...Deck chairs on the Titanic

Been reading all the stuff in Salon abt the the publisher's distributor hassles...really parlous.

At this point it really is down to compiling & proofing. We'll try to give some sort of estimate in a wk or so but it could be another 6-8 wks. Still rattling various contrib/consultants chains. & stuff dribbles in which we can compare & proof against wot we got.

We're mostly finished with a massive proofing of the files, & for abt a wk have been laying in the texts. We originally had 4 interns lined up, but 2 left, & another 2 came on board, but they too left. The two that we have, besides Channing (Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese/Gaelic Scots & Irish/Welsh/Portuguese) are very good indeed. One, Sarah is one of those bicontinental kids (whose parents live respectively in Roma & Ellay -- she lived near my old digs in Ellay), & she is fluent in Italian & Russian & is enow an expert in the cyrillic to be able to transliterate & write the cyrillic for 10 Asian & Middle Eastern languages that are still in the Russian or at least Cyrillic sphere on influence -- downside is that she is really into Emo.

Another kid, David, doesn't speak other languages, but does have a very good eye for detail & very good pattern recognition...so his work is good. I really do hope to be done with this by summer's end. He's more Thievery Corp & other haus mutanta bee-pea-em cardio-pulmo workouts.

I've been on this weird jag where all I want to here is Astor Piazzolla or Sonic Youth & I got about 15 hours of each on the iTunes, so the interns retaliate with Sufjan Stevens or Bright Eyes. (I pretend to hate Magnetic Fields -- they haven't noticed the ceedees on the shelves -- so we listen to something everyone likes.)

We're all getting good at typesetting in Cyrillic & Greek & even Arabic. (There are Arabic fonts buried towards the bottom of the InDesign Creative suites fonts inventory -- but we leave the Mandarin & Cantonese to Channing -- there are thousands of characters in several different files, each having to do with a particular dialect or region, with lots & lots of overlap, but a lot of characters that are occasionally used are hidden in one of those files. Channing says that after 3 or 4 years you can do Mandarin or Cantonese in yr sleep. Do I want to be counting ideograms in my sleep...?)