I know that sounds a bit over-Biblical, but it's literally true. Before there's any book -- even most novels -- there's research. Finding that magic stuff that not only corroborates what you're already thinking, but leads you in new directions and to new insights. The process of writing is a process of discovery.

But before you can start writing, you find yourself -- I find myself, anyway -- sifting through gigabytes of raw data looking for those amazing bits you can only hope are somewhere out there waiting for the right query, which has to be framed in the special jargon of the field you're just learning about.

For instance, when I was writing Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, the discovery of "public journalism" and "cause marketing" -- phrases with very specific meanings, phrases I'd never encountered before -- changed the whole direction of the book.

Of course I used Google for this research. And you can bet I also used Highbeam Research for a deeper level of information archeology -- words you may have noticed elsewhere on this page -- only it was called eLibrary back then. A little further down, I'll demonstrate how I researched some of the core concepts for the book. But first, the de rigueur digression du jour...

Many readers of Gonzo commented that the notes were the best part of the book. Well, OK, I think I remember one person saying that. But I wholeheartedly agreed, so that makes two. Unfortunately, in marking up the text version to put the first couple chapters on the web, my will and energy forsook me before I could get to adding the endnotes. In other words, I was too damn lazy.

Happily, I am not now forced to confront my moral failings in this regard, as Amazon has helpfully added a powerful function to many of its pages -- a bibliographic listing of references, with links to the particular pages on which these references occur. This hyperlinking is beyond anything available in conventional bibliographies. In some cases, a second listing is provided of other books that refer to the book you're looking into. These additions seem to have gone largely unremarked, which is in itself remarkable, as they constitute an invaluable resource for serious readers and researchers.

The endnotes for Gonzo begin here (there are two pages). The listings look like this:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Front Matter, and page 154
• Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World by Benjamin Barber
  • page 50, and Back Matter
• The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger
  • page 46, and Back Matter
• Knowledge and Social Capital: Foundations and Applications by Eric Lesser
  • page 146, and Back Matter

The "front matter," "back matter" and page-number references link to the corresponding scanned pages of Gonzo Marketing. The book names link to the books I referenced. Following are some of the core concepts in Gonzo, along with a couple-three examples of the kinds of sources I went looking for when I was writing it.

cause marketing

Cause-related marketing, which triggers a donation to a nonprofit organization with the purchase of a product or service, epitomizes enlightened marketing. Of all the media in the marketing mix, cause marketing is the only one that concurrently benefits consumers, society and businesses.

These days, purchasing decisions are often based on how a consumer feels about a company. Research proves this: 76% of consumers would be likely to switch to a brand associated with a good cause, according the Cone/Roper Cause-Related Marketing Trends Report.

from: Business, society share interests by Les Ukman
source: USA Today, 6 August 1998

gonzo journalism

Self-proclaimed inventor of "gonzo" journalism, Hunter Thompson combines lurid tales of his personal life, some of them conceivably true, with often exceedingly shrewd political analysis. An example is his 1973 account of George McGovern's doomed Presidential bid in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

He did not scant his own heroic imbibement of any handy alcohol, his driving at high speeds under the influence of same, or his sniffing, snorting, smoking or swallowing marijuana, heroin, Quaaludes, and pills identified only by color. Images of violence freely floated from the man's psyche to his typewriter and from that abused instrument to the printed page. Nevertheless, Fear and Loathing is, on rereading, a more incisive chronicle of the 1972 campaign than any produced by its author's unhallucinated colleagues.

from: Generation of Swine (book review) by Robert Lekachman
source: The New Leader, 28 November 1988

social capital

[Robert] Putnam declines to call this a national crisis, for this sort of thing fluctuates, yet he does see signs that "social capital" - the connections among individuals - has crumbled since the golden postwar years and particularly during the past 25 years....

The Internet, some believe, may emerge as a major player in the reknitting process....

"I'm optimistic that we could use the Internet to increase our connections," he says, "but there's also a risk that it could become isolating, just another glowing screen that we spend time watching."

The question, he says, is whether the Internet will become a really nifty telephone that facilitates person-to-person connections or a really nifty TV that centers on passive entertainment.

"For the most part we are investing in ways that would make the Internet a nifty TV," he says.

from: Bowling as a metaphor for American society (Interview with Robert Putnam)
source: The Christian Science Monitor, 19 July 2000

And so on. And on. And on. It's a long process. But great for writer's block, because you can extend the research phase indefinitely, and thus avoid the writing altogether. As I know only too well. This is when it's probably best to get together with your research assistant for a heart-to-heart talk about your um goals...

In the usual case, that "H" grafik to the left will signal that what you're reading is a clip from an article located in the Highbeam Research database. Ah, but as it so often happens here on CBO, this is not  the usual case. This time I want to talk a bit about Highbeam itself, and Chief Blogging Officer, and what these two entities have to do with each other, anyway. If anything. As I imagine many of you may have wondered from time to time.

But the first thing I want to say is that Highbeam did not put me up to writing this post. Nobody called me up or sent email saying, or by other means suggesting, "Chris, don't you think it's about time you plugged the holy hell outta the company that's paying you all this money we're paying you?" Adding perhaps for effect and to hammer the point home: "Chris? Eh?"

And that's related to the second and more important thing I want to say here, which is: since I started this blog, which is fully underwritten by Highbeam Research, no one from that company has ever told me what to write here. Or, more significantly, what not  to write. Not once.

...well, there was  one time, right back near the beginning, where it seemed that things might get a little dicey. And I thought, oh no, here we go! It never turned into anything, but it's amusing to recall. Do you mind? OK then, here's the story...

Looking back in the CBO archives, I see that my first official (i.e., non-beta-shakedown) post -- What's Going On Here? -- was posted on November 10 last year, two days before my birthday, as it happened, although that has nothing to do with the story and may be safely overlooked as being entirely irrelevant. Anyway, after I announced the existence of Chief Blogging Officer to an intimate secret list of my four or five thousand closest friends (you know who you are), several of my four or five actual  friends threw congratulatory links to CBO from their respective blogs. Two of these were my fellow Cluetrain Manifesto ["155 used & new from $1.34"] co-authors, David Weinberger and Doc Searls.

Now, much as I love Doc, this isn't about him, so just forget that part. No, it's about David, who has a certain snarky way with words. If you know the guy, you can read between the -- usually very funny -- lines. (He used to write for Woody Allen. True fact.) But if you don't know him, you could easily get the wrong idea. Which is what happened in the case at hand. On December 2nd, David wrote...

Would you make someone named RageBoy your Chief Blogging Officer? Look, fellas, you went into this with your eyes open. When the sick bastard turns on you, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Let's call that Graf #1. There was, immediately following, a Graf #2, which continued...

In short, congratulations! The blog is - rather brilliantly - not about HighBeam, the sponsor. It's about Chris burrowing into ideas he's interested in, incorporating information found via HighBeam. So, we get to watch over Chris' shoulder as he works on his next book, which has nothing to do with his sponsor. HighBeam shines the more brightly by being reflected through Chris' interests.

The insight reflected in Graf #2 derives in part from the fact that David is one of the 13 people who actually read Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices ["79 used & new from $0.47"], and thus saw (or, if you will, "got") the connection between what I wrote in that book and what I was doing here on Chief Blogging Officer. So, to needlessly over-explain, Graf #2 was the Content Graf. But not the Funny Graf.

Which do you suppose got picked up and propagated through the Blog-O-Sphere? Very good, Class! The correct answer is, of course, Graf #1.

And who picked up on David's funny line? It was Robert Scoble of Microsoft, whom the industry press was watching quite closely, as blogs had suddenly come on the corporate radar like a giant fleet of Chinese nuclear subs approaching San Francisco at top speed. Naturally, Robert just reposted Graf#1 and let the hyperlinks speak for themselves as to the provenance and let's call it "cultural spin" of the quote.

However, some harried journalist at InfoWorld picked up Robert's quoting of David's line as if it were Robert's own summary dismissal and dastardly damning opinion, not bothering to check the links to see What Was Really Going On. If you've been able to follow this twisted tale so far, you'll possibly understand why Highbeam got in touch pretty quick when they read the following -- context-free -- on InfoWorld...

Robert Scoble reacted in his blog to the appointment of Christopher Locke to Chief Blogging Officer of HighBeam Research.

Here is the post Scoble directed at HighBeam:

Would you make someone named RageBoy your Chief Blogging Officer? Look, fellas, you went into this with your eyes open. When the sick bastard turns on you, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

It's sorta like the kids' game, Telegraph. It gets funnier as the original communication gets more bent out of shape. In this case, the words remained the same, but the context -- or more accurately, lack thereof -- twisted the intended semantics 180.

However, to Kathy Greenler, Highbeam's superb (no kidding) vp marketing, the way this appeared on InfoWorld was cause for understandable alarm. She sent me mail saying something like: I dunno how your RageBoy persona is gonna work with this. Words to that general effect, indicating concern, right at the outset, that this whole CBO thing could be a fiasco on the level of a giant fleet of Chinese nuclear subs actually arriving in San Francisco Bay.

So I got on the phone and told her the story I've just told you. "No, no, this is a good thing. Really. Trust me. That David. Funny guy. Yeah, used to write for Woody Allen..." Kathy sounded a little skeptical at first, but she did get that it was more important what Weinberger and Scoble were saying than what InfoWorld thought they were saying. Welcome to blogging. All part of the fun!

In fact, it was this incident that led me to adopt the image of this somewhat perplexed business individual as CBO's informal mascot and logo...

But to get back to some sort of point here, aside from that one time, neither Kathy nor CEO Patrick Spain has ever even suggested what I should write or not write here. For instance, Patrick has never called me up and said, "Chris, I think I'd like to see you go more in-depth on this whole Nazi North Pole thing." Nor has Kathy ever sent me email saying: "Hey, could you whip us up a little something on pig farming?" Never. Not once. Nor have there been any "suggestions" as to topics I've touched on that were maybe just a tad  too much -- and Lord knows, I've pushed that envelope till she was like to bust.

For that, I'd like to thank Highbeam Research. Sincerely.

And all of you who've been reading this stuff. You've recharged my batteries more than you'll ever know.

Moreover, nota bene, I'd like to not-so-humbly hint to all the suits out there in CorporateLand who are wondering how they're going to "leverage" blogging in "their operations" that they should be paying close attention to what's going on just beneath the radar here on CBO. Those aren't Chinese subs, you fools! They're potential customers. But if you create blogs that don't tell stories, aren't the least bit funny or irreverent, but only read like thinly disguised advertising copy, then those potential customers are going to treat you like Chinese subs -- and send Tomahawk missiles straight up your RSS.

I guess I should point out that none of this should be taken as a slur against the great Chinese people or their advanced technology. Just a random metaphor that probably came from waking up this afternoon to some weird NPR report. Something about Taiwan, I think. I turned it off.

Remember how I promised just a couple days ago: no more "long ones" for awhile? Obviously, I lied. However, the response to my last brief post was overwhelmingly positive, and so -- BY POPULAR DEMAND -- I'll be serializing the first couple chapters of Gonzo Marketing here real soon. And the foregoing has foregone because Highbeam's hands-off policy with respect to this blog is hugely relevant to what that book was all about. More relevant today than when I turned in the final manuscript to Perseus Publishing exactly four years ago. And so...

Check the timestamp on this one. Damn. I need some-a this new stuff...

If Americans have become jittery about popping pills to treat their everyday ills, you would hardly know it from the optimism surrounding Sepracor Inc. On Dec. 16, the Marlborough (Mass.) company won approval from the Food & Drug Administration to market Lunesta, a new sleep aid. Giddy investors pushed Sepracor's stock up 16%, to $60, in the two weeks following the news, as the tiny, still-unprofitable company announced a $60 million campaign to market the drug directly to consumers. Sepracor's ads, set to begin airing in February, will try to convince the bleary-eyed masses that they can safely take a pill every night to help them sleep... The market for drugs that treat insomnia is expected to double, to $5 billion, by 2010...

from: Waking Up The Insomnia Market by Arlene Weintraub
source: Business Week, 17 January 2005

Well, I guess the only thing to do is fix another cup and see if I can catch some early morning Zs...

Aromatic and heady, the smell of freshly brewed coffee envelops customers the moment they enter Misha's Coffeehouse and Roaster in Old Town Alexandria - so rich, nutty and inviting, the aroma offers a taste of the steaming java even before they order a cup. ...the simple pleasure of savoring a good cup of Joe has become for some an obsession -- for others an addiction. There are nearly 18,000 specialty coffee shops around the United States.... With nearly 180 million drinkers a day, the market for coffee has been a highly competitive one since the early 1990s. Starbucks... has more than 6,000 locations nationwide and... opens four new stores every day.

from: Unique fresh blends latest trend...
source: The Washington Times, 27 January 27 2005

btw, while putting together that last monster post, I found the long-lost first couple chapters of my book, Gonzo Marketing. They really were lost too. For a couple years. Seems I uh "forgot" to pay the rent on the gonzomarkets.com hosting site and they then mysteriously disappeared. If lots of you send me mail saying "Oh yes, please post those chapters!" then I'll start serializing them here, bit by bit over the coming weeks. If I say "by popular demand" you'll know I got lots of requests. If I don't, I'll say instead "due to lack of popular demand."

Meanwhile, pay no attention to that noise in the background. That's just my coffee grinder going into cardiac arrest. And oh yeah, just to keep my hand in, here's an entirely gratuitous book cover clip from my fast growing private collection...

Well, that's the last superlong one for a while. There's other stuff cookin, and I gotta mind the stove. Meanwhile, see that link in the top menu bar says SIGN UP? Click on that. Do what it says. More to be revealed...

oh don't lean on me man
cause you can't afford the ticket
~ david bowie ~

So this is from what? Year and a half ago? Wish I coulda made it.

Next Saturday sees the start of the weirdest weekend of the year. The Fortean Times, house journal of both sceptics and open-mouthed believers in everything from weeping statues to the Great Goat of Clapham, is holding an "Unconvention".... Drawn to this occasion like iron filings to a magnet are not only an unhealthy sprinkling of UFO anoraks, but serious students of the paranormal, some of whom are not entirely predictable folk themselves. There is, for example, Gary Lachman, the former bass player for the pop legend Blondie, whose special subject, upon which he will be lecturing, is Julius Evola, otherwise known as "Mussolini's mystic".

Evola was an occult guru who hobnobbed with Nazis and Italian fascists. Evola... believed that there was nothing in modern life worth saving, and that we are living in the Kali Yuga, or dark age. His followers later tried to usher in a new and better golden age by blowing up an Italian railway station, killing 85 people and maiming hundreds more.

from: Observatory by David Randall
source: The Independent Sunday (London), 24 October 24 2004

As I may have related elsewhere at some point, I often use my car radio as a kind of I Ching  oracle, tacitly posing the generic question, "so what's up?" then punching the ON button. Friday afternoon, on my way to the (where else?) bookstore, I got this answer:

By the time I tuned in to what it was saying, it was over. This can also be said of the events in my life I relate this to. Working on mysteries without any clue, to risk further mixing the rock-and-roll metaphor. But then again, why not go 100% depth-first subterranean?

As are we all these days, though for different reasons. It's touching (to me), poignant to think back on the paranoia of that period and to realize it was our time of innocence. The rough beasts we feared in our stonedest dreams now stalk the world in broad daylight. And worse, thinking: we could be heroes. Gonna get me a gun rack for the F-250 and a bumper sticker at says No Pain No Jane. Yeah, gonna get down in it  this time, baby. Gonna get with the program. Dust off and nuke the planet from high orbit. Some things are just not explained by natural selection, social Darwinism notwithstanding -- social Darwinism, correction: case in point. Evolutionary psychology may explain why baby monkey's cling to their mothers. Answer: because those who did are the ones that didn't get eaten by hyenas. But it doesn't explain the last ten years, or twenty or one hundred. Doesn't explain how our future morphed out of a much more recent past that's still as murky as the Devonian or Cretaceous. Murkier, as there is no fossil record. Unless you count Ziggy.

This is not a manual. Not a technical reference, Tab B into Slot A. These are not directions, from which, if you follow them closely, some preordained reward for your attention to detail and procedure will result. This is writing. Make of it what you will. That's what I do. Though there's a method to the madness. It involves a kind of historical back-tracking, a kind of archeology with dental picks and camel hair brushes, sifting and sorting through strata of stone and bone and dirt and other sorts of coverup, whether by natural sedimentary memory overlay or conscious process of revisionist distortion, whether the vaunted spiritual insight of Emerson's Self Reliance: "let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts." -- or Bowie's sweet talking his little China Girl: "Visions of swastikas in my head ... I'll give you eyes of blue. I'll give you men who want to rule the world." And why do I trust Bowie more in this? Because he's mocking the high-horse racial arrogance that pretends to depend only on itself, but in fact lives by parasitism and predation on the "outer" world it so disdains. But Emerson wins hands-down against plebeian rock. Emerson, after all, unlike Bowie (who could even imagine?), is published in the prestigious Library of America.

As is Ezra Pound, about whom I promised last time to tell you something personally relevant. Which I might as well get out of the way right now, before I forget how to work it back in. It's this: my father used to visit him in that mental hospital he got stashed in after the Second World War. I have some vague memory of him mentioning it on a couple occasions. And it fits. My father was a medievalist (doctorate from Harvard on the G.I. Bill) who could read ancient Greek and Latin, Italian, knew the stories the myths the literature, and was therefore one of the not-so-many who could actually read Pound's Cantos. Except, I guess, for the Chinese bits. I've know about this sort of stuff since I was three or four years old. Heard the names, listened, paid attention, poked into the books sometimes. But I never read Pound. Never cared that much. Never thought about the guy at all until recently. Until a few days ago.

I've been tracking down stuff about this other guy named Julius Evola (see Highbeam clip at top), who was involved in something called Traditionalism -- with a capital T, so not any old traditionalism -- along with Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. Basically: don't ask. He was lifelong pals with Mircea Eliade -- the original Mr Shamanism, and part-time Romanian fascist, which latter bit of his CV he edited out when he ended up at the University of Chicago post dubya-dubya 2. Evola was also a fascist. But a bigtime, full-time fascist, who never tried to pave it over. Hardly. It gets complicated, to say the least, and I don't know the whole story yet. But my radar tells me that Evola is part of the overall story I'm slowly but inexorably cobbling together. Especially as he was a spiritual  fascist, an occultist  fascist, heavy into stuff like esoteric Yoga and Tantric sex. You know the type.

Now the only other Italian fascists I knew about were the last baker's dozen of Catholic Popes, Benito Mussolini (duh), and Ezra Pound. So I started poking around Pound. I knew he'd written a book called Guide to Kulchur, originally published in 1938, and brought out by New Directions 30 years later. I got my hands on a copy, but no luck. So far I haven't found anything to indicate that Pound and Evola ever met, or even spoke. But look what I did  find in Kulchur...

"Old Krore" (G. R. S. Mead) never did any harm. He is even mentioned with respect by various continental editors of mystical snippets, tracts, volumes, etc. He used to say: There is something beyond that. Mme Blavatsky said: Now Mead, when you get to the North Pole you think that the earth is a ball, but you know, Mead, it isn't, when you get there you will find another sphere. . . .

(mental picture is, I think, a species of dumb-bell or figure 8 solid).

Mead years after was looking for a meaning and did not suspect the old lady of pulling his leg.

But the Madame was not pulling his leg. At least not in the way Pound surmised. For the entire mind-boggling story, see Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Perhaps you recall my post of last Friday, wherein I mentioned, en passant, "weirdball New Age theories about how the earth is really hollow and there are UFO bases inside from which Hitler and the Waffen SS will soon return to conquer the world and establish a million-year Fourth Reich." Yeah, well if you want to know more about this um theory, Arktos is your book.

Obviously, the dear Madame knew nothing of Nazis -- she was long gone by that time -- but some of them evidently knew quite a lot about her. More to the point (no snickering there in the back!), Ezra Pound was clearly chummy with Blavatsky. And also with her equal in charlatanry, the man behind the curtain himself: Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. The following is from The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, and is therefore not surprisingly a letter from Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson. Who knows, perhaps he'd had a few...

...in yr/ youth an inegsperience of the London scene, as from 1908 yu NEGlect certain factors / London BOMbarded with mystics, Blavatsky, Quest Society, Echos from the Gnosis (GRS Mead) Wisdom of the East Series, [A.R.] Orage an the unreadable Mahabharatta, etc.

Yeats on W[yndham].L[ewis] as "poWWnd's zevil geenius"/ etc. people been tryin to change WynDAMMn's KeraKter for some time. Gurdieff I thot a man an a bruvver, but NObuddy is goin to swallow Ouspensky.

The full title from whence that grafik derives is In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G.I. Gurdieff (never mind what Amazon says) by P.D. Ouspensky. Just for a little, you know, extra context. But the real miracle here is that, if you look closely at the cover, you'll see it says "with a foreword by Marianne Williamson." You remember Marianne, right? I'm starting to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

So anyway, it's crystal clear from all this that Ezra Pound -- who is often credited with having basically invented high modernism single-handed -- was well aware of the ectoplasmic drafts swirling about Europe in those heady just-post-fin-de-siécle days of yore. But he wasn't having the Occult. He was having the Mussolini.

It's pushing 4am and I haven't even gotten to Synchronicity City yet. Let's see if I can do this quick. OK, so last week I was poking through that Library of America edition of Pound, most fascinated by the biographical timeline in the back pages. When he was arrested in Italy. When he was shipped back to the U.S. to be tried for treason. Seems he'd made these radio broadcasts for the bad guys. Here's a clip from "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Cover your eyes if you don't like uh negativity.

• For two centuries, ever since the brute Cromwell brought 'em back into England, the kikes have sucked out your vitals. A mild penetration, for a hundred years they have bootlicked your nobility and now where is your nobility?
• I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yids IF you can do it by due legal process, NOT otherwise. Law must be preserved. I know this may sound tame, but so is it. It is sometimes hard to think so. Hard to think that the 35 ex-army subalterns or whatever who wanted to bump off all the kike congressmen weren't just a bit crude and simpliste. Sometimes one feels that it would be better to get the job done somehow, ANY how, than to delay execution.
• A chair has been founded in the Sorbonne to study modern Jewish history, i.e., the role of the kike in modern history.... I don't think there is any American law that permits you to shoot Nic. Butler. It is a pity but so is it. No ex post facto laws are to be dreamt of. Not that Frankfurter or any other damn Jews care a hoot for law or for the American Constitution.

And so on. The government ruled him insane so they wouldn't have to waste this great poet. He nearly got sprung at one point -- he was in stir for something like 12 years -- but one of his young proteges hooked up with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, blew up a desegregated school, and the court was like well... maybe not this year, Ezra.

I'm sitting on the floor at Barnes & Noble last Friday night reading this stuff, and finally, it was just getting all too much -- perhaps at this point you know the feeling. So I left that section and retreated to Psychology, where I thought it might be a little safer. No luck. Because I start looking at this book I've seen there a hundred times but that I've never had much interest in. Plus, it's all shrink wrapped. However, I think maybe it'll get me out of this whole jump-down-turn-around Poundian fascist trip. Look, no possible relationship (is what I'm thinking): Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle.

Now somewhere in the back of my capacious mind, I've got the initials H.D. stored. And somewhere pretty close by -- thanks to the miracle of Neuroscience -- a trickle charge from that storage address lights up a tiny neural-neon sign that says: Hilda Doolittle. Don't ask me how it happens, it just does. I flip the book over, read...

In addition, the book includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPhereson, Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound...

At this point there are groundhogs popping their heads up through the carpet. To avoid them, I cross the store again, find the Library of America Pound where I left it, running to escape too much bad news. I open to the first section. "Hilda's Book," it says.

Later, back home, sometime over the weekend, I dig deeper, find this. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by Hilda Doolittle. There's more on the New Directions page than on Amazon. Evidently, they were to be married, but it fell apart somehow. Somehow, thanks to universal entropy, it always does.

Now these are things I imagine many people already know. People who studied Literature at the University and got their Degrees. I didn't do any of that, but I learned all this in less than three days. And what is more interesting (to me) than what I learned, is the manner in which it came to me. Synchronicity City. No exit. No cure.