My Brother and I were cooking together last night, bitter-greens/brined-cheese placinta and a simple lamb paprika. In the quiet space between two bottles of such cheap cava as is called "soviet" when sold in Brooklyn he proposed, predictably, a tisane of kava kava (Piper methysticum) before our second cork's expulsion in order to mellow us more deeply while the flesh simmered and the yufka rested. I conceded. We took our seats and, after a steeping carefully time-managed by my brother, contentedly commenced to sipping of the root. He talks well at tea, always, and here with the champagne already in him and the good cook-smells around I found him to be even more than usually on top of his game. He set in to narrating dreams.

"You and I were in Bratislava composing a low brick wall around a rye-field; it was distinctly Bratislava, but the boys who came one after another bringing our materials cracked their jokes in Greek, and the café where we presently found ourselves drinking lemonade & himbeergeist with your friend Mioritza was the one we used to like next to the train station in Alexandroupoli. I said something to you about the rye, I can't remember what, something botanical; and in response Mioritza leaned in close to both of us and said, 'That phrase is looking to be surrounded by verse!'"

We both laughed and I got up to roll out the dough and assemble our placinta. My brother worked gently at the cork of our second bottle & resumed, his phrasing punctuated elegantly after the word "dreamed" by the pretty pop which initiated the cork's flight out through the open window.

"And then I dreamed (!) I was in Nashville Tennessee, needing urgently to print up twelve copies of a short book – like a Blake prophecy – the plates for which I was carrying in a shoulderbag. How was I to find the means to do this in Nashville Tennessee? I was at wit's end; but was suddenly talking with someone about local butterflies, about how the Cloudless Sulphurs all parade endlessly southward along the bank of old brick buildings on 1st Avenue fronting the river; and somehow in between the lines of everything she said I started to discern and decipher a code by which I came to understand that if I were to walk ten miles out of town toward Murfreesboro I would come to a settlement of Chineses (cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, III.438) who were managing a magic portal through which one might step directly into Manahatta New Jork. I set myself at once upon this course. Presently my heart became a small tumbled cullet of rose quartz and slipped out of my chest. I carried it a while in my left-hand pocket while I walked and then somehow lost it – though I could feel it thumping still somewhere, expanding invisibly into the dirty world around, loving all."

Ache, trauma of train-travel, weakness from hunger (money short). Oaks so huge they dwarf my desire as I rattle & sway past the high, massy bulks of their leafage. The Pontic flood-plains consume me, swallowing my want in a slow, complex arithmetic of kilometers and hours. Where will this end, whom will I meet in what noisy terminus in the heart of what dirty mercantile city? I'm capable of forgetting, here, in this chaos of sense, while my subtle-body, outstripped and struggling to catch up & recombine, races desperately, bewilderedly, not quickly enough, along the silver double-ribbon of rail behind.

I left the city today for a fungal excursion with my brother and with cousin X, who's visiting against her druthers but in deference to our relentless invitations and who will "post" this when she reaches Vienna by the overnight train on Thursday morning. As I write, however, in the textual present, in the textual present, in the textual present, we are happily at sup on picnic planks here and enjoying our chanterelle and
chicken-of-the-woods fried in butter & dressed with horseradish mayonnaise. Wine, we were just remarking, is slack but excellent. In contrast, butterflies are abundant but redundant: pretty, dull clouds of milky pierids.

To Shit in our Trinkwasser: dispatch from Slovenia

With my brother & cousin X, I recently perused the models and mock-ups of Western Domestic Interiors on display at the newly-opened Pavilion of Cultural Exchange. When confronted with one open closet containing a ceramic basin inviting our excretions, closer examination revealed a transparent but solid barrier preventing any deposit. After considering this, my cousin exclaimed with this always-timely observation:

"In a traditional German lavatory, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush is way in front, so that the shit is laid out first for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of some illness; in the typical French lavatory, on the contrary, the hole is in the back – that is, the shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible; finally, the Anglo-Saxon (English or American) lavatory presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles: the basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it – visible, but not to be inspected..."

One of the features that distinguishes man from the animals is precisely the fact that with humans the disposal of shit becomes a problem.

"Nous avons chiés la moitié de notre merde."