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 This summer, doing research for another project (which concerned illegal arms dealing) I stumbled across the story of X. X was a businessman who was murdered in 1983. His body bobbed up in a lake in a New York State park. The fascination, here, was the more that I followed the story in the newspapers of the time, the more it became clear that the authorities had a pretty good idea of who murdered X. But they never acted on that knowledge. X became a cold case from the Cold War. So I wrote a long piece about him.  Here's the link to Medium Here's the beginning of the story. -Imagine a wealthy executive. Retired from GM. His neighbors in the tony suburb of Aurora, Ohio, described him as a super patriot, a John Wayne with a Czech accent. Imagine him in 1983. - Imagine his career, with its wonderous lacunae. Starting with birth. Our man is born to American parents in Prague in 1919. Of all times, of all places. Prague was, finally, a capital city again. In that strange merger of B

  Jean Ferry was a pataphysician, a script writer, and a general poet. Like many French writers who swam in the miasma around surrealism, he had fantastic contacts in the French literary world and lived an adventurous life, all of which was perfectly unnoticed in the Anglosphere. He wrote scenarios for Georges Clouzet and dialogue for the famous soft-core vampire flick, Daughters of Darkness, that starred   Delphine Seyrig, which is as close as he got to English language attention.   As far as I know, he is generally untranslated. In English. So I decided to translate this little story, or prose poem,   from the collection The Mechanic, published by Finitude in 2010 – but I believe it was first published in The Secret Society (1946).   Kafka   or “the secret society” When Joseph K… was around twenty, he discovered the existence of a secret, very secret, society. Truly, it didn’t resemble any other society of that type. It was very difficult for certain people to become admitted