During the SARS coronavirus outbreak, in 2003, a cluster of cases in Hong Kong was attributed to one person with diarrhea in a poorly ventilated apartment building.

Toilet of Diana

A stamp in the passport, Portrait, a place I must visit without ever feeling it necessary to return, though I might want to wander out now and then to drop in on Joyce’s poetry, roughly contemporary with the first novel, those curious “pomes,” wearing their spats and dandyish nosegays, occasionally taking up a putative lute to croon promises of theoretical love to unconvincing maidens in the windows of canvas-flat donjons.

Speaking in an interview with Astra Taylor for the film Examined Life (2008), Slavoj Žižek makes a plea for rediscovering poetry in the real of nature (the real, that is, in the Lacanian sense of the term, that which resides in a state beyond or outside of human knowledge or comprehension), in its trash or waste, its chaos, its playing out of mathematical formulae and physical, chemical and biological processes.