February 22, 2002, 1:23 am

In which we sum things up

back & forth

Sweetest readers -- O, what vows I've broken. Shattered them. Foremost and relevantest, I haven't written here in five days, during which WG was probably dying to hear what I had to say about her visit. But then I was cross and swore all day, hardly left my room, and, despite my best intentions to keep up the good cold turkey work, I smoked two Luckies, end-to-fag-end on the front steps with RH, who is in town helping SLB with her thesis. Even lighting one from the other, whilst talking about Parmenides and waiting for the shaking to subside.

For lo, I had good, stressful, reason to return to the sotweed fold: my attempts to install OS X were thwarted, at least until ED helped me hack into my own home folder this evening. But you don't give a damn about that: you want the dish about WG and her hot babe at the club.

I suppose it started last Saturday, when I was waiting for WG's bus in Chinatown. I showed up early, in point of fact, the night before, hoping to score some seedy opium in a seedy opium den. My trusty court-eunuch roused me from the dirty velvet bed in the back room of the electronics shop -- well, it must have been about two in the afternoon, and I was full of poetry. I was also, alas, full of pee, and when I rose to micturate through a nearby window, I'm afraid I lost all the lovely inspiration the blessed papaver muse bestowed upon me. I paid him his customary doubloon, and with an unnatural and high-pitched sneer, he escorted me out onto the street, thoughtfully handing me a pair of Gucci wraparound sunglasses and a headscarf. Headachy and stiff, I waited for WG for four hours, dear reader, cursing myself for not having paid my cell-phone bill; all disasters might well have been postponed had WG had any means to contact me. Instead --and it must have been during one of my brief sojourns around the block to see if WG was waiting elsewhere, she disembarked and vanished into the seething multitude. So it was well after nightfall when I finally met up with her -- too late to take her to my couturier and have the gown I'd ordered for her properly fitted. No matter, I'll have it re-cut into a pair of slippers and wear them when I go to meet the sultan. The whole experience would have been demoralizing, if I had any morals. On the other hand, I did get to finish Austerlitz: in fact, I read it twice over, shocking passersby with my sighs and sobs.

The club was, of course, delightful, although the cupbearers in the VIP room were getting a little long in the tooth -- not one of them was under seventeen -- and the gilding on the marzipan was chipped. At some point, ED and I cooked up the Emergency Goth Boy Scheme, to score some gloomy booty (pour faire passer le temps in the wee hours) but the Emergency Goth Boy was recalcitrant, and our party left with full hearts and empty wallets. The next day, WG and I went shopping; DP and MG came over and we played Siedler. At the stroke of midnight, the local serfs put on a pantomime for us, we took some chartreuse, and then all to bed, to dream unquiet anise-scented dreams.

Other things happened, including rehearsal for the concert redux which is happening Thursday next (I awoke with a terrible start this morning, since I believed in some foggy way that I'd skipped a week and was about to be late to my own show). Next week should be no less eventful, since MRW is in town; but we hardly feel it necessary to moan about that bar ere we are called to it.

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Current reading: John Barth's Floating Opera as WG's presence has put me in mind of Southern Gothic.
Current music: Berlioz, would you believe? Symphonie Fantastique. Although the Tafelmusik to my operating-systemic frustrations this afternoon was all seventeenth-century Venetian. When I die, I shall come back as a seventeenth-century Venetian.
Current horror: vacui.
Current favorite anecdote: From M.F.K. Fisher's translation of Brillat-Savarin. A woman famous for making the finest, clearest beef-stock in all Delaware jealously guards her secret ingredient. At last, she must divulge it, with a delicate cough: to each gallon of stock she adds a cup of the finest bull's piss.