Usually, one assistant comes into the bedroom with a pot of Indonesian coffee (the brew, six hundred dollars a pound and DHL’d from England, where it is rumored to be a favorite of the Royal Family, is sifted from the dung of wild civets) while a second factotum presents me with a freshly bound volume containing selections from every blog and Twitter and Facebook entry that has mentioned my name in the past twenty-four hours—hundreds of pages, with “BRUCE WAGNER” in convenient boldface—but even this lost its allure.

factotum (n) : a servant employed to do a variety of jobs – Best Seats

Proustian inner monologues, belletristic Godardian ruminations, and Warholian stares at sofas aren’t feasible options.

belletristic (adj) : written and regarded for aesthetic value rather than content – Bordwell: The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 107

”And sometimes you run into reshoots and additions of special effects fixes that you just didn’t imagine needing when you did the original budget, but that’s not so unusual today, and I wouldn’t say it’s out of control commensurate with what we’re hoping the film delivers.”

commensurate (adj) : corresponding in size or degree or extent – Tucker and Chan work for laughs

Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest.

palimpsest (n) : a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible – New Yorker: What Else is New?

The only fact marring the sepulchral seriousness of this conversation is that it is occurring as we sit side by side on full-size Western saddles, mounted on poles, facing the bar.

sepulchral (adj) 1: of or relating to a sepulchre; 2: gruesomely indicative of death or the dead [syn: charnel, ghastly]; 3: suited to or suggestive of a grave or burial [syn: funereal] – Doonesbury’s War

It’s also a rank-and-file one—to the degree that journalists at The Wall Street Journal, the Times, The New Yorker, Slate, and the Columbia Journalism Review, sinecure holders at the nation’s journalism schools, and the biographer Tina Brown, that paragon of journalistic virtue (who jumped in to say that Murdoch’s owning the Journal would be ”a horror show”), are rank-and-file.

sinecure (n) 1: a benefice to which no spiritual or pastoral duties are attached; 2: an office that involves minimal duties – Murdoch’s Private Game

Lynch himself uses the downtime between takes to confer with ADs and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate into the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively around the camera truck’s technical fray, sometimes holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny.

micturate (v) : eliminate urine [syn: make, urinate, piddle, puddle, piss, pee, pee-pee, make water, relieve oneself, take a leak, spend a penny, wee, wee-wee, pass water] – One Of The Relatively Picayune ’Lost Highway’ Scenes I Got To Be On The Set Of

Each day brings another investigative story about Murdoch using his media properties to boost his business interests, reward his friends and punish his rivals, and each story carries the message that this man will destroy the Journal by using its hugely respected news pages as his personal fief.

fief (n) : a piece of land held under the feudal system [syn: feoff] – Exclusive: Rupert Murdoch Speaks

Mr. Loxley said speaking English correctly allows ”people to look at you like you’re a leader and your ideas count.”

Well howdy! Do y’all wanna be leaders? Come on in and learn American – for a fee, of course.

Wherever possible, Hitchens writes as an oppositionist, which means that his panegyrics are delivered in the form of a bodyguard’s shove against intruders; and in this case he had decided on a book-length riposte to Alain de Botton’s ”How Proust Can Change Your Life.”

panegyric (n) : a formal expression of praise [syn: encomium, eulogy, paean, pean] – He Knew He Was Right