Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence

[The Neveryón tales, of which Neveryóna (‘The Tale of Signs and Cities’) is the sixth, are based on an ancient text of approximately 900 words known as the Culhar’ Fragment or, sometimes, the Missolonghi Codex, which has been found translated into numerous ancient languages. Because of the Culhar’s incomplete nature as well as its geographical dissemination among so many cultures, it has been difficult to assign an even reasonably indisputable origin to it, either as to date, land, or language of composition. In 1974, however, a comparative retranslation of the text from the various languages in which various versions have been found was presented by a young, black, American scholar, K. Leslie Steiner, along with an extensive commentary. Steiner’s work is notable not only for its linguistic interest but also because of its mathematical side. The first collection of tales (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books; New York, 1979) was clearly in dialogue with Steiner’s findings. That volume concluded with an Appendix, written by archeologist S. L Kermit, giving a general review of the Culhar’s history as well as the thrusts of both Steiner’s mathematical and interpretive work. Among the responses to both the tales and the appended monograph, one, addressed to Kermit, seems worth publishing (en appendice) along with the engendered correspondence, for the readers of the present (or indeed the absent) text.]

New Haven

February 1981

To S. L. Kermit:

I have just read your comments on the Culhar’, and Steiner’s translation of same, and I feel that some remarks are in order.

I have checked the literature, and the Appendix to Delany’s work seems to be your first foray into archeology or text redaction (unless you are the S. Kermit who wrote the annotations to the most recent edition of Dee’s Necronomicon, in which case my congratulations; it was a solid piece of work). I would suggest that before you make another attempt you learn something about the topics you discuss. Or rather, learn something more; you’re obviously not ignorant, but your knowledge fails you at a number of points. Some examples follow (page numbers from the current edition of Tales of Nevèrÿon, London and Hanover, 1993).

p. 247: ‘Proto-Latin.’ I haven’t any idea what you are referring to, unless it be archaic Latin. The prefix ‘proto’ is used to refer to reconstructions of early stages of languages, ‘early’ here being sometime before those languages were reduced to writing. Thus, you can’t have a text of a proto-language. If you do, it is an attested language, and no longer a construct. The proto-language which is the postulated ancestor of Latin is referred to either as proto-Italic or proto-Italo-Celtic, depending on your theoretical bias.

p. 247: ‘…4,500 B.C., or even 5,000 B.C., which put it [the Culhar’ Fragment] practically inside the muzzy boundaries of the neolithic revolution.’ The two scholars I asked agreed that the neolithic period was roughly 6500 B.C.,–3000 B.C. Thus your dates are about as solidly neolithic as is possible.

p. 248: You mention that Blegan found a Greek version [of the Culhar’] in the fourth level down at Hissarlik, i.e., at Troy VI. This is highly interesting, as it is the only evidence I know of that the Trojans spoke Greek. Given the location, an Anatolian language seems more likely. Nor is it possible that it was put there by the Greeks, since the numbering of the cities is done from the bottom up, and VI is older than VIIa, the historical Ilium. Any text in VI was in Troy before the Greeks got there.

p. 248: ‘The only ancient people who did not, apparently, know of the Culhar’ fragment were, oddly, the Attic Greeks…’ This is indeed odd, since it implies that the Ionic and Doric Greeks did, and if this is so, it is about the only thing the groups didn’t share. Greek culture of that period was a nearly seamless whole; we differentiate among them by the recorded dialect differences.

p. 251: ‘…the young engineer Michael Ventris…’ Ventris would probably be slightly wounded by this, as he was an architect.

251: ‘The parchment itself…most probably dates from the third century A.D., but it is also most probably a copy made from a much older source…’ You’re damned right it is! Linear B ceased to be used around 1200 B.C., with the fall of Pylos! This makes it just about dead certain that whoever copied it didn’t know the meaning of the characters. And by the way, Linear B didn’t have ‘letters.’ Letters are those graphic symbols used in an alphabetic system only. You can no more refer to syllabic characters as ‘letters’ than you could hieroglyphs.

251: ‘…written in the same ink…’ How can you tell?

p. 251: ‘…transcriptions of block-letter Greek inscriptions, that sculptural language written on stone in upper-case letters…’ First, I have no idea what ‘block-letter’ is supposed to mean. Are you implying the Greeks also made cursive inscriptions on stone? And what is a ‘sculptural language’? I can give a good metaphorical reading for the phrase, but that doesn’t seem to be what you intend. Do you mean that it was the script used on stone? One presumes that the same script was used on parchment; however, no parchment texts have survived, Greece’s climate being wetter than Egypt’s. And ‘upper-case letters’? The Greeks had no lower case. No one did. Minuscule letters are a Byzantine development. The phrase ‘upper-case’ is thus empty of content.

p. 251: ‘Indeed, it is the only fragment of Linear B ever to be found outside of Crete.’ Garbage. Linear B is found on Pylos, not to mention at several sites on the mainland.

p. 251: Transpoté. Is this a direct transliteration of the Linear B text? Are you sure? Trans- is Latin! If the ancient Greeks (or whoever) were calling something trans-anything, then we are witness to a considerable revolution in archeology. A Greek name with the meaning you want would be Peripoté or Parapoté. And poté does not mean ‘never.’ Never. To do so, it must take a negative particle. And ‘across when’ is not a possible Homeric meaning. Homer simply doesn’t use it in that sense.

p. 252: ‘…Linear B was in use only in the very early stages of the neolithic palaces at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Mallia.’ Hold it right there. The phrase ‘neolithic palace’ is oxymoronic. A culture which can build a palace isn’t neolithic. Further, Linear B is from the late period of the palaces.

p. 259: Steiner retranslates ‘The merchant trades four-legged pots for three-legged pots’ as ‘The merchant (female) ceases to deal in three-legged pots and now deals in four-legged pots.’ Something tickled just over my brow line when I read that reinterpretation. I went and dug out the Culhar’ Fragment in Inscriptiones Graecae, where it is referred to as Kolharé. In the passage Steiner cites, the verb translated as ‘trade’ is αλλασσειν. This does indeed mean ‘trade.’ I can find, however, no evidence of its ever being used in Steiner’s sense. She might be thinking of μεταλλασσειν. While it would suit Steiner’s translation, however, it wouldn’t suit the earlier one. In short, there is no Greek verb which carries the ambiguity which trade does in English. I am wondering if Steiner was simply looking at an English version, without bothering to cross-check.

But I have gone on long enough. Your effort is praiseworthy, and with some revision can become a useful commentary.

sincerely,

(signed:) Charles Hoequist, Jr

New York

4 August 1980

Dear Charles Hoequist, Jr

Back in February, when your letter arrived, I dutifully forwarded it to the address for S. L. Kermit that K. Leslie Steiner had left with me before going off to take a guest-teaching position at the University of Bologna.

Last week, when I got back from my vacation trip across the Canadian Rockies, I found — finally! — Professor Kermit’s reply, sent in care of me. Professor Kermit’s description of the state of your letter on its arrival in the desert (see below) does not even approach the state of his on its arrival here! Besides the indecipherable over-stampings, there was clearly a heel-print on it. At one point the letter had obviously been wetted, Lord knows with what. (Visions of incontinent camels are called up just by the smell!) As well, the whole had been ripped in half and the envelope badly taped together. The sheets inside were still in two pieces. Because of the wetting and the generally deteriorated state of the air-letter paper, I decided it might be best if I transcribed it for you. I just wouldn’t trust it to another trip through the mails. Also, Kermit does not exaggerate about his handwriting. With diligence one can make it out, though the transcription took me a full three days and about 25 consultations with various friends over this or that squiggle, masking a j, y, or g; over that or the other near-contourless line, ghosting an m, n, or u. (I recall Hyder Rollins’s labor over the hen-scratchings of the ‘Keats Circle’ and gain new respect!) I hope you don’t object. If you could see the state of the original, I’m sure you’d understand.

My best wishes,

(signed:) Samuel R. Delany

[Transcription follows:]

June

My dear Hoequist,

Your letter, dated February, reached me yesterday — and it is June! Though would you believe, not one of us here at the dig has been sure precisely what day of June it has been for two weeks now? Sometime when the next provision caravan passes through and I can start my answer to you off on its circuitous way back to New Haven (I just assume you are at Yale, in the shadow of that great, transparent library where writing is at once displayed, displaced, and entombed, like a gleaming metaphor of its own historical position), perhaps we here will be able to orient ourselves again. But since Professor Wellman, hauling that architrave from the cinder basin, smashed up his Seiko LED, we have truly dwelt in a land without time. My own watch has only its sturdy little Donald Duck hands, semaphoring about the day — and no date window.

Really, we could be living in the middle ages, here at the site, rather than in the last quarter of the 20th Century. (It is the 20th Century, isn’t it?) Unless you are familiar with the absurdly primitive techniques expediency makes traditional for the archeology of this region, I doubt you would believe the arrival of your letter: in the haversack of a pack camel, the envelope crumpled, soiled, opened at least three times (as is all the mail that reaches us here — a fraction of that which is sent, I’m sure), and re-sealed and over-stamped with the blurred colophons of Iraqi Government Security (why all our mail must go by way of Iraq, which does not even border on this country, to reach us here, is beyond me — unless it’s because the wealthy Kuba family of that nation, still out of favor, has footed part of the expedition’s costs), in runny blue and screech orange. In this half-excavated oasis, two hundred miles from any place with a pronounceable name, much less a post office, I feel I am sequestered in some parallel world of the sort Leslie used to make me smile over when we had our separate rooms in that shabby student house just outside Ann Arbor. (Field work delayed my doctorate until 1968, when I turned thirty-one, the same year that the then-nineteen-year-old Ms Steiner took her first advanced degree in math.) How many hundreds of years ago is that now? Communicating with what I’ve nostalgically taken to thinking of as civilization could not feel more exotic here than if I were sending up smoke signals to be seen from Mars.

Indeed, in terms of communication your letter brings me information that you apparently assume I have been apprised of long since, but which, alas, I simply had not known. For example, yours is the first indication that the ‘article’ I wrote at Leslie’s somewhat hysterical behest, two and a half years ago in a tent on the icy foothills of the Kapwani Mountains, has actually been published.

How bizarre. How unexpected.

There, as far away from anywhere as I am now, I drafted it in longhand at a single marathon sitting over the back of some foolscap sheets, on the other side of which was a mimeographed proposal for a UNICEF grant to study water-tables in the suburbs outside Leah-Sohl, that had somehow ended up among the paleontology journals I’d stuffed in the book-carrier on the side of my canvas suitcase. Leslie stood outside the while, puffing and pacing in the snow, waiting a good four hours for me to finish it — that is, when she was not spatting with Yavus, who’d come skulking up the blustery slope behind her, all the way from Ephesus, where she’d apparently picked him up again, a continent or so away. Research assistant indeed! The only pay Yavus ever received back at the museum was for unloading boxes from the rickety army trucks that occasionally carted in crates of artifacts, that summer we were all together in ‘Stamboul. That pay, incidentally, came directly out of my meagerly lined pocket! Oh, yes, he can be an entertaining, even an affectionate, companion from time to time, nor is he without a certain street-wise humor that, of an evening’s stroll together down Istiqlal, can be quite charming. But Leslie is a rather heavy young woman — whereas I am a thin, even gaunt, middle-aged man. And Yavus, our handsome black-marketeer, simply made his choices along the lines to be expected of his class and race. But really, I am just assuming you know our — how shall I say? — broad-beamed Hypatia? Is a better term ‘large-bottomed’? Perhaps ‘a generous-breasted, round, brown Venus of Willendorf’? How she gets to the places she does leaves me awestruck! Once she simply ‘dropped in’ to say hello at the bottom of an Afghani cave-complex I was excavating with old Pace and young Dr Kargowsky. The circles in which her work or mine — not to mention the overlap — is likely to attract attention are notoriously small. Though in print we feign an impersonal formality, really — everybody knows everybody! I wouldn’t be surprised if, at one time, I had actually met you, Hoequist, perhaps at some university conference or other (the arrival in blistering heat by commuter plane; Professor Rockeye’s archaic ‘52 MG taking us to our limply chenilled guest rooms) held in the Indian Artifact Museum: two adjoining classrooms in the upper corridors of Fopping-Twee Hall, converted into a display area by the over-enthusiastic anthropology elective of 1938, its wallhangings and glass cases dusted religiously, once a year, during Spring Intersession, ever since. What college would it have been…? There was the obligatory underripe Brie on the cheese board and sherry in plastic champagne glasses — with a stack of paper cups at the table corner, in case. If I recall rightly, Professor Widenose, in very dirty sneakers, kept apologizing for the failed air conditioning. Professor Parsnip yodeled out the conclusion of a story I’d heard her begin some years ago at another conference (with the same name, a different number, and the identical Brie and sherry) about her 1957 exploits among the Grungy-Grungy of the Lower Muddypigpuke. And sitting in the corner, working through her sixth champagne glass of Christian Brothers, bored out of her corn-rowed natural, was Leslie, the tedium relieved by (for her, and just a whit less for me as only about one out of three was launched — dazzlingly! — my way) the smiles of that shy, white-blond, six-foot-seven Adonis of Polish-Ukranian extraction, as at home on the gridiron as he was in the stone-quarries, where, since his fifteenth year, he had taken an annual summer job, but here, in this high and humid eyrie of abstraction, just the most engaging bit out of place. I found all this out by a gambit which began: ‘And what is your connection with our little group? Are you one of Leslie’s star students?’ Oh, no, he was just well, hell, thinking of giving Professor Steiner a hand, if she really did decide to go off and dig in that Peruvian pot-hole next September. Above that bronzed cheek, with its faint, ephebic scars from a boyish brush with acne, between those gray-gold lashes, his blue eyes were challenged by nothing else in that room save his own (size fourteen and a half! Later I had an opportunity to check) adidas.

Leslie, at five-foot-one-and-one-quarter, has a mind like a steel trap and usually one to six stunning creatures in tow, from — should one put this more delicately? — the less intellectual strata of the societies she goes careening through. How she does it, with that bottom and those teeth, I’d give my own last wisdom tooth to know…which was, incidentally, twinging again last night.

This desert is not the place for a toothache.

But we were talking of the Kapwanis, the snow. I remember Leslie said to me, ‘Kermi — ’ She will call me after that ingratiating green absurdity that hops through those hopeless children’s puppet extravaganzas, while I, out of what in this day and age must be misguided chivalry, do not respond in kind — ‘Kermi, just say that Yavus was the research assistant who brought the Codex to my attention.’

‘Leslie,’ I said, ‘we were all sweating together down in that basement storage room. Yavus was going to use the damned thing to roll one of his super-dooper Turkish knockout bombers, when you snatched it out of his hand!’

‘Oh, Kermi, please…!’

Anyway, I finished writing; and they made preparations to spirit it off down the mountainside, after leaving me a full ounce and a quarter of very fine hash, which she begged me not to consider payment for toning down any of the more risqué elements in the tale of her discoveries that I just might have been tempted to throw in for ‘human interest.’ They left then, the fur around her parka hood blowing in the snow-flurry, Yavus’s hood thrown bravely and idiotically back from his hawk-profiled, darkmaned head (it was cold that evening!), the two of them chattering on about bus schedules in Ha’bini — as if those people had any better grasp of time than we do here at our desert site today.

But that is the article’s genesis.

As to the informational points you raise in your letter, I feel a little foolish, Hoequist, claiming that I had no library or references at hand when I scrawled the piece for our brilliant but impetuous mathematician/cryptographer friend. But that is the case. Also, some of the errors you cite I’m sure are simply a matter of the decipherment of my none too limpid handwriting.

Transpoté indeed!

I know I wrote Telepoté, regardless of what ended up in print!

Others, I suspect (and regret), were just those little slips of a mind cut off for months from all civil converse. Yes, of course Ventris was an architect, not an engineer. Of course Linear B was found outside Crete at Pylos and Mycenae — why else would they call it Mycenaean Greek? I know, poté means ‘never’ in modern Greek, not Homeric (and usually, though not always, takes a negative particle). But that whole afternoon we had been speaking Demotike, in deference to Yavus, whose English, though brave, once it gets beyond ‘Change money!’ grows too surreal for comprehension. Leslie, as I’m sure you know, speaks everything, from Turkish to Aramaic to Ukrainian to conversational Coptic. Though I can read, somewhat haltingly, at it, I have no spoken Turkish to speak of. Where Yavus learned his very passable modern Greek, I don’t know, unless it was among the older merchants of the Grand Bazaar, with whom Greek is as common as Yiddish used to be in the open-air markets of New York’s Lower East Side, and among which, as a child, Yavus once carried tea and salep.

Some of your other points, however, strike me as the potshots of a sniper emboldened by two or three direct hits who would now try to raze the entire town. Over the past twenty-five years the upper edge of the ‘neolithic revolution’ has slid back and forth between 4,000 B.C. and 6,000 B.C. so frequently I’ve lost track. Such boundaries should be ‘muzzy’ enough for anyone. ‘Attic Greek’ is simply the school-boy term designating that period (not a geographical area) in the Greek language from which the best known (though, as we both know, not necessarily the best) Greek literature comes — Xenophon through Euripides. I simply used it to distinguish it from the earlier, dual- and digamma-plagued Homeric dialects and the later, impoverished patois of the New Testament. As far as ‘proto-Latin’ vs. ‘archaic Latin,’ your exegesis is interesting, and I am not unfamiliar with it; still, for most of us it is simply a preference in terms. (You are no doubt familiar with the ‘very, very old’ Latin pun: Eva est mala, which translates both as ‘Eve is evil,’ and ‘Eve eats apples’? Leslie likes apples too. Back in the snowy mountains, she brought a sack of them with her, along with the hash; I must have eaten three or four. And you know, that night, after they left, was the first time I ever had any trouble with this damned tooth!) Block-letter Greek? Well, that’s what we called it back at the Archeological Institute in Athens — to distinguish it from precisely those Byzantine inscriptions you cite. A Greek text found at ancient Ilium VI doesn’t seem too odd; certainly, there could have been interchanges between the Trojans and the Greeks in the centuries before Paris carted off Helen, especially since we have reason to believe that Greek was the trade language throughout Asia Minor for many, many hundreds of years before the poetic construct ‘Homer’ began to recite, regardless of what Anatolian dialect was in fashion at Ilium proper. Also, there have been enough archeology texts, guide books, and the like referring to the edifices at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Mallia as ‘neolithic palaces’ that I need not apologize for the term. As far as the similarity of the inks, which you question: well, Dr Yoshikami (her single eyepiece, her cotton swabs, the Exacto knife with which she took her scrapings…) did extensive chemical tests.

So there.

But to defend myself too heatedly is, I fear, to suggest there may be reason for your attack. There isn’t. And the truth is, we had sampled just a bit of the hash that afternoon over hard bread, apples, and yak butter — before I retired into my chilly tent to write the piece as we’d discussed it.

It was very good hash, too.

The only thought I ever really gave it, once it hurried off into the snow under the flap of Leslie’s red student knapsack, was whether or not she might take offense at my faint chidings in the article of her feminist sympathies. She already considers me the most depraved of racist Orientalists. (Probably right, too. I’ve found that blacks such as Leslie have a sense of these things. Goes along with their natural ability to sing and dance.) She didn’t have time to read it before she and her dark-eyed companion left. What we had discussed, of course, was how she would get the thing typed up, how she would of course get a copy of said typescript back to me for checking, to correct both the idiocies that invariably creep into any such transcription process as well as the inaccuracies I was bound to make under the twin pressures of Leslie’s entreaty and Yavus’s dope. (‘Kermi, I need it now. This evening. I won’t be here after six o’clock tomorrow morning!’) Of course I never saw it again. As I said, your letter was the first I’d heard of it in over two years.

I tell you, I know Ventris was an architect.

Believe me, so does Leslie. She could have changed it.

But it would be just like her, on reading my gentle joke anent her politics, to leave in both the joke and my little slips of the pen, the latter as a kind of comeuppance for the former, and with, no doubt, the same self-satisfied smile I had when I wrote it. (If she had cut out the jokes, I wouldn’t have minded, really…) Well, perhaps my comments were over the mark. I know she takes such things seriously. More to the point, when she has talked seriously to me about them, she has been able from time to time to make me take them almost as seriously. Thus it is the one part of the whole enterprise I’ve actually been able to feel guilty about all this time. But such lingering guilt as mine, I know, suggests its origins were there well before Leslie, with Yavus trailing, came up that snowy slope.

All this, of course, is in the realm of speculation — which is to say I know Leslie well enough to speculate on it. What absolutely baffles me, however: What is Nevèrÿon? What is Bantam Books? (Hopefully a more recherché line out of some small North English university press. But I doubt it.) And who is this Delany? Why must we angle our correspondence through him? Iraq is bad enough! Leslie used to be enamored of a bizarre species of anti-literature (more generously called ‘paraliterature’ in the Pop. Cult. journals where some of her more eccentric offerings have appeared), published under gaudy paper covers — ‘scientifiction’ or some such. She would sit around the top floor of our student house, in jeans with frayed knees, and a foul sweatshirt, reading the stuff for hours, even writing reviews of it for benighted mimeographed publications its readers seemed to put out all over what I first thought limited to the civilized world but which, after I had seen a bit more, I soon realized included many places fairly uncivilized as well. It sounds like she’s gotten me involved, somehow, in this ‘SF,’ as she used to call it. (She actually would try to get me to read the stuff!) If that’s what she has gotten me involved with, I shall never be able to set boot in the mahogany-panelled halls of the Spade and Brush Club again. (Professor Loaffer will guffaw and bang me on the shoulder, and invite me for a pint, and ask rude questions about flying saucers until I have to say something rude in retort. Professor Cordovan, on the other hand, will not say anything at all!) Well, she’ll certainly have paid me back tenfold if that, indeed, is what she’s done with it!

She said ‘general readership.’ I thought she at least meant something on the order of The Atlantic, Harpers — a sketch for a more extensive coverage in, say, Scientific American.

I am appalled…!

I add these last paragraphs while the scar-faced gentleman in the very dusty jelabba, who sits stoically by the dirty white canvas tent in a strip of shade that does not quite extend to his brown, cracked toes, drinks slowly and steadily from a half-gallon canteen of Instant Country Time Lemonade, waiting for the evening to grow cool enough to resume his journey, taking with him the excavation team’s several letters (including this one, soon as I finish it), toward…is there really such a thing as civilization?

And, no, he’s not sure of the date either.

One of the things he brought, however, was a note from Abdullah Obtwana. Did you ever meet him? A lanky, large-handed, ebony-lipped youth — yes, another of Leslie’s acquisitions. His mother, who made a micro-fortune at some dubious profession in Nairobi, sent him to one or another of our insistently liberal universities on the Southern Rim to take a pre-med course. After three terms, his advisers asked him if he wouldn’t be happier moving to the agricultural college — and why didn’t he take remedial English on the side? Abdullah was amenable enough, but in the resultant student brouhaha, he came under Leslie’s…tutelage? More Brie. More sherry. (Was that the reception where I met you? You would remember, because Abdullah wore the adidas then — and raspberry red pants!) More luminous smiles — from a broad-cheeked face dark as the tenebricose pit. At any rate, through the desert grapevine (despite its wrinkled, desiccated fruits, its pale, tepid wines), news of my presence has reached him, less than a hundred miles away. He says he is coming to see us, here at the excavation site. He says he remembers our three evenings together with ‘an infinitude of pleasure.’ Don’t you find Africans delightfully formal? At the end of two of those evenings, neither one of us could stand! He’s bringing along a friend — from the details, not Leslie. The friend is male and probably young, since ‘he looks rather very good riding a camel.’ Rather very good indeed, I say! There will be pleasantry forthcoming in a day or ten, when Abdullah and friend ride up through the scrub — someone with whom to talk about my most recent discoveries and complain to of Leslie’s possible treacheries. Unless, of course, this tooth…but I dare not speculate!

All right, then, I’ll speculate: one of the books I am never without is my thin, green, India-paper edition of Layard’s Memoirs. Perhaps you, Hoequist, can say what character-masochism makes me return again and again to this account from 1840:

I had slept little, as I was suffering greatly…The sheikh declared that there was a skillful dentist in the encampment, and as the pain was almost unbearable, I made up my mind to put myself in his hands rather than endure it any longer. After cutting away at the gums he applied the awl to the root of the tooth, and, striking the other end with all his might, expected to see the tooth fly into the air. The awl slipped and made a severe wound in my palate. He insisted upon a second trial, declaring that he could not but succeed. But the only result was that he broke off a large piece of tooth, and I had suffered sufficient agony to decline a third experiment…

Enough of these McTeaguean horrors! (Really, I must go borrow Wellman’s Doughty to drive such daymares off.) I close now — indeed, I have to if I want this letter to go out this week, as the barefoot Berber gentleman has just upended his canteen over the ground and shaken loose not one drop of Country Time for the thirsting sands.

My best regards,

(signed:) S. L. Kermit

[Some physical description of Hoequist’s following letter may be appropriate here. The first two pages are typed on Corrasable bond; page 3 is typed on the back of a Xerox of pages 8/9 of Winnie Ille Pooh — on which someone has marked the long vowels in red ballpoint. Page 4 is typed on the verso of a purple hectographed reading list, in over-sized Cyrillic characters. Thence to Corrasable for the closing page…]

New Haven

August 1981

Dear Kermit,

Your letter, despite several forwardings, still reached here before I did. And when I did see it, my first response was to put it into a box, where it might conceivably survive the moving that was going on.

Yes, I am at Yale, though not many are aware of it. I cultivate unobtrusiveness. That, and the ability to read upside-down print, will take you a considerable distance.

I find your description of my letter’s condition quite believable. A friend of mine spent some time recently doing excavation in Turkey, and attempts to get communication established have convinced me that the best thing to do is stitch one’s correspondence on some fairly tough animal hide.

Indeed, we may well have met somewhere, likely at one of the Ivy conferences — ‘The Hero in Classical Literature,’ something like that. Or one of those where salted peanuts substitutes for Brie, due to budget problems. That was CUNY, I think.

Pardon the hiatus. Due to the unsettled nature of things, I must periodically leap up to answer the phone, so that I can tell increasingly insistent callers that no, he’s not here, and, what’s more, I never heard of him. There are also occasional trips to the hallway to help bring in another piece of furniture. And someone is celebrating something on the floor below, and if I don’t have some champagne, it will be a grave offense.

So it is now tomorrow. Or rather, up there is yesterday.

I have looked over my previous letter and noted your comments on the situation in which the Appendix was written, and I am inclined to think that my tone was a bit harsher than was warranted. (I think maybe I’d just gone through a set of oral exams — no, it was something to do with thesis topics.) I must have been in the mood for some innocent’s flesh.

I retract my comment on the ‘neolithic revolution’; I simply wanted to point out that you could make your own statement a stronger one.

I reaffirm, however, my stand on ‘proto-’ vs ‘archaic.’ It is not simply a preference in terms — not when discussing philology, which you were. And speaking of old Latin puns, how about mea mater mala sus est? It translates: ‘My mother is an evil pig,’ and ‘Come, mother, the pig is eating the apple.’ Which reminds me: it was CUNY that had the awful hors d’oeuvres. I was wincing, both at the taste and at their linguistic punblication (I assure you, that was an unintentional typo!) CUNYforms.

All right, so maybe there was interchange between Trojans and Greeks. Kate from the Classics Department is even willing to argue that the Trojans spoke a Greek dialect. Then again, this would not be Kate’s only peculiarity. If you could hear some of her off-the-cuff etymologies…

The fact that the phrase ‘neolithic palaces’ does exist does not justify perpetuating the silliness. No way. In fact, old Threadneedle turned utterly apoplectic when he saw that. I didn’t realize emeritus professors had that much steam. I wouldn’t have shown it to him if I’d suspected what he’d do. The worst part is not his anger, which is sometimes almost comic in its Continental excesses; he has unfortunately seized on Leslie’s name and is convinced that George Steiner has gone off and had an illegitimate daughter somewhere, and now wants to meet her.

Ms Steiner has done nothing to deserve this.

Thinking back, I may well have met her, and at a science fiction convention, of all places. (‘Scientifiction’? My dear colleague, one would think you’d been keeping company with C. S. Lewis; I am told he’s the last one who used the term consistently. They just call it ess-eff now.) Regrettably, your description of her doesn’t narrow the field enough. I met several very bright women of that physical type. In fact, I met several men of similar build and intellect, some of whom were named Leslie. Does she by any chance know Greek folk songs? In that case, I do remember her. She was the only other person who knew ‘O, Pnevmatikos.’ We were singing it while walking around Faneuil Hall, which would have made it Noreascon 1.

I’m sorry, I digress, and on a path which is probably opaque to you. I’m quite surprised that news of publication hadn’t reached you. Granted, you’ve been well off the normal paths, but science fiction fans have a way of leaking in everywhere; it seems odd that Ms Steiner herself didn’t drop you a line. I’ll keep an eye out for her, if for no other reason than to tell her so; as you point out, we’re more likely to have met than not.

Hiatus again. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.

It is now considerably later, and I am considerably hungrier. A raid is being organized to find the most decadent food in the vicinity, and I intend to be in on it.

Until I hear from you again, I remain

Yours sincerely,

(signed:) Charles Hoequist, Jr