The hero of John Leonard's "Private Lives in the Imperial City" calls himself Dmitri. I can smile at the reference, but I wouldn't have chosen Dmitri as a name. I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov. I always saw myself as Ivan. Well, anyone but Aloysha.

Ms. Chang used to dress up in necktie and charcoal-grey microskirt and unbuttoned white blouse and strike poses in the Rochester university library with a copy of the collected T.S. Eliot. I can imagine her looking over her glasses at me looking over my reading glasses at her legs. Well--- as long as she wouldn't whisper "Gerontion" to me:

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.

Ms. Chang called me once long ago, when she was a wicked high-school girl, and had me read Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" to her. I do remember that. I think I wanted her to read "The Waste Land" to me. I've always liked it that Eliot first planned to call the poem "He Do The Police In Different Voices"--- which immediately makes me think of having the poem read aloud in a thick Jamaican accent.

Eliot's wife made him excise lines from the section "A Game of Chess":

And we shall play a game of chess
The ivory men make company between us
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

Viv Eliot read something into the lines about her own tortured marital life. The image of "the ivory men" disturbed her. That would be worth knowing about.

I went off to the coffeeshop by the university early this morning. I sat there and tried to read stories from Murakami's "After the Quake". Two men at the next table alternated between their BlackBerries and talking about investment in Dubai. They bickered over the number of Muslim immigrants in France and whether Dubai was leveraging its oil profits properly. Well, the university here still turns out petroleum engineering grads and MBAs with an especial interest in oil markets. All I could think of was that, yes, France needs to seriously limit Muslim immigration and seriously insist on assimilation...and that Krystina at yes_please vur' much needs to tell me about her own Hotel Sex experiences in Dubai.

I'd seen "c'est top!" as the equivalent of the way girls in Vienna always chirped "Super!". And so there's "je kiffe grave!" as the equivalent of "way cool!" or "I love it!". Or so I'm told. I can't think of anyone to ask right now. Alessandra's friend a1icey has locked up her journal. Audrey at cadenceme has run off for the summer--- oddly, to Dubai. I don't know anyone who's been in Paris recently. Ms. soft_melodies has vanished, too--- someone who might know Parisian slang.

The weekend Wall Street Journal says that the American expat scene in Paris is dead, killed by a weak dollar and by the cultural changes in France itself. The article argues that, just as the Thatcher years (the "Big Bang") killed the older, more genteel Sloane Ranger world, Sarkozy's "modernised" Paris doesn't have room for the classic expat scene. The article hints that Buenos Aires may be the new expat city. Well, Prague had its moment in the early Nineties, but it just lacked the carrying capacity for a large expat community. Buenos Aires is big enough--- that's true. And it has a large community of Lacanian analysts--- plus access to lots o' cheap prime rib. It's just hard for me to think of Buenos Aires as a literary city. What would expat life there be like? (Damn it, I miss the Austral, the mid-'90s Argentine currency: I loved the name...) Paris is maybe five or six hours from NYC or Atlanta by plane. Buenos Aires is...ten hours? Twelve hours? I know that Caterina used to fly down to Chile and the Argentine to go skiing with her trust-fund boyfriend in the early Nineties. But how long was the flight? I know that Audrey at cadenceme went to B.A. with her family and did a trek down into Patagonia. But--- did she have sex in Buenos Aires? Did she meet some moneyed Argentine and take him to her hotel bed? (Has shakeitfuckers ever done that on her own travels?) You can't have a real claim to a foreign city 'til you've had sex there.

So--- who'll be the first young American writer to do a Buenos Aires expat novel? Who'll do the Buenos Aires version of "A Moveable Feast"?

And...I suppose I do hope that various lovely readers and correspondents will update their City Lists for me--- lists of the cities where they've had sex... City Lists are always important. It's like the L Word Chart--- a map of one's Adventures.

I so want to read more of brine_wings' own stories of Amsterdam and Turkey. I want to know what parts of Europe Megs has claimed...

There are bikini girls down by the pool doing the thing of suntanning with tops off and hands covering their breasts. Lovely eye-candy--- dark-tanned Display Items. Lots o' frozen margaritas being consumed, lots o' daiquiris in styrofoam cups. Eye-candy is depressing in the end. I'm sure there's something in St. Augustine about that. Not so much an occasion of sin as an occasion of despair.

My brother called me yesterday to say that a cousin of ours was found dead. He's not someone I knew vur' well at all. I know he lived in a small town off to the west of the state and was a wholesale knife distributor. He had a child, a daughter of fourteen. He'd have been maybe forty, divorced for a few years. I suppose I last saw him ten years ago, at my mother's funeral. My brother is trying to collect relatives to go to the funeral, since my cousin lived a reclusive life and had no immediate family. I'm just not up for going--- not in the summer, not for a two-hour drive. It's a sad thing, true. One feels bad for his child. And the thought of dropping dead of undetermined causes at a home office desk at forty is...disturbing. All the more so in that he wasn't found for a couple of days. But I just don't want to go. I just don't feel part of anything.

Sarah McLachlan is singing on the Delerium CD. I remember hearing her first CD--- "Vox" ---when I was vur' young. I loved her voice, loved the lyrics on "Vox" and "Ben's Song". And of course I developed a major crush on Sarah McLachlan herself--- see the video for "Into the Fire" ---and all the more so when she cropped her hair short. She has a brilliant late-night voice. And I do love the Delerium track she did for "Silence".

Holiday weekends are just vur' depressing. I can read, true. And sleep. But I can't go down to the pool. I can't be around groups of people having fun. And I'm ashamed to be in a pool full of bikini girls. My presence only takes away from their beauty.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo can do summer trips with her friends. She can even take her cat in its carrier. Ms. Chang is suntanning naked today aboard a sailboat somewhere in the Keys. I don't fly, of course. And I'm afraid to risk driving. There's no girl to travel with me, anyway--- and what's the point of a vacation if there's no romance involved...? I envy Lissy at emigree the ability (and determination) to travel to see her soldier-lover. I don't know if she's actually going with him to Tokyo at New Year's. But it does depress me and leave me envious that a lovely girl of twenty can go to Japan with a lover. After all--- I can't quite get up the energy/money to go fifteen minutes to the hip sushi bar south of the university. I do envy Lissy on multiple levels.

One does think about change--- about how people change. Alessandra at bel_ebat tells me that in the Year Five she was vur' much on-edge and someone who scared her friends. Ms. Flox at besideserato went through the whole Rock Bottom/A.A. thing a few years ago, and became a model Stepford Wife as well. Ms. Chang went from Sexual Adventuress in her 2005/2006 university year to being married and monogamous. So of course I do wonder about girls like Lissy at emigree. Lissy writes that she'll never marry and that she doesn't see the point in long-term monogamy. And yet...isn't that just the kind of thing girls say at twenty who'll be contentedly living with a lover by twenty-two or twenty-four? Even the other Melissa--- Melissa at kraftig_bewegt ---may accept treatment for her more dramatic self-destructive habits and move in with or marry the Polish boy who's desperately in love with her...if only to make tormenting him easier. Piper at PipersPlace (D-Land) is giving up swinging for married monogamy--- she no longer feels "right" doing that, even though her fiance is the same guy who was her partner in swinging for years.

Well--- there is this fact. Girls bring me their Stories or tell me their Adventures for a while. Just like they used to see me as a temporary Older Lover--- a thrill ride at a theme park. They could be Wicked for the length of the ride, then walk away safely. I'm no longer able to be part of girls' Stories, and now all the girls who tell me Stories are leaving, too--- walking away to a world of "normal" and "appropriate" behaviour, to monogamy and morality. I've long since ceased being of physical value. Now I'm no longer even of value as a voice.

I know nothing about Buenos Aires. I don't speak Spanish. I'd have been happier if Prague or Budapest had become the next big expat city. Or even Tallinn. But in Buenos Aires at least I'd never have to look at reminders of the Eastern Europe whose history I used to study. And there's prime rib. In Buenos Aires I'd be...alone. But alone by choice. Here I'm alone even on the aether.