I met her during a trip to Paris, where I watched her stalk and eventually kill a Citroen Luxury Sedan...

All the apparently cold, presumably dead things (vanity mirrors, polishing rags, a copy of The Diary of Franklin Caligari) are ready for transport to the Bureau of Things Dead and Dying, for placement in one of their more elegant Chambers for Consumption by Fire. All the preparations are made, but that stubborn region of the house, that unquestionably large part, integral and indispensable, refuses to stop moaning. It (the part, tiny and insignificant, no question) is done for, but can’t seem to stop bleeding all over the carpets. The carpets have been replaced twice already. I cannot do anything until it is completely gone and the rooms boarded up. The shutters can just be locked, but the rooms entire must be burned out, or the whole house is at risk.

Parts of the part are indeed deceased. They cling steadfastly, in their very limited and deceased capacity, to the whole estate and their decay smells all the way into the outer parlors. The kitchen smells of tar. The conservatories reek of vinegar. A sulphurous haze has filled the library and the poolhouses seem to have been sleeping on beds of burning hair.

The portrait over the fireplace, a beautiful Cambeau piece, “Triumph at Dusk” has been replaced somehow by “Creature with Broken Back, Struggling to Stand on Interstate Highway.” The piano given to me by my uncle has been transformed into a cracked and yellowing heap of National Geographic magazines. The magazines may, I fear, eventually spill into the hallway, blocking passage with a dusty wall of semi-clad natives and Portuguese men-of-war. For now, they are being kept at bay by the mahogany rolltop, glaring angrily at them from the opposite side of the salon, intact but misinformed.

"Psst.. How long is the 'Man' gonna be here?"

"Too long," was the whispered reply, "and I appreciate your sympathy."

Glances flecked over my shoulder back to the smug managers. It was obvious they knew nothing about working behind a cafe counter.

They noticed it was noisy. But they did not think it was their fault.

"Make sure the jazz music is loud enough for everyone to hear it. And put the register farther away from the espresso machines so we can display more products."

To call an order from the register to the espresso machine took a powerful voice, compounding the noise. The nozels hissed loud enough to drown conversation in the parking lot.

"DECAFF LATTE WITH TWO PACKETS OF EQUAL"

As required, the barrista shouted back, "THAT'S A DECAFF LATTE WITH TWO PACKETS OF EQUAL, IS THAT FOR HERE OR TO GO?"

And the 'Man' was contemplating moving the registers even farther away to increase the amount of "point of purchase displays."

If I am ever on a thesis committee I will never ask, during the thesis defence, for the candidate to define "Plagiarism".
Nor will I then say, in front of the other committee members and the candidate, "I don't think you wrote this".
That is just darn tacky.

Andre Breton and the rest of the Surrealist family were, for a time, gloriously devoted to the craft of automatic writing. It seemed the perfect tool for removing extraneous debris from the subconscious. The writer would simply write, often without even looking at the paper and pen1. Since the hand is well trained in the kinetic aspects of writing, it may be driven by the subconscious and allowed to compose without restriction, whether moral, legal, or aesthetic. These automatic techniques, with their removal of the conscious from the act of creation (creation as utter will or utter non-will: typical surrealist extrema) gave birth to all manner of exquisite corpses, word games, drawings, and table rapping ectoplasm spatterings.

To me, the most interesting among these, (excluding the entire body of Dali's visual work, which occupies a peculiar position in the surrealist oevre--that of a man standing on a branch sawing furiously in order to topple the tree. The core of Dali's strength is the fact that when his saw, the pre-explosive blade of Paranoiac Critical Activity, broke through the branch, surrealism as it was envisioned by Breton did indeed fall. Sadly, since Dali was no longer in the forest, no sound was heard and the ghosts of surrealism struggled for decades to remain firmly combed into the nuclear mystic's receptive moustache) are Dali's essays.

Rather than automatic writing with its censurate and eternal struggle for contextual footholds, (invented more often than found--C'est la Surrealism!") Dali's essays, poems, vignettes, and manifestos are semi-automatic, in the projectile sense. One man with a chicago typewriter can do a great deal of damage, but 100 men with time and large bore (big game) semi-automatic Mausers can do a great deal more. The rate of fire is even higher and the precision is, not surprisingly, much greater. The Bretonian herds spent evenings fueled by cafes, cafes, the presence of friends, and the Parisian twilight (i.e. gallons of absinthe) and blindly riddled page after certainly interesting page of subconscious wisdom. The result is the same as removing diseased organs with one's hands--occasionaly effective but invariably wasteful and messy.

Their techniques, and so their work in general, lacked the conceptual, and contextual, precision of the Catalan Surgeon, the prototypical anti-faust and the periodic son of Cervantes. Each of their essays was, in retrospect, so indicative of the surrealist intent and spirit that they could do no less than crucify the movement, word by subconscious word. The Bretonians attacks were vigorous but lacked direction, and as with all such actions, did manage to stir up a great deal of dust. Dali's genius was to embrace and divine the destructive power of his weapons via their design, rather than simply assessing damage after the fact.

"Only I understand [the Paranoiac Critical Method], and I do not even know what it is."

1The emergence of legible words from the scrawl of the writer was referred to by Luis Bunuel as "the triangular forest cries out."

Repeat Offender

Apparently, a prison sentence was not enough to deter Stephen C. Blumberg from a repeat offense. WSU Libraries remembers Blumberg as the thief who helped himself to 23,600 books from 268 libraries in 45 states, including our own in the late 1980s. The value of the stolen material was placed between $5 and $20 million. What was taken from WSU was estimated at $350,000. The timeline goes like this: Blumberg was arrested in 1990 after two decades of rare book thievery. He was found guilty and sentenced to 71 months in prison, a $200,000 fine, and three years probation. Released after serving four-and-a-half years in December 1995, he was sentenced to eight months imprisonment on March 18, 1997 for probation violation, was released again in November 1997, and was arrested for third-degree burglary in Des Moines, Iowa, in December 1997.

He was found guilty by jury trial, and as of this writing is awaiting sentencing. Police found Blumberg and an accomplice fleeing a vacant apartment building on December 10, 1997. Evidently, Blumberg has an affection for all things Victorian, not just books, and this episode was an attempt to steal brass door knobs, ceiling light fixtures, and decorative wood moldings from the abandoned building.

In his book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, Nicholas R. Basbanes notes that Blumberg was stealing from old buildings even in his "glory days." His motive is debatable. In an interview with Blumberg prior to this most recent conviction, Basbanes says, "I asked Blumberg if that is what he really thought he was doing, rescuing these things. 'Yes, in all of it I was doing that--not only the books, but the doorknobs and the windows, the old house...yes, I believe I was. Well, maybe that's a rationalization on my part. I was sort of, okay, let's put it this way: they were sort of on an interlibrary loan to me. That's what I figure. I don't know if that's how they would consider it, but that's the way I look at it. Because I always intended to give everything back. I don't regret putting the collection together, but I regret my inconsideration of others. So in that respect, I wouldn’t do it again.' "

I have not found out where Stephen Blumberg lives at the moment. Old habits are hard to break.

J00r 5I+e be h4Xored bye ascii gibberish

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| luv R007

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never mind

  jonathan