Deadline on my Dante book got moved up for complicated reasons having to do with some unexpected changes at the publisher’s. Manuscript is due on Monday. I have been writing thousands of words daily for a while now. I have about 20,000 words to go. My brains are leaking out of my ears. I wish to associate myself with this poem by Ezra Pound:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.”

Well, I won’t have any left by the time this is over, so that solves that problem.