how do you get this thing to work down here?

Sorry, and sorry if it's you, reading this: but imagine my joy on discovering that someone has arrived at Baroque Mansions on a Google search for "milan kundera interview james joyce".

This reminds me of one day in the seventies when my Uncle Pete was accosted by some man in the street in New York. The man rushed up to him and shook him earnestly (as it were) by the hand, saying over and over again how he was my uncle's biggest fan. Now, my uncle was a successful painter but not the kind with a random fan base. (He was a tall man of, shall we say, rather distinguished proportions, with frizzy white hair and a beard, and he always wore Levi's overalls with a blue chambray work shirt and one of those large denim jackets, the kind with the corduroy collar and the flannel lining. He had only one hand. And he had very piercing dark eyes with bushy eyebrows, and a large hook nose.) Anyway, the man suddenly said, "I've read everything you've ever written, Mr Hemingway! Tell me, when is your next book coming out?" The man asked for an autograph, and my uncle kindly gave him one. "Ernest Hemingway," he wrote.

The sad thing is that, although the House of Pseud would have been greatly enriched by an interview (no doubt conducted in French) between Milan Kundera and James Joyce, until we get the funding structure in place for the ability to raise the dead (I'm developing a pilot around Leonardo di Cap - I mean da Vinci - remember, to kickstart our new Renaissance), it ain't gonna happen.

It's a lovely thought, though.