NP Labor Day Weekend Meditation

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Another $40.00 book! Are these prices going up and is the
quality of books going down? And why is there a tax on
books? Damn, ship to Typee--
"There was no foreclosures or mortgages, no protested notes,
no bills
 payables, no debts of honor in Typee; no unreasonable
tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no
duns of any description; no poor relations, everlastingly
occupying the spare bedchamber, and diminishing the elbow
room at the family table; no destitute widows with their
children starving on the cold charities of the world; no
beggars; no debtor's prisons; no proud and hard-hearted
nabobs in Typee; or to sum all in one word--no MONEY!"

Of course I'll want my Hammer (this computor) and a
Riverside Shakespeare.

I am going to write up something on "The Circular Ruins" and
the "Golem" in Pynchon. I know this won't be popular, but
Pynchon's use of the term gives me some room to squirm. 

TF

s~Z wrote:
> 
> To Whoever is Reading Me
> By JORGE LUIS BORGES
> 
> You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
> those powers that preordain your destiny,
> the certainty of dust? Is not your time
> as irreversible as that same river
> where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
> of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
> which you will not read--on it, already written,
> the date, the city, and the epitaph.
> Other men too are only dreams of time,
> not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
> the universe is, like you, a Proteus.
> Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
> doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
> Know that in some sense you are already dead.
> --TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY
> ALASTAIR REID
> 
> >From "Selected Poems," by Jorge Luis Borges,
> edited by Alexander Coleman (Viking: 478 pp., $40)