Now I go to a writing space, the Brooklyn Writing Space, that’s the most productive place for me to be. It’s a 24-hour access carrel situation, with no Internet access.

carrel (n) : small individual study area in a library [syn: carrell, cubicle, stall] – source: Stefan Schaefer on “Confess”

You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports – following the right steps to become the ”Einstein of Economics” or the ”next Darwin” rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.

funambulist (n) : an acrobat who performs on a tightrope or slack rope – source: The Idea of Negative and Iatrogenic Science

It is Paasilinna’s gift in this gem of a novel (in Will Hobson’s pellucid translation from the French of Anne Colin du Terrail) to wring humor from the most desperate of circumstances.

pellucid (adj) 1: transmitting light; able to be seen through with clarity 2: (of language) transparently clear; easily understandable [syn: limpid, lucid, luculent, crystal clear, perspicuous] – Call of the Wild

It can be made even better by a drink or two, as Nicholson shows when he wanders around Manhattan, trying, in a doff of the hat to psychogeography, to figure out whether certain streets in the Village outline a martini glass.

doff (v): to take from one’s own person: remove, take off – Walk This Way

In the case of lines far more lubriciously explicit than these, Wills embraces the Roman poet’s copious Latin obscenities in tumescent Anglo-Saxon translations, and in this sense certainly conveys the authentic Martial.

tumescent (adj): 1. Somewhat tumid. 2. Becoming swollen; swelling. – ‘My Poetry Is Filthy — but Not I’

In both their systems, the interpreter–the philosopher for Hegel, the analyst for Lacan–is granted absolute, unchallengeable authority. Most people are necessarily in thrall to appearances, and thereby to the deceptions of power; but the interpreter is somehow immune to them, and can singlehandedly recognize and expose the hidden meanings, the true processes at work in History or in the Unconscious. This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be allowed to speak for himself.

sacerdotal (adj) 1: of or relating to a belief in sacerdotalism 2: associated with the priesthood or priests [syn: priestly, hieratic, hieratical] – The Deadly Jester

This brings us to the basic thematic difference between Day For Night and Irma Vep—Truffaut’s film is largely about moviemaking as a microcosm for life itself, while Vep is largely about the cinema (and the cinema icon) as a cynosure of desire.

cynosure (n) 1: something that provides guidance (as Polaris guides mariners) 2: something that strongly attracts attention and admiration – The ”Day For Night”/”Irma Vep” taste test

She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that ”Americans are cravin’ that straight talk,” but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor — not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: ”I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.”

spoliation (n) 1: the intentional destruction of a document or an alteration of it that destroys its value as evidence 2: the act of stripping and taking by force – New Yorker: Verbage

Though the piece was not to appear for another year, three weeks after Labor Day I received a printout of the 7,000-word story and a letter explaining that he was likely to be ”a truculent editee.”

truculent (adj) 1: defiantly aggressive, 2: aggressively hostile – McSweeney’s: Memories of David Foster Wallace

Likewise the mind: our meagre reasoning capacity is an afterthought, spatchcocked on to the ancestral systems that have the reins where practical decision-making is concerned.

spatchcock (v) 1: prepare for eating if or as if a spatchcock; 2: interpolate or insert (words) into a sentence or story – Evolutionary Shortcomings