If you are ever, as they say, in Barcelona, stop in at La Central, a top-rate bookstore, with fine French and English sections, and that great European bookstore smell: good glue in the bindings, fine paper. My Spanish is abysmal -- just fine for "getting around" but not good enough for comfortable reading -- so I was all over the French section. I came away with some Ponge, a handsome pocket edition of Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune (Georges Perec was a great Verne fan -- as a great Perec fan, I feel obliged to return to Verne, who I haven't read in a very long time; I'm happy to report that Verne (as if anyone needed me to say it) holds up big time), a Fred Vargas mystery (Alice Notely turned the audience on to her at a brilliant lecture she gave on murder and mysteries at Naropa a few summers ago -- I'll see if I can find my notes), and Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. I was reading Beckett, have a backlog at home, and we're moving soon, so had no business loading up on books, even just those few, but it's a sickness, one I suppose many of us share... I just wish La Central had been great enough to have a few more P.O.L. books and a bit more poetry and a little more Roubaud. Then I would have really gone to town.