Like most of her kind, my cat practices the discipline of progressive napping. A connoisseur of surfaces, she must methodically try each one for flavor, texture and exposure to light. Approaching slowly with the tip of the tongue, she dandles her head awhile and then gets down to business with four paws and belly. "Get out, get out," I whispered in the long afternoon, "here be tree beasts on bicycles, melting pitch and tinfoil meteors and you are missing it all." In truth though I was wracked with more than a few teaspoons of jealousy. She cares not at all for strangeness but makes her own every which way. Given some orange walls and pink elephants, she finds invisible hands and keeps God-knows-what in very small caves below the raspberry bushes and other places that I will never see.

     Once, long ago, a plague of insomnia swept the city.  No one could sleep for days (and nights) on end and folks went about in their business clothes looking like staved dogs, their cheeks drooping and eyelids at half-mast. People were married in those days with their names transformed into spoonerisms, Hilippa Partfelt recently to Forge Gaston and such (the fault of sleepy clerks of course) and some important firms, in desperation, erected hastily-constructed napping rooms full of flimsy cots that smelled of sweat and sweet cologne. Of course too there were those opportunists, like in any misfortune, that took hold of the plague and shook it to see what money might fall out. Bars advertized late, late, late night specials and quack hypnotists and drug mongers promised to aid and abet oblivion. They say that some died for want of sleep but I have never been able to discover their names.
     Then the Slepy Yerdes came from somewhere. Some said they were another wave of madness and others were sure they would cure the city of sleeplessness. In back alleyways and abandoned storefronts they appeared, dark archways each with a smiling bust of Mercury above the door. Inside there were always, or so I'm told, deep curtains around the places windows should have been, small three-legged tables and, no matter which door you entered by, a number of your friends standing to welcome you with a glass of something or other. Over many nights, inside the slepy yerdes (or maybe it was actually just one), novels were written, poetry recited extempore, love affairs consummated and plans plotted. Some people knew where to find them every night they say, while others stalked them through the shadows for weeks without finding a thing. Most people say now they never existed and scholars have explained the extraordinary number of new works of art from the plague years in other ingenious ways. Still, if you look hard you can find some of the more bohemian city dwellers reminiscing about them in seedy bars even now, though their companions may look the other way. It's true that their stories fail to add up mostly, but they'll all tell you one thing for certain: when the plague finally passed the slepy yerdes disappeared entirely, along with anyone who remained inside.

Translators are alchemists or portrait painters, offering a an image of the source-text or perhaps of its author, or they are actors, directors, or composers, or musical performers or improvisers, or conjurors, diplomats, linguistic mediators, or cannibals. This last, Else Vieira insists, is meant only in the best of senses: “not a note of furious aggression, but rather one of irreverently amorous devouring” (which is to some extent reassuring).

-Nicholas Round, "Translation and Its Metaphors"

Witnesses at the Eichman trial (6 likes, 1 dislike) invites speculation into dichotomy.

There is so much black and white in this picture, though all, the prosecutor, Eichman with his retreating hair (the twist of his mouth and over-sized glasses holds the face together) wobble in grays. Is dislike the same as detestation, as fist shaking, as fascism? Is liking the embrace of Zionism, the death detailed in halting translation, the old men, balding too, seated in judgment? There is a certain clarity to these judgments, each one a glass box, each closed fist with up-held thumb a Caesar in the ring. How shall my gladiator die? Ad ludos by trident or net.

Moving downwards (-X, -Y in the Cartisian Plane, no surprise) are the comments that I cannot read. They are filled with familiars, the neo-Nazis and Jewish conspiracies one has come to expect but not read into.

I've told my students that arguments must have two sides, not the illusion of two sides, up or down. There are two insistent thumbs. Why is neither going my way?

A video of puppies playing (7,679 likes, 283 dislikes) presents a less ambiguous counter-example. Some people just can't bear to see young things, knowing their chances of growing up.

The brow's clear gaslights burning blue
On the point of a chin, Oberon ascending
A column riddled cloud-like, is my beloved's neck, a graceful pillar, a pillory, a steely blancmange, a fair fruitcake, mutable ironmongery.
And in my beloved's breast, amazed circuitry, as many paths as might entwine the sun
And in my beloved's waist, starred furnishings, a flambeau, a fascicle of nebulae
And on my beloved's flanks, a thicket of intrigue, a mirror of virtuous turnings
And o, my beloved's knees, Pražský Orloj, geared depths intricate and infinite
My beloved is a mutable fire, a thin-cased frequency, a tabernacle of whirring, a incandescent colossus, a tranquil Galatea, a frantic mimicry, a thick-skinned homunculus, a deathly antiphrasis, casement of dreams, a feigned humanity.

Oh dear, my beloved is a robot

Amazing.

We should all be grammatical vampires.  It's much better to suck dry the wet feet and beats running through columns and constructions. Much better, that is, than the alternative. Go and build up that blue-veined palace (a pretty place, though a cold one), because marmoreal praxis makes perfect. I love your body, politic, this I do swear.

By the by, there is only one remedy when one dreams, quite prosaically, of couches. If you know what it is, tell me, please.

Lilac
Jonquil
Tulip
Varigated Pink
Cypress and Marigold

the end.

It was there I saw them, at a banquet hall in the middle of a blustery fall.  There were all there, Bob the hermeneutic gardener, Frankie tender of numinous attics, Raffle the Inscrutable Reader of Text, a few professors and many cats. They said, "your style mostly works for us, but go easy on the adverbs and shun passive constructions."  I said, "quiet, quiet! I can't please everyone."  "You don't have to," they said, "just us."  Then we all laughed, 'cause it was a in-joke after all.  After dinner they put on a show for me spelling out verses from the Bible and we wandered out into Circe's garden to eat clementines and bask in the glow. We divined one anothers' near past and future present from the cracks in waxy peels and  in basins of soft cheese.  Pillowed on someone's thigh, I busted open another tender sphere and inside found my fortune.  It said: "the time is now."  What a silly fruit.  The time is always now.