I was sitting in a café at the foot of my street, killing time before bed. Over the past few weeks I’d been organizing a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, but it was slow going. Several key contributors who had promised me papers had proven unreliable. One dropped out entirely, claiming he no longer believed his central thesis (that Rimbaud had not been a homosexual after all). No big loss there, but still it left a hole in the book, one which I was now obliged to fill with my own paper. Others were not up to scratch, obviously dashed off at the last moment, and I was in the delicate position of having to tell their authors that a complete overhaul was necessary. A woman at the university of Tel Aviv, who had been promising me her piece for months now, had taken to not replying to my urgent e-mails. My goodness, they were worse than undergraduates, and I was beginning to regret that I’d ever undertaken the project.So that evening I found myself in a neighbourhood café. I liked the waiters there.
