now some words from Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's new book ...

... before I lend it to M. to read:

Toufic has a new book out, by the way, Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You, which DeWitt was going to order for you on Amazon ... While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or Love Dies, I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead stop and reveals the occasional natural immobilization of the living as merely a variety of movement; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (for example, lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: Am I in a film?; as well as a significant number of other anomalies. This new book contains two or three things I am dying to tell its readers ...

On page 58 you come across for vampires animal flesh is chewing gum which you had presciently underlined before you met DeWitt, and there is the mother of all footnotes, footnote 211

With the concomitant implied blankness, suggested absence of any elements in the section that will function as a matte: there are no Palestinians ("In Israel today it is the custom officially to refer to the Palestinians as "so-called Palestinians," which is a somewhat gentler phrase than Golda Meir's flat assertion in 1969 that the Palestinians did not exist" (Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 2nd ed. (New York:Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 4–5); "The Zionists made it their claim that Britain was blocking their greater penetration of Palestine. Between 1922 and 1947 the great issue witnessed by the world in Palestine was not, as a Palestinian would like to imagine, the struggle between natives and colonists, but a struggle presented as being between Britain and the Zionists. The full irony of this remarkable epistemological achievement—... the sheer blotting out from knowledge of almost a million natives—is enhanced when we remember that in 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine and its population of Jews consisted of a fraction of the total Palestinian population" (ibid., 23)) Jean Genet relates in his Prisoner of Love (page 24) a game of cards he witnessed in which the participants, Palestinian fighters, played, gambled without having cards in their hands.

You're gambling with no cards in your hands.

–Your Name Here, NY, Dalkey Archive Press, 2025, p. 417

But look. What does Jameson (Frederic, not John) have to say? Neurosis is simply this boring imprisonment of the self in itself, crippled by its terror of the new and unexpected, carrying its sameness with it wherever it goes, so that it has the protection of feeling, whatever it might stretch out its hand to touch, that it never meets anything but what it knows already. In other words, forget it. In other words, step into the floating world.

I say: Why don't we go somewhere, do something?

He says: I'm supposed to be meeting my friend Wlad at Gorlitzer Tor at 11, maybe some other day?

–Ibid., p. 565

... when I was at Gorlitzer Tor just before. And, in fact, Your Name Here begins with lessons in Arabic, which I had been learning while in الرياض before we were shipped out, because the neighbours' party was gatecrashed by a pedophile in diapers. And you know that incident with the drone attack in Riyadh while we were there?

False flag.

Saw the smoke, from the Diplomatic Quarter. Must have been someone in the American Embassy passing a wastepaper bin with an idea,

Hey, I'll just drop this lit cigarette in there!

That'll make things seem ... a little more ... justified.