Metatron

What does it mean that the only time the light on my answering machine is blinking is when a credit card company has left an automated message asking if I want a lower rate? It means, I think, that I'm either doing something very right or pitifully wrong. At times I secretly hope it's an old flame calling to rekindle a romance.  But by now I know better. The only recording angel for me is a bank robodial.

Below are scans of the front and back of the Foreign Agents Series edition of Sol Yurick's Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel along with an interior page listing the Columbia University campus address of Semiotext(e). At the time I read Metatron I was working on my honors thesis, my magnum-oh on the analytic a posteriori, a Kant-Frege-Derrida synthesis.  My ex-wife, who at the time was a live-in girlfriend who had just moved out, was living in a one-room outhouse working as an au pair for a financially well-off family in southeast Berkeley.  The head of the family was the wife who was a physician and her husband was a contractor; they had a little boy and a newborn (whether boy or girl I can't recall).  The outhouse was actually a completely renovated small one-room living space with a portable toilet.  It was located in the backyard beneath healthy old trees. This is where I read Metatron. I believe if I was thought about at all by the husband and wife I was considered a persona non grata, a self-indulgent bohemian in the Groves of Academe.