<the big one>

FRIDAY

MY WET COUGH has become a dry, raspy, hacking cough. I attend sessions by Alan Cooper and Dori Smith.

My book editor, Michael Nolan, is in town for the conference, and arranges a dinner at Ralph & Kacoos. With us are my friend and fellow author (and ALA contributor) Curt Cloninger, lovely Julie Cloninger, and their adorable two-year-old daughter, whose head is crowned with golden ringlets.

Dawdling back from the restaurant, we pass the club that's hosting the all-night Builder.com party. After schmoozing with folks outside the club, we retire to the hotel — Curt and Julie because they're the parents of a young child, me because I'm sick, and Michael because he doesn't wish to attend the party without us. Later I learn that the party was preceded by a traditional New Orleans parade; still later, that one of the Neville Brothers performed there.

Tomorrow morning, I'm to deliver a keynote lecture. I can't sleep. I've brought a fine book — Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior — but reading it requires a calm mental alertness I do not possess at the moment.

The TV in my hotel room offers HBO and little else. Coughing into Kleenex tissues, I resign myself to watching the HBO fare: a chop-socky action flick, starring Andrew Dice Clay as a chain-smoking, wisecracking undercover cop. Fred Williamson plays the bad guy, who supplies an unnamed city with deadly steroids.

It's a dazzling departure from the previous night's HBO offering, in which Treat Williams played an undercover mercenary, wreaking vengeance on bad guys who supplied an unnamed city with deadly steroids.

The ads say, "It's not TV, it's HBO."

I have another word for it. »