...as it seems Will hasn't as yet posted the poem of the night, and night is very quickly turning morning where he is, here goes (the first verse is my favorite -- lifted from here -- not necessarily work safe):

Integraciones
Pablo Neruda

Después de todo te amaré
Como si fuera siempre antes
Como si de tanto esperar
Sin que te viera ni llegaras
Estuvieras eternamente
Respirando cerca de mí.

Cerca de mí con tus costumbres
Con tu color y tu guitarra
Como están juntos los países
En las lecciones escolares
Y dos comarcas se confunden
Y hay un río cerca de un río
Y dos volcanes crecen juntos.

Cerca de ti es cerca de mí
Y lejos de todo es tu ausencia
Y es color de arcilla la luna
En la noche del terremoto
Cuando en el terror de la tierra
Se juntan las raíces
Y se oye sonar el silencio
Con la música del espanto.
El miedo es también un camino.
Y entre sus piedras pavorosas
Puede marchar con cuatro pies
Y cuatro labios, la ternura.

Porque sin salir del presente
Que es un anillo delicado
Tocamos la arena de ayer
Y en el mar enseña el amor
Un arrebato repetido.

For non-Spanish speakers, A translation by William O'Daly:

After everything,
I will love you
As if it were always before
As if, after so much waiting,
Not seeing you
And you not coming,
You were breathing close to me forever.

Close to me with your habits,
With your colour and your guitar
Just as countries unite
In school room lectures,
And two regions become blurred
And there is a river near a river
And two volcanoes grow
together.

Close to you is close to me
And your absence is far from everything
And the moon is the colour of clay
In the night of quaking earth
When, in terror of the earth,
All the roots join together
And silence is heard ringing With the music of fright

Fear is also a street
And among its trembling stones
Tenderness somehow is able
To march with four feet
And four lips

Since without leaving the present
That is a fragile thing
We touch the sand of
yesterday
And in the sea
Love reveals a repeated fury

Just had to toss this in in the last minutes of Bloomsday--via Matthew Skala, I came across an interesting fact--Ireland's (and the EU's) retroactive extension of copyright had the unfortunate result of taking James Joyce's Ulysses back out of the public domain. This caused legal problems, with Joyce's heir threatening to bring public exhibitions to a halt. A special law was passed to get around this issue. Food for thought.

Copy-editing is much like working in a non-final appellate court (or at least how I imagine it to be). You are given a working text (the style guide) with which to make your decisions. That text regularly cites to other texts (other style guides, dictionaries, NYT or AP usage) as persuasive authority, but also ignores them quite regularly, too, leaving you baffled when your style guide is silent and your other non-binding texts disagree.

So to resolve your bafflement, you go into a different online database and see how other people working only in your institution have handled the same problem. Usually, there is consensus; sometimes nobody else has handled quite the same problem before; occasionally past copy-editors have roundly contradicted one another.

And of course the pressure is great-- if you make a mistake, or side with the wrong non-binding text, then your error will enter the database for future copy-editors to turn to and be misled by in their hours of need. This way, even very clear commands of your binding text (the style guide) can be completely ignored and rendered null over time (like the rule that "Early, mid-, or late before a decade should always be followed by the shortened form:").

In the end, of course, precedent, textual command, and logic can all be superseded by commands from above, and often are.

Speaking of Bloomsday, my employers have republished Edmund Wilson's 1922 review of Ulysses. . .

No substantive blogging for a while from me.