There are shirtless water polo players frolicking in the hallways of my cheap-ass airport hotel.

I sorta finished a not-quite-so-embarrassing draft of “Everywhere” on the plane. Anyone wanna beta read my big gay Suez Canal historical love story murder mystery? Skud? Spike? Francis? Bueller?

So we are in Cambridge! It didn’t help that we got here at the end of the week that started, for me, in Vegas; so what with the implausible Northern twilight and the pretty pretty greens and colleges so forth I have begun to think of this as just another themed casino. The Cantabrigian. With live shows called Tripos and Viva Voce! We punted on the Cam, which I insisted on spoonerizing, to my own hilarity and the resigned amusement of my entourage.

Anent which entourage Julia has jetlag which means that no one within earshot may rest. As a result Jeremy and I went for about six days with no more than four hours of sleep at a time. Jeremy coped with this better than I did; I was up at 5am yesterday, trying to help Claire in the bathroom, when I fainted. The flat has a wooden floor so I am sporting handsome bruises on my head and hip. It was extremely unpleasant but has had no alarming sequelae. I shall avoid recreating the circumstances.

Not suprisingly, my academic anxiety has been flickering on and off like a flaky Wifi signal. I had another good hard look at the MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, a course I’ve thought about doing before. Grace Hopper, maybe, or Unix as literature? But I couldn’t help thinking I already have a perfectly nice MPhil that I am extremely fond of, and that the books I dream of having written aren’t academic texts at all but novels. And you don’t need any degrees from anywhere to write novels.

This cheering thought had me working on the novella on the train to and from London today. It’s far from perfect but there’s some decent writing in there. That said, I think I’m going to have to smash it to bits and patch the bits together if I want to get it to the next stage. I think it’s publishable as is but that’s not really enough for me any more; I think I can do better. Guh! What’s happening to me? IS IT SOMETHING IN THE CAMBRIDGE WATER SUPPLY???

I just learned that the first writer in recorded history was a woman who wrote political poetry: her name is Enheduanna. I thought her hymn to Inana seemed very fresh, so I had a go at translating it into the vernacular:

The good ole boy, the maverick, holding his own in the Beltway set and a world leader, son of 41, darling of the Grand Old Party, the consummate politician who has transformed the executive branch in ways even Reagan would admire, is President, and the buck stops with him. Congress grovels at his feet. He does whatever he wants. He’s got political capital and he intends to spend it. He’s got the country on a leash.

He is the War on Terror and he is the Terror. We’re all scared shitless down here, I can tell you. Everything he says frightens the crap out of us. There’s no accountability, and God knows what’s going to happen. Who can stand up to him? Meanwhile fire and death rain on New York, and New Orleans drowns in a sewer.

Something about him makes the Democrats unable to tie their own shoes. Pratfalls galore, but it isn’t funny. People burn and drown and he arrives in a very nice suit with spin doctors and cameras and a crack security detail, for a press conference. Wherever he holds a press conference, there is despair. He believes in his own virtue, which makes him more evil than we could ever have imagined. Compassionate conservatism! Remember that? Anyone, Bueller?

He has been the single worst catastrophe of this last tormented decade. Yet to oppose him is to invite censure! Those who speak up for the suffering and the dead are scorned as vicious fools. He does not lack for toadies.

In his mouth language turns to lies. When he speaks of life he means death. When he promises tax cuts he means that the poor will pay for the greed and stupidity of the rich. In the face of defeat he says, Mission Accomplished. He baptises the nation’s children with blood, and looks at what he has done, and says that it is good.

Across the wide and bewildered nation, his deeds blot out the sun. He turns midday into darkness. Brothers turn on their sisters, and parents attack their children. His words frighten not only his own people, but everyone on earth. This man rules the only superpower in a unipolar world! People from every nation look at Iraq and think: Are we next? He leaves no bad deed undone. The Grand Old Party is filled with pride.

I would like to have an editor like Gordon Lish; only, instead of ruthlessly editing my stories, he would write them, then let me collect the accolades, royalties and hot poet wife. Takers?

Me to Julia, idly: Do you like cats?
Julia, intensely: I. Love. Cats.

What I hate most about running is that I end up warm and energized, able to breathe more easily and calmer about whatever is worrying me. It’s so unfair. The odds are totally stacked in its favour. Exercise cheats.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco Ballet, storefronts around Union Square have the original, embroidered and jewelled tutus on display. The effect is to make the expensive clothes that are for sale seem drab and dowdy.

Claire: This is my unicorn. These are its legs. And this is its metal claw, for killing.

“A good diagram isn’t necessarily meant to be taken in at a glance. We should read a good diagram as seriously as we might read two or three paragraphs or even a couple of thousand words of text.”

“It starts with Patient One, and that gives insiders some important information; because of course these charts usually start with Patient Zero. What happened was, the Chinese government suppressed information, so Patient Zero can’t be traced. So the chart pointedly starts with Patient One in Hong Kong.

“An important principle is not just to concentrate on descriptions but also their relationships. Show causality.

“We have evidence at the molecular level, the clinical level, the human level, the patient level, because of the detective work. Finally there’s some public health information. The evidence exists at multiple levels. And that’s one of the important principles of evidence: whatever it takes.

“Most people show material that they’re good at, that happens to be convenient, that happens to be inexpensive… but the evidence should be at multiple levels. From molecules up to the nation state. Whatever it takes.

“Notice that the linking lines are annotated. Look at an organization chart with a few names at the top and an increasing number in the mighty pyramid. The nouns are quite important, but the linking lines – I can’t believe it! – are all the same. Think what that says: that every pairwise relationship in this organization is exactly the same as every other. That simply cannot be the case.

“So how can we give those linking lines some texture? Put some words on them. Put some numbers on them. We have intense specificity in the nouns. Let’s add some specificity to the linking lines. Look at Patient 2C. That’s probably how the virus got to Vietnam. That’s the mechanism. Or look at 2E. Travel to Singapore. Or Patient 2D. Travel to Canada. Instead of just information that tries to tell us the bad news about the epidemic, this shows the flow of causation. So tha we can try to intervene.

“This texture of annotation on the linking lines and on the nouns helps the credibility of this diagram a great deal. It shows off the hard work of the investigators. This stuff is not overload or clutter. In general, there is no such thing as information overload. There is only bad design. Don’t blame the victim. Don’t blame the audience for being stupid. Blame the design.

“We don’t go around a city complaining about information overload, and that’s because we have a very powerful perceptual system. We perceive in 16-bit colour, three dimensions, all day every day. That’s massive bitflow. One of the things we are trying to do with information design, here, is to bring it up to the routine capacity of the human perceptual system!”

Twenty minutes in and I am IN LOVE.