Book of Numbers

Prost, prosit—I took a sip. Trust nothing you read. Nothing about this wine was local. Motion has no local.

Just as I was rimming the sip the door autoslid. And behind it was another door, a wall, my aislemate. He was tall and wide as if he were quarried from the surrounding terrain, as if he were being quarried from the car itself, a raw rupestral growth who had to nick himself down just to fit into my fantasies. He boothed two booths away facing me and ordered a mineral water and was served that sparkling clarity in a glass anchored by a big crystal of ice with a big halfsliced citron floating atop like a buoy.

The English language is like a tu

Probably just an overreaction. Probably he’d just never been around a Jew before.

In the next car another passenger sat reading another book. Not ereading an ebook. The passenger just closed the thing. And took a euro billsized card, an indexcard that spa

But then at the turn of the century—1890? 1880? I forget, my exactitudes are later—the census was automated, at least partially automated, first in America and only later in Europe. In 1933 the Nazis counted only in Germany, but in 1939 they counted in all the a

The punchcard and its calculating machine—the storage/memory and processor of the earliest computing—were invented in 1890 by a German American from Buffalo, NY, named Hollerith, whose company became the company that became IBM, which, in turn, licensed the technology to the Nazis (but don’t get all nitpicky angry if online contradicts me and says the year was 1889 and the city was Albany and the inventor’s name was Höllerith and the licensing was done by an IBM subsidiary).

The technical execution of the punchcard’s primitive programming was modeled on textiles, specifically on how looms used cards to separate threads into patterns for weaving, for embroidering things like swastika bands and yellow stars, though the inventor himself always maintained he’d initially been inspired to adapt the process by a train journey he’d taken through the American West—by the tickets required, their validation, their punching.

The conductor, a sturdy peasant in matching prussic pants and vest over boiled nasty sputumnal shirt, strapped his monkeycap and cowbelled into the car—weaved down the aisle and took your ticket and like a censustaker, with a small metal squeezer apparatus, punched it, put a hole in it, marking your fare and so marking your fate, your final destination. A flurry of chad, white discs of paper floating floorward like the Polish snow that greeted the steerage.

Genocide, like publishing, is 66.6% a problem of distribution—how to get the people/things you need to be killed where they need to be killed when they need to be killed, and at a minimum. How to get Halbwachs to Buchenwald to meet his dysentery. How to get the best Yiddish poets of Kiev all to Moscow, to the Lubyanka’s basement, on the same summer night for mass execution. How to get Mandelstam to the Second River transit camp by Vladivostok in time for his official cause of death, which was frozen “unspecified.”

Nowadays publishers just invest in writers, they have the writer’s work edited, copyedited, proofed, but then they have to print it and make it public (murder). Nowadays writers are murdered mainly by their publishers, by being sent off to press and then to market.

American printers used to be the best in the world (the linotype, 1870–80? by Mergenthaler?), until for margin considerations too caustic to countenance, they merged with or were acquired by foreign companies, and so migrated abroad. Or else the companies uprooted themselves, keeping their corporate registries but moving their plants to Mexico, or China, the country that invented the book but bans books, and imprisons its authors—and in which, about two centuries before Christ, the Emperor I’d butcher his name erected a great firewall all around his Empire, buried its scholars alive, and then burned all their books, either to stifle their critique or standardize the writing system (the same Emperor whatever his name standardized his Empire’s currency, busy man)—and in which, about two mille

If only they had time to read it—hordes of the desexualized toothless working alongside one another like stripped gears, loading and impressing by roll, gathering the signatures, by octavo, by quarto, for binding—12 hours/day, 6 days/week, roughly ¥12 or $2/day, approx $52/month, approx $624/year. I’ve read the same journalism as everyone else, and I’m still not sure what to fall for—either any job is a good job, any pay is good pay, or China has only one factory, is only one factory, and its only product is suicide.

After China the book—because only after China would my ms. be a book—would have to be loaded onto boats and shipped back to America, to my publisher’s distributor in Delaware, or Maryland, or Virginia. The distributor would have to send the books out by truck and train, fraught stock freighted to whatever bookstores still existed, which would sell whatever inventory would sell and then return whatever wouldn’t—returning it damaged unremainderable—and so again the trucks with their squalid cabs shrieking libertarian radio, and so again the trains chuggachuggachoochooing through backyards unmown and littered with stormwater kiddiepools, all the way back to the distributor again, only to be turned around again and redistributed, sent to that minor inferno of upstate NY, Buffalo, where they’d be pulped, where they’d be recycled, in a factory owned by Canadians.