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Other things I’d like to tetrate: Is the chair I’m in Biedermeier? Who’s Biedermeier? Or is it Empire? Whose? Louis XIV was the furniture king? Louis XVI was the king whose only memorable furniture was the guillotine? This desk, what type of wood is it? Deskwood? How to pick a drawer’s lock? How to determine whether a drawer is stuck or merely a glued cosmetic forgery? “Casement” windows? Or “casedment”? Is this ceiling “coffered”? Can floors or walls be “coffered”? Are the parquet plat inlays swastikas or is it me who’s bent? Swastika is “hakenkreuz” and the plural is “hakenkreuze” but am I pronouncing either correctly? Who’s the saint in that painting holding his own severed head as ink spouts out from the mouth? What are the pedals of this warped discordant piano called? How to determine whether a pendulum clock is broken or just unwound? How to wind it? No fireplace? No electronics so the remote I rummaged under the divan cushion is for what? That chest? Camphor chest? “Shoji” screens? Or “joshi”? Lacquer, how? Is there anything creepier than the Reich’s kitsch penchant for the Orient? Are the three idols made out of crystal all Buddhas, or is only one of them the Buddha and the others Laozi and Confucius? Which one is wearing the hat?

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—I have groceries now NO MORE FASTFOOD! NO MORE MC’D’S! STICK WITH RICE! PLATES @ 12:00/8:00!

—the Visa’s been rejected by Deutsche Bank/Commerzbank/Volksbank/Berliner Sparkasse (multiple locations)

—who are Balk’s contacts in Berlin (besides Maleksen)?

—contact Balk or Maleksen via Myung but how?

—better to go online at café or library or try by disposaphone?

—destroy Principal’s passport or just dispose of it?

—hold onto Principal’s passport

—clean up this shitpit

—pawn the flat’s antiques at pawnshop, or “flohmarkt”

—wait until dark to take out the trash (“restmüll,” the rest of the bins in the courtyard are recycling)

—rejected at ReiseBank/Western Union (multiple locations)

—€118.62 left

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From: a@szlayliteristic.com

To: jcomphen@aol.com

Wed, Sept 28, 2011, 11:37 PM

checking

Dear J, stop reading this and get back to work. Two things are bothering me: should I be opening emails with “Dear,” like a letter, and 2.) should I be worried about teensy mental slips like signs of aging? (like not flipping that formula around—it should read: should I be worried about signs of aging like teensy mental slips …) I hope your concerns are slightly more—slightly more—I hope you’re writing. Give me news if you can but if you can’t Just whatever you do don’t come back to NY, where I haven’t been able to sleep so Just up on the roof heeling the tar, clinking two rocks against the glass. The brownstones from here are green Achsa’s settled into Princeton. But of course with her there’s the car issue and she bitches that I’m trying to revert the insurance. She asks me if I know what the payments are. I don’t know how to answer, besides obviously I do, you spoiled bratty bitch of my own raising. Her major will be Econ, which is now called operations research and financial engineering?! or is it !? Mir’s loss was my gain. Now my loss is some asshole fratboy’s gain, but she’s not dating or wouldn’t tell me. For the Econ major most students take a psychology minor. But she didn’t say that. She said something like more than 60% take a psychology minor. Over the phone. Even with the car she don’t come home no mo no mo no mo no mo.

Now, Rach. I can’t have this. Fucking Martinize and Simonize (tetrate it) the Eisen lawyers call. Not to mention the actor guy calls twice a week and last time according to Seth this boy who’s been on phones giving Lisabeth a break—a break from what?—he even tried to pitch a children’s book, a fucking series of children’s books, because, the actor guy said, Seth said, he understands “such things are pitched in series.”! Josh, I can’t have it. I’m your agent, not your personal assistant. And I’m certainly not this kid power forward anymore running pick and rolls like Carmelo Anthony last season (they’re going to regret the lockout, the players arguing over salary caps and revenue sharing while their youths tick away). Don’t get me wrong, I understand what we’re doing and why I have to tie myself and all the office up in phone lies, saying we’ve got no idea where you are, no idea when you’re coming back, but now I’m realizing, with you not responding, it’s true, I don’t, I’m worrying.

You need to get a lawyer (because I’m not a lawyer and my dead parents are on line 2 saying “we told you so.”). You’re going to need Irv Feyer, or maybe like a Spence Rich. I’ll think on which, you’ll think on which, GET BACK TO ME and I’ll handle it. Rach is trying to serve you with papers, and because she can’t or for whatever other fucked delusional reason she’s trying to shame you with this illiterate blog of hers and anything you can do to address it on your own will just exacerbate the situation. Do Not Fucking Comment. Keep doing what you’re doing and DON’T CONFRONT. We’ll get a lawyer to handle everything and make the removal of the blog a stipulation. But only a lawyer can tell you if that’s viable.

The other reason I’m getting personal and legalistic is this: the check, first half, just came. I knew it was coming and I knew we had to decide what to do with it and trust me I considered every option. We need, the two of us, to talk, and if you end up retaining either Feyer or Rich as counsel as I strongly advise, we need to talk with him. Because it’s my sense, again, not as a lawyer, that as the contract was executed and the half advance was sent before a divorce or even papers were served (it’s not like I’m in the position to tell Finn how to time his checks, it’s not like Finn after your fiasco with him in California would put himself out with “the bookkeepers”), it’s my amateur sense that this counts as earned income that Rach can claim, because this is NY, babele, up to 50% of, especially given indiscretions I’ll spare the both of us, and the fact that she’d supported you financially for years, or like a decade. A judge would bankrupt you and a lady judge wouldn’t leave you enough for funeral expenses. I was hoping you’d patch all this up or had been straighter with me.

So, two options to consider (I haven’t taken my commission yet, I haven’t even deposited the check): we can be what Miri used to call “home kosher” on this—meaning we ate whatever on our own but in our parents’ house it was milk separate from meat and never a crustacean—and you get a divorce and only after the divorce the agency cuts you a check and you keep low like the mafia after a heist and don’t flash foxes and Caddys, or we go full on treyf and impatient and you go now and open a new account with a new bank abroad and I’ll have the money routed there and we pray (I have European junketing this autumn)—again, we can discuss this, even with Feyer and maybe Rich.

What else I wouldn’t bother touching on unless I felt you might have a sense of it and would be willing to break the “radio silence” and please enlighten me. I’m also a bit trepidatious like I’m some Hollywood Adam Shale about to be popped by TMZ saying something racist and then I’ll have to go on the Today Show to count up how many nonwhite friends I have. I have 12 nonwhite friends is how many (though Skip Gates has to count for like 10 on his own—my numbers were higher before Octavio Paz died).

But over the last two weeks, or when I went to the Fulton banya I first noticed it, mid-September, wherever I went I was noticing this Asian person. It’s more with Asian women and I’ll never understand this and I bet I’m not unique in this regard but I can always tell from behind if a woman’s Asian. Even with the hair bunned up. It’s not like I’ve spent so much time parsing why, but it’s consistently true, from behind, and I’m only secondarily an ass man, I can always get them. It might be just how they hold themselves. But I won’t get into it. I hate this pc shit. I hate that I’ve been cowered into this tapdance—I swear I’m so concerned for Asian welfare, I dropped Jolly Roger acid and 4F’d the VC, which at the time still meant VietCong.