glides past this conversation with a middle aged white cop in the drivers seat and a young black man clearly still in handcuffs sitting uncomfortably in the back seat.

Paul, “Where is St. John’s? Is that a municipality?”

Angela, “I would imagine it’s up by Bonnita Park, in that area, but I am really not sure.”

We went down to Blueberry Hill last night for beer and burgers. Paul is in town to celebrate Mother’s Day with his wife’s family, but he got a pass for the evening. He decimated me at Gallaga, but I held my own on The Shadow pinball game. I saw my old Zorro lunch box in the case of many wonders. Blueberry Hill is filled with case upon case of lunchbox and happy meal style memorabilia.

Paul’s quote of the evening while discussing autopsy work, “You know, the one’s that smell so bad that you have to put Vick’s Vapor Rub under your nose before you even walk in the room, just to get in the door. The one’s that they fished out of a lake after four months. On a day like today – in the eighties - it’s amazing how fast you begin to decompose. They’d literally have to scrape you up after just twenty-four hours.”

Karl, “We’re just a bunch of meat puppets.”

Angela, “Wasn’t that a band? The Meat Puppets?”

Beth, "You know that's going on the blog."

Karl, "yup."