The rectum, redux

I've just finished Papillon, which described a reasonable amount of fiddling around in one's rectum for one's money cache. Now reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, where in under 100 pages the protagonist has first been advised that if he wishes to smuggle, he ought to put his goods up his "fig," and then has been used for an unwilling demonstration of a glister (i.e., clyster) technique.

The return of accoucheur

And again in Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock: A Story of 21st Century America.

As--

As--I constructed, then deleted, a sentence using the word "ramify." After writing the entry below, I opened a new e-book, Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. On the second page I find "...the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by cold storages, root cellars, disused coal chutes and storm cellars."

The induction of psychosis

Psychosis can be thought of as a crisis of over-meaningfulness. Faces in the leaves, words in faces, organisms comprised of clouds. Sometimes people with a vulnerability to superfluous resonance may be tipped into a crisis of significance by the coincidence of signs. Simultaneously reading Leaves of Grass, Ulysses, An Outcast of the Islands, and Swann's Way via DailyLit, I receive an e-mailed page or so of each a day. All (picked more or less randomly) are poetic, descriptive, image-laden. In a random day's segments, there are overlapping tones and moods. Sometimes I couldn't tell you which I'm reading. There is significant overlap in theme and content. A few days ago, Willems lost his canoe to the tide. Today, Stephen Dedalus's ashplant is taken by the tide. The word accoucheur has appeared repeatedly. Since I am not disposed toward psychosis, this is pleasurable, not frightening, not a message urgent to involve me in itself.

Another publication

A small book for which I've written the introductory essay was published this week. It probably doesn't matter in the realm of academic coup-counting that tallies scholarly productivity, but then, that's not what I had in mind when I agreed to write it.