Taj Mahal beer this afternoon--- and Czechvar, and a few Singhas. Singapore mei fun there at a tiny Chinese restaurant. I feel satiated and a bit hungover. I may just stretch out on the couch and watch "Trouble Every Day". My architect friend in San Francisco reminded me about "The Governess"; I may watch that again.

Sat at the coffeeshop this morning and finished re-reading "Circle Round the Sun". Tomorrow morning I'll go there again and read Caroline Weber's "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution" or maybe re-read Horace Freeland Judson's "Eighth Day of Creation".

Co-eds at the coffeeshop--- short shorts with black tights, cowboy boots or Frye boots, hooded sweatshirts or plaid flannel shirts. Too many of them with new MacBook Pros. Too many with that Saturday morning post-sex look.

I'd told Trish at kissingverlaine about Philip Glazebrook's "Journey to Kars". It is a favourite travel book about the old Ottoman northeast. I was trying to remember the title of the sequel--- "Journey to Khiva" ---and a Google link to the Guardian let me know that Glazebrook had died in July of the Year Seven, aged seventy. That's sad. I liked his two travel books a lot. The obit says that he did two novels set in the early 19th-c. Levant--- "Captain Vinegar's Commission" and "Gate at the End of the World". I suppose I'll try to find them. I've no idea if Trish at kissingverlaine is a fan of travel lit and picaresque novels, but they're what I grew up on.

I wrote Lacey to point out that Rick Springfield is now sixty. We'd seen him once in concert a long time ago. 'Til Tuesday opened--- Aimee Mann young and alluring. Lacey wore a very short white twill mini from Commander Salamander and looked like the wicked high school girl she was. She's seen Rick Springfield on "Californication" this fall, and she's amazed and baffled that he's sixty. My architect friend told me that when she saw Rick on "Californication" last Sunday she recalled using his image for Solitary Vice purposes when she was in junior high. She did that again last Sunday, she said: still handsome and wet-making. But now that she knows his age, she's having...Oedipal qualms. This is an issue I might ask both Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Trish at kissingverlaine about.

«Nous naissons tous fous. Quelques-uns le demeurent.» I've never quoted that to a girl in bed, or across a table at a late-night nomiya. I suppose I should remedy that.

Shannan Click and Eniko Minalik and Masha Novoselova--- Cynthia Gralla has sent me photos of all three. New vat-grown high-cheeboned girls to sigh over with Miss Ginny. And I really do need to get Ms. Gralla's take on Hodson's "Circle Round the Sun".

Einsturzende Neubauten doing "Magyar Energia"... Great after-hours-club industrial-dance song. Make a note: Miss Ginny all in black, a hidden club in Chelsea or Tokyo...

Let's see... Peregrine Hodson read Oriental languages (Japanese, Farsi) at university. Lived in Japan for a year or so. Qualified as a barrister. Went to Afghanistan (age...thirty?) and wrote "Under a Sickle Moon". Then...working in London, then back to Tokyo with an investment bank. What I want to know is...when did he learn to do investment analysis or sell securities? Did his bank run him through a quick training program? Or was this Oxbridge old boys' network--- someone who'd been at school with Perry bringing him into the bank just on the strength of that? (After all--- Wallace Breem got on as law librarian at Inner Temple after having done...well...five years as a Corps of Guides officer on the Northwest Frontier... all based on a school tie) I really do have to think of ways to do something with a PhD and a JD that will get me...far, far, far away from here.

I'm not on the Skinny Island tonight, or at a table at a cafe in Montreal or Tallinn Old Town. I have a hooded Yale sweatshirt, but not a life or a night to go with it. What I am or have will never be as good as certain co-eds with certain laptops and certain sweatshirts.

I'll go pour a glass of Ardmore and go out on the deck and stare at my keitai and wish that I had Voices. Or any sense of belonging. Or value.