Nora, I keep waiting for you to find me…obviously, not the best policy. It is perhaps helpful, if small consolation, to note that I’m someone who has trouble changing his trousers…I’m sorry that things aren’t well, and I’m angry at someone about your trip if it’s truly cancelled. I’ll call you later tonight. Things are fine. Sometimes, when out for a walk, maybe, among muted winter buildings, a gasp! Of indiscriminate longing or loneliness; I’m never sure. I wonder what would happen if your beauty were to settle finally about your shoulders — something you share with Caliphurnia, slipping naked from the Pacific, and turning amniosis out of her tresses. WHEN that song begins to churn forward suddenly I roll my eyes like I’m trying to figure out How all of the air left the room. She smiles like I said something to the contrary; it says study my canines. He says, I did love you once. She tells me about teaching English in Patagonia to anyone who would give a fuck and two-steps her cigarette. You suddenly understand why it might be thrilling to copulate in a graveyard. He fails to bay. The tide turns when you take the cigarette to your forearm. What comes back full force in the moving final motive of the black sail and the white. The song is the promissory note of an absence. I pin myself to it like an airplane’s black box. In spite of everything, someone’s not on the guest list And what sad piano fingers you have (Did you see Penélope at the Oscars? ¡dios mío!)...

Nora, Hi, how are you? I just got off the phone with Simon. Poor dude, Someone-In-Charge has informed him that he has to have a psychological evaluation in order to take time off. (I think he wants to go to Argentina. Did he knock someone up? Do you know anything about this?) That is, he has to demonstrate that he needs a break or else he’ll do something nutty. (I guess he didn’t get the grant?) Can you imagine your own Cuckoo’s Nest audition? There’s no accounting for weariness, I suppose, if that’s what it is. So I helped him rehearse, like any proper older sister would (we are two minutes apart, and that counts, you know). I thought maybe he could talk about his fifteen-inch freckle…in detail. Sort of like the time he convinced the Dean to let him drop Philosophy 8 with ol’ man Wollheim once he covered Plato (we got into a big argument over this one). I liked that guy! Sure, he cringed at taking on my honors thesis on Walter Benjamin (‘Yes, he’s something of a poignant figure, isn’t he?’ back then, that statement totally confused me, but I thought W was cute anyway). Simon claims he persuaded the Dean to acquiesce to the pointlessness of anything after Master P. At the time, I’m not sure I believed him exactly, but he did get out of the class without a blemish on his record. I’m sure the poor old guy just wanted to run off to some terribly collegiate sporting event or to catch Tina Brown at Zellerbach, anything, Anything! Just shut this guy the hell up! How about the time when we were in England and we saw an old woman on a talk show who had a...

Hi Nora! No more blind dates for me, man. I’m going on strike. Rooftops in NYC on Spring Break are mighty dangerous for this type. I felt like a kite trapped in the dendrites of a tree. I think his brain was thoroughly adled by the heat. We went and saw a Frida/Diego exhibit at the Museo Del Barrio, and he said (he likes to hold forth), “I don’t know, Max. I have some reservations about a few of these portraits. They still look like they appear airbrushed on the side of a van.” The date was over at that point, I only blame myself, I blame myself that he sounds so much like Simon. That was my Spring Break for ya, oh yeah, I also overboiled some potatoes, you know how I get, drinking loads of flat champagne, reading in bed, day dreaming about the leftovers from a party the previous night. I was the left overs from the previous night’s party. But left overs are kind of funny, don’t you think? Fuck, where were you? I’m supposed to go to Disneyland (Spring Break never ends!) next week with S and his new Cuban babe, what’s-her-face, since it’s been her lifelong dream (an ironic one, I hope) to visit all that milk and honey. He says I’m not to make any raft/Elian jokes in her presence. Also, I’m not to remind him that you’re Cuban too and that the two of you (probably) rest on opposite sides of the bar according to the order “Cuba Libre” (well, I made that up, but I’ve got my gut feelings). I’m at The Albatross. Sorry, I couldn’t wait for you to get back into town. I completely forgot that I went to the movies today, that...

Nora, How funny to learn that autumn is an Edward Gorrey illustration, the trees on my street are the bad switches that bad children get for Christmas. Only one day, trained on self-abuse, I came outside and discovered these two men carrying huge leafy green evergreens and placing them in front of the naked dendrites. The sound of one laughing, they’re filming a movie in the wrong season. Did I ever tell you about the time I pissed on the singing tree as an inebriated freshman at UCSD? It was truly satisfying. Sure, it doesn’t quite hold up under the staggering weight of some of your stories. Like the time you wrote that one Sylvia Plath paper two weeks in advance of the due date. I know! Please tell me again about the time you dropped acid with that one guy, what’s his name, Phil (or, as you prefer, “Philly” — in the dotty parlance of your chosen profession); tried dancing it off at a rave at Cloyne, but then decided your energy better directed toward writing those four papers “just” waiting in your inbox, back at that beautiful loft high up in the trees on Virginia Street on the north side of campus — Once inside you’re fooled into believing that you’re staring out to the street from inside the hull of a boat. Anyway, you said something about tractors that left a few questions and this bastard of morningside heights a bit restless. PS: Would this be the appropriate time to tell you about the time I lingered overlong under that man hole window, after leaving one of those notorious poetry tutorials? I caught your profile, thought of Disneyland, thought of wishing to be the mail man and then you sneezed/appeared momentarily...

Hello there, The weekend was really strange, but I haven’t yet hermetically sealed it in tupperware containers for easy transport. The Radiohead review was pretty much right on, except that I would have made a bigger deal about the saxophone. I wish you had been here earlier. Tried to mend a dispirited tire to within an inch of losing everything I’ve got on file. Exhibition of boring male-type destructiveness. Upset some birds. I feel dispossessed. I’m a terrible mechanic. I’m a very angry god. I don’t care how appealing you find me. Chary beauties with nerdy aviator glasses just are, perhaps. It makes sense that no one will ever know about us. I would say let’s meet up for a drink but you know. Only that I need to hear from you, ice plant, and it always makes me happy. Why the interest in The Immoralist? The sparrows tell me your secrets, the jacaranda is your bold kimono. Til then,...