The Palace at 4 A.M.

Strange weather in Milwaukee lately. Earlier in the week, it rained 3/4" round-head rusted wood screws along the lakeshore, damaging some docks and pleasure craft. On Wednesday, an otherwise unnoticeable change in air pressure caused the area waterfowl to lose some of the bodily oils that allow their feathers to shed water, and so all the ducks and geese in the city sat lower in the water than normal. Last night, a midnight storm of rolling thunder towed in its wake all the lost kites and mylar balloons of last weeks' birthday parties in the south and west, a parade of color that passed through the skies largely unseen as most of us slept.

On Tuesday night, I lifted the pillows off my side of the bed to give them a fluff. Underneath them had lain a little brown beetle, a stub end of a cheap cigar but with a carapace and little round head. I thought it was dead, that it had been pushed beneath my pillows after a scrap with my wife's cats, who would do that sort of thing out of their callous disregard.

I took the flashlight I keep next to my bed for after-dark reading and which always has fading yellowy light because the kids are always messing with it, and I unscrewed the top and set that aside, along with its batteries. I scooped the beetle into the hollow body of the flashlight and took it to the bathroom, dumped the bug in the toilet, flushed, and went back to bed. Reassembled the flashlight and read some of the Bolano.

My wife came to bed, after awhile. "There's a huge beetle in the toilet," she said.

It's hard not to see a beetle under one's pillow, particularly after a weird and difficult day, as a bad omen. And it's hard not to think about Kafka.


Once you're thinking about The Metamorphosis, you're probably going to be led to recalling Nabokov's lecture on the story. Nabokov served as a curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology in the late 1940's, and so is uniquely qualified among novelists and literature professors to speak on bugs. (Those are his notes -- and revisions -- of Kafka above.) Nabokov challenged the common conception that Gregor Samsa transforms into a cockroach:

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)

Amazingly, you can watch Nabokov deliver this lecture (with great humor and strong production values) on the You Tube in two parts.

According to this site, "in many parts of Europe it is said a beetle will bring on a terrible storm." As in fact, it seems to have done. So learned are the many parts of Europe!