Umi at ivich tells me that the turkey club at the Novotel is vur' good...and under $20. I'm going to assume that's at the Novotel in NYC-- Novotel Times Square. I like the idea--- and the image of Umi in just a hotel bathrobe as she answers the room service knock. Umi has a blue bird tattooed on the back of her neck--- I like the look of that above the bathrobe collar as she opens a cold beer there with the Official Room Service Club Sandwich.

The Roosevelt on Madison has a chicken club on the room service menu, but there's no price listed. I don't take that as a good sign. The New Otani in Tokyo has a club sandwich for 2100 yen...plus another 945 yen for a Suntory beer. These are things worth noting.

I'm drinking a Kirin Ichiban here at my little computer desk. The Zeppelin Pilots' Club has a good turkey club; I keep thinking about that. Though they serve it with fries, and it does occur to me that a club sandwich ("sammich") really should come with chips-- "crisps", they'd say in London.

There's a good all-Chinese room service at the Shanghai Knightsbridge, and there's always gulyas at the K + K Hotel Opera in Budapest. I will be asking Ms. Chang to tell me about room service at a good hotel or two in St.-Petersburg. Room service menus are for two things: sitting up late with a laptop there in the suite, or for a post-sex midnight snack. I hope Ms. Chang will remember that in Tallinn. And I hope that Umi at ivich and Emily at iminhell and Lissy at emigree will all tell me good hotel sex/room service stories. If Lissy does go to Tokyo for New Year's Eve, I do want details...and a copy of the menu.

I will be reading Eve Babitz's early stories this weekend. The little local library has "Sex and Rage" and "Slow Days, Fast Company" for me. I'm hoping that various lovely wicked panty-free correspondents will track down Babitz's books and tell me about them. I need to hear about books--- "Failing Paris", "The Floating World", "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler", "The Last of the Wine", "The Dud Avocado", "Roads to Sata", "Pattern Recognition"... I miss grad school and academia. I miss the days when I worked at a bookstore. I miss being around people who talked about books. I do love reading to the little K-dot at night, and I miss being in places where people talked about books and ideas. I do need to hear more about books, to talk about books. Books matter to me. I've lived through books since I was a vur' tiny little long-eared desert hedgehog. Books brought the world to me and gave me visions of the world out past the small towns where I grew up.

I know that I get edgy when I write and no comments come in. I don't want attention as such. I know that if I had a radio studio somewhere in the high desert I wouldn't take calls. I'd just tell stories into the night. I'd want to be a ghost voice on the aether. When I write, though, I want to have comments come in--- comments are gateways to other worlds, invitations to read about other lives. I want so vur' much to be able to talk back, to open up conversations, to exchange Stories. All the way back to the Year Two, I found people through comments. My conversations these days aren't across seminar tables or along the bar at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club. They're on line. But they are for the same reasons: I want to hear about ideas and music and films and books; I want to know about other lives and other worlds.

I live through and for Stories. I always have. Conversations do matter. I'm notorious for talking late into the night across the aether. I'm not good at IMs or chat--- I really don't like the whole IM thing. But I'll talk for hours--- books, ideas, Stories. Voices across the aether matter. It's always a rare and valuable thing to find someone whose voice matters, who's a voice that I want to hear late at night. Voices matter. Not just for seductions--- I want to be clear on that. I need to hear a voice that's kind and fun and articulate and thoughtful--- e.g., the little K-dot, who always makes me do the Happy Wuff! Noise. And I suspect that if I ever spoke to Caitlin at kissmecaitlin we'd trade Stories for hours: books, '80s music, firearms and History and odd gadgetry. I could listen to ginny_mccoo talk about Baltic literature and Modernist English poetry for whole afternoons.

There's an element of loneliness there; I won't deny that. So many friends have gone Missing in the last few years, so many lights have gone out on the map. And I miss the world I gave so much of my life to--- books and academia and university towns. I do hope I can find voices out there, even if voices are only words on a screen...

I do want to hear Stories, and one day I want to be able to exchange room service menus from hotels in exiles' cities from Sapporo to Tallinn, from Montevideo to Ulan Bataar...