from a Sudanese story recounted in Richard Francis Burton's The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa retold by Jorge Luis Borges as The Mirror of Ink and now retold once again - a cover. Like a good song, a story too can have many forms, many retellings ...

Upon receiving his intriguing e-mail message I immediately hopped a plane to Oakland. He lives high on a hill once thickly forested now denuded by a great fire several years back. Since everyone who lives in these hills can afford insurance most had rebuilt the empty slopes. The new houses are helter skelter, huge and ugly, proof positive that the rich too can have bad taste. One house takes up a whole lot climbing from lower to upper driveway like a giant's stairstep, another sticks out into space looking like the face of a piano, row of windows for keys, note motifs -  I can see fog gathering round to play a few loose tunes. His house fortunately is modest, tasteful and expensive, designed by the famous firm of Houf and Ikura. Inside the floors a rough dark granite, poured concrete walls. We gather on a teakwood deck overlooking a stunning view of the Bay - San Francisco, the bridges, all glowing in the distance like a fabulous carnival ...

We sit down next to a glass table, he serves Cognac, sweet pastries, a bowl of the finest bud. I notice that he gives me a separate bowl, we don't share the same. He is short pudgy and swarthy, thick shock of black hair, black silk shirt and black jeans, a stripe of white runs through his hair from the top of his forehead back making him look like a smug skunk ...

Ran into him some months ago on eBay, selling accordion books, philosophical texts, writings that change w/the folds, ideas folding outward or back in again, each nuance of meaning changing and re-evaluating itself with each new sequence of fold. As a collector of such things, an amateur expert on narrative topology, I had already purchased several when he wrote me, promising something extraordinary if I could only come see him in person ...

we chat for a few